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Zui at The Language Closet (“anything and everything about languages”) posts about a language hitherto unknown to me, Wymysorys:

Spoken in the region of Wilamowice, Poland (Wymysoü), this language is also quite an interesting anomaly. […] Wymysorys, Vilamovian or Wymysiöeryś is the Germanic language spoken in that small Polish town, between Silesia and Lesser-Poland. Considered the most endangered Germanic language today, it has experienced a significant decline since the 19th century. From the phasing out of Wymysorys in local schools in favour of Polish in 1875, to the banning of its use in the communist period until 1956, many have stopped speaking Wymysorys, instead turning to Polish, or for those who left Poland for Germany, German.

Mutually unintelligible with German, along with all of its dialects, Wymysorys features a rather Germanic sound system, with borrowed sounds in Polish loanwords. The language has had major influences from Polish, even incorporating its orthography in literary works by the author Florian Besik. However, this has since been standardised, as a distinct Wymysorys alphabet. Polish influences include the letter “ł”, which represents the sound /w/ but way closer to the Polish articulation than what you might hear in Germanic languages. […] Literary works are also rather few and far between, since the first author known to publish Wymysorys literature did so in the 19th century, around when the language started to decline. […] However, in the 21st century, there have been movements to revitalise the declining language.

Zui links to a more detailed Culture.pl article by Mikołaj Gliński, who studied classics at Humboldt University in Berlin and cultural studies at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Polish Culture:
[Read more…]

My wife and I watched one of my favorite movies, Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion; it’s also one of the best war movies ever made, precisely because it doesn’t show any of the war itself, just its destructive effects on humanity. (As I’ve said elsewhere, even movies intended as anti-war tend to promote war simply because the battle scenes, however grueling, are also exciting.) The acting is excellent and the filmmaking superb; Renoir gets important ideas across simply and without pounding them in. (Alas, the commentary track by film historian Peter Cowie on the Criterion release, while acute about filmic virtues, is larded with historical errors verging on idiocy — Cowie thinks the Battle of Tannenberg was fought in Flanders and that the Bolshevik government could have been sending packages to Russian captives in 1916. I was reminded of Simon Winchester.)

But I’m not here to talk about filmic virtues, I’m here to talk about languages, which play a role here second only to the wild multilingualism of Godard’s Contempt (see this 2003 LH post). Renoir made the decision — unusual then as now — to have everyone talk in their own languages, and the interplay, especially of French and German, is an important plot element. When the main heroes of the movie, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay), are shot down near the beginning of the movie by Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), Rauffenstein apologizes in good though accented French for the inconvenience he’s caused them; then he and Boëldieu exchange reminiscences in English, a language only the two of them understand. Throughout the movie there is that tension between the shared nationality of the Frenchmen and the shared class background and interests of the aristocrats; Rauffenstein can’t understand why Boëldieu feels any fraternity with his low-class fellow officers (when he asks Boëldieu for his word of honor about something, the latter asks why he doesn’t do the same with the other officers, and Rauffenstein, with inimitable hauteur, says “The word of honor of a Rosenthal and a Maréchal?!”). And when Maréchal finds it strange that Boëldieu still uses vous rather than the informal tu with him after they’ve been cooped up together for weeks, the monocled Boëldieu says calmly “Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme” [I use vous with my mother and with my wife]. Different worlds…

When the French officers are transferred to another camp, they want to tell the incoming English prisoners about an escape tunnel they’ve been digging, but when Maréchal daringly defies the guards and dashes over to warn them, he can’t get the message across because he doesn’t speak English and the blitheringly genial Englishman he’s so urgently talking to doesn’t understand French (“Yes, thank you, my good chap…”). And there’s even a bit of Russian: when a large box arrives from Petrograd (marked with a large А for Александра, the Empress Alexandra — not Л for Lenin, Cowie!), everyone assumes it will contain luxury foodstuffs and vodka, so the Russians invite the Frenchmen to share the feast, but when opened its contents prove to be unexpectedly high-minded. “Книги!” [Books!] the appalled Russians shout, and set the box on fire to express their disgust.

When (spoiler!) Maréchal and Rosenthal make their escape, they wind up staying in the isolated house of a widowed German woman who treats them kindly and does not give them away when soldiers come knocking; Rosenthal, it turns out, speaks German, so he can communicate with her while Maréchal has to have her remarks translated — though he quickly comes to understand some words and phrases, having (as he says) more incentive than he had with the prison guards. And the very last line of the movie is in German: just as they are about to make it out of Germany, a patrol sees them and begins shooting, but then the officer in charge says to stop, because the fugitives have crossed over into neutral Switzerland — “Desto besser für sie” [So much the better for them]. A great ending to a great movie.

