languagehat.com

EastWest Literary Forum has posted Osip Mandelstam. Translations by Alistair Noon in a pleasing format, with the Russian originals directly beneath Noon’s translations — a confrontation that requires a certain amount of self-confidence on the part of the translator. On the whole, I think Noon does well; he doesn’t try to match the meters and rhyme schemes of the originals, but replaces them with his own rather than soggy free verse (as is sadly common these days). He has a nice sense of sound patterns: “Prometheus, propping the rock”; “a curve that the steely camber connives in”; “A wave sprints in and cleaves the crest of a wave.” I would have liked to see him try harder with the echoing repetitions of “Он эхо и привет, он веха – нет, лемех” [on ekho i privet, on vekha – net, lemekh]; his “An echo and hailing? A guide-pole? No, he’s a ploughshare” ignores them entirely and settles for a (fairly pointless) literal version. But Mandelstam is hard, and I don’t fault him too much. Here’s one of his versions (for the original, click the link):

Twitching my lips, I lie underground,
but my words will be words that pupils recite.

Red Square: no ground on this earth is as round,
a curve that the steely camber connives in.

Red Square: no ground on this earth is as round.
No plan said the camber must spread out that wide

as it tilts to the rice fields, all the way down,
for as long as the planet’s last slave stays alive.

May 1935

(We talked about “camber” in 2018.) Thanks, Trevor!

It’s time once again to don the headgear-related half of the Languagehat brand, with Hannah Seidlitz’s New Yorker Talk of the Town squib “Jeff Tweedy Gets His Hat Back” (May 16, 2022; archived):

Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, retired his trademark off-white Stetson about five years ago after he looked out from the stage one night and saw that a number of fans were wearing the same hat. “I felt like Madonna,” he said the other day, in Chicago. He’s played largely hatless ever since. But for Wilco’s twelfth studio album the band is returning to its roots (roots music), and the fifty-four-year-old front man is feeling ready to reinstate the image repertoire. The band will première all twenty-one tracks of “Cruel Country”––“I love my country, stupid and cruel”—at Solid Sound, the music-and-arts festival that it throws every two years at MASS MOCA: lawn chairs, vintage Luccheses, craft I.P.A. Tweedy had to complete the costume.

In search of a new hat, Tweedy wandered the leather-fragrant aisles at Alcala’s Western Wear, a vaquero haberdashery in Chicago, which has been his home since the nineties. He passed hats that, he said, were suitable for a villainous Mountie, R. L. Stine, Lemmy from Motörhead, and the photo booth at his cousin’s bar mitzvah. But he struggled to find something that felt like him. A lot was riding on this purchase. “My first live review comes out where I’m wearing a stupid hat,” he prophesied gravely. “ ‘Ruined by a Stupid Hat: It was a great show—can’t believe he wore that hat.’ ”

And if you don’t care about hats, here’s an xkcd featuring a linguist.

Lisa Hilton’s TLS essay ‘Il trend’ for finglese (January 1, 2021; archived) is pretty much a standard-issue thumbsucker on alleged flooding of a language, in this case Italian, by the all-devouring colossus English, with the usual mix of nonsense (“eventually leaves native speakers unable to express certain concepts without recourse to the Anglo imports”), dubious statistics (“A study by Tullio de Mauro in the 1980s claimed that 2 per cent of words in the press derived from English, a figure which is now estimated to have risen to 10 per cent”), and interesting-if-true facts; here’s the start:

One festive tradition that my daughter and I were able to continue this year was our annual viewing of Carlo Vanzina’s classic Italian comedy Vacanza di Natale (1983), shot on the sparkling slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo and as essential a part of an Italian family Christmas as the Queen’s speech in Britain. Usually, we dress up in salopettes and bobble hats and make use of a wedding-present raclette set, but this year we were isolating in a glorified garden shed in Sussex, so we had to content ourselves with curling up on a small sofa like a pair of inverted commas. Still, it was nice to be reminded that there are still mountains somewhere.

