languagehat.com

As I said here, NYRB Classics was kind enough to send me a review copy of Telluria, Max Lawton’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 Теллурия, and having finished it, I’m here to say a few things about it. It’s not really a novel in the traditional sense, in that there is no continuing plot and no consistent set of characters (except for chapters 39-41, which describe the same event from the points of view of the three characters who take part in it); it consists of fifty vignettes set in the neo-medieval future Sorokin created in День опричника, translated by Jamey Gambrell as Day of the Oprichnik, each with its own style and use of language (often a parody of some well-known writer). To give you an idea, the first is about two “littleuns,” Zoran and Goran, creating a set of brass knuckles; here’s a paragraph from Lawton’s translation:

Goran extended his hand demonstratively and poked his finger through the smoky stench of the packhouse. And there, seemingly at the command of his tiny finger, two biguns removed a crucible with the capacity of a hundred buckets and filled with molten lead from the furnace and carried it over to the casting flasks, a peal of thunder seeming to escape from their bellies. Even the steps they took with their bare feet made the packhouse tremble. A human-size glass clinked around in a glass-holder on the table.

The second takes the form of a letter from a visitor, beginning:
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I was reading along in a novel when I got to a line of dialogue that included the sentence “Thy shall be done.” After a moment of appalled bafflement, I decided the author must have written “Thy will shall be done” and some idiot grammar software (or, worse, an idiot human copyeditor) had seen “will shall” and just deleted the first apparent synonym, leaving gibberish in its wake. But then I decided to check Google Books, and discovered that there is a long tradition of this as “kids say the darndest things” humor; from Babyhood; the Mother’s Nursery Guide, Vol. 4 (1888), p. 38:

–A little boy of our acquaintance had had his use of shall and will so often corrected that one night in saying the Lord’s Prayer he said, “Thy shall be done” in place of “Thy will be done.”

–Y., New York.

And from Terrot Reaveley Glover: A Biography by H. G. Wood (Cambridge University Press: 2015), p. 212:

This entry in her father’s diary for 1906 shows Anna’s response to his religious instruction. ’22 July 1906. Heard Anna’s prayers. “Thy shall be done”, she said—so we discussed God’s will and its application to the nursery. But if you have a fight, I said and she chimed in, That would be Thy won’t be done.’

And then (since by now everything on earth has been discussed at the Hattery) I did a site search and found that, indeed, just a couple of years ago Jen in Edinburgh wrote in a comment:

Vaguely on the subject of archaic language – when I was little, I didn’t realise that ‘will’ in the prayer was a noun – I thought the line just meant something like ‘your things will be done’. And I knew that if you were being very polite you didn’t say ‘will’, you said ‘shall’, and if you’re talking to God you should be very polite, and so I misremembered it as ‘thy shall be done’. It still almost catches me out, sometimes.

Apparently this was so alien to my sense of English that I forgot it more or less instantly, and will probably do so again. At any rate, “Thy shall be done” is a thing, not a typo.

My wife recently came across what is apparently a new or newish slang term, sploot, defined here as “the pose an animal, especially dogs, cats, and other four-legged pets, makes when it lies on its stomach with its hind legs stretched out back and flat.” This news story by Melissa Reeves shows squirrels splooting and explains that they do it to cool down in hot weather; we have seen the squirrels in our yard doing it lately, and now we know what to call it, and so do you. An excellent word.

In the spirit of completeness, I must add that I have found another completely different use of sploot, but I don’t think it will catch on; it’s from p. 373 of “Reconfiguration of Satisfying Assignments and Subset Sums: Easy to Find, Hard to Connect” by Jean Cardinal, Erik D. Demaine, David Eppstein, Robert A. Hearn, and Andrew Winslow, in Computing and Combinatorics: 24th International Conference, COCOON 2018, Qing Dao, China, July 2-4, 2018, Proceedings (Springer International, 2018):

For each exact cover configuration C in the output instance, at least one maximally split configuration is reachable from C via a sequence of splits. Call the set of all such configurations the sploot set of C, denoted sploot(C).

Also, don’t miss xkcd’s Complex Vowels, which as a former math major I especially enjoyed. (Thanks, Sven!)

Yes, this is fluff, but it’s my kind of fluff:

It’s August once again, and in Japan that means its time to dust off our hat and huts to celebrate 10 August, which is known as Hat Day…or Hut Day. In Japanese the short “a” and “u” sounds of English are virtually indistinguishable, so the words “hat” and “hut” would both become “hatto” (ハット) in Japanese. This confusion is the true meaning of Hat Day, as well as Hut Day, and is probably best understood after hearing The Hat Day Story, also known as The Hut Day Story.

It all began in 2019, when automotive parts retail chain Yellow Hat approached the pizza chain Pizza Hut to work together on a promotional campaign called Hat Day. Yellow Hat had hoped to use the date of 10 August because the numbers “8” and “10” could be read as “hatto” together in Japanese. However, the deal went south after Yellow Hat realized that their would-be partner was not named Pizza Hat. […]

Yes, it’s sure to be a Hat Day to remember, and quite possibly the greatest Hut Day yet, so mark your calendars with whichever rendering of hatto you prefer and be sure to take part in the festivities.