Matt Treyvaud of No-sword sent me a link to Anton Howes’ essay Did the Ottomans Ban Print? from his newsletter Age of Invention; it’s an investigation of why the printing press seemingly didn’t take root in the Ottoman Empire and specifically of whether there was actually a ban on “printing in Arabic characters, or perhaps the Arabic or Turkish languages, or perhaps printing outright” (there are various claims about this). It’s a long essay, and somewhat unsatisfactory because Howes is limited to sources he can access in languages he can read — I’d love to see what an actual Ottoman historian had to say on the subject. But it’s worth a read if you’re interested in digging into the details of the available evidence (and finding out about the skulduggery practiced by rival religious groups); here’s his conclusion:

So the principal evidence of Ottoman suppression of printing is overwhelmingly related to its use by non-Muslims. We have, of course, only some of the vaguest hints to go off. But I think a rough, albeit speculative picture is starting to come together. It appears that in the mid-sixteenth century Ottoman authorities might have been worried about the profanation of Islamic religious works by non-Muslims printing in Arabic script, so they prohibited the Jewish printers from doing so. Following the 1590s attempt of the Medici Press to sell them works in Arabic script that were secular, however, they became suspicious about the foreign Christians’ ultimate aims, blocking such books during wartime, and then during peacetime on the grounds that foreign, heathen printers would be benefiting at the expense of local Muslim scribes. This wariness then extended to the non-Arabic script presses of the empire, too, especially when foreign powers seemed to be behind the unrest. Thus, it was in response to the missionary or commercial agendas of Europeans, that Europeans learned of the justifications for not allowing the printing of Arabic script.

What this doesn’t explain, however, is the absence of printing among the Turks themselves. After all, if the evidence we have mainly relates to the suppression of non-Muslim printers using Arabic characters, why didn’t Muslims themselves print? That’s the question I will try to answer in the next post.

If Matt sends me the follow-up thus tantalizingly promised, I will add an update here. Thanks, Matt!

I have recently learned that there is such a thing as a mechanical calculating device called a dumaresq. Now I happen to know (thanks to my perusal of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names and Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary in my leisure hours) that the surname Dumaresq (as in John Dumaresq, inventor of the dumaresq) has the unintuitive pronunciation /dʊˈmɛrɪk/ (du-MERR-ik), but I’m wondering whether the calculating device retained that pronunciation or was given a new one by the sailors who used it. Wikipedia says that the dumaresq Mark VIII “lasted into service through WWII,” so it’s still (barely) within living memory; does anyone happen to know how it was said? (Shockingly, it’s not in the OED.)

Also, I have just learned that there is a word pneudraulic ‘of or relating to a mechanism involving both pneumatic and hydraulic action.’ I do not approve.

Update (Oct. 2022). I found this video, seemingly authoritative, which uses /ˈduːmərɪk/ (DOO-merik) for the device.

Via Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti post, a quote from Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996):

As everyone knows, Greek religion was not a ‘religion of the book’. No doubt it acquired its distinctive stamp before writing was thought of. But it persisted as a religion ‘not of the book’ through something like a millennium of literacy. (And it had passed through an earlier literate phase in the Mycenaean period.) In this area, it seems, social factors prevented the ‘technology of communication’ from exercising a really decisive influence.

The city used writing to record publicly its commitment, financial and so moral, to the cult of particular gods. What mattered about this declaration was that it could be seen to have been made, even if not all Athenians had the skill, and fewer still the interest, to read the dry and difficult inscriptions. Writing was not, by contrast, used to build up a complicated specialized corpus of ritual knowledge. We stressed earlier the crucial importance of the fact that ‘sacred laws’ (not a Greek term) are a subsection of the whole law-code of a community, not an independent category resting on a different authority. They are so, of course, because of the indissoluble unity of ‘church and state’ in Greece, powers that could never be at odds because they could never be clearly distinguished. A crucial aspect of this integration of religion in Greece is the ordinariness of the priests; they were ordinary in many ways, but above all in lacking all pretension to distinctive learning. Elaborate ritual texts are the hallmark of a more specialized priesthood and a more autonomous religious order than those of Greece.

