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I presume everybody knows about the absurdly addictive Wordle by now (and its many offshoots like Dordle, which you can play as often as you want); I’ve been playing them without feeling any need to post about them, language-based though they are. But I’m frustrated enough by Semantle that I’m passing it along to frustrate you as well:

Each guess must be a word (of any length) or short phrase. The game will tell you how semantically similar it thinks your word is to the secret word. Unlike that other word game, it’s not about the spelling; it’s about the meaning. The similarity value comes from Word2vec. The highest possible similarity is 100 (indicating that the words are identical and you have won). By “semantically similar”, I mean, roughly “used in the context of similar words, in a database of news articles.” […]

The “Getting close” indicator tells you how close you are –if your word is one of the 1,000 nearest normal words to the target word, the rank will be given (1000 is the target word itself). If your word is not one of the nearest 1000, you’re “cold”. (By “normal” words”, I mean non-capitalized words that appears in a very large English word list; there are lots of capitalized, misspelled, or obscure words that might be close but that won’t get a ranking. Those get marked with “????”).

You will need more than six guesses. You will probably need dozens of guesses. There’s a new word every day, where a day starts at midnight UTC or 19:00 your time. Yesterday’s word was “consume”.

I’ve already made 48 guesses on today’s word and have gotten no closer than 20.23 (today the nearest word has a similarity of 74.10, the tenth-nearest has a similarity of 45.08 and the one thousandth nearest word has a similarity of 20.28, so my best guess is damnably close to the top 1000); I don’t seem to have a good instinct for how to approach the semantic center. May you fare better!

From Susannah Clapp’s LRB review (archived) of Square Haunting, by Francesca Wade:

[Jane] Harrison’s father had resisted the idea of education for women and her stepmother insisted on trying to make her more feminine: she sewed a fringe on her mackintosh. Yet in 1874 she got a scholarship to Cambridge to study Classics (three years earlier Newnham had made accommodation available to women attending its new ‘Lectures for Ladies’). Her insistence on an alternative history – punching against the Olympian pantheon, revealing evidence for matriarchal husband-free goddesses – is central to Square Haunting and a direct influence on Woolf and HD. Central, too, are the obstacles she encountered (along with some coterie idolatry): in 1888 London academics pronounced it ‘undesirable’ that ‘any teaching in University College should be conducted by a woman’. She left Cambridge saying that ‘much of our ingenuity & energy goes in cringing’.

Something else makes Harrison all-pervasive. Fascinated by Henri Bergson’s idea of time as a series of changes melting into one another and finding this represented in the imperfective aspect of the Russian language, with its implication of collective memory, she evolved a theory, simply expressed, of merging boundaries between past and present, between one person and another: ‘Each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.’ Square Haunting reverberates with this notion. The connections Wade finds between her subjects’ work and lives are in the main echoes and overlaps – a kind of confluence – rather than direct inheritance, debts or tussles for supremacy.

Harrison knew 16 languages (11 living and five dead), and in a nifty footnote Wade comments that she ‘began teaching Russian almost as soon as she began learning it’.

Yes, of course the idea of the imperfective aspect of Russian implying collective memory is silly; so what? Many fine things spring from imaginary roots.

A reader writes to say “Lingthusiasm (https://lingthusiasm.com/) is a podcast that (this is all too uncommon) comes with transcripts.” From the homepage:

Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us. From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn’t realize you were already making.

And yes, they have transcripts, from Episode 1: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace to (as of now) Episode 62: Cool things about scales and implicature (“But first, it’s our 5th anniversary! I can’t believe we’ve been making this show for five years”). A fine site; it was mentioned in a comment in 2018, but it definitely deserves its own post. Thanks, Pau!

