languagehat.com

I’m finally reading Boris Fishman’s novel A Replacement Life (see this 2017 post), and I thought this passage was postworthy (the viewpoint character, Slava, is the only one in his immigrant family who can read English, so the mail is turned over to him for interpretation: “Was this a letter from James Baker III alerting the Gelmans that a tragic mistake had been made and the family would have to return to the Soviet Union?”):

The letter was given to Slava. His fingers were small enough for the Bible font and onionskin pages of the brick dictionary they had procured from a curbside, somebody who had learned English already. As the adults shifted their feet, leaning against doorjambs and working their lips with their teeth, he carefully sliced open the envelope and unfolded the letter inside, his heart beating madly. He was all that stood between his family and expulsion by James Baker III. America was a country where you could have Roman numerals after your name, like a Caesar.

As the adults watched, Slava checked the unfamiliar words in the bricktionary. “Annual percentage rate.” “Layaway.” “Installment plan.” “One time only.” “For special customers like you.” The senior Gelmans waiting, Slava was embarrassed to discover himself mindlessly glued to certain words in the dictionary that had nothing to do with the task at hand. On the way to “credit card,” he had snagged on “cathedral,” its spires —t, h, d, l—like the ones the Gelmans had seen in Vienna. “Rebate” took him to “roly-poly,” which rolled around his mouth like a fat marble. “Venture rewards” led him to “zaftig,” a Russian baba’s breasts covering his eyes as she placed in front of him a bowl of morning farina. Eventually, he managed to verify enough to reassure the adults that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.

Slava remained with the bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock—was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.

Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha), kartoshka into kartoshechka (little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant.

Oxford University Press is publishing a book that’s way overdue, Women in the History of Linguistics, edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson:

• Brings together ground-breaking work on the role of women in the history of linguistics
• Explores the contributions of women in a wide range of spheres, from the production of dictionaries and grammars to language teaching methods and language policy
• Looks beyond the European context, examining such diverse topics as women’s roles in the codification of Arabic, and the regulation and exploitation of women’s speech in Japan.

It has nineteen chapters, ranging from “Visible and invisible women in ancient linguistic culture” by Anneli Luhtala to “European women and the description and teaching of African languages” by Helma Pasch; I hope it makes an impact. When I was studying linguistics, we only learned about Great Men.

And for readers of Russian, Lev Oborin has a stimulating interview with Evgeniya Nekrasova and Oksana Vasyakina of the Школа литературных практик [School of Literary Practices] (associated with the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, known as “Shaninka” after its founder Teodor Shanin). Among the school’s aims, according to its website, is “способствовать появлению авторов, которые смогут рассказать о реальности настоящего, прошлого или будущего оригинальным и адекватным современности языком” [to contribute to the emergence of authors who can describe the reality of the present, past or future in original language adequate to the modern world]; Nekrasova says on this topic that Russian poetry is doing well today, but:

The language of the mainstream prose which has existed until recently doesn’t even come to us from the nineties but, I don’t know, from the seventies. That has always greatly surprised me; I never understood why it was like that. And we’re trying to somehow deal with it.

Мейнстримная проза, которая до последнего времени существовала, — она даже не из девяностых к нам приходит по языку, а, я не знаю, из семидесятых. Меня это очень сильно всегда удивляло, я никогда не понимала, почему это происходит. И мы, в частности, пытаемся с этим как-то справиться.

And Vasyakina says:

For me, one negative tendency is our fascination with the idea of ​​a “great Russian novel,” even though Vladimir Sorokin many years ago wrote his Roman [‘Novel,’ but also Roman, the name of the protagonist; among other things, it’s a catalogue of the clichés of the 19th-century Russian novel], which already ate, and slept, and died. Barthes killed everybody off a long time ago, but we still dream of writing the great Russian novel, and we’re all eternally waiting for it. It has to be narrative, it’s definitely about a new hero, it definitely has a large collection of minor characters. And as soon as we start writing a great novel, that framework begins to drag us [into itself]. But how can we create a different text, which will not be that “great novel,” but will tell us how life works [or ‘is constructed’ or ‘is arranged’]? And does it absolutely have to be great? Maybe it will be thirty pages long and nonlinear.

