languagehat.com

Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes about “the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were,” beginning with a striking illustration of a word that has stuck around in recognizable form:

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”

The piece continues with a description of how the Indo-European family was discovered, and then gets back to the lox:
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Another interesting Laudator post, on an IE topic I’d forgotten about if I ever knew it; from M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 117-119:

A special case of Behaghel’s Law that is distinct and easily recognizable is what I call the Augmented Triad. It consists of the construction of a verse from three names (or occasionally other substantives), of which the third is furnished with an epithet or other qualification. I have devoted a paper to this topic and collected there numerous examples from the Vedas, the Indian epics, the Avesta, Hesiod and Homer, and the Germanic and Celtic literatures (West 2004). A few will suffice here by way of illustration. I can now add one from Hittite and a couple from Latvian.

If he has seen something with his eyes,
or taken something with his hand,
or trodden something with his powerful foot. (CTH 760 V iv 1 ff.)133

Diyaúr, Vánā, Giráyo vṛkṣákeśāḥ.

The Sky, the Forests, the Mountains tree-tressed. (RV 5.41.11)

Tváṣṭā, Savitā́, suyámā Sárasvatī

Tvaṣtṛ, Savitṛ, easy-guided Sarasvatī. (RV 9.81.4)

Daityānāṃ Dānavānaṃ ca Yakṣāṇāṃ ca mahaujasām.

Daityāna and Dānavāna and Yakṣāṇā of great might. (MBh. 1.2.76)

Βῆσσάν τε Σκάρφην τε καὶ Αὐγειὰς ἐρατεινάς.

Bessa and Skarphe and lovely Augeae. (Il. 2.532)

Heorogār ond Hrōðgar ond Hālga til.

Heorogar, Hrothgar, and Halga the good. (Beowulf 61)

Vara sandr né sær né svalar unnir.

There was not sand nor sea nor the cool waves. (Vọluspá 3)

Nōe, Ladru Lergnaid, luath Cuar.

Nóe, Ladru Lergnaid, the swift Cuar. (Campanile (1988), 29 no. 6. 3)

Simtiem dzina govis, vēršus, | simtiem bērus kumeliṇus.

Par centaines elle menait les vaches, les taureaux,
par centaines les bruns chevaux. (LD 33957; Jonval (1929), no. 144)

Līgo bite, līgo saule, | līgo mana līgaviṇa.

Sing, bee, sing, sun, | sing, O my bride. (LD 53542)

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My wife was reading a story in the paper and ran across the word cockloft; she asked me if I knew it, and I said I didn’t but would look it up. Happily, the OED updated its entry in September 2019; it means “A small upper loft; a small room or apartment directly under the ridge of a roof, usually accessed by a ladder” (c1580 tr. Bugbears i. ii: “They gate in by lowe & so in to the cockelofte ouer my old masters head”) and has a figurative sense as “the type of a high secluded place” (1694 P. A. Motteux tr. F. Rabelais 5th Bk. Wks. v. ix. 43 “Unnestle the Angels from their Cockloft”) and a colloquial sense as “A person’s mind or head” (“Originally only in phrases indicating a person’s empty-headedness or stupidity, as a person’s cockloft is unfurnished”). The most interesting thing about it is its etymology: “Apparently an alteration of coploft n., by folk-etymological association with cock n.¹, as if originally a place in the rafters where cockerels roosted; compare hen-loft at hen n.¹ Compounds 1b.” And coploft (1571 in A. Dyer Inventories Worcs. Tradesmen in Miscellany II. 52 “The orrell..a bill, a chaire and a fourme with other ymplementes there and in a coploft above in the forstrete”) is a straightforward joining of cop “The top or summit of anything” + loft; the entry for cop hasn’t been updated since 1893, so its etymology is a little quaint:

