languagehat.com

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera at Public Books writes about Don Quixote, which he calls “the Saturday Night Live of the Spanish Inquisition.” He says “A traditional line of scholarship holds that Cervantes was Islamophobic and something of a Catholic zealot,” giving examples, and continues:

“I have another view,” says [Muhsin] al-Ramli: Cervantes was “in favor [of Islam]” in Don Quixote. “The Inquisition was going on,” notes the Iraqi scholar, “and Cervantes knew how to camouflage his ideas.” Al-Ramli foregrounds the author’s lived experience in the Muslim world, saying, “without his experience in Algeria,” where he lived for six years, “Cervantes could not exist as we know him, nor his literature.” […]

[Read more…]

Dave Wilton has posted a Big List entry for frankincense, which we don’t seem to have discussed here (though we have talked about frankgum). He says “Frankincense is perhaps best known as one of the gifts the Magi bring to the infant Jesus” and quotes the Vulgate Matthew 2:11 (“et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera aurum tus et murram”):

The Latin tus or thus can refer to incense generally and the resin of the genus Boswellia in particular. The Koine Greek original is λίβανος (libanos, frankincense), a reference to what is now Lebanon, probably because trade routes for the product came through there into the eastern Mediterranean.

The English word is borrowed from the Anglo-Norman phrase franc encens. The basic meaning of franc is free, but it can also mean noble or distinguished. In other words, the term means high-quality incense. The Anglo-Latin francum incensum makes an appearance in 1206, although the more usual Latin nomenclature was liberum incensum. However, there is a slight problem with this etymology in that while the Latin liber means free, it was not generally used to mean noble or distinguished. Additionally, the noble/distinguished sense of franc in Anglo-Norman and Continental Old French was, as a rule, only applied to the social status of people. Francencens is the only example in Old French where franc is applied to a plant.

That issue does not rule the standard etymology out, but it does suggest an alternative. It may be that the Latin liberum incensum is a re-analysis of the Greek libanos, turning what was in Greek a reference to the Levant into a more familiar adjective in Latin. The franc would then be a straightforward translation of the Latin, with a subsequent semantic shift to mean noble/high quality, as that would make more sense in the context of incense […]

Makes sense to me. (He continues with a discussion of the word’s complicated history in French and English.)

I’m still reading David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, and I’m delighted to get to a passage I can feature on LH (it’s a superb book, and I want to finish it before I get my eagerly anticipated Christmas present, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity). He’s been talking about how reforms intended to increase “transparency,” for example in universities (his example is the Cambridge anthropology department), tend to “turn custom into a kind of board game”:

Faced with such demands, everyone’s first impulse was just to say, “Well, sure, we’ll just write that for the authorities and proceed as we always have.” But in practice this quickly becomes impossible, because the moment any conflicts crop up, both parties will automatically appeal to the rule-book.” […]

If we think about it, this sort of thing happens all the time—and even in contexts that have nothing to do with arbitrary personal authority. The most obvious example is language. Call it the grammar-book effect. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in places where grammars were only written recently. In many places in the world, the first grammars and dictionaries were created by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, intent on translating the Bible and other sacred texts into what had been unwritten languages. For instance, the first grammar for Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, was written in the 1810s and ’20s. Of course, language is changing all the time, so the Malagasy spoken language—even its grammar—is in many ways quite different than it was two hundred years ago. However, since everyone learns the grammar in school, if you point this out, people will automatically say that speakers nowadays are simply making mistakes, not following the rules correctly. It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came [sic –LH] and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.

[Read more…]

Slavomír Čéplö (aka bulbul) posted this two-hour Russian video on FB; it’s about the life and work of the great Mayanist Yuri Knorozov (note photo with cat), whose story is well worth reading — the Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of telling it. But what concerns me at the moment is his name. The English and Russian Wikipedia articles both give Кноро́зов, with penultimate stress, and so does a biographical dictionary published in 1998 (the Всемирный биографический энциклопедический словарь) — but everyone in the video, including his relatives, says Кно́розов, with initial stress, and that’s what’s given in Unbegaun’s Russian Surnames (he derives it from an old word кнороз ‘boar’). I’m reasonably confident the latter is correct, but I hesitate to change the Wikipedia articles when there’s a reference book published during his lifetime that says otherwise; I welcome all thoughts about the name, his work, or anything else that comes to mind.

From G.P. Goold, “Richard Bentley: A Tercentenary Commemoration” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 [1963]: 285-302), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

The greatest book written in Greek is the New Testament, though a Chinese who studied Greek in the classics departments of Occidental universities might well become an old man without ever discovering the fact.

