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My wife asked me if jerboa and gerbil were related; I looked them up, and sure enough, they’re both from Arabic يربوع (yarbūʿ), the latter via French gerbille (the first OED cite is as late as 1849: Sketches Nat. Hist.: Mammalia IV. 47 The Indian gerbille is common in Hindustan, and seems to be gregarious). What particularly struck me was the Arabic etymology:

From Proto-Semitic *ʿakbar- (“mouse”) mingled with عُرْقُوب‎ (ʿurqūb, “hamstring, Achilles tendon”) from *ʿarqūb- (“hamstring, Achilles tendon”) in specialization to the fauna of the Arabian desert where the jerboa is marked by its jumping muscles. Compare Classical Syriac ܥܽܘܩܒܪܳܐ‎ (ʿuqbarā, “mouse”), Hebrew עַכְבָּר‎ (ʿaḵbār, “mouse”).

Anybody know how reliable all that is? [Not very! See Xerîb’s comment below.]

Another interesting etymology I recently ran across in Vasmer:

обдо “сокровищница”, только русск.-цслав. обьдо, ст.-слав. обьдо θησαυρός (Супр.). От *обь- (см. о II) и к. *dhē- “ставить” (см. де́ять, деть); ср. Мейе, Ét. 234. Образование аналогично суд, просто́й.

In other words, the archaic Russian word обдо ‘treasury’ is a prefixed form of the PIE root dʰeh₁- ‘to do, put, place,’ the familiar descendant of which in Russian is деть ‘to put, place.’ I wouldn’t have guessed.

Recently I lamented the confusing wording of OED updates, and ktschwarz commented:

Could be anything from minor formatting changes, to correcting errors in quotation dates and sources, to restoring spelling and punctuation as they appeared in the original editions, to adding or dropping quotations (potato, for example), to adding and updating etymologies ahead of full revision (see December 2020 blog post), maybe even changes to the definition.

The Life of Words is annoyed too: “The impression is of a very up-to-date dictionary, which at least half of OED.com is very much not.” […] This is not as bad as making all these changes without indicating them at all, which is what they did up until this year (see Examining the OED for some blatant examples), but it’s not as good as it should be.

As I said then, I love the OED and they do great work, but they need to do better in this regard. Here’s the first paragraph of that OED December blog post, so you can see their explanation of what they’re up to:

Over the past eighteen months we have begun a new initiative as part of the ongoing revision of the OED: revising the etymology and variant forms section in entries that have yet to be revised in full. We are doing this in order to remedy deficiencies in entries that hitherto lacked an etymology, or where we have been aware that the etymology and variant forms sections already offered could be significantly improved, ahead of revision of the full OED entry. We have done this by making use of spare moments in our schedules, where members of the etymology team had completed their work on OED revision ranges slightly ahead of expectations. By working in this way, we have now managed to publish over 1500 revised etymologies and variant forms sections in this new stream of work. For each of these entries, a note appears in the “Entry history” window, “Etymology and variant forms provisionally revised”, together with the date when these revisions were published.

But I recommend reading all the links if you’re interested in this stuff.

Less than a week into the existence of this blog, I posted about the workings of coincidence (see also Apophenia, from 2005); now I’ve got another splendid example. For over a month now I’ve been hacking away at Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (see this post) with the invaluable help of (inter alia) Boguslawski’s valiant translation Between Dog and Wolf; I quote the following from his introduction (p. xxi):

The best example of a recurrent visual image is the ekphrastic description of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, which provides a detailed portrayal of the setting of the novel in chapter 2 and is skillfully repeated in Note XVII. It becomes a source of many reappearing images in the novel (birds, boats, skaters, a frozen river and ponds, hunters and hunting dogs, a tavern) and, in addition, provides a connection to the theme of the seasons, since Bruegel created the famous painting as a part of the series called Months and depicted in it activities common in December and January.

Well, Barnes & Noble is having a 50% off sale on all Criterion Blu-rays and DVDs through August 1, and being an aficionado of Criterion’s superb editions I put together an order that included one of my favorite movies, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Зеркало (Mirror), and the last movie by another of my favorite directors, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. I knew nothing about the latter, but Criterion describes it enticingly:

Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images—most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife—and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.

So I was excited to get the package today, and I tore off the plastic coverings and checked out the beautifully illustrated booklets they tuck into each box. The one for Mirror reminded me of an element I’d forgotten: “Alexei’s anecdotal recollection of a snowy day during the war prompts a visual echo of the composition of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.” Huh, I thought. Then I turned to the Kiarostami and found in Bilge Ebiri’s essay:

The first frame begins with Dutch master Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s immortal sixteenth-century painting Hunters in the Snow, a winter scene of a group of men and dogs looking over a small village beside a frozen lake. Slowly, Kiarostami’s digital embellishments emerge. Smoke rises from a chimney. A bird flits among the branches of a tree. A dog starts sniffing around. A herd of cows lumbers along in the distance. But amid all this movement, the figures of the original painting stand motionless. The hunters carry the same poses they did in 1565. Some birds may hop among the trees, but one remains frozen in the sky, captured midflight by Brueghel 450 years ago, its wings spread out forever.