Old English cop, copp top, summit; generally thought to be identical with cop n.¹ [‘drinking-vessel, cup’], since in Middle Dutch cop developed (after 12th cent.) the sense ‘skull’ and then ‘head’, and kopf was in Middle High German ‘cup’, in modern German ‘head’. Compare also the analogy of Latin testa pot, shell, skull, Italian testa, French tête head. But in Old English the sense ‘skull’ or even ‘head’ is not known, only that of ‘top, summit’, which hardly runs parallel with the words in the other languages, besides being so much earlier. It is possible that the two words are distinct or only related farther back.
(One might suppose that kop(p) top, was the native Old English word, and copp of the Northumbrian Gospels < Old Norse kopp’r: but the whole subject of the history and origin of these words in Germanic is very obscure: see Kluge, and Franck, also cup n.) There was also an Old French coppe, summit (compare coperoun n.), by which this word may have been influenced.

The word occurs in many names of hills (compare sense 1b), as Coulderton Cop, Kinniside Cop in Cumberland, Meltham Cop near Huddersfield, Mowl Cop in Cheshire, Fin Cop in Derbyshire, etc.

I don’t know what the apostrophe is doing in “kopp’r”; I guess that’s how they rolled in 1893.

Time for the annual roundup of birthday goodies! My wonderful wife got me (with some trepidation) Jonathan Smele’s The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World — she’s a little worried that, added to the state of the world and our nightly reading of War and Peace, it might push me over the brink, but I assured her I wouldn’t let it drive me to despair. After all, I own (and have read) three other books about the Civil War, so I’m well aware of the horrors involved. This book puts the war in a wider context, both temporally and geographically, with more emphasis on the non-Russian parts of the (former) empire than is usual, and I can’t wait to read it.

Other gifts: Keith Gessen’s novel A Terrible Country, which has gotten great reviews; a DVD of Godard’s Une femme mariée (A Married Woman), which especially excited me because it’s the last missing piece from my run of his pre-Mao ’60s movies and will be coming up soon in my retrospective (see this post); Maxim D. Shrayer’s The World of Nabokov’s Stories; Cixin Liu’s The Wandering Earth (I enjoyed his Three-body Problem trilogy, so I’m looking forward to it); and from my generous and punk-loving brother, Ork Records: New York, New York — I may not belong to the Blank Generation, but I love its music.

I guess this is a good place to list all my Godard DVDs, since I’m not likely to get any more in the near future (when will they issue Passion and Éloge de l’amour in a format I can use? and when will Criterion get around to Histoire(s) du cinéma??): À bout de souffle (Breathless), Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman), Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), Les Carabiniers (The Carabineers), Le Mépris (Contempt), Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman), Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Féminin (Masculine Feminine), Made in U.S.A., 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), La Chinoise, Week-end, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen), Détective, Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language). And God still lives, at 91!

Update (Jan. 2023). I have since added Soigne ta droite, Film Socialisme, and Le Livre d’image, and have sent away for a three-disc set that includes Passion. And God is dead.

Update (Apr. 2024). I’ve gotten the Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Le gai savoir, which isn’t nearly as rebarbative as I expected. To quote Richard Hell’s booklet essay:

With Godard, we can take the beauty part for granted. Above all, Godard is an aesthete. But he is also a humanist and so there’s a moral and political aspect of truth for him. In a way, making cinema or art of any kind is by definition humanist because it presupposes the importance of community. Godard is an aesthete of morality. […] So yes, there’s some work involved for the viewer in this movie. But Godard is also a comedian, so it’s funny too. The movie starts with a joke, when Juliet Berto, carrying a pretty, transparent, red-rimmed umbrella, joins Jean-Pierre Léaud on the darkened set. Léaud: “It’s an anti-atomic umbrella.” Berto: “Yes, but I use it as a reflector of consciousness.” Don’t ask me what she means, exactly, but it made me smile gai-ly. […] (For me, casting Juliet Berto in itself brings humor to the movie. Part of her affect is that she often looks as if she’s suppressing a smile, as if she’s distracted or not quite fully understanding or agreeing with things, and is about to laugh…) […] As intellectual as it is, the movie doesn’t have a meaning, rather it is poetry, and about beauty as much as anything else, in other words about itself: the combination of sound and image.

