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From The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, by Frederick Forsyth (via Joel’s Far Outliers):

Tangier in 1956 was an extraordinary place, my first taste of Africa and the world of Islam. Morocco had been, until very recently, a French colony, but Tangier was under tripartite administration between the British (the post office), the French (police and law courts), and the Spanish (general administration). […]

There was a British warship moored in the outer harbor on what is called a “flying the flag” mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of Marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish.

I tried to help and was promptly press-ganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate, or the Gorbals: about five feet tall and just as wide. The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. We moved from bar to bar as they spent their shore leave and accrued pay on pints of beer and triple-scotch chasers.

Bathrobe sent me links to two Facebook posts by Christopher Atwood; if you’re on FB you can read all the replies, but you can get the basic idea from the texts of the posts, which I will reproduce here:

1) Russian literature has had a big influence on modern Mongolian literature. In your opinion (and I’m specially interested in those who were educated in Mongolia), what are the three most important works of Russian literature that you need to know in order to understand Mongolian literature? In other words, which three works of Russian literature most influenced Mongolian literature?

2) Based on the great responses to my earlier post about Russian literature [here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mongolianstudies/permalink/2646748208950447/], I confirmed what I’d suspected, that while both English-speaking and Mongolian-speaking readers and authors read a lot of Russian literature, they read rather different literature.

Tolstoy and Chekhov are shared between the two. Pushkin is also shared, but he seems more significant in the Mongolian canon. I guess this is because as a poet, his work is harder to translate and many more Mongolian writers than English speaking writers are fluent enough in Russian to appreciate Russian poetry.

Mongolian- and English-speaking readers both read Gogol, but it seems Mongolians read “The Inspector-General” most and English-speakers read “Dead Souls” most.

One big difference is that for English-speakers Dostoevsky is up there with Tolstoy as one of two greatest Russian novelists, while very few in Mongolia mention his work as influential.

When it comes to the “Soviet” canon, there’s no almost common ground. As I have seen it, a Soviet canon for English-speaking writers might be Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita,” Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.” That for Mongolian writers’ canon is headed by Sholokhov’s “Tikhii Don,” with Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How Steel Was Tempered.” Gorky is probably the only shared author. This has to do with politics obviously — the English-speaking canon is pretty much all “dissident literature” while the ones well-known and loved to Mongolians are not.

I’m fascinated by the topic of which authors and books of a given national literature are read by people in other countries, and this is a nice exemplification.

And while we’re on the topic of Russian literature, a thousand thanks to whoever sent me a copy of Elena Kravchenko’s The Prose of Sasha Sokolov; not only is it a book I’m excited about in general (Sokolov published three novels, all of them considered classics, in the decade 1976-1985 and then went silent except for a few essays, and those novels are difficult enough that any and all help understanding them is welcome), but I’m up to 1976 in my reading and will be getting to Школа для дураков (A School for Fools), which Nabokov called “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book,” within the next few weeks, so it’s an exceedingly timely gift!

Breck Yunits has a nice little webpage:

This is a visualization of my MacBook Air’s keyboard. It has 127 symbols spread across 78 keys. I found an approximate date for every symbol. Most of these symbols are thousands of years old. Play around or read more here. […]

You can click each symbol to see the source where I pulled an approximate year. Pull requests are accepted as some may be off by hundreds of years, but the theme should hold.

If you want an “uppercase” element (e.g., ! or @) click on the upper part of the “key.”
There’s a slider that says:

Hide Symbols Older Than: 1,500 Years | 1,000 Years | 500 Years | 100 Years | 50 Years |

I’m sure there’s debatable stuff there, but it’s fun to play with.

I’ve long been curious about the idea that certain foreign writers, wittingly or otherwise, produce novels in language that has been slanted toward easy translation into English or excessively influenced by English style, and Masatsugu Ono’s Paris Review essay from last year addresses exactly that issue with some fascinating insights into Japanese literature:

The next time I encountered those books was after I moved to Tokyo for university. I came across a large stack of them right by the entrance of one of the city’s largest bookstores. They were the two parts of Haruki Murakami’s novel Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood). I was already familiar with him as a master of short essays. My landlady had the bad (or good?) habit of reading books in the bathroom, and Murakami’s essays were among her favorites. One day, she handed me a collection she had finished. In these essays, he writes about literature and music and even cooking in such a natural way that it feels as though he’s addressing the reader personally. Something delightful and friendly in his style fascinated me (it’s a shame that those early essays of his haven’t been published in English). I couldn’t say how exactly, but I immediately felt that his style was different from other contemporary Japanese writers I had read. Probably because one of my professors (who was from Belgium) had translated it into French, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of Murakami’s novels I read. And I soon found myself reading through them all.

