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Dave Wilton has posted a Big List entry for Alaska; here’s the first paragraph, which gives you the basics (go to the link for the interesting details):

The name Alaska comes from the Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland, originally only a reference to the Alaska Peninsula, from which the Aleutian Islands extend. Later it was applied to the entire territory that would eventually become the state.

At the discussion page, I wrote:

A fascinating post, but can you expand on “Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland”? Can that be broken down morphologically?

Dave said “I’m sure it can, but I don’t have the expertise and resources to do it.” So: anybody know anything about Aleut?

Dmitry Pruss wrote me about a Russian counting sequence “эне бене рес” [ene bene res] that he was surprised hadn’t been mentioned on LH; this Pedagogical Encyclopedia page gives an example of the full sequence:

«Эне, бене, рес, / Квинтер, финтер, жес, / Эне, бене, раба, / Квинтер, финтер, жаба».

Ene, bene, res, / Kvinter, finter, zhes, / Ene, bene, raba, / Kvinter, finter, zhaba.

Which was interesting but didn’t seem worth a post of its own (I was going to add it to the “Yan tan tethera” post) until I googled it in the Latin alphabet and found it’s a Latvian thing as well: you can see a woman reciting “Ene, bene, res, Kvinter, finter, džes, Ene, bene, rupucis, Kvinter, finter, pasprucis!” here, and it’s listed with a bunch of other Latvian children’s rhymes on p. 12 of this pdf. So now I’m thinking there’s some Russo-Baltic Kindersprachbund thing going on here; anybody know anything more?

David-Antoine Williams was kind enough to send me a copy of his book The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry last year, and it looked so interesting I didn’t want to rush through it, so shortly after starting it I set it down for a minute and… well, things happened, it slipped out of my field of view, and (to my shame) I forgot all about it. Fortunately, a reader sent me a link to Stephanie Burt’s review for the University of Chicago Press Journals, so I can bring it to your attention that way. She begins:

Neither the sound of a word nor its history provides a metaphysically or intellectually reliable guide to its present-day use and force. Poets, however, sometimes write as if such a guide could exist, or as if their poems could provide one: these imaginary guides stand behind, or direct, some recent poets’ major works. So David-Antoine Williams concludes in this learned, careful, insightful study of how these poets take account of etymology: not only the histories and the origins of words, but also the stories we tell about them, whether or not we believe them.

According to a durable myth—or story or philosophical axiom—the present-day meanings of words, along with their sounds, conceal the truths in their Proto-Indo-European (PIE), or perhaps Edenic or Hebrew or archaic Greek, beginnings. To reactivate the history of a word is to make available for one’s own modern poem these truths, to return the phonemes and graphemes that make up a language to their nonarbitrary, cosmic roots. Martin Heidegger sometimes seemed to believe as much, with his hope to connect “origin, truth, primacy and propriety” (31). So did the Christian Hebraists of John Milton’s time, and the “Latin-speaking early Christians” who heard malum (sin) in mālum (apple) and saw more than coincidence or pun (27). So did such ambitious modern poets as Charles Olson, who promised his followers a way of writing (and reciting, and even breathing) that could extend “from the root out,” from the “Aryan root, as, to breathe” (“Projective Verse” [1950; repr., Poetry Foundation).

Such claims run exactly counter to Saussurean linguistic theory, and to modern historical study, with its emphases on “the non-teleological nature of linguistic development” (35). Signs are not referents, not even in PIE. We have, instead, only words and their empirically, imperfectly researchable histories. And yet those histories give—as Williams shows—contemporary poets ways to make poems: etymology, false or true, conjectured or historically supported, mystified or demystified, supports the verse-making strategies—and the various attitudes toward truth and art—in Williams’s chief subjects, Seamus Heaney, J. H. Prynne, R.F. Langley, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

I’ll quote a passage on J.H. Prynne, whose poetry I have come to love (see this thread):
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A repost from 2003 (the past is never dead):

Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

The long-forgotten Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been having a revival lately; New York Review Books has published five collections of his fiction, and now Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series (which started with a bang and has gone from strength to strength) has put out Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor, which they were kind enough to send me. It’s every bit as impressive as you’d expect, fourteen pieces dated from 1912 to 1949 rendered into English by a range of translators and provided with a general introduction as well as introductions to each piece, and there are over forty pages of notes at the end. The first essay, “Love as a Method of Cognition,” is a sort of response to Vladimir Solovyov’s “The Meaning of Love” and is apparently his only actual work of philosophy; the last, “Writer’s Notebooks,” is a collection of epigrams (“I have noticed that in games played for one’s life, the trump card is always from a black suit”). In between there is everything from “The Poetics of Titles” (see the detailed discussion at Russian Dinosaur) to “A History of Unwritten Literature,” and of course the title piece, which was not published until 1994 and which the introduction calls an “imaginary autobiography.” Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has a good review where you can find out more; I’ll just say this is one more bit of evidence that the Russian Library is one of the best innovations in the publishing world in recent years. Keep up the good work!

The Modernist Journals Project “digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s. We also offer essays and other supporting materials from the period.” From the About page:

We end at 1922 for two reasons: first, that year has until recently been the public domain cutoff in the United States; second, most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922 with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. We believe the materials in the MJP will show how essential magazines were to the rise and maturation of modernism.

Via this MeFi post, where you will find links to some of the more important journals, with descriptions.

This is a Good Thing.

Alex Foreman (frequently linked at LH, e.g. here and here) has an informative and (as is usual for this boisterous fellow) provocative essay called What Past Poets’ Rhymes Don’t Tell You About Past Speech:

I’ve just got to get this out there, after seeing so many people make terrible assumptions about what rhymes can tell you about the English pronunciation of the past. Did pre-modern English poets’ verse always rhyme perfectly in their own speech?

