languagehat.com

Slavomir/bulbul posts (on Facebook) “Runes from Lány (Czech Republic) – The oldest inscription among Slavs. A new standard for multidisciplinary analysis of runic bones,” by Jiří Macháčeka et al., and comments:

Somewhat exciting news from local archeologists: a bone with an inscription in Older Futhark was found in the Czech Republic in a Slavic context, suggesting contact between Germanic and Slavic peoples. This find does not mean, as the university’s press release irresponsibly suggests (and the comparison to the Glagolitic in the title confirms), that this is the oldest instance of writing among Slavic peoples. As the paper – describing this as a “rare artefact” – says, “… the runes may have been incised by people of Germanic origin… Alternatively, the runes may have been engraved by a Slav;” any speculation about the actual use of the runes among Slavs is thus premature at best.
Still, pretty cool.

If Slavo says it’s cool, it’s cool.

I was reading Stephen Baxter’s very interesting report on a new interpretation of the Domesday survey (“It is now clear that the survey was more even more efficient, complex, and sophisticated than previously supposed”) and got curious about the word featured in this passage:

The suggestion is that the first draft of the survey was made between Christmas 1085 and the following Easter, which fell on 5 April 1086. This was organised on a geographical plan and was intended to improve yields from the land tax known as the “geld,” which was paid by lesser landholders, subtenants, and peasant farmers. Indeed, a major levy of the geld was collected and accounted for in tandem with the survey.

I looked up “geld” in the OED and discovered the article had been updated as recently as December 2018, and the discussion of spelling and pronunciation was so interesting I thought I’d share it:

Etymology: < post-classical Latin geldum (also gildum) tax paid to the crown, district paying this tax (1086 in Domesday Book; frequently in British sources) < Old English gield yield n. in sense ‘payment, tax, tribute’ (compare also guild n.). […]

When borrowed from Old English, post-classical Latin graphical forms geldum, gildum reflected a usual correspondence between an insular form of the letter g in Old English script (pronounced /j/ in this position: compare yield n.) and a continental form of the letter in contemporary Latin script (see discussion at G n.). The original English word subsequently came to be written with ȝ (the development in Middle English of Old English insular g) or with y (compare forms at yield n. and discussion at G n.), while Latin geldum, gildum continued to be written with the continental form of g, as the only form available in Latin scripts. Since g did not normally stand for /j/ in post-classical Latin, the word was borrowed back into English on the assumption that its initial consonant was pronounced /g/. […]

The previous version of the entry was much less helpful:

[ad. med.L. geldum (in Domesday Book), ad. OE. ȝield, ȝeld, ȝyld, str. neut., payment, tribute, also guild; = OFris. geld, jeld money, OS. geld payment […], Goth. gild tribute:—OTeut. *geldom, f. root of *gelþan: see yield v.]

Incidentally, the Wikipedia article for Domesday Book says “/ˈduːmzdeɪ/ or US: /ˈdoʊmzdeɪ/”; can it really be true that everyone in the UK is so knowledgeable they pronounce it as if it were spelled “Doomsday”? If they mean “knowledgeable people in the UK,” well, the equivalent people in the US presumably also say /ˈduːmzdeɪ/. I smell lingering postcolonial snobbery.

A reader writes:

I play a lot of word games like Scrabble and crosswords, and I was wondering whether word games are more or less popular in other languages. This then led into speculating about what language characteristics suit particular sorts of games, and are there word games in other languages that don’t work in English?

I assume that language using Chinese characters obviously support some very different forms of games, but was also wondering about languages that are closer in form to English.

That seemed like an interesting question, so I’m putting it out there.

I finished Valentin Rasputin’s Прощание с Матерой (Farewell to Matyora) several days ago, but it’s so dense and powerful a text that I had to let it settle for a while before trying to write about it. I’m very glad I read his earlier Borrowed Time (post), Downstream (post), and Live and Remember (post); I was a little afraid that they would diminish the impact of his most famous novel, but it was just the reverse — the background allowed me to appreciate it all the more. It’s so good, and so final, that it essentially put an end to the whole “village prose” movement.

