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The mail brought me an unexpected pleasure today: a copy of Sarah Whittall’s A Study of English Nautical Loanwords in the Russian Language of the Eighteenth Century. Dry, you say? Nonsense — ships are wet! But seriously, folks, this is the kind of impressively detailed investigation I love. The presumption is that Russian nautical words are of Dutch origin, and this is overwhelmingly the case, but that makes it all the more interesting to see the alternative terms that once existed. And Whittall is a very careful scholar who is not afraid to take others who show less care to task, as you can see from the excerpts below. From the introduction:

Van der Meulen’s work is a comprehensive study of the Dutch element in the Russian nautical terminology, but its value is somewhat reduced by its author’s bias. He appears to take the line that Russian shipbuilding and nautical words were adopted entirely from Dutch, and, therefore, that any Russian word which bears a similarity to a Dutch term must have been borrowed from Dutch. […] Vasmer gives a very limited number of English eighteenth century nautical loanwords, and has relied a great deal on Smirnov’s work for these. This latter study, it must be said, is not always entirely reliable: his derivation of ган рум from gang room (repeated by Aristova) is incorrect, for example […] Aristova’s book deserves a few remarks, both because it contains a fair number of nautical loanwords, and because it is the first attempt at a comprehensive treatment of English loanwords in Russian […] Aristova has done for English loanwords what van der Meulen did for Dutch nautical borrowings. In other words, she attributes to English each and every Russian word which is phonetically similar (and some which are dissimilar), in very many cases without considering the possibility of Dutch, German or other origin. […]

The purpose of this study is to give as complete a survey as possible of Russian eighteenth century nautical and shipbuilding terms which were borrowed either directly or indirectly from English. I have been as inclusive as possible, recording not only those words which became permanently fixed in the Russian vocabulary, but also those which became obsolete, and those which were never more than foreign words or occasional borrowings. Some words were obviously not borrowed directly from English ( e.g. лоцман), but are included nonetheless because English was their ultimate source. Other words are of doubtful origin, but are included because English origin is possible. […] No attempt has been made to define the Russian words, since in the case of obsolete words it is not usually possible to be absolutely sure of their meaning, whilst surviving words may have changed their meanings.

There is a useful section on the historical background (“British aid was of great importance to the Russian navy in the eighteenth century, particularly during the last ten years of Peter’s reign, the period of neglect which followed his death, and the era of Catherine the Great”), and then comes the main part of the book, the Vocabulary. I’ll quote the first few entries to give you an idea of how comprehensive and detailed it is (I’ve replaced her underlining with bold or italics as seemed useful):
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No, Ezra Pound did not visit Russia, but Ian Probstein’s article “I have beaten out my exile” (Make It New IV 4.3 [December 2017]) is a wonderfully detailed account of his reception there, from the first translator of his poetry into Russian, Zinaida Vengerova (1867-1941), to recent publications of his complete works, including two different Cantos. I could quote the whole thing, it’s so full of interesting material, but I’ll try to limit myself to a few digestible chunks and send you to the link for more if you’re interested. Probstein says “it was probably due to Vengerova’s essay that imagism became known in Russia, and it is not unlikely that it impacted the Russian Imaginist movement, with its series of manifestos, the first of which came out in 1919,” and continues:

The next connection between Pound’s circle and the Russian poets was established during the June 1917 visit to London of the prominent Russian poet and founder of Acmeism, Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886-1921), an outstanding Russian poet, critic, and translator, and one of the founders of the Guild of Poets, to which Osip Mandelstam also belonged.