Not so much. No. They didn’t in the 16th century. They didn’t in the 17th. Nor at any later point. This becomes obvious when we get the rare chance to see a poem phonetically transcribed (or in this case, notated) by its author.

He provides examples from Richard Hodges’ The English Primrose (1644) and Robert Robinson (fl 1617), summing up as follows:

There is evidence that people in reciting verse might adjust their normal pronunciation to a degree to give full rhymes. For example, the only time Robinson transcribes secondarily stressed final <-y> with /i:/ is when rhyme requires it, e.g. misery/she. Alexander Gil’s transcriptions of Spenser show that when rhyme called for it he could adopt pronunciations of head (rhyming with lead v.b.), desert, swerve (rhyming with art, starve), dear (rhyming with were), and poor, door (rhyming with store, adore) other than his normal one.

But this kind of thing only went so far. Gil’s transcriptions in particular do not accomodate rhymes that rest on a pronunciation used by social groups he found objectionable: thus he transcribes Spenser’s rhyme despair/whilere as / (the rhyme rests on a monophthongized WAIT vowel which Gil condemned with mighty spleen as an effete affectation). Mismatches in shortening of ME /ọ̄/ simply do not affect his transcriptions at rhyme. Wood/stood and move/love are for him / and /. Nor does he drop the velar fricative in “fight” when Spenser rhymes this word with “smite”. Recitation practice (as one might expect) also seems like it varied considerably from person to person. (In Robinson’s transcriptions of his own verse, the two examples I cited are the only imperfect rhymes, but his transcriptions of Richard Barnfield’s verse are on the whole remarkable for how unconcerned with rhyme they are: he often opts to transcribe a non-rhyming form even when the form that would’ve made a perfect rhyme also existed in his own speech.)

And, as I’ve just shown, poets themselves could clearly rely for their rhymes on forms of speech other than their own. My point is that one cannot assume, without a good deal of other evidence, that a pre-modern poet’s use of a particular rhyme implies that the pronunciation on which such a rhyme rests was necessarily their own. It doesn’t even necessarily imply that the rhyme would have been perfect in their own reading of their own verse.

He finishes up with a swipe at careless scholars:
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A reader writes:

I came across a word in Wikipedia that seems to be hapax legomenon. It was on a page for Tarkhuna, a Georgian tarragon flavored soft drink. “Mitrofan Lagidze began to add odorous chukhpuch containing extract of Caucasian tarragon to sparkling water with natural syrups of his own production.” Google seems to send me back to the same text about Tarkhuna. The Russian version of the page has it as “чухпуч”. Curious if you or any of your readers would be keen of chasing down this mystery.

I thought I could clear it up with a little googling — though it’s not as easy as you might think, since Georgian has two different ch’s (ჩ, ჭ) and two different p’s (პ, ფ) — but no, all I got was translations of the same Wikipedia sentence. Georgian Wikipedia does not have an article on Tarkhuna, but they have one on Lagidze (properly Laghidze)… but it doesn’t refer to any chukhpuch. I checked my biggest Georgian dictionary, but no luck. So I’m giving up and turning to the assembled multitudes: any ideas? (Thanks, Andy!)

Geoff Pullum has a typically invigorating review of the new second edition of Randy Allen Harris’s The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure; here are a few excerpts:

It is quite difficult to explain in nontechnical terms what triggered the linguistics wars, but let me try. Chomsky in the mid 1960s maintained that the structures of sentences were nowhere near as simple as the sentence diagrams of yesteryear; they were more like se­quences or layers of such diagrams. The most concrete layer, called the surface structure, captured facts about the overt shape of the sentence (word order, inflec­tion, and pronunciation). More abstract layers accounted for things like con­nections between sentences — relations be­tween active and passive clauses, for example. […]

However, from about 1967 some of Chomsky’s earliest defenders and most talented students began to develop arguments undercutting his case for “Deep Structure.” They claimed it had no theoretical necessity or significance. Instead, they posited much more abstract syntactic layers, and suggested that the most abstract layer of all looked much like what philosophers would call the “logical form” of a sentence. Their hypothesis was dubbed “Generative Semantics” (GS). […] GS emerged directly out of Chomsky’s work, using the kind of arguments he used, but it diverged from his own views, and displeased him. In his view this meant that the promoters of GS had to be defeated and punished.

The punishments Chomsky imposes on publicly announced enemies of his views are of two types: the dungeon and the fire.

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Back in 2014 we talked about Translating Frozen Into Arabic, but that’s just one tiny tile in the impressive mosaic that is Rhaomi’s MetaFilter post:

Unlike many cinematic exports, the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to dubbing. Through an in-house service called Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for lyrical reinvention). The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well — everything from Arabic to Icelandic to Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project, Encanto, debuted in more than forty tongues (can you even name that many?). Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney’s translations is thoroughly documented online in multilanguage mixes and one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards.

There are a bunch of links there (and he provides quite a few examples that I didn’t quote), but the only one I’ve linked here is the name-the-language quiz, which I did annoyingly badly on (37/47). Some of it is my fault (I couldn’t come up with some obvious-in-retrospect language names under time pressure), but some of it is theirs (to spare others my suffering, they call it “Mandarin,” not anything involving “Chinese”). You don’t have to put the cursor anywhere on the quiz, just type a language name into the box and if it’s correct the name will appear next to the appropriate translation. Fun, as is the whole post (unfond though I am of Disney movies).