The amateur status of the Greek priesthood was not affected in any way by the advent of the art of writing. One does not picture the priestess of an Athenian public cult with a book in her hand. The famous sixth-century marble sculptures of ‘seated scribes’ from the acropolis are generally held to represent not priests but, significantly, ‘treasurers’ or similar officials, bound to give account of the sacred monies in their care. When the religious book begins to appear, it is rather the mark of marginal figures, the wandering initiators and purifiers and prophets, who in the phrase of the Derveni papyrus ‘make a craft out of rites’. Lacking a position in the civic religious structure, they naturally need to display credentials of other kinds. The association between bookishness and irregularity is at its clearest in Orphism. Both in social and religious terms Orphism is profoundly unorthodox; and it displays several characteristics of a ‘religion of the book’, being indeed transmitted through a ‘hubbub of books’. The only books of public cult, by contrast, are the calendars inscribed for all to view (though few to read) on wood or stone.

See the linked post for footnotes.

Alison Flood reports for the Graun about a new dictionary:

Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years and promises to “spare no blushes” for today’s classics students. […]

It was initially thought that Chadwick’s project would take five years, but Cambridge professor James Diggle, who was then chair of the advisory committee, said it soon became clear that the Intermediate Lexicon was “too antiquated in concept, design and content”, and the team would need to start afresh.

Diggle and his fellow editors then set out on the “Herculean task” of rereading most examples of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to the early second century AD. They then worked through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to create a modern guide for today’s students to the meanings of ancient Greek words and their development through the years. The lexicon is the first to be based on an entirely new reading of the Greek texts since 1843. […]

[Read more…]

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a thorough investigation of the origins of the golf term mulligan, meaning “an extra stroke allowed after a bad shot in a friendly game.” I admit I was skeptical when I read his opening statement that “it seems that mulligan actually made its way into golf from baseball, after a fictional long-ball hitter named Swat Milligan or Mulligan,” but by the time I finished it I was convinced. Here are some excerpts:

Swat Milligan was the creation of New York Evening World sportswriter Bozeman Bulger in 1908. Milligan was the stuff of tall tales, a Paul Bunyan or John Henry of baseball. The earliest appearance of Milligan in the Evening World that I have found is from 26 May 1908 […] But Swat Milligan was too big a character to be confined to the pages of the Evening World. By 6 August 1908 sportswriters of the Trenton Evening Times in New Jersey were writing about his visiting and watching the Trenton team play, but the name was switched to Mulligan, either through error or to avoid potential copyright infringement […] And by the end of the decade, mulligan was being used to mean a hard-hit ball. […]

The term jumps to golf later that year with a pair of articles by sportswriter William Abbott in the Evening World in which he dubs two different golfers as the Swat Mulligan of the links. […]

And in the Detroit Free Press of 13 October 1931, we see mulligan applied to a do-over golf stroke for the first time. The passage is about New York Yankee Sammy Byrd playing in a pro-am golf tournament:

All were waiting to see what Byrd would do on the 290-yard 18th, with a creek in front of the well-elevated green. His first drive barely missed carrying the creek and he was given a “mulligan” just for fun. The second not only was over the creek on the fly but was within a few inches of the elevated green. That’s some poke!

Note that the general use here is that of a long drive from the tee, but the particular context is that of a handicap of a free stroke, so this is a transitional use of the word.

See the linked post for details and discussion of alternative hypotheses; I should reproduce Dave’s disclaimer: “The etymology of mulligan was unearthed by Peter Reitan and published in his blog in 2017. What I present here is mostly the fruits of his work.”

Valentina Gosetti, who writes the “unapologetically multilingual blog” Transferre (“The idea is to encourage poetry in translation for the preservation and the promotion of minority languages”), has a post Alexander Blok in Dialèt Bresà that begins:

Here is another of my translations (or better, trapianti, transplantations) into Dialèt Bresà, my native dialect, a non-standard variety of Italo-Romance. This time I have taken up a new challenge: I have decided to translate a very well known Russian poem written by Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (188o –1921) in 1912, his very famous ‘Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека’.

A quick note on one of my lexical choices: for the Russian word ‘аптека’, which literally means ‘pharmacy’ or ‘drugstore’, here I have chosen the more general word ‘botéga’, meaning ‘shop’ in Dialèt Bresà. I have decided to do so because the sound of this word is very similar to its Russian counterpart, and, more importantly, the stress falls on the same syllable. This permitted me to imitate the rhythm of the original version, especially its widely known opening line.