I’m not saying it Means anything, but tell me that isn’t weird.

I last posted about the Sorbs in 2002 (less than half a year into the blog’s existence), so it’s time for an update; Thomas Sparrow writes for BBC Culture, opening with a passage on Andrea Bunar, “the local postwoman in Lehde, a quiet 150-person village of marshy islands connected by footbridges, nestled in the lush Unesco biosphere reserve of the Spreewald,” who delivers the mail in a gondola-like boat. He continues:

But although Bunar, who has lived near the Spreewald for most of her life, often chats in German with locals and tourists alike, she regrets that she doesn’t speak the region’s second language, which forms an important part of its unique identity. That’s because, in addition to sheltering 6,000 species of animals and plants, the Spreewald is also home to the Sorbs: the world’s smallest Slavic ethnic group and one of Germany’s four nationally recognised minorities, alongside Danes, Frisians and the German Sinti and Roma.

The Sorbs are descendants of Slavic tribes who lived north of the Carpathian Mountains in Central and Eastern Europe. Around 1,500 years ago, some of these tribes migrated to Lusatia, a historical region sometimes called Sorbia that straddled eastern Germany, western Poland and the northern tip of the Czech Republic. Over time, European empires and nations have come and gone, but the Sorbs have remained – a Slavic-speaking ethnic minority existing inside modern-day Germany.

Today there are an estimated 60,000 Sorbs in Germany. A third live in the state of Brandenburg, where the Spreewald is located, and the rest live further south, in Saxony. In addition to German, Sorbs speak their own West Slavic languages: about 20,000 people in Saxony speak Upper Sorbian (which has similarities to Czech); while Brandenburg has around 5,000 speakers of Lower Sorbian (which has more in common with Polish). Both languages are endangered, and are protected and promoted locally.

This means that as visitors slowly paddle through the Spreewald’s tranquil canals in their hired punts or kayaks, they’re likely to notice that public signs are bilingual. Lehde, for instance, is Lědy in Lower Sorbian. And if you ask locals, many will write their names and titles in both German and Sorbian.

“For many people, the language is incredibly important, it’s the main way of identifying with the Sorbs in general,” said Fabian Kaulfürst, a language expert at the Sorbian Institute, a research facility that specialises in Sorbian history and culture, located in the town of Bautzen, or Budyšin in Upper Sorbian – which is commonly known as the Sorbs’ spiritual and political heart today.

There’s more information (and gorgeous photos) at the link; it sounds like the Sorbs are doing pretty well for speakers of endangered languages. (I note, by the way, that Spreewald in Lower Sorbian is Błota, ‘the Swamps.’) Thanks, Trevor!

I’m still bushwhacking my way through Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf), with help from various books, the internet, and my pal José Vergara, and when I hit the end of chapter 10 I turned to José as my only hope, e-mailing him as follows:

After the sad story of Orina’s sexual exploitation and the tales of Fyodor/Egor/Pyotr’s suicide by hanging and Kaluga/Kostroma’s suicide by belladonna, we get Karaban’s amazing account, which ends the chapter [I quote the passage starting “Отдыхал я, повествует, под ильмами,” which you can see here]. You’re carried along by the lush, swooning prose, gobsmacked by “это Вечная Жизнь” [it was Life Everlasting], thrilled by “посетила она, посетила” [she visited us, she visited], and then you hit that last sentence, with its triumphant final chord: “и не как-нибудь, а как…” [and not just any old way, but like…] what?! WTF are простипомы? It turns out a простипома is a (pretty unattractive) fish […]. Boguslawski translates it as “pristipomas,” which exists in English, but barely (I learn from googling); it’s certainly not in the dictionaries. But never mind the details, the point is that it’s an extremely obscure word that hardly any reader of Russian can be expected to recognize; what’s it doing here as the culmination of a carefully composed and highly effective lyrical passage? Is it just остранение, to throw you out of your luxurious carriage and make you scrape your skin off on the gravelly embankment of the lexical unknown?