In London, Gumilyov resumed friendship with his old acquaintance Carl Eric Bechhofer Roberts (1894–1949), whom he had first met in St. Petersburg’s famous literary café “A Stray Dog” [Brodyachaia Sobaka] in December 1914. Bechhofer invited Gumilyov to stay at his house, introduced him to his numerous literary friends and acquaintances, and later published an interview with him in The New Age. During his two–week stay in London, Gumilyov met with W. B. Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, and John Cournos; on June 16–17, he visited Lady Ottoline Morrell and her circle, where he also met D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, and many others. However, there is no documented evidence that Gumilyov met Ezra Pound, although he had heard of him from so many people. In addition, it should be pointed out that Nikolay Gumilyov, like Pound, was attracted to Homer, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti – the last was the hero of Gumilyov’s novella The Joys of Earthly Love [Radosti zemnoi liyubvi]. Like Pound, Gumilyov was fascinated by the poetry of Théophile Gautier and published both adaptations and translations of the French poet. Furthermore, Gumilyov was captivated by Africa, where he travelled extensively in 1909–1913, visiting several countries from Egypt to Ethiopia. He wrote about these travels in his poems, plays, short stories, and diaries. It is notable that Gumilyov wrote both about the Princess Zara, Zotar (akin to Pound’s “Zothar” of Cantos XVII and XX) and Hanno the Seafarer, the hero of Pound’s Canto XL. Finally, like Pound, Gumilyov was attracted to China and in July 1918 published a book of poems, Porcelain Pavilion [Farforovyi Pavilion], in which he included his adaptations and imitations of Chinese poems from Li Po, Liu Che, and others, inspired by Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de Jade (1867).

(A nitpick: Gumilyov’s Радости земной любви is not a novella but a short story divided into three sections which he called “новеллы” [novelly] for reasons of his own.) There follows a discussion of “the striking affinities between Ezra Pound’s and Osip Mandelstam’s views on nature, reality, and language,” something I’ve always felt but never explored, which I particularly regret leaving out, but it’s too long to reproduce and too tightly organized to excerpt. But I’ll quote his conclusion: “Although they never read a line of each other’s writing, the affinities between Mandelstam and Pound were due to the overlapping of their sources — Hellenism, High Antiquity, Medievalism, Dante, and Villon.” He continues:
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Danny Bate writes for Greek City Times about a papyrus dated to between the 5th and 7th centuries:

The text is like a phrasebook – it’s key vocab and phrases for Armenians living in Hellenic Egypt! Although it’s one of the earliest sources for the Armenian alphabet (created c. 400 AD), the text doesn’t contain one word of Armenian. Instead, it’s lines and lines of Greek. There’s everyday words (like parts of the body), helpful phrases and even conjugations of common verbs! […] The text is so important for our knowledge of Greek. By using Armenian letters, its author didn’t have to follow the norms and archaisms of Greek writing – they were free to spell more accurately. The window into the Greek of that time and place that it gives us is incredible. For example, the consonant /h/ is consistently spelled (as in “hipar” ‘pony’), while the use of the Armenian letter Բ shows that /b/ hadn’t shifted to /v/ in this Greek.

The papyrus doesn’t have any specific name beyond simply ‘the Armeno-Greek papyrus’. It’s held in the collection of the National Library of France (BnF 332). For more information, Clackson 2000 (additional notes 2002) is the leading paper on it, and where I got the picture.

Clackson 2000 is A Greek Papyrus in Armenian Script (Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 129 [2000]: 223–258):

This article concerns a papyrus containing Greek in Armenian script which is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (inventory number BnF Arm 332). Portions of the text and photographs have already been published, but I present here the first full edition and commentary. My edition differs substantially from previous readings of the text which did not recognise that the text, as mounted, was misaligned.

Fascinating stuff; thanks, Trevor!

A Language Log post quotes Bob Ramsey on the history of American Chinatowns, originally settled largely by immigrants from Taishan, “a tiny, rural district on the southern coast of China”:

The result of this sustained immigration from Taishan (“Toisan” in Cantonese, “Hoisan” in the local language itself) was that an estimated 86 percent of Chinese-Americans traced their ancestry to that little out-of-the-way place.

These residents of Chinatown would tell you they were “Cantonese.” But were they really? My Cantonese colleague at Columbia told me she found it frustrating. People in Chinatown understood her Cantonese fairly well, but she could not understand much of anything they were saying, she said laughing. The reason is that the language of Taishan–or “Hoisan”–is closely related to, but distinctively different, from Standard Cantonese. Taishanese was the language on the streets there, not (Standard) Cantonese, and definitely not Mandarin.

