languagehat.com

Keith Kahn-Harris, featured here in The Languages of Kinder Surprise earlier this year, writes for Psyche about the pleasure to be had in not understanding a language:

[…] I haven’t lost this heady, even mystical, faith in the possibilities of meeting and talking with the other. But more recently I’ve sought to understand how similarly transcendent possibilities can arise from not talking with the other, or even being able to understand their voice. Philosophically and theologically, I’ve subscribed to Martin Buber’s ideal of working towards ‘I-Thou’ encounters, in which we each meet the other mutually as authentic individuals, without objectification or qualification.

Here we come back to the Kinder Surprise. I love to peruse scripts I cannot understand, signs I cannot parse: Czech diacritics, the loops and curves of Georgian, the intricacies of Chinese characters, the elegant fluency of Arabic. In my book The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (2021), I went further, commissioning dozens more translations of the Kinder egg message into tongues as out of the way as ancient Egyptian and Klingon. My passion for not understanding language releases me from the effort of comprehension, freeing me to revel in the manifold sounds the human mouth can make, the tiny nuances the pen produces on paper. It made me wonder if Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ encounter might not require any dialogue at all? What if his concept of ‘dialogue’ – which he contrasts with the ‘I-It’ instrumentalism and objectification of ‘monologue’ – could be taken non-literally? […]

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The Untranslated does it again — calls my attention to a work that I’d never heard of but that I now very much want to read. The review starts “Vladimir Gubin has remained in the history of Russian literature as the author of one work, which he kept reworking and polishing for 15 years, from 1981 to 1996,” describes the wacky plot (involving the brutal dictator Illarion and his nemesis the Dwarf, who works in a Tower whose function is to generate ideas for state legislation and who gets imprisoned for trying to help Illarion’s sister Pomezana, who never wears any clothes and “has recently taken to flying in the sky like a character in a Marc Chagall painting”), then continues with this passage on the style, which is what grabbed me:

Of course, the way this novel is written is more important than what it is written about. This becomes evident from the very first paragraphs, which describe the swarms of blood-thirsty fleas causing mayhem among the citizens of Sycophantia. We do not know this yet, but the sporadic attacks of these uncannily trained insects are Illarion’s doing. From time to time, he orders his servants to release the fleas into public places as the indispensable “scourge of the masses”. The whooshing of the nasty swarms is conveyed by the repeated sibilants, something that a good English translator would be able to recreate after some time of concentrated effort. […]

Gubin’s rhythmic prose deserves a separate article, perhaps even a monograph, so I will just lightly touch upon it, giving you a couple of examples. Some of his sentences are likely to spark an acute sensation of déjà-vu in any reader who has been exposed to the Russian canonical translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. It is a peculiar feeling when you realise that a scene or a description in the novel suddenly bursts into a dactylic hexameter or at least into its truncated version. […] There are more likewise ingeniously metered sentences and phrases scattered throughout the text, and I cannot stress enough how important this rhythmic ornamentation is to the overall aesthetic experience of reading the novel.

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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Wackernagel’s Lectures on Syntax with Special Reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic (tr. David Langslow):

In this course on syntax, we shall have constantly to deal with inherited material, which is to be found in even the smallest details and in oddities concerning which one would hardly think in terms of inheritance. For example, at Iliad 3.276–7, in a prayer to Zeus and the Sun-god, we read: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε (‘Zeus father (voc.) . . . and Helios (the Sun) (nom.)’), i.e. in the invocation one god is named in the vocative, the other in the nominative. It would be superficial simply to refer this to the requirements of the metre, since the poet would have had other means at his disposal for turning out a correct hexameter. From the point of view of Greek this is an oddity, particularly as vocatives elsewhere occur in coordination. This puzzle was solved by an outstanding philologist, Theodor BENFEY (1809–81). He showed (1872: 30–4) that in the Rigveda, the oldest written remains of an Indo-European language, when two forms of address are joined together with the little word ca ‘and’ (corresponding to Greek τε ‘and’), the second is in the nominative rather than the vocative. So Homer’s use of the nominative instead of the vocative is conditioned by the little word τε. This tiny detail reveals the power of linguistic habit and the influence of inheritance.