I saw on Facebook an announcement of the publication of Ha! Linguistic Studies in Honor of Mark R. Hale (publisher’s page); needless to say, I was curious about the title, and the first paragraph of the preface not only answers that question but is so entertaining I thought I’d post it here:

Mark Hale’s work is among the most original, thought-provoking and provocative in the field—or fields, rather, since his interests range from comparative Indo-European linguistics and reconstruction to phonological theory, syntactic change, Polynesian comparative reconstruction, Middle Iranian philology, and subgrouping methodology all the way to sociolinguistics (as anybody who has ever heard him lecture about change and diffusion will know). It is not easy to do justice to all these interests in a single volume, but we are proud to say that the contributions collected here pay homage to quite a respectable subset of them—hence the all-encompassing “linguistic studies”. This is all the more pleasing given that when we began the project of organizing what was then referred to by its preliminary working title as “Mark Hale’s so-called Festschrift” (have you heard him talk about “Wackernagel’s so-called Law”?) for his 65th birthday, we certainly did not anticipate having to navigate a global pandemic. “Ha!” aptly describes how we felt when we were finally able to complete this volume despite such adversities. It is, of course, also an interjection that you might utter while reading one of Mark’s articles and suddenly encountering a new solution to an old problem—or to something that you hadn’t even realized was a problem! And, finally, “ha” is also one of the infamous particles and clitics in Vedic that we now understand so much better thanks to Mark’s work. In fact, it is also in the title of his contribution to the Gedenkschrift for Jochem Schindler (Hale 1999, “ha: so-called ‘metrical lengthening’ in the Rigveda”), in which he elegantly explains the distribution of the particles h ̆ ̄a and gh ̆ ̄a and the variation in their vowel quantity as having arisen through the interaction of regular sound change (Brugmann’s Law) with metrical position. This article, which is such a good representative of Mark’s careful application of philology and linguistic theory, inspired us to recycle the eponymous particle for him.

I also liked their reference later on to “the perfect photo of our honorand”; I had forgotten the delightfully donnish word honorand (OED: “< classical Latin honōrandus worthy of honour, gerundive of honōrāre”), meaning “A person who is the recipient of an honour (esp. an honorary degree) or the subject of an honorary inscription, monument, etc.”; the OED’s first citation is from the Times of 27 June 1935: “The Hall of Worcester College where the honorands..and Doctors had met to partake of Lord Crewe’s benefaction.”

A couple of days ago I watched the pre-release “book launch” event hosted by Globus Bookstore for Irina Mashinski’s new English-language book The Naked World — she’s a wonderful poet whom I met at a reading in 2014 (see this post), and now that the event is on YouTube it’s worth a watch (it features Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, among others), but what drove me to post is a mention of Mashinski’s English translation of a famous Soviet song, “Журавли” [Cranes]. (The site I just linked has many versions in languages from English to Vietnamese.) It was popularized by the Russian version recorded by Mark Bernes in 1968, but the original lyrics were written by Rasul Gamzatov in Avar, and since we recently discussed Avar in another thread, I thought I’d post the original (also available at Avar Wikipedia). The first stanza:

Дида ккола, рагъда, камурал васал
Кирго рукъун гьечӀин, къанабакь лъечӀин.
Доба борхалъуда хъахӀил зобазда
ХъахӀал къункърабазде сверун ратилин.

In the canonical Russian version:

Мне кажется порою, что солдаты,
С кровавых не пришедшие полей,
Не в землю эту полегли когда-то,
А превратились в белых журавлей.

And in Irina’s translation:

Sometimes I think that soldiers, who have never
come back to us from the blood-covered plains,
escaped the ground and didn’t cross the River,
but turned instead into white screeching cranes.

You can hear it sung in Avar by Zainab Makhaeva here. And for those who know Russian and want to try to figure out how the original works, there’s a useful online Avar-Russian dictionary (e.g., the first word, дида, turns out to be an oblique case of дун ‘I’).

I finished Yuri Buida’s second novel, Ермо [Ermo] (1996), with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration that I have felt before. As with Veltman’s Странник [The wanderer] (see this post) and Pisemsky’s Сергей Петрович Хозаров и Мари Ступицына. Брак по страсти [Sergei Petrovich Khozarov and Marie Stupitsyna: Marriage for passion] (see this post), I ask “Why does nobody know about this wonderful book?” “Nobody” is an exaggeration, of course, but I can’t find any discussion of it aside from a couple of unperceptive paragraphs in Norman Shneidman’s Russian Literature, 1995-2002 (“one may wonder whether Buida and Ermo are not one and the same person” [!]) and an admiring review by Andrei Nemzer (“Он красиво и продуманно выстроен, написан с должным стилизаторским мастерством и еле приметной, но оттого особенно действенной, самоиронией, наконец, но не в последнюю очередь, вполне интеллектуален” [It is beautifully constructed and carefully thought out, written with fitting mastery of style and a barely perceptible, but for that reason particularly effective, self-irony; last but not least, it is quite intellectual]), and I can’t find a copy for sale either new or used (I really want to reread it in a physical copy that I can annotate). I admit that I’m particularly susceptible to this kind of writing, which might be called “cosmopolitan,” using as it does all the resources of world culture, scattering names, quotations, and allusions on every page — other Russian writers who scratch that itch for me are Leonid Girshovich and Lena Eltang. But I would think anyone who enjoys, say, Borges and Nabokov would love this novel, and I commend it to the attention of translators looking for something to do. And since the main character is an American (even if Russian-born and resident in Italy), I would think it would appeal to readers in these United States. But enough generalities: what’s it about?