The post goes on to quote the Wikipedia article:
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Tessa Koumoundouros at ScienceAlert writes about how “a rare script from a language in Liberia has provided some new insights into how written languages evolve”:

“The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries,” says linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia. “Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time.” […]

“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs,” says Kelly. For example, “the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician [aleph] and eventually the Roman letter A,” the team explains in their paper. “But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers,” Kelly notes.

The eight Vai creators set out to design symbols for each of their language’s syllables, inspired by a dream. Their chosen symbols represented physical things like a pregnant woman, water, and bullets, as well as more abstract traditional emblems. It was then taught informally by a literate teacher passing their knowledge of the script to an apprentice student (with 200 individual letters that must have been a challenge to remember!). This practice is still used today to teach the written language, which is now even used to communicate pandemic health messages. Kelly and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute analyzed the 200-syllabic alphabet of the Vai people from 1834 onwards using archives across several countries.

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I’ve just finished Victor Pelevin’s 1996 novel Чапаев и Пустота, whose title is (like so many) hard to translate. It looks like it means “Chapaev and Emptiness” (or, if you prefer, “Chapaev and the Void”), but it turns out (quite a ways into the novel) that Пустота [Pustota] is the surname of the viewpoint character, whose full name is thus Pyotr Pustota. Andrew Bromfield translates his name (rather awkwardly) as Voyd (why not Void, if you’re going to go in that direction?), but he renders the title as Buddha’s Little Finger in the US edition and The Clay Machine Gun in the UK. (Those are both references to the same annihilation-producing entity that appears towards the end of the book.) If you want a summary of the novel, which shuttles back and forth between Civil War Russia (it opens in Moscow in 1918) and a psychiatric hospital in the mid-1990s, see the poorly written Wikipedia article (which is oddly titled Chapayev and Void, a title under which the book exists nowhere else). In the Civil War parts, Pyotr becomes Petya, commissar to a very unusual Vasily Chapaev, who in addition to being a Bolshevik commander is an all-knowing Buddhist who tries to share his enlightenment with Pyotr, while in the 1990s the lead psychiatrist Timur Timurovich tries to cure him; both have him write down his “dreams” in detail, and the point of the novel is that neither existence is real — the whole idea of “reality” is demolished, and you achieve enlightenment by realizing that you are no one, you exist nowhere, and the world doesn’t exist. This whole farrago of pop Buddhism didn’t interest me in the least (its natural home is in dorm rooms with some beer and/or pot), and frankly I was thinking of giving up on the novel, but by that point I was three-quarters of the way through and figured I might as well plug away at it; I was rewarded by some excellent Chapaev jokes in the final chapter. Basically, it’s the same story as Hermit and Six-Toes (LH) and Omon Ra (LH), except that instead of the hero seeing the truth of and escaping from a Broiler Combine or the Soviet space program, he escapes from both a psychiatric hospital and the shackles of “reality.” But it’s much longer than either of those — too long, I’d say. Lots of people like it, of course, but I know two people who bailed out on it early.

Mind you, Pelevin is always worth reading, despite the longueurs and silliness. I liked this image from the first paragraph of the novel proper (there’s a preface by an Urgan Dzhambon Tulku VII):

The same old women were perched motionless on the benches; above them, beyond the black latticework of the branches, there was the same grey sky, like an old, worn mattress drooping down towards the earth under the weight of a sleeping God.

На скамейках сидели те же неподвижные старухи; вверху, над черной сеткой ветвей, серело то же небо, похожее на ветхий, до земли провисший под тяжестью спящего Бога матрас.