The basic plot is set out in the first sentence: “И опять наступила весна, своя в своем нескончаемом ряду, но последняя для Матеры, для острова и деревни, носящих одно название.” Antonina Bouis translated it thus: “Once more spring had come, one more in the never-ending cycle, but for Matyora this spring would be the last, the last for both the island and the village that bore the same name”; I would venture something more like “And spring came again, taking its own place in its endless row, but it was the last for Matyora, for the island and village that shared the same name.” (I particularly dislike her “cycle,” which imposes a sense of recurrence that is not in the Russian — a ряд just goes on in a straight line.) A dam is being built downstream on the Angara (presumably the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, though the name is never mentioned), and the reservoir it creates will flood the village that has flourished for three hundred years. Most discussions of the novel focus on this as the hook for a sociopolitical approach; the (pathetically stubby) Wikipedia article quotes Edward J. Brown on “Rasputin’s persistent theme, the tragic impact of industrial progress and unbridled urbanization on a peasant community still rooted in the past,” and yes, that’s true, but it’s not what I care about. You could write a terrible novel on that basis, and many have, but Rasputin has written a great one.

If you were going to write a bad novel, you would start by creating a whole series of characters illustrating every aspect of the situation, each with his or her own point of view, and present endless debates between them, clarifying the positive and negative results of the flooding; in the end everyone would move to the new village on the mainland and we would see them settling in in their various ways. Rasputin does not do this. He has one central character, Darya Pinigina, who is over eighty years old and has no conception of or interest in life beyond her village — it is impossible to imagine her outside it. There are a couple of other old women, her neighbors and friends, and a half-wild man nicknamed “Bogodul” (from a word for ‘blasphemer’) because he speaks mainly in curses. There are Darya’s son Pavel, who feels sorry for the village and for his mother but realizes the inevitability of change, and his son Andrei, who is completely committed to the new world of triumphant socialism and has no patience for nostalgia (he plays a very small role). But Darya, with her memories and lamentations, carries the novel, and one of the things I like about Rasputin is his focusing on old women in some of his most important works — most male novelists feature young or middle-aged men, whose travails are presumably more compelling to the imagined (male) reader.
[Read more…]

Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) has a post about his love for the veterinary memoirs of James Herriot (most famous in their filmed versions as All Creatures Great and Small) and his discomfiture on discovering that he preferred the Russian translation he’d read in his childhood to the original English. He goes on to say:

You might say that’s a silly thing to dwell on, of course a text in your native language is easier and closer to you. Maybe so. But I’ve been living outside of Russian-speaking countries for almost thirty years, and for at least the last twenty of them I’ve read in English more than in Russian. I read scientific books, nonfiction, belles-lettres, fanfic, and pretty much everything else in English. I very much love the English language and English literature, it causes me no difficulty to read complex literary texts — only pleasure! — and I always, always prefer to read a book in the original and not in translation if I can. I have absolutely no sense of being defective or lacking understanding when I read in English… and all those fine words dissolve, vanish into thin air, when I directly compare one and the same text by Herriot, very well written in both languages.

Казалось бы, нашел о чем думать, конечно же, текст на родном языке проще и ближе. Может, так и есть, не о чем думать. Но я живу за пределами русскоязычных стран уже скоро тридцать лет, и последние двадцать из них, как минимум, я читаю по-английски больше и чаще, чем по-русски. Я читаю по-английски научные книги, нонфикшн и худло и фанфики и что только не. Я очень люблю английский язык и английскую литературу, мне не составляет никакой сложности читать сложные литературные тексты – только удовольствие! – и я всегда, всегда предпочитаю прочитать книгу в оригинале, если могу, а не в переводе. У меня абсолютно нет ощущения какой-то своей ущербности и недопонимания, когда я читаю по-английски – и все эти прекрасные слова растворяются, улетучиваются в никуда, когда я напрямую сравниваю один и тот же текст Хэрриота, очень хорошо написанный на обоих языках.