I’m tempted, in the heat of the moment, to say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a scholar commit to print, though of course that can’t be right. Mind you, Goold was a perfectly respectable classicist; Paul Lewis’s NY Times obit (Jan. 24, 2002) says:

George P. Goold, a Yale classics professor who rejuvenated and debowdlerized the Loeb Classical Library, a collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts published with English translations, died on Dec. 5 in Holyoke, Mass. He was 79. […]

[Read more…]

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912, by Donald Keene (Columbia U. Press, 2005), and I thought this was interesting enough to share:

As a further step in cementing the ties between the emperor and his people, the emperor’s birthday was proclaimed a national holiday, the Feast of Tenchō [天長節]. Observance of the emperor’s birthday as a holiday had begun as far back as 775, but the custom had long since fallen into abeyance. Its revival at this time was thus another instance of the intention to restore ancient practices.

On October 23 [1868] it was announced that the nengō [年号] had been changed from the fourth year of Keiō to the first year of Meiji and that henceforth there would be only one nengō for an entire reign. The name Meiji was derived from a passage in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination: “The sage, facing south, listens to the world; facing the light, he governs.” The day before the new nengō was announced, the emperor himself had visited the sanctuary (naishidokoro [内侍所 ‘inner samurai place’]) where he drew lots to determine the new nengō from among several names submitted by scholars. Although he probably did not realize it at the time, the emperor had also chosen the name by which posterity would know him; earlier emperors were known by a place-name from the site of their residence or (as was true of Meiji’s father and grandfather) by a posthumously chosen title. The name Meiji [明治], interpreted as meaning “enlightened rule,” came to seem an accurate description of his reign. Names like those of his father and grandfather, auspicious though they were, would have been less appropriate to the era.

It turns out that KDoore explained the basic fact in a 2009 comment, but I had of course forgotten, and this has more detail. I’m curious, however, about how exactly Meiji [明治] is derived from the I Ching; it’s apparently from the Shuogua (an appendix explaining the trigrams), and the passage is translated here as “The sages faced south when they listened to the world (that is, held court), they turned towards the brightness and ruled.” Is “enlightened rule” from “turned towards the brightness and ruled”? I want context!

Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Babel (n+1 Issue 40, Summer 2021) is an essay about OpenAI’s GPT-3, described “by a friend who works in the industry as autocomplete on crack.” (I posted about it briefly last year.) She has plenty of interesting things to say; here are some excerpts:

From what I could tell, the few writers who’d caught wind of the technology were imperiously dismissive, arguing that the algorithm’s work was derivative and formulaic, that originality required something else, something uniquely human — though none of them could say what, exactly. GPT-3 can imitate natural language and even certain simple stylistics, but it . . . cannot perform the deep-level analytics required to make great art or great writing. I was often tempted to ask these skeptics what contemporary literature they were reading. The Reddit and Hacker News crowds appeared more ready to face the facts: GPT-3 may show how unconscious some human activity is, including writing. How much of what I write is essentially autocomplete? 

Writers, someone once said, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. The question of who said it is not really important. The whole point of the metaphor was to destabilize the notion of authorial agency by suggesting that literature is the product of unconscious processes that are essentially combinatorial. Just as algorithms manipulate discrete symbols, creating new lines of code via endless combinations of 0s and 1s, so writers build stories by reassembling the basic tropes and structures that are encoded in the world’s earliest myths, often — when things are going well — without fully realizing what they are doing. The most fertile creative states, like the most transcendent spiritual experiences, dissolve consciousness and turn the artist into an inanimate tool — a channel, a conduit. I often think of the writer who said she wished she could feel about sex as she did about writing: That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.

[…]

[Read more…]

Alexander Anichkin, who comments here as Sashura, is my go-to guy for the realia of Soviet life, and I wrote him as follows (I’ve excised most of the Russian quote):

I’m reading Nikolai Klimontovich’s Дорога в Рим [The Road to Rome, published in 1994] and I’ve gotten to a part where he’s reminiscing about the early ’60s (he was my age, born in 1951):

Бог мой, как много было хорошего: а напиток «Чудесница», а летка-енка, […] и отцовские норвежки, и дача на Сходне […]…

[My God, how many good things there were: the beverage “Chudesnitsa,” the letka-jenkka [a Finnish dance: see this LH comment from nine years ago], […] and my father’s norvezhki, and the dacha at Skhodnya […]…

I know or can google most of this, but I can’t find anything for норвежки but ‘Norwegian women.’ Do you know what he’s talking about? (Skis?)