The more Godard I watch, the more I realize that even when he seems to be hectoring (through the mouths of his characters or in propria persona), he’s just trying to get closer to whatever truth can be found by vigorously stating possible angles of approach. Which is much like my own way of doing business.

Update (Aug. 2024). I’ve gotten the OliveFilms Blu-ray of Comment ça va (How’s it going) — and why is that Wikipedia article under an English translation when, as far as I know, the movie is always referred to by its original French title?

Update (Sept. 2024). I’ve gotten Hail Mary and For Ever Mozart, bringing the total to 30 (not counting compilation films he took part in). Still waiting for someone to issue Nouvelle vague…

A reader wrote: “As a lover of swearing, perhaps you might like this link for the blog: Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin.” And so I did! Colin Morris’s post begins:

Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example:

• Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance
• Add a word for an agglomeration or container

Hence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon…

The introduction ends “If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together…”; Morris continues:

I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains […] As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.

The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.

Check out the Matrix of Pejoration, the discussion of flexible and inflexible affixes, and odd lacunae (“Butthead is common, so why are asshead and bumhead so rare? Why does buttclown fail where assclown succeeds?”); it’s all fun and informative. Thanks, Ryan!

Dave Wilton has done a Big List post on the legal phrase stare decisis, for which he quotes the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary:

stare decisis (stahr-ee di-sI-sis or stair-ee) n. (Latin “to stand by things decided”) (18c) The doctrine of precedent, under which a court must follow earlier judicial decisions when the same points arise again in litigation.

I’ve known the phrase as long as I can remember, and I just assumed it was International Latin, like deo volente or primus inter pares. Imagine my astonishment on discovering it’s purely Anglo-Latin:

Stare decisis is not an idiom found in classical Latin, having been invented in the seventeenth century—not the eighteenth as Black’s incorrectly indicates. It appears in the record of a legal case decided by a British court in 1673:

It being moved again this Term, Hale consented that it should be reversed according as the latter Presidents have been; for he said it was his Rule Stare decisis.

It is used as a verb in another case, this one from 1735. While in Latin stare decisis is grammatically a verb phrase, in English usage it is almost always a noun phrase. This is an exception to the usual trend:

Whatever therefore my first thoughts were, and how much soever the law of executors wants alteration; we think, that as to the two bonds which were forfeited, the defendant must have an allowance for the penalties: and we must stare decisis.

Also somewhat astonishing is the fact that Dave has antedated the OED by over a century, despite the entry having been updated in June 2016; its first citation is:

1800 Rep. Deb. House of Commons Ireland 15–16 Jan. 61 Stare decisis and non quieta movere has been the cant of the cabinet.

Last year I posted about Dr. Ester Salgarella’s work on Linear A, and people seemed intrigued; now Aeon has published Salgarella’s own explanation (for laypersons), and since it includes examples where the earlier piece was pretty generic, I thought it was worth its own post. I’ll skip the lengthy introduction about the history of the Cretan scripts and their discovery and proceed to the meat of it:

In this respect, because of the historical context of adaptation and use of the Linear writing tradition, it is legitimate to draw a comparison (of signs and words) between the known Linear B and the less well-known Linear A. Although the underlying languages are different, evidence suggests that those signs that have the same shape in both Linear A and Linear B (‘homomorphs’) can be read with the same, or at least approximate, phonetic value identified for Linear B (hence called ‘homophones’). There are, in fact, a number of sign-sequences (or words) that are the same in both Linear A and Linear B: mostly place names and personal names.