In 1978, Murakami went to Jingu Baseball Stadium, located near the jazz bar he ran, to watch the opening game of the season. The moment the lead-off hitter slammed the first pitch cleanly into left field, a thought struck him: I think I can write a novel. […] Murakami describes this event—even in Japanese—using the English word epiphany. Late that night, he sat down at the kitchen table and began to write. Several months later, he finished a first draft. But it disappointed him. Murakami placed his Olivetti typewriter on the table and began to write again, this time in English.

The resulting English prose was, unsurprisingly, simple and unadorned. However, as he wrote, Murakami felt a distinctive rhythm begin to take shape:

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle.

It may seem paradoxical that his mother tongue prevented him from writing. But writing in a foreign language liberated him, and he finished the beginning of his novel in English before translating it into Japanese […] The style Murakami describes as “neutral” was deemed by some critics “translationese.” When Murakami became a success in the global literary market, Kojin Karatani—one of the most influential Japanese critics—attributed this success to the “non-Japaneseness” of Murakami’s style.

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This Hannah Weber rounduup of contemporary Balkan fiction for the Calvert Journal is a few years old now, but as we know, the Balkans are an ageless land of mystery where today is exactly the same as a thousand years ago, so who’s counting? Anyway, it’s an interesting mix of famous writers like Ismail Kadare, reasonably well-known ones like Dubravka Ugresić and Aleksandar Hemon, and ones I’d never heard of, like Ognjen Spahić (from Montenegro) and Gabriela Babnik (Slovenia). Here’s a description of The Russian Window by Dragan Velikić (Serbia):

An omnibus novel in three parts, The Russian Window juxtaposes each character’s missed opportunities with the paths they choose, providing the reader with an understanding of the diverse and countless lives of others. Through careful irony and sparse humour, we begin to discover the aching but inevitable gap between one’s expectations and how one lives. The title of the book lends itself to a beautiful metaphor: a fortochka is a small window inset in a larger one, used for ventilation in cold climates. As Velikić writes, it is “an attempt to inhale the outer world without losing our inner warmth”. His latest novel, Islednik (2015), eagerly awaits translation.

Which raises the question, does Serbian not have its own word for fortochka? (If you’re curious about the title in the last sentence, islednik means ‘investigator.) There are splendid photographs of cities (I particularly like the one of Dubrovnik). Thanks, Trevor!

1) Cathy McAteer’s Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics is out, and Routledge is making it freely available as a pdf (while charging $128 for the physical 196-page book, sheesh). I’ve already downloaded it and am looking forward to reading it. (I posted about McAteer and David Magarshack in 2016.)

2) Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul posted this on Facebook:

This is “Українські говори підкарпатської Руси і сумежних областей” (i.e. “Ukrainian dialects of the Subcarpathian Rus and neighboring areas”) by Ivan Paňkevič (Prague 1938) and it is one of the many books on Ruthenian I bought and read this year. This one is actually a foundational work as it introduces another one of them pesky terminological problems, Ruthenian vs. Ukrainian.

So at least how things stand now, Ruthenian is the modern name used for Western Ukrainian “Lemko” dialects of Ukrainian spoken in North-Eastern Slovakia (roughly around the city of Prešov).

There is also a language called “Ruthenian” that is spoken in today’s Serbia in and around the city of Ruski Krstur which is actually a variety of Eastern Slovak. Horace Lundt proved so, but some people keep insisting that is the same Ruthenian as the Lemko variety.

And then there’s of course the historical term “Ruthenian” which describes anything vaguely Eastern Slavic spoken and even written in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in whatever became of it. So it could be Russian, it could be Ukrainian, it could be Belarussian, it could even be some form of Eastern Slavic + Church Slavic.

Makes sense? No? Now you got it!

We discussed Ruthenian (the Western Ukrainian kind) back in 2005.

As I said here, I got Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire for Christmas, and I have now finished reading it. Since most of what I have to say will be negative, I should start by mentioning what’s good about it. The author has a master’s in classical Armenian studies and a PhD in Byzantine and comparative history, and she puts that academic background to good use; the book’s Teixcalaanli empire is clearly based on Byzantium, and she says the novel is “in many respects a fictional version of her postdoctoral research on Byzantine imperialism on the frontier to Armenia in the 11th century, particularly the annexation of the Kingdom of Ani.” If you know anything about the subject, it’s fun to see the echoes, some of which are linguistic (see below). The central character, Mahit Dzmare, a new ambassador from Lsel who has long been absorbed in Teixcalaanli literature and culture, is very convincingly torn between her Stationer patriotism and her desire to be absorbed completely into the imperial culture — I’m sure many provincial visitors to Constantinople felt the same way. And there are nice science-fictional touches like cloudhooks and infofiches. I can see why sf readers enjoyed it.