(The translation is Bromfield’s, and I discovered that you can read most of the first chapter here.) On the next page I thought “пулеметную р-р” [machine-gun r-r] was great, and later on I loved Ебанишада (Upanishad, with the start replaced by еб- ‘fuck’). If cultural references are your thing, there are scads of them: philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Swedenborg, Schopenhauer), musicians (Boris Grebenshchikov, Leonard Cohen), movies (Seven Samurai, Pulp Fiction), and of course writers (Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Bunin, Nabokov, Pushkin in statue form, and Bryusov and A. Tolstoy, among others, in person). I’ll finish with a linguistic puzzle from late in the book; there’s a wonderful story that includes this passage:

He said that the Romanian language has a similar idiom — haz baragaz, or something of the kind — I forget the exact pronunciation, but the words literally mean “underground laughter”.

Он сказал, что в румынском языке есть похожая идиома – «хаз барагаз» или что-то в этом роде. Не помню точно, какзвучит. Означают эти словабуквально «подземный смех».

Now, there is a Romanian haz ‘humor; fun; wit,’ but what is “baragaz”? Fortunately, a Romanian has investigated this very question and decided it’s a distortion of the phrase haz de necaz ‘humor from sorrow/trouble/misfortune.’ Again I am thankful for the wide reach of the internet.

From Alex Foreman’s FB post I learned the following wonderful word:

Kezayit, k’zayit, or kezayis (Hebrew: כְּזַיִת) is a Talmudic unit of volume approximately equal to the size of an average olive. The word itself literally means “like an olive.” The rabbis differ on the precise definition of the unit:

▪ Rabbeinu Yitzchak (the Ri) defines it as one-half of a beytza (a beytza is the volume of an egg).
▪ Rambam specified that a ‘grogeret’ (dried fig) was one-third of a beytza, making this the maximum size for a kezayit, which is smaller. Rabbeinu Tam made the argument explicitly, though, using a slightly different calculation came out with a maximum definition of three-tenths.
▪ According to some interpretations, including the Chazon Ish, the zayit is not related to other units by a fixed ratio, but rather should only be conceived of independently as the size of an average olive.

Stick that in your metric pipe and smoke it! Alex says “Somebody from Ashkenaz just told me that the size of an olive isn’t the size of an olive. Mobius strip in my brain now. What do?”

Unrelated, but I learn from this Baseball Hall of Fame page that there was an old “scruffy, worn out cowboy” character called Alkali Ike, “paired with Mustang Pete in a popular series of silent films in the 1910s,” and that this is the origin of both Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike and Cardinals pitcher Grover Alexander’s otherwise mysterious nickname “Pete”:

Alex and his regular catcher, Bill Killefer, went on a hunting trip together and after a day on the trail, the catcher looked at his dirt-encrusted friend and hung the name “Alkali Pete” on him. Though hardly appropriate for a successful young athlete, the nickname stuck to the former Nebraska farm boy. Just before Alexander entered the Army in 1918 during World War I, Alexander’s teammates presented him with a wristwatch with that nickname engraved. As more players and reporters began to use the nickname, it morphed into “Old Pete.”

Nicholas Ostler is one of LH’s favorite authors of language books, as I said here (see that post for further links), so of course I was interested in The best books on The History and Diversity of Language recommended by Nicholas Ostler. After an introductory interview, he discusses his five chosen books, Dying Words by Nicholas Evans, La Révolution Technologique de la Grammatisation by Sylvain Auroux, The Stories of English by David Crystal, Linguistic Diversity by Daniel Nettle, and Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ll quote his remarks about the second and leave you to discover the rest for yourself:

The author is a French linguist and historian and this book explores the new view of language which was adopted about the time of the Renaissance. The big figure here is the Spaniard Antonio de Nebrija (1444 – 522). He did two things that nowadays don’t seem so extraordinary but represented at the time a completely new view of language. First, he wrote a grammar of his own language, which was Spanish. Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin. These grammars had been written more than 1,500 years earlier.

The Greeks first worked out what the structure of language was with nouns and verbs and inflections of various sorts and how the syntax of sentences worked. Then the Romans came along and it was done for Latin too. You might have thought that people would have come from all directions thereafter and done the same for their own languages, but it stopped dead there. The only languages thought worthy of having grammar were Greek and Latin. Even languages like Hebrew, which you’d have thought would have some credibility, were not analysed in this way.