It’s a literary biography of an invented writer, born Georgy Mikhailovich Ermo-Nikolaev in St. Petersburg in 1914 just after the outbreak of war, whose father, an engineer of noble birth, soon took him to New England, where he grew up: “В отличие от Бунина и Набокова, рядом с которыми его чаще всего ставят, он не вывез из России почти никаких воспоминаний и впечатлений” [Unlike Bunin and Nabokov, with whom he is most often compared, he brought almost no memories and impressions out of Russia]. His beloved Sofya marries another man, he studies literature and begins a career as a professor (writing a promising essay on Dante and Bonagiunta), unexpectedly goes to Spain as a war correspondent, and winds up living in a palace in Venice, where his writing becomes more and more famous and eventually wins him a Nobel Prize. (Cleverly, Buida leaves us guessing what language he writes in until halfway through, when he reveals it’s English, though Ermo also begins writing essays in Russian; I think it might have been even better never to tell us, leaving it a mystery, like so much in the book and in life.) Though it tells a chronological tale, it jumps around, opening with a long quote from Ermo’s last novel, Als Ob (German for ‘as if’ — Ermo is just as multicultural as Buida), and frequently jumping back and forth in time, with ever-richer accumulations of repetitions and allusions. By the time it’s over, you have not only a strong sense of who Ermo was but an appreciation of Buida’s skill at simulating an eager, slightly pompous biographer who perhaps takes too many liberties (“что и вовсе затрудняет работу биографа, оказывающегося в опасном зазоре между вымыслом и домыслом” [which greatly complicates the work of the biographer, who finds himself in the dangerous gap between invention and speculation]).

The book is full of brilliant little set pieces and stories-within-stories, but I don’t see any point in trying to summarize them; instead I’ll quote some favorite passages so you can get an idea of what it’s like. From a description of his forebears:
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Rebecca Mead has a New Yorker piece, The Common Tongue of Twenty-First-Century London (archived), about Multicultural London English; we’ve talked about it before (2015, 2019), but it’s constantly developing, and I continue to be interested in it:

Not long after my family settled into a new home, near Hampstead Heath, I went south to the Tate Britain museum, on the bank of the Thames, to see an ambitious project undertaken by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. He had made a collective portrait of London by photographing its Year Three students—second grade, in the British system. […] London itself belongs to these students, whose parents and grandparents have come from all over. More than three hundred different languages are spoken by the children who attend London’s schools, but, as I listened to their voices at the Tate, I was struck by how similar to one another they sound. Sociolinguists who study the way that Londoners speak have identified the emergence, since the late nineteen-nineties, of a new variant of English among the younger generations: M.L.E., or Multicultural London English.

In recent decades, large-scale studies have been undertaken of language use in Hackney, in East London. Historically, Hackney was occupied by white working-class residents, or Cockneys, whose basic elements of speech are familiar not just to Londoners who grew up with them but to anyone who has watched Dick Van Dyke effortfully twist his tongue in “Mary Poppins”—saying wiv for “with” and ’ouse for “house.” The years after the Second World War brought an influx of immigration that resulted in Hackney becoming one of London’s most decisively multiethnic neighborhoods. In one cohort of Hackney five-year-olds, who were studied between 2004 and 2010, there were Cockneys, but there were many more children with parents from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Albania, Turkey, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and various African countries. Friendship groups were multiethnic, the researchers noted, and often included children who spoke a language other than English at home, or children whose first language was English of a postcolonial variety, such as Ghanaian or Indian English. In this diverse milieu, the children found their way to a new common language.

