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Kensy Cooperrider reports for Aeon on what seems to me a self-evidently absurd theory, but since I am a known fuddy-duddy and since it’s been taken more seriously than I would have guessed and has a surprisingly long history, I thought I’d toss it out there:

Proposals about the origins of language abound. […] Over this long and colourful history, one idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural ‘protolanguage’. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. […]

Anthropologists of the 19th century widely championed gesture-first theories, citing other intuitive arguments. Garrick Mallery – who saw gesture as a ‘vestige of the prehistoric epoch’ – noted that it is much easier to create new, interpretable signals with one’s hands than with one’s voice. Imagine ‘troglodyte man’, he wrote in 1882. ‘With the voice he could imitate distinctively but the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he could exhibit actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, with their derivatives and analogues.’ In more modern terms, it is easier to create transparent signals with gesture – signals that have a clear relationship to what they mean. This observation has since been borne out in lab experiments, and it remains one of the most compelling arguments for a gestural protolanguage.

In the 20th century, scholars held on to these intuitive arguments for gestural theories, while also introducing new sources of evidence. One thinker in particular, Gordon Hewes, deserves special credit for this advance. An anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Hewes had an encyclopaedic cast of mind and an unusual zeal for questions about language origins. In 1975, he published an 11,000-item bibliography on the topic. But it was his article ‘Primate communication and the gestural origin of language’ (1973) that would initiate a new era of ‘gesture-first’ theorising. […]

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Nathaniel Rich’s NYRB review (October 7, 2021 issue; archived) of They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans by Macon Fry opens with an amusing anecdote, a bit of historical geography, and a word new to me:

I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation to Alabama—my young son and I take a bike path that begins at the corner of Audubon Park and follows the ridge of the levee upriver. The path is part of the Mississippi River Trail, which runs three thousand miles to Lake Itasca in Minnesota, but our destination is only two miles away. There, just past the US Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans headquarters, we reach what my son calls the “crazy houses.” Or as the local newspaper once put it, “A Queer Little City Built on the Batture, Where Society Is Divided, Where Queer Beings Live, and Where the Society for the Protection of Children Has Found Considerable Work to Do.”

All that remains of this bustling city are a dozen houses, half-swallowed by the thickets of willow trees that shadow the riverbank. This row of houses, or camps as they’re locally called, is the Southport colony, named after the bend of the Mississippi on which it is situated. The camps do not appear on Google Street View, because they are not visible from any street. They stand on stilts on the batture (rhymes with catcher), the riverside slope of the levee. When the Mississippi is low, the camps are surrounded by lush gardens, sloping yards, and the occasional kayak or propane tank. When the Mississippi crests, the homes appear to float on it—or in it. My son and I rarely see any of the residents but we always encounter Inky and Dinky, freely roaming the batture. He likes to imagine that they are the Billy Goats Gruff, and that among the willows, hiding beneath one of the rickety catwalks that lead to the shacks, lives a troll.

I offer Rich my deep gratitude for the parenthetical “rhymes with catcher,” because you would never learn that from standard lexicographical sources; OED (entry from 1887) has /baˈtjʊə/ (“A river- or sea-bed elevated to the surface”) and M-W \ba-ˈt(y)u̇r\, both reflecting the word’s origin in French. But New Orleans famously has its own way of saying things, as explained in the site How ta tawk rite: A Lexicon of New Orleans Terminology and Speech (the link, featured in my 2004 post, miraculously still works):

A few words on New Orleansese: in a city whose very name is pronounced in nearly 100 different ways by its citizens, all the way from the filigreed, nearly five-syllable “Nyoo Ahhlyins” to the monosyllabic grunt of “Nawln'”, it takes a very sensitive ear, not to mention years of practice, to pinpoint the incredible binds the native speaker encounters, those specific words where the slow tongue gives up and makes a leap of faith. For those who have never heard it, you must begin by imagining Brooklynese on Quaaludes.

As I said in that post:

I particularly direct your attention to the section “A guide to the pronunciation of local place names” (most of the way down the page), where you will learn the proper pronunciation of the street names Burgundy (bur-GUN-dee), Burthe (BYOOTH), Cadiz (KAY-diz), and the like.

