languagehat.com

Ben Yagoda at his blog Not One-Off Britishisms (aka NOOBS) posts about perhaps the earliest example of a Britishism in American:

In the course of putting together a book based on this blog (you heard it here first!), I found that I am standing on the shoulders of Richard Grant White. White, a nineteenth-century American literary critic (and father of the architect Stanford White), coined the word “Briticism” in 1868, to mean words and usages that had sprung up in Britain (but not America) in the century or so since the countries had been apart. White didn’t look kindly on this phenomenon. Among the instances he cited was a peculiar British use of the word “directly” […] He also complained about a supposed British insistence on saying “ill” instead of “sick” to describe someone who was under the weather. […] Another complaint was “awfully” to mean “very,” instead of its early meaning of “in a manner that inspires awe or terror.” White wrote, “The misuse is a Briticism; but it has been spreading rapidly here during the last few years.” And here he was on the mark. In fact, I put forth this intensifier “awfully” as the very first Not One-Off-Britishism.

The early citations in the OED (which labels it “colloquial”) are all British, starting with one from The Times in 1820: “Let any one..say whether the illustrious defendant [sic]..has not awfully strong grounds for protesting against the tribunal.” I happen to be reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair—published in 1847-48 and set in the 1810s—and came upon a line where Becky Sharp thinks, “I suppose he will be awfully proud, and that I shall be treated most contemptuously.”

Ngram Viewer also confirms White’s impression. It’s an interesting chart, showing significantly more frequent use in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century (White’s era), and American topping Britain in about 1920.

Since then, the two countries’ use of the word have been awfully similar.

Not surprising, of course, but it’s always good to have these things verified.

Dmitri Levitin’s TLS review (December 11, 2020; archived) of The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English polymath and a French polyglot discovered the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Jed Z. Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz gives a good summary of the history of the Rosetta Stone, but I presume that’s familiar to most Hatters; I’m going to quote the last section, which makes some interesting points about Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, the early decipherers, and about how this whole advancement-of-knowledge thing works in general:

A major step forward was made by Young, who adopted the seemingly crude but effective technique of examining the two unknown scripts without any resort to phonetics, but simply by mapping groups of signs, or logograms, onto the lines of Greek. Making use of Young’s notes in the British Library, Buchwald and Josefowicz provide a mesmerising account of the Englishman at work. With them, we can follow Young as he pasted cut-up strips of the hieroglyphs over what he thought to be the corresponding parts of the Demotic, and as he came to conceive of the middle script as a simplified (or degraded) version of the hieroglyphs. For Young, the hieroglyphs functioned as logograms, and so were intrinsically primitive, lacking syntax and the ability to convey tone and emphasis. It was only the representation of foreign names and words that brought limited phonetics into Egyptian writing. Coptic, he believed, was near-useless for elucidating any earlier forms of the language.

Champollion proceeded very differently. He initially agreed with Young that all the Egyptian scripts were non-alphabetic, and suggested that the Egyptian signs could be identified with Coptic words (but not letters). However, he gradually came to admit the existence of a phonetic system, not only for Graeco-Roman names but also – and this was his key discovery – for native Egyptian words. He saw Egyptian writing as heterogeneous: although the majority of characters were not phonetic and never had been, phonetic signs, he suggested, had evolved early out of a need to convey abstract concepts or proper names by means of the so-called “Rebus principle” now beloved of game shows (“Ramses”, for example, can be formed from the hieroglyphs for Horus/Ra (Ra), the child (mes) and the sedge plant (su)).

[Read more…]

Damon Young, a columnist at the Washington Post, received a passive-aggressive piece of peevery of a sort that is all too common in general, but the particular focus of this one inspired him to write A letter to that man who emailed me to correct my grammar (archived), a coruscating evisceration that I urge you to read in full; I’ll quote part of it here (at the link, the offending e-mail is shown in an image at the top). He starts with the single-paragraph sentence “I’m better at this than you are at everything you do” and proceeds to explain:

In your email, you declared that my use of the word “ain’t” was a “really poor choice,” corrected my use of “them,” and demanded that I don’t try to sound like I’m “still in the street.”