Here’s the original German:

Überall in unserer Syntax werden wir es mit Ererbtem zu tun haben. Es erstreckt sich bis auf kleinste Kleinigkeiten und Seltsamkeiten, bei denen man kaum an Vererbung denken würde. So heisst es I 277 in einem Gebet an Zeus und den Sonnengott: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε. Da wird also der eine Gott bei der Anrufung im Vokativ genannt, der andere im Nominativ. Es wäre oberflächlich ohne weiteres von einem Zwange des Metrums zu sprechen, da dem Dichter andere Mittel zu Gebote gestanden hätten um einen richtigen Hexameter herauszubringen. Vom Standpunkt des Griechischen ist dies eine Seltsamkeit, besonders da sich in andern Fällen Vokative koordiniert finden. Das Rätsel wurde gelöst durch einen ausgezeichneten Sprachforscher, Theodor Benfey. Er wies nach dass wenn im ältesten indogermanischen Sprachdenkmal, dem Rigweda, einer ersten Anrede eine zweite durch das dem Wörtchen τε entsprechende Wort ča beigefügt wird, diese zweite Anrede statt des Vokativs den Nominativ hat. Die Setzung des Nominativs statt des Vokativs ist also durch das Wörtchen τε bedingt. So enthüllt sich in dieser minimalen Kleinigkeit die Macht der Gewohnheit und der Einfluss der Vererbung.

I note that Langslow felt it necessary to add the qualifying “linguistic” to Wackernagel’s “die Macht der Gewohnheit” [the power of habit]. At any rate, this is the kind of cross-linguistic comparison that provides so much of the thrill of historical linguistics. (More details at the Laudator link.)

Maria Bloshteyn writes for Punctured Lines about her family’s library, painfully assembled and now being disposed of equally painfully (her essay is preceded by Yelena Furman’s brief introduction):

The books are a heartache. I have been dreading this moment for years. My mother, the adored and formidable matriarch of our small family, had moved into a nursing home after struggling with dementia for the past several years. She doesn’t care now what will happen to the family library, but I do. These are, after all, the books that we brought with us from the Soviet Union, when we left it forever in 1979. I grew up looking at their spines both in our Leningrad flat and in our Toronto apartment: light brown for the complete edition of Pushkin, mauve for Heine’s poems, beige for Tolstoy’s collected works. The classics, the translated classics, the poetry chapbooks, the art albums, the subscription editions, children’s literature—they are all here. Once, they provided the continuity between the two vastly different worlds: one that was forever lost to us and the other that we were slowly learning to inhabit. Reading and rereading them kept me sane as I, rarely at a loss for words, found myself suddenly language-poor and unable to either defend myself against nasty verbal attacks I faced in school as the Russian kid, or to express myself adequately to friendlier others.

These are the books that I am now packing into large cardboard boxes, as I am deciding their fate. Lowering them in, one by one, I think of the books that we weren’t allowed to bring with us as we left: most prominently, unfairly, and painfully, the single volume of Pushkin’s poems that my grandfather, part of the 13th Air Army during World War II, sent to my mother, evacuated to a village in the Urals. We weren’t allowed to take it, because it was published before some arbitrarily assigned cut-off year, which made it, ridiculously, a possible antiquity of value to the State. The passage of years hadn’t dimmed my sense of outrage.

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Mitra Taj writes for the NY Times about the latest expansion of Google Translate:

When Irma Alvarez Ccoscco heard that the language she has spoken her entire life, Quechua, had been added to Google Translate, she hurried to her computer to try it out. “I said: ‘This is it. The day has finally arrived,’” Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco, a poet, teacher and digital activist, recalled in a phone interview. She started with some basic sentences. “I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she said. “And yes, it worked.”

It was more than a new tool for communication; it was vindication that Quechua and its several millions of speakers in South America deserved greater voice and visibility, Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco said. She and other Quechua activists had been making that argument for years. After all, Quechua is one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas. But now, “a company as big as Google says so,” she said. “It’s like saying to the world, ‘look, here we are!’”

Quechua — or more precisely southern Quechua, the main language in the Quechua linguistic family — was one of 24 languages that Google added to its translation service this month. Collectively, they are spoken by some 300 million people. Many, like Quechua, are mostly oral languages that have long been marginalized, spoken by Indigenous or minority groups. […]

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Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker essay on bicycles (archived), describes their origin story thus:

A few years back, the bicentennial of the bicycle wheeled past at breakneck, bike-messenger speed. In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais, the Master of the Woods and Forests to the Duke of Baden, invented a contraption called the Laufmaschine, or running machine. A climate crisis had led to a great dying off of livestock, including horses, especially in Germany. Drais meant for the Laufmaschine to be a substitute for the horse. It had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you sort of scooted around on it, and a full-grown man could pick up pretty good speed. (“On descent it equals a horse at full speed,” Drais wrote.) In England, Laufmaschinen were called “swiftwalkers.”