I should also, in fairness, point out that I have an inherent bias against space operas that expect you to thrill to the glorious grandeur of empires and emperors (though I enjoyed them as a wee lad); I especially dislike the trope of the Old Wise Emperor who is needed to preserve peace, law, order, and such good things. I’m a pacifist anarchist, which means I don’t actually want emperors blown up, but I don’t want them to exist and I bristle when they’re glorified. I also am sick and tired of trilogies and other series; why can’t people just write a self-contained novel without leaving plot ends dangling for inevitable sequels? On all that, YMMV, and I am not a dispassionate critic. But I stand by what follows.
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Five years ago I posted about the phenomenon of Sanskrit as a spoken language; now Amara Hasa posts at the Log about a project that involves spoken and communicative Sanskrit:

Our project is a free online library of Sanskrit stories for learners. What makes these stories special is that they follow the current best practices from second language acquisition research.

Specifically, we aim to provide the learner with as much compelling and comprehensible input as we can, since this is a vital and necessary factor in developing communicative proficiency. Here are some specific techniques we apply to keep the input rate high:

– We use a highly restricted (“sheltered”) vocabulary to avoid overwhelming the learner with new lexical items. […]

– We use unrestricted (“unsheltered”) grammar so that all utterances follow normal Sanskrit grammatical patterns, without any attempt to teach a specific rule. […]

– We provide illustrations and word-for-word translations to establish meaning and avoid the pitfalls of some immersion-only approaches. Our simpler stories also have per-sentence translations so that beginners can be confident that they understand what a sentence means.

– We prioritize learner choice and understand that language acquisition is highly dependent on factors like interest and motivation. The more that a learner can choose content that is personally compelling, the more fun they’ll have, and the more they’ll want to read in the future.

Under the constraints above, we simply try to provide the most engaging content that we can. Our content mainly takes the form of stories, which closely aligns us with TPRS methods. But it is also true that many people learn Sanskrit to read a specific text of interest, so we are also working on graded adaptations of major works, such as the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Panchatantra.

The site is Sanskrit for everyone, and it seems like a Good Thing.

As a retired copyeditor, I of course enjoyed David Vecsey’s report from the NYT trenches:

It is a feeling that every copy editor knows. You bolt upright out of a deep sleep at 3 a.m., eyes wide open, and you say to yourself, Did I misspell “Kyrgyzstan” last night? And nine times out of 10, you can go back to sleep comfortably knowing … that you did.

Copy editors — those of us who polish articles and write headlines and photo captions — have an almost photographic memory when it comes to the words that pass before our eyes. Unfortunately, the cameras we use are those old-fashioned tripods that use flaming magnesium for a flash and take hours, or even days, for the pictures to develop. But eventually it all comes back in a rush of clarity. You might be pushing your toddler through the park on a glorious sunny day off when suddenly you ask yourself: Did I say Dallas was the capital of Texas last week? Yes. Yes, you did. You idiot.

My latest foray into the Corrections list came last month when I wrote a photo caption identifying Senator Tom Udall of Utah. And by Utah, obviously, I meant New Mexico. Because that’s the state he represents. (Until this week.)

My job, simply speaking, is to get things right. So there is no worse feeling than the realization that you have entered a correctable error into print and that a correction will appear a day or two later to proclaim, “Because of an editing error …” There is no escaping the page of the newspaper that you have marred; it reappears everywhere you look: blowing down the sidewalk, on a subway car, wrapped around the sea bass you’ve just bought at the market. There is no doubt that five years from now, I’ll buy something on eBay and it will come in a box padded with a scrap of The New York Times that says “Tom Udall of Utah.”

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ScienceDaily features The surprising grammar of touch: Language emergence in DeafBlind communities:

A new study demonstrates that grammar is evident and widespread in a system of communication based on reciprocal, tactile interaction, thus reinforcing the notion that if one linguistic channel, such as hearing, or vision, is unavailable, structures will find another way to create formal categories. There are thousands of people across the US and all over the world who are DeafBlind. Very little is known about the diverse ways they use and acquire language, and what effects those processes have on the structure of language itself. This research suggests a way forward in analyzing those articulatory and perceptual patterns — a project that will broaden scientific understanding of what is possible in human language.

This research focuses on language usage that has become conventional across a group of DeafBlind signers in the United States and shows that those who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels — a practice known as “Protactile,” — make regular use of tactile grammatical structures. The study, “Feeling Phonology: The Conventionalization of Phonology in Protactile Communities in the United States” by Terra Edwards (Saint Louis University) and Diane Brentari (University of Chicago), will be published in the December, 2020 issue of the scholarly journal Language.

The article focuses on the basic units used to produce and perceive protactile expressions as well as patterns in how those units are, and are not, combined. Over the past 60 years, there has been a slow, steady paradigm shift in the field of linguistics toward understanding this level of linguistic structure, or “phonology” as the abstract component of a grammar, which organizes basic units without specific reference to communication modality. This article contributes to that shift, calling into question the very definition of phonology. The authors ask: Can the tactile modality sustain phonological structure? The results of the study suggest that it can.

A very interesting development; there are more links, including one to a video discussion of the study done in Protactile, at the MetaFilter post.