By way of example, the place names pa-i-to ‘Phaistos’ and se-to-i-ja (which has not survived) show the same spelling in both Linear A and B, as do a number of personal names such as ki-da-ro, da-i-pi-ta, pa-ra-ne. There are also morphological adaptations from Linear A personal names (di-de-ru, ka-sa-ru, a-ta-re) to Greek in Linear B (di-de-ro, ka-sa-ro, a-ta-ro). This comparison, whose legitimacy has been recently supported by Torsten Meissner and Pippa Steele, has allowed scholars to reconstruct a sketchy outline of Minoan phonology. Today, we are therefore able to ‘read’ Linear A texts – without gaining full access to the contents of the inscribed documents.

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My late friend Allan, who had French friends, used to love to say “Allons-y, Alonso!” I was delighted to hear it used in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (you can see the clip here), and Godard, a magpie for colloquial speech, used similar expressions such as “Tu parles, Charles!” and “je fonce, Alphonse!” (both from Breathless). I decided to google to find out if there was a comprehensive list, and I see I’m not the only curious searcher; michelmanu, under the heading Relax, Max, said:

Je trouve plutôt amusantes ces expressions bâties sur des assonances :

Tu l’as dit, bouffi ;
Tu parles, Charles ;
Cool, Raoul ;
C’est parti, mon kiki ;

Mais je peine à me souvenir d’autres ; en connaissez-vous?
Manu

Responses included À l’aise, Blaise; T’as raison, Gaston !; Tu m’étonnes, Yvonne !; Ça glisse, Alice !, and others. Like Manu, I enjoy this form of wordplay, and am curious if anyone knows anything about its history and geographical spread. Do people still use these bits of linguistic flotsam (like “cool” in English), or are they redolent of a previous generation (like “groovy”)?

I’m always griping about publishers commissioning the umpteenth translation of Anna Karenina rather than looking for something interesting that hasn’t appeared in English yet, so I’m especially appreciative of Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series (see this post on their Krzhizhanovsky edition, with prior links), which does exactly that, and does it very well. They have now published Boris Poplavsky’s Homeward from Heaven, translated by Bryan Karetnyk (see this post), and have been kind enough to send me a copy. As is usual with Russian Library, it comes with an informative introduction by the translator and a full set of end notes that not only explain the realia of the novel (“The Paris-Midi was a midday newspaper in daily circulation between 1911 and 1944. It enjoyed wide popularity and catered principally to a working readership at a time when two-hour lunch breaks were still common…”) but quote long chunks from the typescript (the textual history of the novel is complicated) and French lyrics used in the text (in both French and English). The publisher’s summary says:

The novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator is Oleg, whose intense love for two women leads him along a journey of spiritual transfiguration. He follows Tania to a seaside resort, but after a passionate dalliance she jilts him. In the cafés of Montparnasse, Oleg meets Katia, with whom he finds physical intimacy and emotional candor, yet is unable to banish a lingering sense of existential disquiet and destitution. When he encounters Tania again in Paris, his quest to comprehend the laws of spiritual and physical love begins anew, with results that are both profound and tragic.

Taken by Poplavsky’s contemporaries to be semiautobiographical, Homeward from Heaven stands out for its uncompromising depictions of sexuality and deprivation. Richly allusive and symbolic, the novel mixes psychological confession, philosophical reflection, and social critique in prose that is by turns poetic, mystical, and erotic. It is at once a work of daring literary modernism and an immersive meditation on the émigré condition.

You can read an appreciative review at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Karetnyk’s Englishing is eloquent and convincing, and I’m glad he’s chosen to focus on little-known writers like Gaito Gazdanov, Yuri Felzen, and now Poplavsky rather than on the usual suspects. Kudos to him and to CUP!

Jose Vergara (see this LH post) did an interview with Mo Rocca which focused on Rocca’s early work as a writer for the PBS show Wishbone, which “retold classic stories, introducing them to children by dropping the eponymous dog with an instantly classic theme song into their plots.” Introducing the interview, Vergara says:

Rocca wrote on the show’s two seasons, including the episode “Rushin’ to the Bone,” which was based on Nikolai Gogol’s play of mistaken identities, The Inspector General. Given my own interests, I was eager to speak to him about this Russian connection in particular.

A relevant exchange:
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