He responded “It’s certainly very obscure to me, and to contemporary Russian readers, but this page suggests it may have been more common closer to the book’s publication,” and that page (from yesaul’s Live Journal) is so funny and enlightening I have to share it here in my translation. The title is “О простипома моя, простипома!” [O prostipoma, my prostipoma!]:
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Another break from Sokolov, another great Bunin story (see this post): his 1916 “Петлистые уши” [Loopy Ears] (published in 1917, in Slovo 7) is far more interesting than it is made to sound in the usual summary (“man murders prostitute”). Yes, in the last sentence we learn that a prostitute has been murdered, but that’s just the donnée on which the story is based (apparently it was sparked by Bunin’s having read a newspaper account of such a killing). Bunin was polemicizing with his least favorite writer, Dostoevsky (one of the things he and Nabokov had in common), replacing the loquacious and tormented Raskolnikov with the sullen Adam Sokolovich, a former sailor who spends his time wandering around Petrograd, looking into shop windows, and hanging out in dives. At the start of the story we see him in such a dive, in the down-at-heels neighborhood near Five Corners (Пять углов, associated with Dostoevsky), haranguing a couple of sailors about the depravity of mankind (I quote the translation in Thomas Gaiton Marullo, “Crime without Punishment: Ivan Bunin’s ‘Loopy Ears’,” Slavic Review 40.4 [Winter 1981]: 614-624 [JSTOR]):

It is time to abandon the fairy tale concerning pangs of conscience, those moments which supposedly haunt the murderer. People have lied enough as it is — as if they shudder from the sight of blood. Enough of writing novels about crimes with their punishments; it is time to write about crimes without any punishments at all. The outlook of the criminal depends on his view of the murder — whether he can expect from his crime the gallows, reward, or praise. In truth, are they tormented, are they horrified, those who accept ancestral revenge, duels, war, revolution, and executions?

He goes on to mention the famous (in his day) French executioner Louis Deibler (who chopped off “exactly five hundred heads”), the violence in popular literature (including James Fenimore Cooper and the Bible), and the horrors of World War I (Bunin was writing two years into the war): the mass murder of Armenians by the Turks, the poisoning of wells by the Germans, and the bombing of Nazareth (I can find no reference to this — maybe a war rumor in 1916?). He concludes that it was only Raskolnikov who was ever tormented by murder, and only because his spiteful creator insisted on sticking Christ into all his trashy novels (“по воле своего злобного автора, совавшего Христа во все свои бульварные романы”). By the time he leaves his indifferent companions and heads out into nighttime Petrograd, oppressed by a wintry fog, half the story has gone by, and since Bunin does not waste sentences, we obviously need to give due weight to that conversation.
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Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posts about a striking example of ancient macaronic poetry:

Inter ‘eils’ Goticum ‘scapia matzia ia drincan’
non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus.

It’s quoted from D.R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Anthologia Latina, I: Carmina in Codicibus Scripta, Fasc. 1: Libri Salmasiani Aliorumque Carmina (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982), p. 201 (number 279), where it’s titled “De conviviis barbaris” [On barbarian banquets]. In Bailey, it’s followed by this (number 280):

Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho,
  ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.

Gilleland then cites Magnús Snædal’s excellent article “The ‘Vandal’ Epigram” (Filologia Germanica/Germanic Philology 1 [2009]: 181-213), which concludes that the Germanic words are Vandal rather than (as often previously thought) Gothic and that the verses were probably composed around the beginning of the sixth century; Snædal “regards 279-280 as one poem and translates the Latin thus (at 184)”:

On foreign guests.
Among the Gothic ‘eils scapia matzia ia drincan’
No one ventures to recite decent verses.
Calliope hurries to depart from the wet Bacchus,
So it does not happen that a drunken muse doesn’t stand on her feet.

He adds:

The simplest assumption is that the author had himself tried — with limited success — to recite poetry among drunken Vandals, had witnessed such an attempt, or had been told about one. He composed the epigram about this and, although it is presented as a general truth, most likely he had a certain incident in mind. He is not making fun of Vandal poetry but only saying that dignified verses cannot been [sic, i.e. be] read while they are always ordering food and drink because Calliope flees from there. This is indeed all we can say with some certainty about the occasion of the epigram.

I refer you to Snædal for pretty much everything you could want to know about these verses, and to Gilleland for further conjectures and notes; what puzzles me is Snædal’s assumption that the verses form a single poem. The first two lines (number 279) are a pair of dactylic hexameters, while the second (number 280) comprise a line of dactylic hexameter followed by one in dactylic pentameter — in other words, a standard elegiac couplet. I do not recall ever seeing those two forms combined (a number of hexameters followed by a line of pentameter), so I am dubious about the assumption. But then my understanding of late classical Latin verse is exiguous to say the very least, so I am probably wrong. Anybody know about this stuff?

I seem never to have posted about Livonian, which surprises me, since I’ve always found it one of the more interesting dead-or-dying languages. Alastair Gill at BBC Travel writes about its current situation, opening with Davis Stalts talking about his seafaring grandfather, who “seldom spoke in Latvian to his grandson: he would relate his stories in a language full of extended vowels, dipthongs and tripthongs.”