Batture-rhymes-with-catcher fits right in.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2003):

There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. He wrote about them, commented on them, brought them up in conversation. With all the names in the telephone book to draw on, Tolkien is unlikely to have picked out just one name without considering what it meant: and ‘Nokes’ contains two clues as to its meaning. One is reinforced by the names of Smith’s wife and son and daughter, Nell and Nan and Ned, all of them marked by ‘nunnation’, the English habit of putting an ‘n’ in front of a word, and especially a name, which originally did not have one, like Eleanor and Ann and Edward. In Nokes’s case one can go further and observe place-names, as for instance Noke — a town in Oxfordshire not far from Brill — whose name is known to have been derived from Old English æt þam ácum, ‘at the oaks’. This became in Middle English *atten okes, and in Modern English, by mistake, ‘at Noke’ or ‘at Nokes’. There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings‘, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.

The second clue lies in the derivation from ‘oak’. ‘Oak’ had a special meaning for Tolkien, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in his footnote to Shadow, p. 145. In his early career as Professor at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had devised a system of splitting the curriculum of English studies into two separate groups or ‘schemes’, the ‘A-scheme’ and the ‘B-scheme’. The A-scheme was for students of literature, the B-scheme for the philologists. Tolkien clearly liked this system, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to Oxford in 1930 with similar nomenclature (see ‘OES’, p. 780). But in his private symbolism ‘A’ was represented by the Old English rune-name ác, ‘oak’, ‘B’ by Old English beorc, ‘birch’. Oaks were critics and birches philologists, and Tolkien made the point perfectly clear in Songs for the Philologists, for which see below. As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this.

I am struck by the derivation of Nokes, and amused by Tolkien’s childish good-versus-evil approach to (of all things) critics and philologists. And what’s so awful about oaks? (I have omitted the footnotes, for which see the link.)

After finishing Fedin’s Города и годы (Cities and Years — see this post), I stuck with the mid-1920s for Zamyatin’s Рассказ о самом важном (“A Story about the Most Important Thing”); a bunch of Bunin stories; Ivan Shmelyov’s grimly powerful Солнце мертвых (The Sun of the Dead), set in war-ravaged Crimea in 1921; Mikhail Prishvin’s autobiographical Кащеева цепь (The chain of Kashchey), which I was enjoying until it turned into a standard-issue Soviet “how I overcame my youthful idealism and became a good materialist and Marxist” memoir; and Elsa Triolet’s first novel На Таити (In Tahiti), which she wrote because Maxim Gorky was impressed enough by her letters to Victor Shklovsky to say she should consider a literary career (she of course became famous for her later writings in French). Here’s what I wrote to Lisa Hayden (Lizok) about it:

So far I’m enjoying Triolet’s cool, descriptive style, especially refreshing after Prishvin’s overheated interiority; here’s the final paragraph of the first chapter:

На террасе — суета. Две темнокожих молодых женщины сломя голову исполняют приказания старой и огромной туземки, которая фыркает и шипит на них. Это приготовляют наш утренний завтрак и убирают комнату. На столе — хлеб, масло и неизвестные мне фрукты. Андрей пьет скверный кофе, сияет и верит в светлое будущее. Я тихо сажусь рядом с ним и думаю о том, что на меня из открытого чемодана, из-под белья, выползли три огромных, черных, мясистых таракана.

The terrace is abustle. Two dark-skinned young women are dashing around following the orders of an enormous old local woman who snorts and hisses at them. They’re making our breakfast and cleaning the room. On the table are bread, butter, and some fruits unknown to me. Andrei [her new husband André Triolet] drinks foul coffee, beams with pleasure, and believes in a bright future. I sit quietly next to him and think about the fact that onto me, out of an open suitcase, out from under the linen, have crawled three enormous, black, fleshy cockroaches.

It’s too bad it hasn’t been translated, but if you read Russian, I recommend it. It’s short and snarky.

So then I decided to return to the present century and read Margarita Khemlin’s 2012 novel Дознаватель (translated by Melanie Moore as The Investigator). You might call it a police procedural — the narrator, a sort of junior detective named Mikhail Tsupkoi, is investigating the murder of young Lilia Vorobeichik. But although the case is soon closed, he keeps doggedly gnawing away at it, neglecting his marriage and his official duties in the process, and because this is Chernigov (now Ukrainian Chernihiv) in 1952-53, both Stalinist terror and the lingering horrors of World War Two are omnipresent and play a larger and larger role. The tale is cleverly told, with no chapter breaks to orient you, just a succession of short passages separated by line breaks and the fevered, repetitive, increasingly obsessive thoughts of Tsupkoi. I don’t know how I’d go about trying to tell you anything more about the plot; fortunately there are two good reviews I can send you to for that: Lisa/Lizok’s Busybody: Khemlin’s Investigator (she, like me, read the Russian original) and Kaggsy’s The complexities of detection under Soviet rule (she read the translation). I can therefore confine myself to discussing some of the linguistic material that caught my attention. (Oh, and if anybody finds historical maps as useful as I do, this one of Chernigov from 1908 was a great help to me.)
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Oxford University Press will be adding to its majestic shelf of language reference works with the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE); Elizabeth A. Harris reports for the NY Times (archived):

The first time she heard Barbara Walters use the expression “shout out” on television, Tracey Weldon took note. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, it has crossed over!’” said Weldon, a linguist who studies African American English.