Для меня негативная тенденция — это заворожённость идеей «большого русского романа», хотя Владимир Сорокин сколько лет назад написал своего «Романа», который уже и поел, и поспал, и умер. Уже и Барт давно всех поубивал, а у нас до сих пор все мечтают написать большой русский роман, и мы все вечно его ждём. Он обязательно нарративный, он обязательно про нового героя, обязательно с большой системой второстепенных героев. И как только мы начинаем писать большой роман, эта рамка нас начинает тащить [в себя]. Но как создать другой текст, который не будет этим «великим романом», но расскажет, как устроена жизнь? И обязательно ли писать его большим? Может быть, он будет тридцатистраничным и нелинейным.

And to tie it in with the first part of the post, Oborin asks about the largely female staff; after naming a couple of male teachers, Vasyakina says:

But we’re trying to make female names and female practices as visible as possible. Feminist enthusiasm [or ‘ardor’ or ‘fervor’ or ‘spirit’] comes first with us, let’s say.

Но мы стараемся делать максимально видимыми женские имена и женские практики. Феминистский задор у нас на первом месте, скажем так.

Music to my ears, and as with the linguistics book, I hope it makes an impact.

Kristian Heal at Studia Syriaca has a stupendous roundup called Twenty Great Developments in Syriac Studies in the Last Twenty Years; it starts with gatherings of Syriac scholars and includes accounts of digital humanities projects, reprints and PDFs, translations, manuscripts, and much more. A couple of my favorite sections:

Dictionaries

The first edition of Carl Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum was published in 1895 when he was only 27. This dictionary was based on his broad and deep reading of the Syriac editions that were accumulating at this time, thanks in large part of the British Library acquisitions from Deir es-Surian. And it is clear that Brockelmann kept reading everything that was published, not only from the addenda added to the first edition, but also from the considerably enlarged second edition, which appeared just over thirty years later (1928). By that time, Brockelmann had competition in the form of Jessie Payne Smith’s brilliant Compendious Syriac Dictionary (1903). Despite the advantages of Brockelmann’s Lexicon, Payne Smith became the preferred, and then the only dictionary used by English speakers who did not have a command of Latin. That is until Michael Sokoloff’s corrected, expanded and updated translation of Brockelmann’s Lexicon appeared in 2009. This marked a massive advance in the lexicographical knowledge available to English speaking readers of classical Syriac texts.

Two other publications deserve special attention. The first is Claudia Ciancaglini 2008 publication of Iranian Load [sic — LH] Words in Syriac. This important volume discusses and demonstrates the significant impact of Iranian languages on Syriac from the earliest period. The second is Sebastian Brock and George Kiraz’s Concise Syriac-English, English-Syriac dictionary, with its successor, the Gorgias Illustrated Learner’s Syriac-English, English-Syriac Dictionary. The concise dictionary draws upon centuries of lexicographical work, and also offers the first bi-lingual dictionary for English readers (Brockelmann’s first edition had a Latin-Syriac appendix, while the second dictionary only had a Latin index).

Teaching and Learning Syriac

It is now easier than ever to learn Syriac. Syriac is taught in many universities around the world. Summer courses at The Catholic University of America, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Vrije University in Amsterdam, and Beth Mardutho also offer the chance for graduate students, and others, to start and advance in learning Syriac. The standard English language grammar, by Robinson, now fully revised and updated by Chip Coakley, is in its sixth edition (2013). Revised editions of Muraoka’s Classical Syriac (2005) and Classical Syriac for Hebraists (2013) have also appeared. John Healey’s First Studies in Syriac was published in 2005, adding to the established list an inductive grammar that can be gone through in a single semester, and that also has the advantage of recordings of the chrestomathy readings. Finally, George Kiraz has produced a splendidly accessible and effective Syriac Primer, now in a corrected third edition (2013). It is also now easy to supplement these teaching grammars with a copy of Nöldeke’s Compendious Syriac Grammar, thanks to the fine reprint published by Eisenbrauns (2001).

There are approximately a zillion links there; syri.ac, which I posted excitedly about in 2015, is but one of them. Enjoy!

I’ve been wanting to read Vladimir Makanin for years, mainly because of Lizok — back in 2011 she wrote “I’ve read quite a few books and stories by Vladimir Makanin and found more than enough to consider him a favorite” and in 2017 “I’m not sure I would have started writing this blog if it hadn’t been for the dearth of English-language information about his books,” so he was high on my list. I’m not quite sure why I started with Старые книги [Old books], except that I’d gotten up to 1976 and decided I wanted a breather before plunging into the Big Three of that year, Trifonov’s Дом на набережной [The House on the Embankment], Rasputin’s Прощание с Матёрой [Farewell to Matyora], and Sokolov’s Школа для дураков [A School for Fools]. Needless to say, I was attracted by the title, which turned out to be fully justified: the heroine, Svetik (an unusual diminutive for Svetlana), arrives in Moscow with the intention of making some money in the illegal book trade, and much of the story focuses on the details of how that trade worked (if you’re planning to travel via time machine to Moscow in the 1970s, you will definitely want to read it first — which reminds me, Russian readers will want to check out Техника выживания для случайно попавшего в СССР, about how to make a living if you unexpectedly find yourself back in 1980).