If you were better at this than I am, you would know, as I do, that the rules of grammar are mostly suggestions. Guardrails to help us corral and curate the mess in our heads into something cohesive. And, to quote Jason Reynolds, what happens within that space is a form of alchemy. […]

You would also know — if you were better at this than I am — that sentences are music. And that both sentences and music are math. Equations. Beats separated by pauses. Microbursts of energy clustered and cut and culled to find balance. You would know that sometimes “ain’t” just fits in a way that “isn’t” or “is not” does not. Same with “them” instead of “those.” You would know that even the choice of “does not” at the end of the above sentence instead of “doesn’t” was intentional, because of the repetitious rhythm of “does not” existing immediately after “is not.” You would know that short phrases lead to shorter sentences, which punch in a way that longer ones sometimes can’t. Like this just did. You would know that “ain’t” ain’t a signifier of being “still in the street.” You would know that “still in the street” ain’t do what you think it did. You would know that writing a thing like that just proves you’re a living anachronism. But not in a romantic way, like a streetcar or a Ferris wheel. But like cigarette smoke indoors.

He ends “This was fun to write. But I feel bad for you now. Because I wish you had better sentences.” He must have put in a lot of work filing the rough edges off what I’ll bet started off with bursts of open rage; I don’t think I could have been nearly as restrained. Give that guy a raise!

Stephen Goranson, whose name should be familiar around these parts (cf. this post), sent me an e-mail about his researches into the word madeleine; I have added italics, links, and some material in brackets:

OED (online) madeleine, n. was most recently modified in December, 2021 [but most recently updated in March 2000 — LH]. The Etymology section states “the reason for the designation is unknown” and mentions a proposed source, a cook, Madeleine Paulnier or Paumier (also elsewhere given as Paulmier; refs. in Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2. 20, n. 2), but “whose existence is dubious,” correcting a 1989 OED assessment as “prob. F. name of Madeleine Paulmier, 19th-c. French pastry-cook.”

OED’s earliest bracketed French use is from 1767 [B. Clermont tr. Menon Art Mod. Cookery Displayed II. 410 Gâteaux à la Madeleine. Common small Cakes]. At Hathi Trust and Gallica is a 1755 use, Gâteaux à la Madeleine, in Les soupers de la cour….tome III, p. 282. OED’s earliest English use is from 1829 [L. E. Ude French Cook (ed. 10) xxvii. 406 (heading) Madeleine Cake] (and bracketed French/English, 1827 [A. B. Beauvilliers Art of French Cookery (ed. 3) 231 Cake Madeleine.—gateau a la Madeleine]). At archive.org is an 1824 English translation of a French cookbook by Beauvilliers, The Art of French Cookery; in the index, “Madeleine cake,” though perhaps OED would bracket it too.

I am warming up to attempt comment on Elizabeth Schrader and Joan E. Taylor, The Meaning of “Magdalene”: A Review of Literary Evidence, Journal of Biblical Literature, 140.4, December, 2021, 751-773.

I asked him about his thoughts on Schrader and Taylor, and he responded with this groups.io post, which begins:
[Read more…]

Back in 2000, James Wood reviewed Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language for the Grauniad, and very appreciatively too:

You might say that this is Kermode treading his customary middle way between high theory and unmediated amateurism, but Shakespeare’s Language is a magnificent book, the honey of a lifetime’s visits to the Shakespearean garden, and makes great virtues of reasonable in-betweenness.

But this passage made me raise my eyebrows:

In the speech by Bushy, for instance, is Shakespeare trying to say something about shadows and tears and himself getting “muddled”? Or is he perfectly capable of greater clarity, but deliberately muddling things a little in order to give us the most direct sense possible of a mind struggling to express itself?

This is an inevitable tension in dramatic poetry. For instance, when Cornwall shouts out that his servants should bind fast Gloucester’s “corky arms”, listeners get a characteristically Shakespearean thrill of pleasure at the delicious justice of the word – the old man’s arms, white and crumbly, like cork. But it is hardly likely that a vicious aristocrat would have expressed himself as beautifully as this, and most listeners decide for them selves that this is Shakespeare the poet having his say – inserting into a character’s mouth a line of unlikely but lovely poetry.

I don’t understand how anyone literate, let alone such a fine critic as Wood, can seriously say “it is hardly likely that a vicious aristocrat would have expressed himself as beautifully as this.” It is hardly likely that he would have expressed himself in iambic pentameter, either. This seems to me on a level with complaining that opera is dumb because people don’t sing at each other. Am I missing something?