I was, of course, curious about this alleged “swiftwalkers,” a word I didn’t recall ever having seen. Sure enough, it is unknown to the OED. [Not true — it’s there, but hyphenated; see Jen’s comment below.] That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, so I turned to Google Books, where I got a lot of hits of the type “About 1817, Baron Karl von Drais of Germany created the Swiftwalker, an improved wooden model with iron wheels and no pedals” and “Another early 19th Century version was called the ‘Swiftwalker.’” Clearly, Lepore picked it up from some such modern history. But when I restricted my search to the 19th century, I got exactly two hits, to The Velocipede: Its History, Varieties, and Practice by J. T. Goddard (1869) and Digest of Cycles Or Velocipedes with Attachments Patented in the United States, from 1789 to 1892, Volume 1 (1892)… and when I clicked through and searched within the books, I got “no results found.” When I restricted my search to the 20th century, I got hits like “Dubbed the dandy horse, the swiftwalker, the velocipede, hobby, and the running machine, von Drais’s invention took off” and “The velocipede gained rapid popularity in France, and almost immediately migrated to England, where it was known variously as a Draisine, Swiftwalker, Hobby Horse, Dandy Horse, or Pedestrian Curricle.”

So my current theory is that someone joining the throng of people trying to cash in on the new craze decided to call their version a Swiftwalker; some later historian happened on this obscure and forgotten term, thought it was colorful, and added it to their collection of colorful terms (I have to say I myself am particularly fond of “Pedestrian Curricle”); and such lists proliferated in the same way as lists of supposed names for groups of animals (the “exaltation of larks” phenomenon), so that any later writer on the subject could pluck out whatever pleased them, and “swiftwalker” pleased Lepore. All well and good, and there would be nothing wrong with saying something like “In England, Laufmaschinen were called many things, including ‘swiftwalkers,’” but her actual phrasing suggests that “swiftwalker” was the English word for it, which is flatly untrue. This is the trouble with popularized history, even from actual historians — the temptation to be as colorful as possible leads you into the swamp of error.

(Oh, and Drais’s name is perpetuated in the draisine used on railways.)

The always clickworthy Poemas del río Wang has a post about Ouranoupoli and its history (it’s the last settlement before the border with Mount Athos); it’s full of the usual intriguing details and gorgeous illustrations, but I’m posting about this passage:

The tower of Ouranoupoli was probably built as early as the late 1200s, but the first written record of it only survives from 1379, when “Ioannes Palaiologos, Despot of Thessaloniki” stayed here and granted tax relief to the area. It is not clear who this Ioannes was. In this period, “despot” means an emperor’s son who is officially declared heir to the throne and is given the rule of an important province, such as Thessaloniki. In 1379, however, the despot of Thessaloniki, that is, the heir to the throne and local governor, was the later Emperor Manuel II, who held this office from 1376 until his accession to the throne in 1391. His son, the later Emperor John VIII – a participant in the Council of Florence-Ferrara, and a model for Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli – was only seven years old in 1379, so he could not be it. As this Ioannes is mentioned on the Greek net only in connection with Ouranoupoli, and other Byzantine historical sites are silent about him, it is possible that he is just a long-surviving error of the historical literature. But tax relief, whoever granted it, suggests that the central government admitted that they could not pay the garrison, and in return they did not demand anything from what the soldiers produced for themselves.

It occurs to me that “despot” is a very misleading faux ami here; to ordinary (non-Byzantinist) English-speakers it means only (to quote M-W) “a ruler with absolute power and authority […]; one exercising power tyrannically,” which is not the sense needed here. I would suggest translating it in such contexts as “prince” or “crown prince.”
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I’m reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard), which is frankly not a good novel — if it had been set in the famous “city of N” I probably would have given up after a hundred or so pages. But it’s set in a very vividly rendered Kiev in the winter of 1918-19, and I’m a sucker for city novels, so I persevered and now have only eighty pages to go, and my understanding of that complex metropolis is now far greater than it was. At any rate, I’ve just gotten to a passage of Hattic interest: after the city has changed hands yet again, three grim men bang on the door and announce a search, and the language of their wolfish leader is described as follows (Marian Schwartz’s translation):

He spoke a strange and incorrect language — a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian words — a language familiar to inhabitants of the City who had spent time in Podol, on the banks of the Dnieper, where in the summer the wharf’s winches whistled and spun and in the summer ragged men unloaded melons from barges.