I find this fascinating, and it reminds me of a Facebook post by Irina Mashinsky some years ago (I have no idea how to retrieve old FB posts) about how she still desperately loved the translation of Pnin she read as a young woman in Russia, even though she’s long since come to value Nabokov’s style in English. I’m trying to think of a similar instance in my own reading; the first thing that comes to mind is the famous poem by Archilochus whose translation I quote in this 2007 post (a discussion of Catullus and Virgil which I am glad to have the occasion to reread). I presume those of you who splash around in more than one language have experienced such things as well.

Janis Krumins writes with a description of a tool he’s created:

It converts IPA symbols to English word(s). Familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabet is required, but in return, it offers far more flexibility than a regular rhyming dictionary. Using wildcard symbols (any, consonant, vowel), you can find a wide variety of similar-sounding words – rhymes, consonances, assonances, alliterations, pararhymes, and more.

The Phonetic Word Search is here; enjoy!

Marie-Lucie Tarpent, who used to comment frequently here (come back, Marie-Lucie!), gave a lecture for the Sealaska Heritage Institute called The Tsimshianic Language Family, its Ancestry, and Distant Relatives (YouTube; there doesn’t appear to be a transcript, alas). You can read a brief description here, and of course there’s a Wikipedia article. It’s fun to hear her voice and to hear the Tsimshian spoken.

Courtesy of Sci-News:

Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) form some of the most cooperative groups in the animal kingdom, living in multigenerational colonies under the control of a single breeding queen. Little is known about how individuals within these colonies navigate the many interactions that must occur in such a complex cooperative group. A new study shows that calls emitted by individuals, in particular the common ‘chirp’ call, convey information about group membership, creating distinctive colony dialects; what’s more, these dialects are culturally transmitted across generations, supporting the idea that social complexity evolved concurrently with vocal complexity.

[…] To investigate the role of vocal communication in mole-rat society, Professor Lewin and his colleagues recorded a total of 36,190 chirps made by 166 individuals from seven naked mole-rat colonies held in labs in Germany and South Africa. They then applied machine learning techniques to analyze the acoustic properties of these vocalizations. “We wanted to find out whether these vocalizations have a social function for the animals, who live together in an ordered colony with a strict division of labor,” he said.

The researchers found that naked mole-rats have distinctive soft chirps, unique to an animal’s group, and that this dialect is determined by a colony’s queen and is learned by mole-rat pups early in life. However, these dialects are not fixed; they change when a colony’s queen dies and is replaced, and young pups fostered in foreign colonies learn the dialect of their adoptive groups. This suggests that individual colony dialects, including their transmission from generation to generation, is cultural rather than genetic.

“We established that each colony has its own dialect,” said first author Dr. Alison Barker, also from the Department of Neuroscience at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine. “The development of a shared dialect strengthens cohesion and a sense of belonging among the naked mole-rats of a specific colony.”

“Human beings and naked mole-rats seem to have much more in common that [sic] anyone might have previously thought,” Professor Lewin said. […] “The next step is to find out what mechanisms in the animals’ brains support this culture, because that could give us important insight into how human culture evolved.”

I’m generally skeptical of animal-language stories, but this seems reasonably plausible, though I don’t know about “insight into how human culture evolved.” Thanks, Jonathan!

Since Manchester and Mancunians came up here recently, I thought it would be a good time to repost this from Laudator Temporis Acti, quoting John Hines, “The Roman Name for Manchester,” in G.D.B. Jones, Roman Manchester (1974), pp. 159-163 (at 160, notes omitted):

The name MAMUCIUM has found its way into the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain, and (as the received version) into such authoritative works as Crawford and Richmond’s ‘The British Section of the Ravenna Cosmography’, and Rivet and Jackson’s ‘The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary’, which came out in 1949 and 1970 respectively.