English has many words and expressions like “shout out,” she said, which began in Black communities, made their way around the country and then through the English-speaking world. The process has been happening over generations, linguists say, adding an untold number of contributions to the language, including hip, nitty gritty, cool and woke.

Now, a new dictionary — the Oxford Dictionary of African American English — will attempt to codify the contributions and capture the rich relationship Black Americans have with the English language.

A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor in chief and the Hutchins Center’s director. […]

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Recently I wanted to find out about a Book-of-the-Month Club selection from back when it was important influence on what Americans read, and I complained on Facebook that I couldn’t locate a complete list; the reliably knowledgeable Anatoly Vorobey responded with this link, saying “All ‘main selections’ (one book each month, I take it) up to 1977.” And it’s even better than that; here’s the self-description on the page:

The Books of the Century

This website compiles, by year, four different lists of books published during the twentieth century:

1. The top ten bestsellers in fiction, as recorded by Publishers Weekly.
2. The top ten bestsellers in nonfiction, also as recorded by Publishers Weekly.
3. The main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926.
4. Critically acclaimed and historically significant books, as identified by consulting various critics’ and historians’ lists of important books.

Not every list is available for every year. Click here to learn more about the lists and for some caveats about using them. Otherwise, simply follow the links to the left to delve in. Happy hunting!

Here’s the “learn more” explanation for the Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant Books list:

This composite list was made by consulting numerous sources, including the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best novels and nonfiction books of the century and the chronology of historically significant books listed in the back of David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition, vol. 2 (New York, 2006). The last source is particularly useful, as it lists significant academic works written by specialists in addition to more general works. I have also added my own selections. It should be noted that “critical acclaim” and “historical significance” are two very different measures of a book’s import. One is a term of praise, the other is not. A book may be considered historically significant without being thought good, and, indeed, there are many different ways in which a book might become interesting to a historian. But all of these books command our attention today, whether it is because they are well-written, innovative, representative of an important historical episode, or causally significant. Although not all of the books on this list were written in English or published initially in the United States, the books that are included are ones that have been important to U.S. audiences.

I’m not sure why the BOMC lists end after 1977, but never mind — what a great project! Someone should do something similar for other literatures; it’s fascinating to see what was popular and/or considered important in previous decades. And the BOMC choices hold up, for the most part, far better than I would have expected. My most surprising discovery so far: the selection for June 1931 was M. Ilin, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan! (The Marxists Internet Archive has put it online if you want to investigate it.) “M. Ilin” was the pseudonym of Ilya Marshak (1895-1953), and the Russian original was «Рассказ о великом плане» (1930). I’m not surprised it was translated and published in the US — people were, of course, curious about what was going on in Red Russia — but I would have thought the BOMC would have been more conservative in its choices.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins has a Big List post about the phrase been there, done that, which has a surprisingly specific origin, Australia at the end of the ’70s. He first goes over the shorter “(I’ve) been there” (meaning ‘I’ve had experience’), then continues:

But the addition of done that is distinctly Australian in origin. Pascal Tréguer has found an Australian citation from a 13 December 1979 column by Ian Warden in the Canberra Times that refers to a song about Alan McGilvray, the Australian cricketer and cricket commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC):

[…] The venerable, admirable and conservative McGilvray (“He’s been there! He’s done that!”) has become so indispensable to the proper, sober, traditional wireless broadcasting of cricket in this country that to exploit him in this way is a lot like producing a jingle which asserts “The Church is not the same without Wojtyla.”

[…]

The earliest use in print of the common wording of the catchphrase that I have found is in Tharunka, the student newspaper of the University of New South Wales, on 31 August 1981 in an interview with Michael Atkinson, a member of the folk music group Redgum:

Our only form of statement is what we sing. I’ve tried everything else—I’ve handed out leaflets at factory gates—been there done that—the music is all that I can do and it’s all that I can do well.