I enjoyed the story greatly, in part because I was coming off an Andrei Bitov binge, and while Bitov is a fine writer, I had gotten pretty tired of his solipsism — everything he writes, whether fiction or travel reportage (of which he did a lot), focuses almost entirely on a first-person viewpoint described in tireless, moment-by-moment philosophical detail (opening his book on Armenia at random I immediately see “I dream of living this moment. In this moment, by this moment alone. I would then be alive, harmonious, and happy…”; from his book on Georgia: “Time exists independently, we exist independently. Time is not understood…”) A little of that goes a long way, and I’d had a lot of it. What a relief it was to open Makanin and see (my translation):
[Read more…]

I just had a very odd realization. I was fiddling with the wood stove when I looked at the three implements underneath it and thought “The thing on the left is the poker, on the right is the scoop, but what’s that in the middle?” It’s a simple piece of iron about a foot long, with a ring at one end to hold it by and a curve at the other for grasping and pulling the lever that controls the stove damper. I’ve used it every winter day for the dozen years or so that we’ve had the wood stove (one of our most prized possessions), and yet it’s never occurred to me to wonder what it was called. It was just there, darkened and slightly warped at the business end (since it often gets shoved inside the stove to move wood around), but if it was missing and I had to ask my wife if she’d seen it, I’d have no idea what to say. I googled [fireplace tools] and [wood stove tools] and was quickly frustrated because you get lots of pretty pictures of tool sets but the individual tools are not named; finally I found this Etsy listing of something that serves the same purpose though it’s much more elaborate, and it’s labeled “Vintage Fireplace Manual Damper Pull Hook, Flue Hook, Flue Open Close Hook Tool, Fireplace Tool.” With those terms as search aids, I’ve decided “damper hook” is the closest I can come to an official term; it’s compact and expressive, and I’ll try to remember it. But it’s strange to realize you’ve been using something for years and had no name to call it by.

Mark J. Pallen, Andrea Telatin, and Aharon Oren have a paper in Trends in Microbiology (2020) called “The Next Million Names for Archaea and Bacteria“; here’s the opening Highlights section:

Microbiology has entered a golden era of discovery, with exponential growth in the identification of new species, genera, and high-level taxa through culturomics, genomics, and metagenomics. This creates an urgent unmet need for new taxonomic names for Archaea and Bacteria.

Currently, creation of well-formed names relies on time-consuming nomenclatorial quality control by a dwindling pool of experts conversant with classical languages and the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes. These problems are compounded by the custom of creating names on an as-needed, just-in-time-fashion.

Here, we outline a novel approach with three features: creation of names en masse before they are tied to taxa; combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek, drawing on stocks of roots with relevant meanings; computerised automation of the creation of new names.

Latin binomials, popularised in the 18th century by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, have stood the test of time in providing a stable, clear, and memorable system of nomenclature across biology. However, relentless and ever-deeper exploration and analysis of the microbial world has created an urgent need for huge numbers of new names for Archaea and Bacteria. Manual creation of such names remains difficult and slow and typically relies on expert-driven nomenclatural quality control. Keen to ensure that the legacy of Linnaeus lives on in the age of microbial genomics and metagenomics, we propose an automated approach, employing combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek to create linguistically correct names for genera and species that can be used off the shelf as needed. As proof of principle, we document over a million new names for Bacteria and Archaea. We are confident that our approach provides a road map for how to create new names for decades to come.

I enjoyed this section:

Another pressing problem is that most microbiologists follow Shakespeare in possessing, at best, ‘small Latin, less Greek’ and so are poorly equipped for creating well-formed binomials that comply with the rules of Latin grammar and are presented with clear, plausible etymological justifications (Box 1). Despite the publication of several ‘how-to’ guides, this skills gap has led to propagation of numerous erroneous malformations – a high-profile example is the species epithet pyloridis, which even passed validation in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology before it had to be corrected, according to the rules of Latin grammar, to pylori.