The form MAMUCIUM, then, has as strong manuscript support as has MANCUNIUM, although popular tradition still holds to the latter. When one considers what the popular mind is capable of making of names (‘Manchester’ was in Camden’s day locally supposed to be the ‘city of Men’, or of the ‘good burghers and true’ who fought back the Danes) this particular consideration gives the received form no real advantage. Those who accept the form MAMUCIUM as the original Latinised Celtic name have the problem of finding a satisfactory derivation. Indeed this did not prove too difficult, since the word MANS, MAMM, is to hand. This means in Irish or Welsh ‘breast’, ‘mother’ or ‘womb’. To the specialist scholar, then, the name means ‘breast-like hill’ and is compared to CICUTIO, a place-name with similar meaning of a fort sited in Wales (Y Gaer).

You can (I hope) read Hines’ further discussion at Google Books; I suppose it’s unlikely that “Mamucian” is going to replace “Mancunian” in popular use, however weighty the scholarly arguments.

Back in 2016, Frank Jacobs wrote about a culturally important phenomenon I had not been aware of:

The general synopsis at midday: High west Sole 1028 expected east Sole 1019 by midday tomorrow. Low southern Portugal 1010 losing its identity. The area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire: Northwesterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 at first. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

The Shipping Forecast is quite possibly the most British thing ever. It’s quirkier than cricket, defiantly old-fashioned and ceremonial, and as reassuringly regular as Big Ben (1). Produced by the UK’s Meteorological Office, it’s broadcast four times a day by BBC Radio Four. […]

Listing the weather conditions in 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles, the Shipping Forecast is read out at 5.20 am, 12.01 pm, 5.54 pm and 00.48 am. The first and last broadcasts of the day also include reports from additional weather stations and inshore waters forecasts. The last one also includes an outlook for next-day weather across the UK itself. […]

Much of the Forecast’s charm derives from the – literally – outlandish names of the sea areas listed in the bulletin. The names derive from sandbanks (e.g. Dogger, Bailey), estuaries (Forth, Thames, Shannon), islands or islets (Wight, Rockall, Utsire), towns (Dover), or other geographic features (e.g. Malin Head, Ireland’s northernmost point). […]

One is named FitzRoy, after the captain of HMS Beagle, Britain’s first professional weatherman and the founder of the Met Office. The southernmost region, Trafalgar is only mentioned standard in the last forecast of the day. The regions are always listed in the same order, starting north with Viking, between Scotland and Norway, and then proceeding in a roughly clockwise direction:

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland. […]

The gap between Radio Four’s last programme of the day and the final Shipping Forecast, at 48 minutes past midnight, is plugged with as much as necessary of ‘Sailing By’, an orchestral piece by Ronald Binge, otherwise famous for his arrangements for Mantovani. The repetitive waltz helps sailors find the right frequency. For the many landlubbers tuning in to the last Shipping Forecast of the day, the cozy number signals that it’s almost time to turn in for the night. […]

The Shipping Forecast has made a huge mark on music, literature and the wider culture. It inspired songs by Jethro Tull, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Wire, Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, British Sea Power, Beck and the Prodigy, among others, and it was used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney wrote a sonnet called ‘The Shipping Forecast’, and British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy mentions “the radio’s prayer” in one of her poems. The programme is used in books, films, tv series, and has been parodied countless times (once as ‘The Shopping Forecast’, listing UK supermarkets instead of sea regions).

You can hear “Sailing By” here (and I recommend the nostalgic comments) and read the Heaney sonnet here. Alas, there’s no point clicking on the audio link at the start of the article, because it’s just a robotic voice making its way through the text; you can hear actual Shipping Forecast recordings at the Wikipedia article (which also, of course, goes into detail about the history of the broadcast and the origin of the names; Utsire, being Norwegian, is pronounced /ʊtˈsiːrə/, not — as the robot has it — /juːtˈsaɪər/ [though the actual Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ]; see comments below]). Thanks, Trevor!