It was only when Stalts reached the age of nine or 10 that he started to understand that aside from a few relatives, nobody else around him spoke like this. “I remember thinking, what’s going on? Why does nobody speak this language? Only some very old people.”

In fact, Stalts’ grandfather was one of the last native speakers of Livonian, a language now considered by linguists to be on the verge of extinction. Unlike Latvian, which is an Indo-European language from the Baltic group, Livonian belongs to the group of Finno-Ugric tongues, most of which are spoken by ethnic minorities in modern-day Russia. Like its cousins Finnish and Estonian, it has a complex grammar […].

Today’s Livonian population is estimated at just around 200, making them Europe’s smallest ethnic minority. But it wasn’t always this way. For centuries this Finno-Ugric race of fishermen thrived on Latvia’s remote western shores, with as many as 30,000 people speaking the language in medieval times. The Livonians carefully preserved their distinct heritage as the region passed from German to Russian hands, and eventually, in the early 20th Century, became part of an independent Latvian republic.

But the war years and subsequent decades of Soviet occupation brought harsh repressions, executions and deportations for Latvians and Livonians alike – for Stalin, anyone with a strong sense of national identity was a threat. […] By the time Latvia regained independence in 1991, the Livonian community was fragmented, and extensive intermarriage with Latvians had seen the use of the language dwindle. Grizelda Kristiņa, the last true native speaker of Livonian, died in 2013, leaving just a handful of Livonians who were able to communicate in the language.

But there’s an ongoing revival effort:
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The main Marine Lexicon page describes the project thus:

Marine Lexicon is a cooperation initiative between CHAM – Centre for the Humanities in Portugal and the University Museum of Bergen and NIFU (Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education) in Norway, funded by EEA Grants and CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, aiming at the construction of a thesaurus of European common names of marine mammals (cetaceans, seals and sea lions, sirenians, polar bear and otter), symbolic elements (sea monsters, hybrid beings, folklore creatures) represented in the early modern age (15th-18th centuries) and place names related to the exploitation of marine mammals.

For now, words and expressions in 14 languages, including old versions of the respective languages, are collected in a thesaurus. All are languages from countries and regions with a coastal line. The thesaurus is presented here, allowing scholars and the public to search within the true ocean of possibilities that is the European vocabulary about marine mammals.

Looks good; thanks, Trond!

And if you’re interested in non-biological things of the sea, J. Richard Steffy’s Illustrated Glossary of Ship and Boat Terms has you covered.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf); it’s both a delight and a real slog to read — I keep switching between text, translation, Ostanin’s annotations, dictionaries, and computer to look up things that aren’t in any of the books — and after each chapter I take a break to read other stuff so I don’t get too frustrated to continue. I usually turn to Bunin, simply because I never get tired of reading him, and the other day I reread Худая трава, which I hadn’t really appreciated the first time around. Now I think it’s one of his best stories, and I want to talk about it a bit.

The first thing to notice is the title. The adjective худой can mean either ‘thin, skinny’ or ‘bad’; I have actually seen the title translated as “Thin Grass,” but that’s ridiculous — the phrase is from a proverb (used as an epigraph and quoted in the story) “Худая трава из поля вон” ‘Bad grass [should be taken] out of the field,’ and it clearly means ‘weed.’ On the other hand, it’s also ridiculous to translate the title “The Weed,” as Serge Kryzytski does in his The Works of Ivan Bunin ($154.00!), since the usual Russian for ‘weed’ is entirely different (сорняк or сорная трава) and “The Weed” sounds banal and boring. So “Bad Grass” it has to be.

Bunin called the story “my Ivan Ilyich,” and one can see why: both are long, detailed accounts of the slow death of a male protagonist, with emphasis on his reflections on his past. But the two stories could not be more different — Tolstoy, in his late avatar as Finger-Wagging Moralist, makes very clear who’s bad and who’s good, freely employing his beloved generalizations (“The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”) and pointing out everyone’s hypocrisy as though it were a mortal sin. Bunin never moralized and certainly never thought that simple, ordinary lives were terrible; he wanted simply to present life and people as they were, in language as effective as he could make it, and he nearly always succeeded. In this story he is describing the final months of the old farmworker Averky (no surname is provided), who after decades of hard labor feels his end approaching and decides to go home and be with his family (who he hasn’t seen much of over the years). He feels himself indifferent to the concerns of those about him, doesn’t find their jokes funny, and when a drunken itinerant pilgrim (странник) he used to dislike shows up and starts being obnoxious, he thinks “Не хуже меня, такого-то” ‘He’s no worse than me.’ He hears girls singing an old wedding song in the distance and remembers hearing it the night he met his wife as she was scooping water from a river at dusk (the passage in the Russian text linked above starts at “Ай помочь?”):
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