The following year, an Associated Press article about Lauren Tewes, one of the stars of the American television series The Love Boat, was published on 21 February 1982. Tewes is an American:

Tewes, who has just divorced, says she doesn’t plan to get married at this time. Using an Australian expression, she says, “Been there, done that.”

See the link for more history and citations; this is the kind of detailed investigation I love. (For what it’s worth, I would have guessed with reasonable accuracy that the phrase dated from the ’80s.)

A correspondent writes:

My mother (2nd youngest of nine, b. 1934) and her sisters used an expression that I took for granted, but never heard elsewhere. They’d say “gom and gower”, always in that order, with a hard “g”, rhyming with “mom and power” to refer to overhandling a substance or object the point of ruining. As in “I don’t want it after you’ve been gomming and gowering it” to decline a second helping of food offered after the offerer had carefully picked out the part they want, possibly stirring it. Or “don’t gom and gower it” if something needed to be left alone or only lightly stirred. But it wasn’t used exclusively in the kitchen; other projects were similarly prone to overwork or damage from too much fussing and needed to be left alone. (It may just be that kitchen memories are stronger for younger people.) […] It could be just a family expression, but it seems like more than that.

For any help it gives you, she was born in old Florida, to a family that traced its roots there to an English sailor to Barbados in the early 1500’s, the usual Scot-Irish protestants and Irish Catholics of Georgia and the Carolinas, and one German soldier arriving from Sweden after some war in the mid 1600’s.

I found the question intriguing and thought I’d pass it along to the Varied Reader. “Gom and gower” is a great expression, and I may start using it myself.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, John Woods (translator of Thomas Mann) on his line of work:

Literary translating is about literature, it’s about being very, very skilled in your native language. Not only do you need to know the second language, and I mean know it well, but you have to love and work with and understand your own language. You have to know how to make it sing and dance. Being bilingual certainly is a leg up, but that doesn’t create a literary text. There are a lot of people out there who are bilingual. They think, “Well, I ought to be able to translate something.” And the publishing houses know that there’s this vast pool of workers out there, and so they farm the stuff out in piecework. The results are haphazard. Some great and wonderful translations are produced, and some that are not so great and wonderful.

[….]

Every German publishing house has editors who go over every translation, comparing it word for word, with the original. I don’t know of any publishing house that does that anymore in this country.

[….]

I’ve made lots of horrible mistakes. One in fact that Helen Wolff didn’t catch, in a small book by Günter Grass called Show Your Tongue, about a year he spent in Calcutta, India. And somewhere he uses the word “Schuppen,” which can mean the “scales of a fish” or “dandruff.” And in a moment of average inattention, I chose dandruff — and it should have been the scales of a fish. That sort of thing happens, it just happens. You’re working fast, you go back and check, but it never registers, and suddenly the translation is there forever in black and white.

One of the things you learn, particularly in this job, is that there is no such thing as perfection in this existence. And you learn to live with that. It will never be perfect. Any translation can be made better both aesthetically and in terms of accuracy, and that’s why you correct four and five times yourself, and that’s why somebody else should look at it too. Because it will never be as good as it truly ought to be.

Refreshing modesty! And hurray for the German publishers who takes such pains to make sure translations are accurate.

Via Kerim Friedman’s Facebook post comes Han Cheung’s very interesting Taipei Times piece on indigenous naming systems, among other things:

Bukin Syu has only been using his current name for two years, adopting it after he began studying the lost tongue of his Taivoan ancestors. The Taiovan are one of the Pingpu, or plains indigenous groups who are not recognized by the government, and they have been using Chinese names for so long that Bukin isn’t sure how their original naming system worked.

“Bukin means mountain, and my father’s Chinese name includes the character for mountain,” he writes in a display at the O ngangan no niyah (自己的名字, “our own names”) exhibition on indigenous names. His parents’ village, Siaolin (小林), was wiped out by a landslide caused by Typhoon Morakot, and the name further honors his destroyed homeland.

The exhibition, which opened in January at the National Central Library but is currently on view at Ketagalan Culture Center (凱達格蘭文化館) in Taipei’s Beitou District, details the varying naming customs of the 16 official indigenous groups, how they were forced to adopt Japanese and Chinese names and their struggle during the 1980s and 1990s to revert to their “true names.” […] As the Ketagalan Culture Center is named after the local Pingpu people, it makes sense that a new section on Pingpu names has been added here. […]

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