Months of shrunken horizons seemed to bring a new focus. The film’s stiletto-stab at the Italian class system remains as sharp as ever, I noted, but its satire on the linguistic pretensions of the upwardly mobile has proved less an observation than a prediction. Guido Nicheli plays Donato, a pushy, status-obsessed Milanese industrialist who shows himself up with his attempts to speak English. Think Betjeman’s “How To Get On in Society” on skis. Donato’s attempts to appear sophisticated and cosmopolitan consist in mispronounced, inapt English idioms, which Italian audiences greet with glee. His catchphrase, “See you later”, even became the title of the actor’s biography. The incursion of “itanglese” or “finglese” (fake English) is getting beyond a joke, however.

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Merriam-Webster’s Words At Play features one of my favorite words in Some Notes On ‘Asshat’:

One of the difficulties in the creation and upkeep of a dictionary is the issue of how to treat nonstandard language. English is constantly being refreshed with new slang words, some of which quickly wither and disappear, while others assimilate into the language and become standardized (our 1916 Collegiate listed awful, jinx, and measly as slang). Should the lexicographer enter every new slang term that comes along the dictionary would quickly become overloaded with words which have little current applicability; if too long passes before entering some of these words the dictionary is obsolete before it is published.

The compromise is to enter words after they have demonstrated a certain breadth and consistency of use, typically in printed form. A fine example of the kind of word that merits inclusion is asshat (“a stupid, annoying, or detestable person”), a word recently added to our dictionary. It occupies the space between assez and asshead.

Asshat is a new addition to the English language. Recent research has found evidence of use from the late 1990s, in Usenet groups. (Note: the first citation below may be a pun on the misspelling of musical group Hatebreed)

who are hatbreed? maybe it’s part of that ass hat crew selena hangs out with
— alt.music.hardcore, 14 Apr. 1998

1977 CHiPs 3 3/4″ action figures (5 different: Ponch, Jon, Sarge, Jimmy
Squeaks, Stupid F***ing Asshat Erik Mouse, and Wheels Willie) $10-15 each
— _alt.fan.erik_, 23 Jul. 1999

The use of this word has, over the past two decades, spread considerably, and it may now be found even among the most urbane and sophisticated speakers of English […]

See the link for much information on further development; I like their last paragraph:
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I just got to the end of the TLS letters section featured in yesterday’s post, and found another gem:

Stepneys

It seems odd that a child born at sea should have a birthplace “Stepney” because of a Welsh street where a car’s attachable spare tyre design originated, as Bernard Richards suggests (Letters, December 11). A quick delve into historical commentary shows that the link is likely to be traceable to an old rhyme in London’s East End, taken to mean that children born on British ships can claim to belong to Stepney parish: “He who sails on the wide sea / Is a parishioner of Stepney”. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Stepney borough was formed and its official seal highlighted a sailing ship, at least partly in acknowledgement of the legend. Shipping had been the area’s major industry from its medieval maritime origins.

Alex Faulkner
Lewes, East Sussex

The “spare wheel” sense of the word was mentioned here in 2006, and our favorite Martian, Siganus Sutor, said:

Re: stepney. The word is (still) used in another language in which it also means “spare wheel”, and it is in Mauritian French.

The OED has an entry (not updated since 1933 except to add citations):
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The following letter to the TLS (Jan. 1, 2021) contains several curious words:

Merpeople

Apropos Shahidha Bari’s review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople (December 11), and its timely reminder that merpeople “are still with us, potent figures of human difference”: not many non-merpeople perhaps know that in what’s been hailed (by David Attenborough) as “the first natural history encyclopaedia”, besides mermen and mermaids, there’s a splendid image of a mer-monk, large as life and twice as unnatural. The source is Jacob Meydenbach’s Hortus Sanitatis, an incunable of 1491 from Gutenberg’s Mainz, a fine copy of which resides in Cambridge’s University Library.

Paul Cartledge
Clare College, Cambridge

Merpeople is a pretty obvious plural, but you still don’t see it very often; the OED (entry updated September 2001) has these citations:

1824 C. Lamb Let. 10 Aug. (1935) II. 434 A baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties,—sea dragons, ploypi, mer-people, most fantastic.
1882 Spectator 16 Dec. 1618 The idea of the ‘child of earth..’ carried away to consort with Mer-people is as old as Hylas.
1964 J. P. Clark Three Plays 46 Daughter of Umaloku, the delight of God and pride of unguents, Who the merpeople desire, I come Ahead of the snail and tortoise.
2007 Weekly World News 6 Aug. 11/1 While studying exotic marine life in the lowest depths of the Indian Ocean, marine biologist Vincent Harbor encountered a merpeople colony unlike any ever seen.