I wonder if she realizes that аптека [apteka] and botéga are etymologically the same word (as is bodega), Latin apotheca ‘storehouse’? Here’s the Bresà version; I’ll send you to the link for the original and links to a couple of translations into English:

Nòt, viàl, lampiù, botéga,
En ciarùr stras e ‘nsensat.
Va avanti e vif amò vint agn –
L’è semper chèla. S’en va mia föra.

Te möret – e là töt che ricumincia amò
E töt che turna ‘ndré, come ‘na olta
Nòt – co’l sò crispì de giasöi söl canal,
Lampiù, botéga, viàl.

Her reference to the “widely known opening line” is so true that when Trevor Joyce sent me the link, I knew immediately what the Russian poem was simply from seeing the Bresà version of the line as the e-mail subject. Thanks, Trevor!

The Russian writer Ekaterina Vilmont (Екатерина Вильмонт, stress on the final syllable of the surname) has died at 75; she was the daughter of two well-known translators and became a translator herself and then a popular writer of romance novels and kids’ detective stories. I thought this passage from a memorial article by Aleksei Viktorov was striking enough to share (I’m translating from his Russian):

Ekaterina was fifteen when an editor brought her mother a literal version of a Chinese novel, asking her to make a literary translation from it. [This was standard Soviet practice — LH] Natalia Man [her mother] refused, but the editor kept trying to persuade her. While this was going on, Katya, just for the fun of it, translated several pages, which not only surprised her parents but made the editor incredibly happy. The final translation was considered extremely successful, and it was followed by new commissions. Soon the name of the young translator appeared on the covers of books as often as the names of her parents.

In the late 1990s she decided to try her hand at writing her own books, and her first novel, Путешествие оптимистки, или Все бабы дуры [An optimist’s journey, or All women are fools], was wildly successful, starting a new career off with a bang. This description of her working method is also of interest:

She never thought up the plot in advance; as she said, she never knew how the next page was going to end. The only rule she tried to stick to was that each book should end on a positive note. She didn’t otherwise restrict herself, but all her books turned out to be about love anyway, so they were called “women’s novels.” Vilmont herself didn’t like that allocation.

Via Lev Oborin’s indispensable weekly link roundup.

The Sifter is a multilingual historical database of cookbooks:

The Sifter is a public database, free to all users. It is a tool for finding and comparing historical and contemporary writing on food and food-related topics. It is overseen by an advisory board composed of members from The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery as well as other friends of food history. As with Wikipedia, the Sifter will be populated by its users. All entries will have an English translation, enabling users to search languages they cannot read. Soon, we will have over 100 languages represented. Registered users will be able to make corrections and add new information. Future releases will include a data visualization component. We also plan to include more resources linking to digitized photographs, artworks, television and film. With the aid of this tool, it is our hope that what has been invisible will come into focus.

You can read more about it at Reina Gattuso’s Atlas Obscura article:

Now, the public can enjoy the fruits of Wheaton’s 50 years of labor. In July 2020, Wheaton and a team of scholars, including two of her children, Joe Wheaton and Catherine Wheaton Saines, launched The Sifter. Part Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced database and part meticulous bibliography, The Sifter is a catalogue of more than a thousand years of European and U.S. cookbooks, from the medieval Latin De Re Culinaria, published in 800, to The Romance of Candy, a 1938 treatise on British sweets.

The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s. Search “peacock” and you’ll find the bird’s meat was sometimes eaten from the 1400s to the 1700s in courtly England. […]

The story of The Sifter’s genesis similarly reveals the connection between gender, labor, and prestige. When Wheaton got started as a culinary historian, as a young mother 60 years ago, “I couldn’t have a PhD, because there wasn’t a PhD in the field until we invented it,” she says. At the time, there was a split in the academy around the study of domestic labor, such as cooking. On one side, traditional historians—predominantly male—considered the history of food to be unimportant, even vulgar. “Food history has been a bit of an embarrassment to a lot of academics, because it involves women in the kitchen,” says Joe Wheaton, a professional sculptor and member of The Sifter’s advisory board.

I was just complaining to my wife about the wretched job dictionaries have done with food-related terms (none of my Russian dictionaries had the common dish жаренка, meat and potatoes fried with mushrooms). Thank goodness things are improving on that front, and I wish The Sifter every success!