His response was so enlightening I couldn’t resist sharing it here:

oh, this brings back so many memories!
Norvezhki were a type of skates. The point here is that they were more expensive and rare, only for grown-ups. Children hardly ever got a chance to have them or even to try skating on them.
In my memory, they are the ones with long straight thinnish blades, designed for speed skating on good clear ice. As opposed to ‘kanadki’ (Canadian skates) with shorter wider blades curved and angled at tips, designed for quick turning and dribbling when playing hockey. There were also ‘figurki’ for figure skating with serrated tips and, for smaller children, ‘snegurki’ (Snowmaidens) with still wider blades and straps to attach to valenki. I had a pair of skates that I sometimes used to go to school. There was one road to cross on tiptoes, and the rest of the way were alleys with packed snow and ice. […] And, for Languagehat purposes, also note the etymology of the word коньки [‘skates’] – little horses! (cf. sea horse – морской конёк) […] And here’s an image for you. Look at this painting from 1952: the skates in the boy’s school bag are probably those very norvezhki –

PS. Skis are near enough. We had Soviet-made long narrow skis made in Estonia. They were called estonki [‘female Estonians’].

It’s really hard to find that kind of information without the help of knowledgeable people, and I’m grateful for them.

Éanna Ó Caollaí reports for the Irish Times:

In what is believed to be a first in modern British political discourse, a Welsh member of parliament addressed the House of Commons in Irish on Wednesday. During a debate on decision-making powers of civil-servants at Stormont, Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville-Roberts called on the British government to introduce legislation protecting the rights of Irish speakers.

Parliamentarians heard the Member of Parliament for Dwyfor Meirionnydd say in Irish that language rights are human rights and that the Irish-speaking community is entitled to equality of treatment: “Is cearta daonna iad cearta teanga agus tá cothrom na féinne tuilte ag lucht labhartha na Gaeilge,” she said.

Continuing in English, she pressed Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley to uphold the British government’s commitment to introduce language legislation as outlined under the St Andrew’s Agreement struck between the Irish and British governments and Northern Ireland’s political parties in 2006.

You can see a video of her speech at the link; a tweet from the Department of Welsh & Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University (@CelticAber) says:

You can do anything with a degree in #CelticStudies! @LSRPlaid is a graduate of @CelticAber, and we are very proud to see her use Irish in @HouseofCommons

I know too little about the legislation to have an opinion on it, but I’m all for speaking Irish whenever possible. A note to the story says:

A headline on an earlier version of this story stated that Wednesday was the first time Irish was spoken during a debate in the House of Commons in 100 years. The SDLP press office has informed The Irish Times that Mr Mark Durkan, then MP for Foyle, spoke in Irish during a 2015 debate.

And if you’re wondering about the name Éanna, it’s said to be from the Middle Irish Éan dála, meaning ‘similar to a bird, resembling a bird.’ (Thanks, JC!)

I just learned (or relearned — I had probably run across it before) that the Russian word for ‘fluorine’ is фтор [ftor]; as Russian Wikipedia explains:

The name phthore (from Greek φθόριος ‘destructive’), proposed by André Ampère in 1816, is used in Russian, Greek, and some other languages. Many other countries, on the other hand, use a name derived from the ancient names of the mineral fluorite CaF2, which in their turn originated from its ability to decrease the melting point of the metallurgical slag formed during the reduction of metals from ores and to increase its fluidity (Lat. fluere ‘flow’). Ampère, in his letter to Davy of August 26, 1812, proposed the word fluorine, which thanks to the addressee of the letter got a fixed place in the English language.

I was pleased to find in the OED the entry phthore, n.:

Forms: 1800s phthor, 1800s phthore, 1800s phtor.

Etymology: < French phthore (1819 or earlier as phtore) < ancient Greek ϕθορά destruction < an ablaut variant of the base of ϕθείρειν to destroy, to corrupt: see phthartic adj.), so called on account of the corrosive action of hydrofluoric acid.
French phthore is attributed to A. M. Ampère (1775–1836).

Chemistry. Obsolete. rare.

Fluorine. Cf. phthorine n.
1858 R. G. Mayne Expos. Lexicon Med. Sci. (1860) 951/2 Phthore.
1890 Webster’s Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang.   Phtor,..fluorine. (Written also phthor.) [Also in later dictionaries.]

Phthor would make a good name for a superhero.