I am happier than I can say that the last citation is from the Weekly World News, the natural home of merpeople-related news. The word incunable is not particularly rare, though I myself usually use incunabulum. But the prize find here is mer-monk (I would prefer mermonk, since the other mer-words are not hyphenated); it’s not in the OED, and I thought perhaps it might be a hapax, but Google Books finds it in The English Illustrated Magazine, No. 5 (March 1898), p. 271:

The sea-monk or mer-monk of our Illustration may be regarded by comparison as a common object of the seashore, “for the hinferior horder of clergy,” in the nature of things, must be more numerous than their ecclesiastical superiors of episcopal rank.

And I presume that this refers to the very mer-monk, “large as life and twice as unnatural,” mentioned in the letter. How many can there be?

We were recently talking about phonaesthetic words, so this seems like a good time to post ‘Rough’ words feature a trill sound in languages around the globe, from Radboud University (at Phys.org). It begins:

In languages spoken around the world, words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a “trilled /r/” sound—a linguistic pattern that stretches back over 6,000 years, a new study reveals. The international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham, Radboud University, and the University of British Columbia has published its findings in Scientific Reports.

Language scientists first analyzed words for “rough” and “smooth” in a worldwide sample of 332 spoken languages—discovering a strong link between the sounds of speech and the sense of touch, which has influenced the structure of modern languages.

Compared to words meaning “smooth,” words that mean “rough” were nearly four times as likely to contain a trilled /r/ sound—from Basque “zakarra” and Mongolian “barzgar” to Dutch “ruw” and Hungarian “durva,” these words feature the common sound—an “r” pronounced as an Italian speaker might say “arrivederci.” […]

In the case of English and Hungarian, two unrelated languages, they found that in both languages, some 60% of words for rougher textures, such as “rough,” “coarse,” “gnarled” and “durva,” “érdes,” “göcsörtös” contain an /r/ sound—more than twice as frequent as for words for smoother textures, such as “smooth,” “silky,” “oily” and “sima,” “selymes,” “olajos.”

Co-author Mark Dingemanse, Associate Professor in Language and Communication at Radboud University, commented, “On their own, any of these patterns would be quite striking, but taken together, they demonstrate a deep-rooted and widespread association between the sounds of speech and our sense of touch.”

Mark Dingemanse has been at the Hattery before. I don’t know what to make of this, and I welcome all thoughts. (Thanks, Trevor!)

A while back, Anatoly Vorbei linked to V. N. Makeeva’s Материалы для толкования устаревших слов, which lists words that occur in Lomonosov’s Russian grammar and related materials that are difficult for modern readers to understand, with explanations taken from early dictionaries and from literature of the period. There follows this hopeful sentence:

Будущие исследователи раскроют, надо надеяться, значение тех, очень немногих слов, для толкования которых не удалось подыскать пока ни словарных, ни литературных материалов; таковы, например, слова артовль, ахидъ, березгъ, горлъ, слюгъ, хвихъ, хогъ, устрецъ, которые встречаются в черновых списках имен существительных мужского рода, кончающихся на ъ и ь.

Future researchers will hopefully discover the meaning of those very few words for whose interpretation we have not yet been able to find either dictionary or literary materials, such as the words artovl′, akhid, berezg, gorl, slyug, khvikh, khog, and ustrets, which are found in the draft lists of masculine nouns ending in ъ [hard sign] and ь [soft sign].

Anatoly is particularly taken with two of them:

Слюгъ и Хвихъ хорошо подходят как имена двоих слуг злой ведьмы в театральной сказке, мне кажется. Или абстрактных персонажей в пьесе Беккета.

Slyug and Khvikh work well as names of two of the servants of the wicked witch in a theatrical fairy tale, I think. Or abstract characters in a Beckett play.