Don’t miss that Box 1 link, with its parade of horribles: “Common problems include trying to use poorly Latinised English words (e.g., geesorum instead of anserum for a species associated with geese) or making up nonsensical etymologies.” (Related: Abra cadabra, from 2004.) Thanks, Kobi!

From Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?, translated by Michael R. Katz (the original from Кто виноват? follows); the context is that a “philanthropic privy counselor” is passing through town on his way to Moscow, and the principal of the gymnasium (high school) seizes the opportunity of having him visit the school:

Then one of the pupils stepped forward, and the French teacher asked, “Didn’t he have something to say on the occasion of this grand visit to their ‘garden of learning’?” At once the pupil began a speech in a strange Franco-ecclesiastical dialect: “Coman puvonn nu pover anfan remersier lilustre visiter?” [“How can we poor children show our gratitude to our illustrious visitor?”]. As the patron looked around during this Celto-Slavonic speech, he was somehow attracted by Mitya’s sickly and delicate appearance; he called the boy over, spoke to him, and showed him kindness.

Затем один из учеников вышел вперед, и учитель французского языка спросил его: «Не имеет ли он им что-нибудь сказать по поводу высокого посещения рассадника наук?» Ученик тотчас же начал на каком-то франко-церковном наречии: «Коман пувонн ну поверь анфан ремерсиерь лилюстръ визитеръ». Глядя по сторонам во время этой кельто-славянской речи, меценат обратил как-то внимание на болезненный и нежный вид Мити, подозвал его к себе, поговорил, приласкал.

(Cited in Anne Lounsbery’s Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 to show how the provinces were portrayed as appropriating culture from elsewhere in hopelessly garbled form; I presume the “Celto-” refers to nos ancêtres les gaulois.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Nicholas Evans, Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us, p. 208:

The Kusunda are a little-known group of hunter-gatherers who may help us understand the pre-Hindu civilization in India. This tiny people somehow managed to hold onto their distinctiveness in the remote jungles of Nepal: their language is unrelated to any other. First mentioned in 1848, when a British envoy wrote that “amid the dense forests . . . dwell, in scanty numbers . . . two broken tribes having no apparent affinity with the civilized races . . . and seeming like fragments of an earlier population,” by the late twentieth century the language was being declared extinct, disappearing almost without record. But Nepalese officials recently intensified efforts to locate speakers. In 2000 they discovered a man who could remember some of his parents’ speech, and in 2004 they found a couple more Kusunda and brought them to Kathmandu to give them citizenship papers. One, Kamala (center) is only 30, and still speaks the language with her monolingual mother, who was too old to make the journey to Kathmandu. Her 60-something cousin Gyani Maiya (left) is also fluent, although she had not used the language for 20 years; the two knew of one another but had not met until both came out to Kathmandu. And these speakers know of a couple more, six days’ walk into the jungles. Yogendra Prasad Yadav, David Watters, and Madhav Prasad Pokhrei have now been able to record and analyze a good part of the language. Amazingly for hunter-gatherers, this language has native words for domestic animals (horse, cow, sheep, goat, chicken), for 15 different castes of tribal groups, for king, police, gold, and money. All these words are completely unrelated to those found in other languages of the region. This suggests that the Kusunda, against first expectations, have not always been hunter-gatherers, but were once the bearers of a much more sophisticated civilization, predating the Indo-Aryans of Vedic times, from which they had to retreat into a marginalized hunter-gathering existence once more powerful groups encroached.

There’s more on the language at Wikipedia:

Watters (2005) published a mid-sized grammatical description of the language, plus vocabulary, although there has been further work since. Watters argued that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically, and phonologically distinct from its neighbors. This would imply that Kusunda is a remnant of the languages spoken in northern India before the influx of Tibeto-Burman- and Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples; however, it is not classified as a Munda or a Dravidian language. It thus joins Burushaski, Nihali and (potentially) the substrate of the Vedda language in the list of South Asian languages that do not fall into the main categories of Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic.

And Wiktionary has a Kusunda word list. In my younger days I would have felt a strong urge to start studying it; there’s something compelling about language isolates.