I’ve finished Mikhail Shishkin’s 1999 novel Взятие Измаила [The taking of Izmail] — see this post for previous Shishkin — and 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 (as advised by The Untranslated in this post, which you should consult if you want to get an idea of what the novel is like, not to mention what the title means). Here I’ll just quote a brief passage from the end of the first part with some thoughts on translatability:

The human lifespan is a dot. Nature is fluid. Feelings are dark. The linking of the whole body is corruptible. The soul is a top. Fate is incomprehensible. The teacher is orphaned. The soldier is barefoot. The plowman is naked. The veteran is inconsolable. The sickly person is fierce. Pindar is unwashed. The moaning is musical. The roads are hopeless. The far-off is befouled. Weekdays are humiliating. The festivities are drunken. The neighbor is very bitter. The publican is negligent. The huntsman is venal. Power is stinking. The law is good-for-nothing. The verb is all-powerful. Prison is all-devouring. The cop on duty is selfless. The corpse is unidentified. The war is daily. The Chechen is quick to forgive. The Sami is swaggering. Geography is jumpy. History is whorish. The tsarevitch is murdered. The past is a shame. Love for the paternal graves is captivating. The bush is burning. The sky is snowy. The future is entrancing.

Срок человеческой жизни — точка. Естество текуче. Ощущения темны. Соединение целого тела тленно. Душа юла. Судьба непостижима. Учитель сир. Солдат бос. Пахарь наг. Ветеран безутешен. Немощный лют. Пиндар немыт. Стон музыкален. Дороги безнадежны. Даль загажена. Будни унизительны. Торжества пьяны. Ближний прегорек. Мытарь нерадив. Псарь продажен. Власть смердяща. Закон никчемен. Глагол всевластен. Тюрьма всеядна. Постовой самозабвенен. Труп неопознан. Война ежедневна. Чечен отходчив. Лопарь чванлив. География прыгуча. История блудлива. Царевич умерщвлен. Прошлое срамно. Любовь к отеческим гробам пленяюща. Купина неопалима. Небо снежно. Будущее восхитительно.

[Read more…]

I have volunteered to serve as a Russian consultant for a reading group that is working its way through War and Peace in translation, and today I got a question that wound up teaching me a bit of specialized Russian and is worth bringing to the attention of the Hattery:

OK, Steve, here’s another translation question, perhaps disguised as a physics question. It concerns a passage in P&V [Book 4 part 3 chapter 2] where partisan warfare is described as contrary to conventional military theory:

Military science says that the bigger the army, the stronger it is. Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison.

In saying that, military science is like a mechanics which, considering forces only in relation to their masses, would say that forces are equal or not equal to each other because their masses are or are not equal.

Force (the quantity of motion) is the product of mass time velocity.

In military action, the force of an army is also a product of mass times something, some unknown x.

I read this (with a lifelong immersion in the physical sciences) and am befuddled. It is momentum, not force, that is the product of mass and velocity, and if you have Force = mass times some unknown x, the x is acceleration, as Newton explained in the 1670s. Is Tolstoy treating us to this analogy to demonstrate willful ignorance of The First Law or is he attempting a re-definition of the terms used? His credentials for pulling off some kind of scientific treatment of the mechanics of history are devalued immediately thereby. Clearly words like energy, force, momentum and mass were in common use prior to Newton (who likely wrote in Latin anyway), and continue to have common usage distinct from their precise technical definitions. Taking offense at a common usage in opposition to their technical meaning may merely be the arrogance of the scientist, and not a reflection on the author or the translator. But when posed as such blatant blasphemy as “Force = mass x velocity,” it is as if I were to misquote several of the Ten Commandments in an argument relating Judaism and psychoanalysis, assuming no one would know or care.

My correspondent went on to quote the Maude translation, “Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity,” which “makes total sense to me,” and added “Briggs renders this passage similarly to the Maude translation, with the misjudgement of momentum by ignoring velocity set up as the mechanical equivalent to ignoring the spirit of an army. […] But Garnett uses ‘force’ in the same way P&V do.” Here’s my response:
[Read more…]

Y wrote to me “I think you’ll enjoy this mini-memoir by Sally Thomason” from the Annual Review of Linguistics, and I very much did, so I’m sharing it with you; it’s full of good things about studying and teaching linguistics, with much description of working in the field. Here’s the Abstract:

My career falls into two distinct periods. The first two decades featured insecurity combined with the luck of wandering into situations that ultimately helped me become a better linguist and a better teacher. I had the insecurity mostly under control by the watershed year of 1988, when I published a favorably reviewed coauthored book on language contact and also became editor of Language. Language contact has occupied most of my research time since then, but my first encounter with Séliš-Ql’ispé (a.k.a. Montana Salish), in 1981, led to a 40-year dedication to finding out more about the language and its history.