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From the October 16, 2020, TLS letters column:

In his letter of October 9, Leo Carr mentions the “strong Hamitic elements” of Jibbali, an indigenous Semitic language of Oman. The term “Hamitic” was coined in the nineteenth century to refer to a putative language family including Berber, Ancient Egyptian, and the Cushitic languages, which in turn was thought to be part of a larger family including the Semitic languages. The enormously influential linguist Friedrich Müller named this larger family “Hamito-Semitic” in 1876. These names were taken from the sons of Noah, Ham and Shem, in the book of Genesis, and the linguistic classification was often tied to speculations about race and culture. In fact, the inclusion of a wide variety of African languages in the Hamitic family was posited by leading figures in African linguistics (such as Carl Meinhof) on the basis of characteristics such as skin colour, stereotypical facial features, and subsistence type. In his Races of Africa (1930), Charles Gabriel Seligman provides a representative example of this style: “the incoming Hamites were pastoral Caucasoids – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker-witted than the dark agricultural Negroes”.

From 1950 onwards, Joseph Greenberg, one of the fathers of contemporary linguistics, demonstrated again and again that “Hamitic” does not itself constitute a valid linguistic family (ie, there is no special relationship between Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian, as opposed to Semitic or Chadic), and suggested adopting the geographically-based name “Afroasiatic”, proposed earlier by Maurice Delafosse (1914). Beyond establishing the linguistic facts, Greenberg advocated against race-based classifications of language, which was a major achievement for modern linguistics.

By common reckoning today, Afroasiatic, also known by a handful of other names that are not widely adopted in Anglophone linguistics, is thought to be a macro-family (or “phylum” or “stock” in the jargon of linguistics) that includes the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic families. Afroasiatic is the fourth largest family in the world in terms of number of speakers. Higher-order relationships between these six families are controversial, and while most linguists consider it highly plausible that Afroasiatic does indeed constitute a valid linguistic unit, this has not been demonstrated according to the standards of proof commonly required in historical linguistics.

It is not clear what Mr Carr intended by “strong Hamitic elements”, but according to Aaron Rubin’s excellent The Jibbali (Shahri) Language of Oman (2014), the main languages that have influenced Jibbali are the poorly-described local Arabic varieties and other indigenous languages of the area, such as Mehri. In other words, both in terms of inherited lexicon and grammatical structure, as well as later influences, Jibbali’s “elements” are strongly Semitic. The term “Hamitic” has not had a place in modern linguistics or anthropology for the past seventy years, and invoking it is akin to referring to phlogiston.

Eitan Grossman
Jerusalem

Now, that’s my kind of letter to the editor; I’m glad they featured it. The final letter on the page is relevant to this 2007 LH post:
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Frequent commenter rozele sent me this link, describing it thusly:

it’s an epic-length 90s-style webpage (remember infinitely long webpages with tables of contents? are they scrolls to contemporary sites’ codex structure?) by one andrei conovaloff. it aims to disentangle the confusing terminology used for one corner of the russian spiritual christian landscape. along the way, it’s an insider’s history (and ethnography, really) of what conovaloff clarifies should be distinguished as the Molokane, the Pryguny, and the Dukh-i-zhizniki, especially their north american diasporic branches. i found it a great ride, and learned a lot along the way.

She’s not kidding. My jaw literally fell open after a few minutes and remained that way until I backed out to post; I’ve only scratched the surface, but I feared if I kept going I might not eat for the rest of the day, let alone post. Here’s a sample, about the “malakans” and why you shouldn’t confuse them with Molokans:

The ancestors of malakan people were Spiritual Christians who came from the Russian Empire after Russia began colonizing the Caucasus, after 1840, to get more economic benefits (more land, no taxes) and religious freedom. They are neither creeds, nor sub-creeds of one faith or religion. They are many faiths of mostly heterodox (non-Orthodox), mostly White people, many intermixed with other peoples (Asiatic, Northern Europe, Germanic) from many places in the Russian Empire who migrated to the Caucasus. The exception to non-Orthodox are the old rite Orthodox, Old Ritualists, who are also considered heretics to the New Orthodox. Most malakane lived in groups or clans, often in their own villages, or sharing a village with other heterodox people from Russia who met for the first time in the Caucasus, often clashing, some inter-marrying.