What Nebrija said was that you could do this for any language, and argued that, above all, any language which is the language of an empire ought to have a grammar. He did this for Spanish, but later, as a result of his work, the Spanish missionaries who went out to the Americas started writing grammars of all the languages they encountered there. This was an amazing thing: Nobody had ever done this with such a wide variety of languages before, and certainly not with languages they considered to be used by savages.

The other thing that Nebrija did was write a grammar of Latin. That had been done before, but he happened to do it at the time the printing press was taking over the production of books, and so effectively he ended up creating one of the first student textbooks. The idea took root that language could now be learnt from books and that there could be a technology or system of learning languages. This began to be applied all over Europe, where all the major powers wanted to analyse the grammar of their language and provide textbooks for students.

Auroux looks at the process of how this development spread across Europe and the world. This is a very important work and I’m just sorry that this book doesn’t seem to be available in English.

I’m sorry too.

From John Emerson’s FB post:

I’ve been studying Classical Chinese and especially the Daodejing for 45 years now, and during the 1990s I even published a few articles about it in legit academic journals. For a couple years now I’ve been gathering and editing my writings with the eventual goal of book publication. I now have a few things ready to go and more will follow.

To begin with, I have an edited text and translation. There are over 300 English translations of the Daodejing available and any new translation makes people ask “Why?” But my version is very substantially different than any earlier version, and I claim that in these respects it is better. To begin with, I have revised the Chinese text with an eye to 4 texts, much older than the traditional Wang Bi text, which have been unearthed by archaeologists in recent decades which are. My goal has not been to reconstruct the “original Daodejing” but to produce an eclectic composite text which lacks the various problems and inconsistencies that each individual text has, and when possible to find new (to us) meanings which have been lost over time.

I have also rearranged the text of the Daodejing, which is acknowledged to be a chaotic hodgepodge, into intelligible historical-topical groups which stand in an intelligible relationship to one another. Most significantly, I have divided the Daodejing into two distinctly different parts, each amounting to about half the Daodejing, which I call Early Dao and Sage Dao. My thesis that the Daodejing is an anthology put together by the followers of “Sage Daoism”, and that about half of the book consists of writings of Early Dao authors who *did not mention the Sage at all*.

My explanation of the Early Dao / Sage Dao division is here. These are final versions, though I am open to editing and proofreading help. My main goal, however, is to find a publisher (or at least an agent). Please share this message and these links with anyone who you think might be interested. (My email address is at the links).

So if you know any agent or publisher who might be interested, do let him and/or me know; the Daodejing is endlessly interesting and needs as many interpretations as it can get.

Eric Margolis in the Japan Times has the kind of close look at hard-to-translate words I love, Translator trip-ups: What do they mean for learning Japanese?:

In the recent issue of the literary magazine Monkey, which publishes new and old Japanese writing translated into English, a dozen literary translators dished out their thoughts on the hardest words to translate from Japanese into English. These choices ranged from the omnipresent いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase), which is used as a greeting when entering a store, to sentence endings like the emphatic よ (yo) and the interrogative かしら(kashira, I wonder?).

Examining the words chosen by these translators can shed light on why communication between languages requires so much more than one-to-one translation. It also demonstrates how important it is to have a high level of cultural understanding for speaking fluent Japanese.

I want to take a look at five of these words and dive into why they’re significant and how Japanese learners can embrace and grow by using them. These words are: いらっしゃいませ、おじさん/おばさん (ojisan/obasan, mister/missus), 懐かしい (natsukashii, nostalgic), はあ(hā, an interjection) and 心 (kokoro, heart). Why did translators choose these words as being hard — even impossible — to translate? As we’ll soon see, the parenthetical definitions are woefully insufficient. We’ll need to dive deeper.

I’ll just quote a couple of passages:
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