Thanks, Nick, and a happy Hat(to) Day to all!

S.I. Rosenbaum’s Input piece on Thomas Buchler and his Torah program TropeTrainer is fascinating and sad, and I recommend the whole thing; here I’ll excerpt some particularly Hattic bits:

One day — Zucker doesn’t remember exactly when, but it must have been in 1998 or 1999 — Buchler approached him about a project he was working on. He was creating software, he said, that would teach people to chant Torah. […] In the 1970s, home-recorded cassette tapes had been a huge technological innovation in teaching Torah: No longer did students have to study for hours with an older, learned Jewish adult; they could take home a cassette and learn from that. Some rabbis felt that this made the transmission of Torah an automated, machine-based experience; they worried the personal connection between generations would be sacrificed in the name of convenience.

For Buchler, however, the tape wasn’t convenient enough. There had to be a better way than winding and rewinding a cassette, he thought, and as an experienced software engineer he set out to create one. But in order to do so, he first had to learn a code much older than any he was familiar with.

Every written word or short phrase in the Torah is assigned one of a body of musical motifs, known collectively as cantillation or trope in English, or ta’amim in Hebrew. The words of this text had been written down, in the consonant-only Hebrew alphabet, by sometime around 400 to 600 BCE; but as the musical component continued to develop, it remained an entirely oral tradition. As more written texts were added to the Jewish sacred canon, they, too, were set to trope and sung aloud.

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Count Szechenyi was briefly mentioned here back in 2002 when mark said he “was personally responsible for cutting the number of respect-related forms of address down from five to three”; now (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti) we get a more sweeping claim by Priscilla Smith Robertson in Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 1952):

In the period before 1848, the outstanding Hungarian was, undoubtedly, Count Stephen Szechenyi, who spent his handsome fortune and considerable talents to build up modern institutions in his country. He traveled extensively in Western Europe and in England, where he was well-known and got most of his ideas; but it was easier for the west to understand the practical changes he wrought than the psychological ones which were just as important in his eyes. Wishing to force his country to become both proud and rich, he appealed to every motive among his countrymen—public spirit, private gain, patriotism, the wish to be in fashion, the spirit of fun, the sense of noblesse oblige.

He first struck the public eye in 1825 by offering to give a year’s income to help endow an academy for the Hungarian language. This, interestingly enough, seemed the prime step toward making a modern nation, and it was largely owing to his efforts that Hungarian came back to the lips of his countrymen. The gentry had been gradually forgetting it, talking German in Vienna, often using Slovak to their peasants, and, odd as it seems, Latin in their Diet. In some parts Latin was a general language of communication. Dr. Tkalac remembered his Croatian mother using it in her household (though this was more unusual in a woman than a man) and other observers reported the strange effect of hearing a nineteenth-century peasant greet his landlord, “Bonum matutinum, domine.” Szechenyi raged at this decay of his mother tongue. His appeals succeeded so well that in 1847, for the first time in history, the Diet members spoke Hungarian, even though it still came haltingly to some lords’ tongues.

Someone more familiar with the history of Hungarian than I will have to judge the truth of the claim that it was thanks to Szechenyi that it “came back to the lips of his countrymen.”

I was trying to find an etymology for the Russian word люрик ‘little auk‘ when I went to that Wikipedia page and saw “The little auk or dovekie (Alle alle) is a small auk, the only member of the genus Alle.” I was struck by “dovekie” and went to the OED, where I found (entry from 1897):

dovekie, n.
Pronunciation: /ˈdʌvki/
Forms: Also doveca, dovekey, doveky.
Etymology: Scots diminutive of dove: compare lassikie, wifikie, or -ockie (which are of 3 syllables), and see dove n. 1c, dovey n. b.

An arctic bird, the Black Guillemot (Uria grylle). Also (and now normally), the little auk (Plautus alle).

1819 A. Fisher Jrnl. 18 June in Jrnl. Voy. Arctic Regions 1819–20 (1821) 27 Another species of diver was seen today..it is called by the seamen, Dovekey.
1823 W. Scoresby Jrnl. Voy. Northern Whale-fishery 421 Colymbus Grylle—Tyste or Doveca.
1835 J. Ross Narr. Second Voy. North-west Passage liv. 693 The second dovekie of the season was seen.
[…]
1954 J. M. M. Fisher & R. M. Lockley Sea-birds i. 17 Among the auks the dovekie and the Brünnick’s guillemot from the north join the puffins, razorbills and guillemots in ocean wanderings.

There are no entries for lassikie, wifikie, or -ockie, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to compare them, and I don’t know what they mean by “which are of 3 syllables,” but never mind — what a charming word!

I never did find an etymology for люрик (it’s not in Vasmer), so if anybody knows anything, do share.