Он говорил на странном и неправильном языке — смеси русских и украинских слов — языке, знакомом жителям Города, бывающим на Подоле, на берегу Днепра, где летом пристань свистит и вертит лебедками, где летом оборванные люди выгружают с барж арбузы…

That language is called surzhyk, “a range of mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands… The Ukrainian word surzhyk (from Proto-Slavic *sǫ — «with» + *rъžь — «rye») — originally referred to mix of different grains that includes rye or a product like flour or bread made from such a mix.” Melissa Mohr describes it at the Christian Science Monitor:
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I was stopped in my tracks by the second sentence in Chandni Singh’s “Spring Never Came to India This Year” (NYT, May 24, 2022):

I am no stranger to heat. I know the stifling breath of “loo,” the hot and dry summer winds that blow over North India and Pakistan.

I immediately turned to the OED, which has it s.v. loo, n.³ (entry from 1976):

Etymology: Hindi, < Sanskrit ulkā flame.

The name given in Bihar and the Punjab to a hot dust-laden wind.

1888 R. Kipling Phantom ‘Rickshaw 78 The loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees.
a1936 R. Kipling Something of Myself (1937) iv. 98 A hot wind, like the loo of the Punjab.
1954 O. H. K. Spate India & Pakistan ii. 55 In the NW hot weather depressions generally take the form of violent dust-storms… Such dust-storms are distinct from the loo, a very hot dust-laden wind which may blow for days on end.
1965 E. Ahmad Bihar iv. 45 The hot scorching ‘loo’ winds of the Bihar plains during late April and May have an average velocity of 5–10 miles per hour.
1974 M. Peissel Great Himalayan Passage xi. 175 The Loo is caused by the hot expanding air of the Indian plains rushing into the cool hills.

Looking up Sanskrit ulkā (उल्का) I find it defined as “A fiery phenomenon in the sky, a meteor; A fire-brand, torch; Fire, flame”; Wiktionary says it “is related to Sanskrit वर्चस्- (várcas-, ‘luster’), from a root Proto-Indo-Iranian *waRč-.”
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In 2019 Richard Janko published a long article “Amber inscribed in Linear B from Bernstorf in Bavaria: New Light on the Mycenaean Kingdom of Pylos” in Bavarian Studies in History and Culture; here’s the abstract:

In 2000 the extensive fortified citadel of Bernstorf near Munich in Germany, which burned down in or after c. 1320 BC and had already yielded some gold regalia of rather Aegean appearance, produced two amber objects seemingly inscribed in Linear B. The authenticity of these objects has been questioned, on grounds that are as yet insufficient. A new reading suggests links with a place called *Ti-nwa-to, the existence of which is attested by the Mycenaean archives at Pylos and possibly at Knossos. Women from this place worked at both palatial centers as weavers, but it also had a wealthy ‘governor’. An analysis of the Pylos tablets suggests that this place was in western Arcadia. This material sheds light on long-distance connections in Mycenaean times.

It starts with a lengthy description of the finds and their authenticity, continues with “Reactions to the discoveries” (“the finds at Bernstorf were too outlandish and remote for them to have attracted much notice from scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age, a field which has seen some notorious forgeries and hoaxes”), and proceeds to Janko’s own “fresh approach,” which involves interpreting the inscription “??? pa-nwa-ti” as ti-nwa-to, comparing it to other forms attested in the Linear B tablets, and concluding that it represents a place in the Western Peloponnese. There follows a detailed discussion of possible locations and implications, with “some hypotheses”:

If the amber from Bernstorf was incised with Linear B in the western Peloponnese, how did it reach Upper Bavaria, and why? Even in the Middle Bronze Age, valuable artifacts could travel vast distances. One can only offer hypotheses, since it is not clear on what basis we could decide between them, but at least only a limited number of them are available; considering them will shed light on several aspects of Mycenaean long-distance relations. If these objects are genuinely from Mycenaean Greece, they must either have been traded by Mycenaeans, taken from them by force, or paid by them for services of some kind, the most obvious of which is service in a force of mercenaries. They could then of course have been traded great distances, as far as Bernstorf, by other intermediaries. […] The whole story may never be known, but the discovery of Linear B in Upper Bavaria opens a surprising new window onto the Mycenaeans and their far-flung connections.

This kind of thing is extraordinarily interesting in theory, but I can’t help but feel that it’s an awful lot to make of a few scratches on a piece of amber. I’ll be curious to see what others think.