Malakan is an etic term used by indigenous Caucasian peoples referring to the “new invasive settlers from Russia” — a foreign group, “them” (chuzhikh grupp), “outsiders,” outgroup, ne nashi, aliens. In a similar xenophobic manner, before 1700 in the Russian Empire, all western foreigners in Russia were called Nemtsy (dumb, those who can’t speak our language), no matter what their actual nationality; and this term meant both Germans and stupid, because few could understand them. It was more insulting than Americans today who say: “It’s Greek to me” when they don’t understand something. In a similar fashion, a single derogatory term is used in the American Southwest “… to refer to (any) foreign citizens living in the U.S.” — “wetback” (morjado [sic; should be mojado — LH]).

Do not confuse the general category malakan with the Spiritual Christian Molokan faith. These 2 words sound alike, appear to be cognates, and are too often confused. The origin of Molokan is from the heresy of eating dairy (molochnye) products, probably morphed into a pun about nursing infants (molokane) who cannot understand religion. The origin of malakan is probably from a geographic river area in South Ukraine, northeast of Crimea.

Malakan originally was a demonym (gentilic) for “people from the Molochnaya (river area)” who were moved to the Caucasus(30) by the thousands. Molochnaya (German: Molotschna) is the river delta and territory in south Ukraine northeast of Crimea. Molochnaya means “milky” in Russian, which referred to the abundant dairy grazing land. In the native language Cuman (Polovtsy), the area was called syutana, meaning “nurse, mother.”(31) For most of a century, many descendants of Spiritual Christians in the southern republics of the Soviet Union and who migrated to the U.S.A. from the Caucasus, retained an oral history that their label (malakan) came from ancestors who lived in “Milky-waters.”(32) I was told by Molokane who remained in Central Russia that they never heard this rumor until they met Molokan refugees from the Caucasus and South Ukraine who were repatriated to Central Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Most settlers in the Caucasus from Russia called malakan were illiterate and did not know much of their history, nor how to define their faiths. They probably accepted the default geographic label, emic, from within their groups, like I did when some people who did not know, or could not remember my name, nicknamed me “Arizona” from my 1952 Ford car license plate, when I moved from Arizona to Los Angeles in 1966. The old car and my country manners excluded me from most of LA-UMCA parking lotters who valued sporty cars and surfers.

I could go on quoting — he tells us about Los Angeles tribalism and the Aktinsky congregation on Percy Street before getting back to how “the easy to pronounce term — malakan — expanded into common usage in South Caucasus languages […] to refer to any peoples similar to malakan, any indigenous non-Orthodox faith (heresy, sekt) from Russia, and later into a general term for all Russian-speaking settlers from anywhere in Russia” — but you get the idea. One could spend days lost in this labyrinth. Thanks, rozele!

Audrey Magee writes in the TLS (archived) on Joyce and the Irish language:

James Joyce had been raised as a Catholic but not as a bilingual speaker of Irish and English. His parents were English speakers, the city where he lived was English-speaking, and his education had always been conducted in English, first with the Jesuits and then as an undergraduate at University College, Dublin. He was, however, taking classes in Irish at the time of the census, his interest having been sparked by the Irish Literary Revival, a movement spearheaded by intellectuals and academics from both Ireland and England, from Protestantism and Catholicism, among them W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde and Maud Gonne MacBride.

Joyce abandoned these lessons while still a student, deeply irritated by the then febrile nationalism of Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League), which organized Irish-language classes for English speakers. He was suspicious of the nationalist politics surrounding the language and, as a Parnellite and a European, was also wary of a romantic and nostalgic view of Ireland. Yet he was unwilling to speak out too harshly against the more ardent supporters of Irish, or to align himself fully with the language of the colonizer: he did not want to be on the wrong side of Yeats and the Revival movement. His solution was to leave the country, declaring in Stephen Hero that “English is the language for the Continent”.

But in Trieste, Zurich and Paris he found himself immersed in other languages, their variety fascinating and delighting him. He already knew French, and he also took lessons in Italian, German, and – in order to read Ibsen’s work in the original – Norwegian. By the time he moved to Paris with Nora Barnacle and their children, the family had its own hybrid language, a mixture of Triestine Italian, English, French and some Swiss German. Irish, though, was never far away. Annie Barnacle, Nora’s mother, was a bilingual speaker from Galway. Nora, like Joyce, had been educated in English and was an English speaker, but Joyce was able to draw on Nora’s latent knowledge of Connemara Irish, her mother’s mother tongue.

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