Another post swiped from Far Outliers, this time a quote from Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith:

Meanwhile the wave of anger over Britain’s annexation of the Transvaal spread further afield to the Boer communities of the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony, stimulating old grievances. […]

In the Cape, it gave a huge boost to a nascent cultural and political movement led by Boer intellectuals calling themselves Afrikaners. In Paarl, a small market town thirty-five miles from Cape Town, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, Stephanus du Toit, joined several associates in 1875 to found a society named Die Genootskap Van Regte Afrikaners – the Fellowship of True Afrikaners – dedicated to promoting the use of Afrikaans, a colloquial language commonly used in Boer farming communities throughout southern Africa. It had diverged from Dutch over the years, changing vowel sounds, adopting simplified syntax and incorporating loan words from languages that were spoken by slaves in the Cape in the seventeenth century – Malay, Portuguese creole and Khoikhoi. It was the language used between masters and servants and amongst the poorer sections of the Boer community. Upper and middle-class Boers, particularly those living in the western Cape, spoke ‘High Dutch’, the language of the church and the Bible, and regarded the Zuid-Afrikaansche taal with disdain, dismissing it as Hotnotstaal, a ‘Hottentot’ language, or a kombuistaal – a kitchen language. They also used English to a considerable extent, the only official language of the Colony and thus the language of commerce, law, administration and – increasingly – culture.

What Du Toit and his colleagues feared and resented most was the growing cultural domination of the British colonial regime, aided and abetted by Boers themselves. In a lecture given in 1876, the chief justice, Sir Henry de Villiers, described Afrikaans as being ‘poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflections, wanting in accuracy of meaning and incapable of expressing ideas connected with the higher spheres of thought’. The energy of colonists, he said, would be far better spent in appropriating English, ‘that rich and glorious language’, that ultimately would become ‘the language of South Africa’. Du Toit argued that a mother tongue was a person’s most precious possession: ‘The language of a nation expresses the character of that nation. Deprive a nation of the vehicle of its thoughts and you deprive it of the wisdom of its ancestors.’ He wanted to develop Afrikaans as a landstaal – a national language.

To spell out this message, in 1876 Du Toit launched Di Afrikaanse Patriot, the first newspaper to use an early form of Afrikaans. The following year he was the main author of a history entitled Die Geskiedenis van Ons Land in die Taal van Ons Volk – The History of Our Land in the Language of Our People. It was the first book to treat all Afrikaners, dispersed as they were among British colonies and independent republics, as a distinct people, occupying a distinct fatherland; and it linked them to a common destiny endowed by God: to rule over southern Africa and civilise its heathen inhabitants.

The term kombuistaal ‘kitchen language’ led me to look up kombuis, which turns out to be closely related to the source of English caboose, which originally meant (OED) “‘The cook-room or kitchen of merchantmen on deck; a diminutive substitute for the galley of a man-of-war. It is generally furnished with cast-iron apparatus for cooking’ (Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk.).” It didn’t take on the sense “A van or car on a freight train used by workmen or the men in charge” until 1861 (H. Dawson Reminisc. Life Locomotive Engineer 90 Another midnight ride in the ‘Caboose’ of a freight train), and the OED qualifies that sense as “U.S.” The OED (entry from 1888) says “The original language was perhaps Low German; but the history and etymology are altogether obscure”; the much more up-to-date Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (2003-2009) agrees: “De verdere herkomst is onbekend.” Thanks, Bathrobe!

From Wikipedia:

The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, also referred to as the snail telegraph, was a contraption built to test the pseudo-scientific hypothesis that snails create a permanent telepathic link when they mate. The device was developed by French occultist Jacques-Toussaint Benoît (de l’Hérault) with the supposed assistance of an American colleague monsieur Biat-Chrétien in the 1850s.

Benoit claimed that when snails mate, a special type of fluid forms a permanent telepathic link between them. This fluid forms an invisible thread that keeps the snails in “sympathetic communication” by using animal magnetism similar to an electric current pulsating along it. They claimed that this method would work instantly, wirelessly, over any distance, and be more reliable than a telegraph. […]

During the 1871 uprising in the Paris Commune, the need to send and receive secured messages prompted a revival of the idea by Marquis Rochefort, president of the barricades commission. However, it proved to be as unreliable then, as it had originally been.

This is one of the greatest ideas humanity has ever come up with; alas, the experiment proved inconclusive. You can read about it at that link, you can read Jules Allix’s lengthy report here (“Ever since I have had the honor of announcing the discovery of Messrs. Jacques Toussaint Benoît[…] and Biat-Chrétien[…], my excitement about their new system for the universal and instantaneous communication of thought has not ceased to increase”), and you can watch a brief video with a visualization here; my concern, however, is linguistic, and since the word pasilalinic is (unaccountably) missing from the OED, I thought I’d render a public service by pointing out that it’s from Greek πᾶς ‘all, every, each’ + λαλέω ‘talk, chat, prattle.’ Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find some snails. I want to believe!