After I finished Margarita Khemlin’s Дознаватель (The Investigator; see this post), I turned to a novel I’d been anticipating for years, Alexander Chudakov’s 2000 Ложится мгла на старые ступени [A gloom is cast upon the ancient steps (a quote from a 1902 Blok poem)], which won the only Booker of the Decade prize ever awarded. As is sadly often the case when I’ve been eagerly looking forward to a book, it was a disappointment — not that it was bad, mind you, but it wasn’t what I wanted. As I told Lizok (the usual recipient of my complaints), “it seems like a standard-issue intelligentsia memoir/novel, with too many relatives to keep track of… There were some good anecdotes, but it was basically just one damn thing after another.” So I gave up after a hundred pages or so and turned to Dmitry Bykov’s first novel, Оправдание [Justification]; having loved his second, Орфография [Orthography], when I read it fifteen years ago (see the links at the start of this post), I was pretty sure I’d enjoy it, and indeed I did.

But it was a bumpy experience. To quote another e-mail to Lizok:

At first it was moving along at a nice pace and kind of reminded me of the Strugatskys, except with a mystery set in the past rather than the future. Then it settled into a quest narrative and it took me a while to adjust. Then it looked like a big chunk was going to be told from the perspective of an Isaac Babel who survived the camps, and I was irritated (I don’t mind Famous People showing up as furniture, so to speak, in historical novels — “Hey, isn’t that Pushkin over there?” — but I don’t like novelists trying to write from inside their heads), but then it turned out it was the main viewpoint character, Rogov, trying to imagine Babel’s experience, so that was all right (and it didn’t last too long), and now Rogov is in a situation reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and I don’t know where Bykov is going with it…

The basic idea (and this is not a spoiler, since it is manifested early on and is what people know about the novel if they know anything at all) is that Stalin’s Terror was not about punishment, it was a filtering system to create a group of supermen — if they could resist six months of torture, they would be the kind of people who could save Russia in the war Stalin knew was coming and help him build a new society. This was not a new concept (as Bykov says, Alexandre Kojève had said something similar decades earlier), but Bykov uses it brilliantly, starting with his young protagonist, the historian Rogov, finding clues that point in that direction and eventually, in 1996, going off to Siberia to try to locate the camp where his grandfather and other survivors had supposedly been held for a decade. Bykov keeps setting traps for readers, pulling the rug out from under their feet over and over again, and by the time I got to the end I was very glad of the experience. (Bykov said a few years ago that though it got terrible reviews when it came out, it is the reading public’s favorite of his novels, “probably because it’s the shortest.”)
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Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul posted on Facebook (reposted from Johannes Preiser-Kapeller):

In the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PmbZ), one can find an entry on a certain Prince Přzibislav of #Maghrebinia, who had intensive diplomatic contacts with #Byzantium in the 9th century.

As already Alexander Beihammer pointed out in his contribution to “Prosopon Rhomaikon”, this and some connected entries (such as the one on a certain “Chuzpephoros”) are based on the “Maghrebinische Geschichten”, a collection of short stories by the author Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998), which take place in the fictitious (!) country of Maghrebinia in Southeastern Europe.

Ralph-Johannes Lilie, the initiator of the PmbZ, used these collections of satirical stories like a historical source and smuggled the resulting entries into the prosopographical database. Thus, unfortunately, you will not find #Maghrebinia among the adressees of the #Byzantine Emperor in De cerimoniis…

I shake my head in wonderment. It would be one thing for an easily distracted blogger like myself to mistake a fictional kingdom for a part of actual Byzantine history, but for the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit to do so should be deeply embarrassing, if not humiliating, for that presumably august institution. I wonder if they’ve noticed? As Slavo said, “it’s the -řz- that gets me.”

In the course of my ongoing Godard retrospective, I had occasion to read Louis Aragon’s “What Is Art, Jean-Luc Godard?” (an encomium of Pierrot le fou), and I was struck by the following rhapsodic passage:

Red sings in the film like an obsession. As in Renoir, where a Provençal house with its terraces reminds one here of the Terrasses à Cagnes. Like a dominant color of the modern world. So insistently does Godard use the color that when I came out of the film, I saw nothing else in Paris but the reds—signs indicating one-way streets; the multiple eyes of the red stop-lights; girls in cochineal-colored slacks; madder-colored shops, scarlet-colored cars, red-lead paint on the balconies of rundown buildings, the tender carthamus of lips; […]

Carthamus? Quel minuto più non vi lessi avante — I headed straight for the reference works. Wikipedia told me “The genus Carthamus, the distaff thistles, includes plants in the family Asteraceae. […] The best known species is the safflower (Carthamus tinctorius).” As for safflower:

Safflower petals contain one red and two yellow dyes. In coloring textiles, dried safflower flowers are used as a natural dye source for the orange-red pigment carthamin. Carthamin is also known, in the dye industry, as Carthamus Red or Natural Red 26. […] The dye is suitable for cotton, which takes up the red dye, and silk, which takes up the yellow and red color yielding orange.

And the word carthamus is from Arabic قرطم (qurṭum):

From Classical Syriac ܩܽܘܪܛܡܳܐ‎ (qūrṭəmā, “safflower”), from ܩܰܪܛܶܡ‎ (qarṭem, “to cut off gently, to trim”), from the plucking off petals which are used for dyeing.

I was pleased (and surprised) to find that the original of the Aragon essay is available online; of course it sounds better in French:
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