Those are indeed excellent, but I am fond of artovl′ and khog as well; the first is impressively high-flown, the second sounds down-and-dirty.

Poetry, the magazine, is an American institution, founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912 and still going strong. I confess my interest in it peaks with the Ezra Pound years (I treasure my copy of the March 1915 issue, which includes some of his greatest poems); it was hit-and-miss during my college years (1968-72), and I pretty much stopped reading it after that. When I’ve looked at copies in recent years, my invariable reaction is “not my thing.” But the last three issues, edited by Srikanth Reddy (personal website; Poetry Foundation page), have made me snap to attention. His Editor’s Note to the March issue begins by describing the difficult life and career of Margaret Esse Danner (1915–1984), “the first Black woman on Poetry’s editorial staff,” and ends:

This issue of Poetry seeks to address an overlooked poet—and to bring Margaret Danner’s artful manner of looking at things to a wider readership. […]

My own guest editorship will turn, next month, to the diverse communities of language-users from a transnational perspective, with a special issue on “Exophonic Poetry”—featuring work by migrant, refugee, and other poets who write in a “non-native” language. And I’ll conclude my guest editorship at the magazine with a May issue on pre-modern poetries of the world in translation, titled “Make It Old.” A Black Chicago author who worked in Poetry’s offices; an immigrant chorus of exophonic voices; and the ancient poetries of our world in translation—addressing poetry from past to present, from the individual to the community, and from the neighborhood to the planet might, I hope, open new dimensions in our experience of art, language, and society.

Along with our folio on Margaret Danner, I’m grateful for the opportunity to introduce an extraordinary group of contemporary poets, hailing from Nigeria, Turkey, Bolivia, Japan, Chicago, and beyond, who have contributed their work to this issue of Poetry. Let’s turn now to their “blazing forms.”

In that issue I was struck by the substantial number of poems with the originals and en face translations, e.g. Rüştü Onur’s Hülâsa and the English version In Sum; I also very much liked Simone White’s From “or, on being the other woman”, which begins “I am an ignorant fucker. difficult to be close to in that i am unsentimental and intimate with everyone. This is connected to the problems I am working through regarding metaphor” and later includes this satisfying passage:
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I bought Tatyana Tolstaya’s Кысь (translated by Jamey Gambrell as The Slynx) in 2001, shortly after it came out; like everyone else, I was captivated by her brilliant short stories of the 1980s, and eager to see what her long-awaited novel was like (she’d been working on it since 1986). Alas, at the time its prose was too much for me, and I set it aside; now, having reached the year 2000 in my chronological reading program — and having gotten a lot more Russian literature under my belt — I’m finally in a position to read it without excessive difficulty, and I have done so. Alas and alack, it turns out to be a disappointment, as most Russian reviews said, although reviews of the translation seem to have been largely ecstatic (“a complex, deeply rewarding masterwork”; “A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy, and an impressive step forward for the gifted Tolstaya”; “It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of The Slynx” — John Banville in The New Republic). The New Yorker’s one-paragraph review (from the January 13, 2003, issue) provides a useful summary:

The hero of this spellbinding futuristic novel, a government scribe named Benedikt, lives in a primitive settlement on the site of Moscow, two hundred years after “the Blast.” No one knows quite how the old world was destroyed; as Benedikt puts it, “People were playing around and played too hard with someone’s arms.” Citizens born after the Blast exist on a diet of mice and “worrums” and bear frightening mutations, or “Consequences”—a tail, a single eye, a head covered with fringed red coxcombs. Other inhabitants, called Oldeners, haven’t aged at all since the Blast, and harbor memories of a lost culture that go unheeded by their descendants. Tolstaya’s radioactive world is a cunning blend of Russia’s feudal and Soviet eras, with abuse of serfs, mandatory government service, and regulation of literature. The dangers that threaten, however, feel more contemporary: to the south, Chechens; and to the west a civilization that might hold some promise, except that its members “don’t know anything about us.”

The thing is that if you are familiar with Russian and other dystopian literature, little of what she does is all that new or interesting. Lisa Hayden at Lizok’s Bookshelf puts it well:
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