Some excerpts:

I was born in late 1939 in Evanston, Illinois, on the northern outskirts of Chicago, and I grew up 20 miles farther north, in Highland Park. English was the only language taught at my elementary school, but in high school I discovered the joy of learning languages, taking three years each of Latin and French. In college (Stanford University, class of 1961) I took German, Russian, and Ancient Greek. But the animal kingdom was my enduring passion, so my first choice of a college major was biology. I had to give up on that plan: A toxic high-school chemistry teacher had left me with a powerful aversion to chemistry, which was required for biology majors. And fear of math (justified in my case) ruled out a geology major, my second choice. I settled for German, an undemanding major that left me plenty of time for elective courses in exciting topics like evolution, invertebrate paleontology, comparative vertebrate anatomy, and plant ecology. […]

[Read more…]

I’m still making my way (in the leisurely fashion appropriate to a literary flâneur) through Lucy Sante’s The Other Paris (see this post), and I’ve gotten to a passage on the famous cours des miracles of old Paris which is so full of strange and wonderful words I have to post it here:

A cour des miracles was a cluster of houses that by some mix of tradition, common accord, and benign neglect was deemed off-limits to the law and, as lore has it, where a sort of permanent feast of misrule persisted. The name derives from the fact that miracles were a daily occurrence there—the blind could see, the hunchbacked stood straight, the clubfooted ran and danced, leprous skin became clear and unblemished—once their disguises had been put away for the night. The inhabitants were generally known as gueux or argotiers, the latter with reference to the fact that they spoke a secret language known only to them, at least as of the fifteenth century, when François Villon made use of it in his poems; its earliest vocabulary derives from the language of the Roma. The intricate social structure is illustrated by the abundance of names the gueux had for their highly specific professions: rifodés posed as families (they were usually unrelated) and begged in the streets, holding out a certificate that claimed their house had been destroyed by “fire from the sky”; hubains presented a document stating that Saint Hubert had cured them of rabies contracted by a dog bite; coquillards displayed seashells as proof that they had lately returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain; sabouleux were fake epileptics; piètres were fake amputees; francs-mitoux were fake lepers; capons were gambling shills; and so on. They were ruled by an elected chief called the King of Thunes, or Grand-Coësre, who carried a cat-o’-nine-tails and whose banner was a dead dog impaled on a pitchfork. Their relationship with the church was hand in glove: fake lepers would claim to have been cured by a certain statue or relic; donations from the devout would pour into the abbey; the monks would share the proceeds with the gueux.

I continue to be grateful to Keith Ivey for his generous gift!

Molly Crabapple has an NYRB article (February 26, 2022; cached) about a bookstore hanging on by its fingernails:

CYCO books is not New York’s last Yiddish bookstore. Yiddish bookstores do a brisk trade in Hassidic Brooklyn, where some 150,000 people still speak the language as a mother tongue. It is, however, the last bookstore to deal in the sort of Yiddish that once dominated New York’s Lower East Side: that of socialist rabble-rousers and sweatshop poets, which their upwardly mobile descendants were glad to leave behind and forget. Suffice to say, CYCO is now the only place in the city to get your Avrom Sutskever or Sholem Aleichem in the original.

The Central Yiddish Cultural Organization was founded in 1938. It was both a renowned publisher of Yiddish books and a nonpartisan cultural space in a fractious literary world, and it had branches as far away as Argentina. CYCO was one of many Yiddish organizations that, like other boosters of minority languages, saw their tongue as deserving of respect and civilizational status as French or any such language of empire; and despite their lack of money, power, or a state, they believed they could will their equivalents of institutions like the Académie Française into being.

That decades-old global heritage has persisted in this corner of Queens. Jam-packed, eccentrically indexed, and run by a wisecracking actor named Hy Wolfe, CYCO is more than an independent bookstore; it is a bohemian survivor from a world that was nearly lost.

Sadly, today’s New York has little place for such survivors. Last fall, the Atran Foundation, CYCO’s main supporter, cut off its annual stipend. After eighty-three years, the store seemed poised to close forever—until a crew of young Yiddish lovers launched a defiant campaign to save it.

Crabapple talks about her own experience with the language (“I first visited CYCO Books in 2019. I had then been studying Yiddish for six months, in order to write a book on the Jewish Labor Bund, and I was on the hunt for the official four-volume history of the political party”) and about the proprietor (“A white-haired, barrel-chested man in an old T-shirt, with a thin face and habitually sardonic expression, Wolfe mixes tough street talk with polyglot literary allusions in a way that’s utterly New York”), then gets to the current crisis:
[Read more…]