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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, Sheldon Pollock, from “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (Summer, 2009) 931-961 (at 933-934):

First, what precisely do I mean by philology? It is an accurate index of philology’s fall from grace that most people today have only the vaguest idea what the word means. I have heard it confused with phrenology, and even for those who know better, philology shares something of the disrepute of that nineteenth-century pseudoscience. Admittedly, the definition of any discipline has to be provisional in some sense because the discipline itself is supposed to change with the growth of knowledge, and there isn’t any reason why the definition of a discipline should be any neater than the messy world it purports to understand. Still, philologists have not done much to help their cause. An oft-cited definition by a major figure at the foundational moment in the nineteenth century makes philology improbably grand—“the knowledge of what is known”⁸—though this was not much different from the definition offered by Vico in the previous century, for whom philology is the “awareness of peoples’ languages and deeds.”⁹ Perhaps in reaction to these claims, a major figure in the twentieth-century twilight, Roman Jakobson, a “Russian philologist,” as he described himself,¹⁰ made the definition improbably modest: philology is “the art of reading slowly.”¹¹ Most people today, including some I cite in what follows, think of philology either as close reading (the literary critics) or historical-grammatical and textual criticism (the self-described philologists).

What I offer instead as a rough-and-ready working definition at the same time embodies a kind of program, even a challenge: philology is, or should be, the discipline of making sense of texts. It is not the theory of language—that’s linguistics—or the theory of meaning or truth—that’s philosophy—but the theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.

The footnotes:

8. August Boeckh: “das Erkennen des Erkannten” (“[re-]cognizing [what the human mind has produced—that is] what has been cognized”) (quoted in Michael Holquist, “Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother,” PMLA 115 [Dec. 2000]: 1977). See also Axel Horstmann, Antike Theoria und Moderne Wissenschaft: August Boeckh’s Konzeption der Philologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), p. 103.

9. Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh (Harmondsworth, 1999), p. 79; hereafter abbreviated NS. See also NS, p. 5: “By philology, I mean the science of everything that depends on human volition: for example, all histories of the languages, customs, and deeds of various peoples in both war and peace.”

10. Holquist, “Forgetting Our Name, Remembering Our Mother,” p. 1977.

11. Quoted in Jan Ziolkowski, “What Is Philology? Introduction,” On Philology, ed. Ziolkowski (University Park, Pa., 1990), p. 6, though the idea is in fact Nietzsche’s, who described himself as “ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens” (Nietzsche, “Vorrede,” Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. [Munich, 1980], 3:17).

Pollock has appeared at LH several times (e.g., 2010, 2015), and we discussed philology in 2009.

Anthony Ossa-Richardson sent me a link to the Graun’s A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? (“We asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch”) with the remark “Good to know AI is just as much of ignorant blowhard as most humans”; he pointed specifically to the statement:

Robots in Greek [sic] means “slave”. But the word literally means “forced to work”.

The Grauniacs were kind enough to add the [sic] and the link to an article which correctly states:

‘Roboti’ derives from the Old Church Slavanic [sic! –LH] ‘rabota’, meaning ‘servitude’, which in turn comes from ‘rabu’, meaning ‘slave’.

Remember, kids, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially if it was written by a robot!

Gaelic Thesaurus of the Historic Environment launched:

A new Gaelic thesaurus which offers specialised terminology relating to the historic environment has been launched by Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on Ancient & Historic Monuments, with financial support from Bòrd na Gàidhlig.

The thesaurus contains more than 4,000 terms and is aimed at Gaelic speakers, learners and schools, as well as the general public. It provides terminology relating to areas such as architecture, archaeology and history as well as place-names for many historical sites.

As a thesaurus, it not only functions as an English-Gaelic, Gaelic-English dictionary of terminology but also provides the meaning of each term in both languages.

The Gaelic Thesaurus is online here. Thanks, Trevor!

Alex Foreman posted this video on Facebook, adding:

Me reading a poem by the Romani poet Lera Yanysheva, first in Xaladytka Romani, and then in my English translation.
This poem is based on real events. Since 2003, Romani neighborhoods in and on the outskirts of St. Petersburg have been repeatedly attacked by Neo-Nazi skinhead groups, with the reaction of the police and the public seldom rising above indifference.

It’s a powerful poem, and I find both his translation and his reading effective; you can see the Romani poem in Cyrillic with a Russian translation (which was helpful to me as I listened) here (scroll down about halfway, to “Петербу́рго”). Of course I was thrilled to hear Romani poetry read aloud, apart from all other considerations.

And if you’re curious about “Xaladytka Romani,” it’s in Wikipedia as Ruska Roma: “The Ruska Roma (Russian: Руска́ Рома́), also known as Russian Gypsies (Russian: Русские цыгане) or Xaladitka Roma (Russian: Халадытка Рома, […] i.e. ‘Roma-Soldiers’), are the largest subgroup of Romani people in Russia and Belarus.” They have a footnote for the translation “Roma-Soldiers” which leads here (scoll down to “Ruska Roma”): “Also called ‘Xaladitka Roma‘ (Gypsy soldiers).” But my Russian/Romani dictionary gives кэтана = kətana for солдат ‘soldier’ and doesn’t have a listing for халадытка [xaladytka], which looks like it should be a derivative of халавав [xalavav] ‘wash, rinse,’ past tense халадем [xaladem]. If anyone knows anything about this, please share.

From Peter Brown’s NYRB review (available in full here even to non-subscribers) of
Armenia! (an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22, 2018–January 13, 2019) and its catalog Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages, edited by Helen C. Evans:

Ancient Armenia was idiosyncratic, but it was far from insular. The Armenian plateau was not a mountain fastness like the Caucasus. Rather it was the meeting point of a series of ridges that stretched southward on either side, like strands of rope knotted in the middle, toward the west into Roman Anatolia, and, toward the east, along the Zagros range, into Iran and Mesopotamia. The roads from the highlands descended gently, most of the way, in a series of wide mountain valleys. For Armenians of the Middle Ages, before the drawing of modern borders, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean lay closer than one might think. Even within recent memory the two worlds would meet in the upland valleys of eastern Turkey. Scattered across the summer meadows, one could see the white felt yurts of the “cold desert” nomads of Central Asia mingling with the black camel-hair tents of the “hot desert” nomads of Syria and Mesopotamia, within view of the majestic white cone of Mount Ararat.

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was like the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century—an overbrimming reservoir of military manpower and skilled adventurers of every kind. As soldiers, Armenians fought with equal vigor in the armies of Eastern Rome and Iran. They were not only military men. In the fourth century, the Armenian Prohaeresius was a leading professor of rhetoric in Athens. In the tenth century the engineer Trdat, who reinforced the supports for the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was also an Armenian. The most remarkable evidence of this constant drift of a hardy and enterprising mountain people into the Mediterranean world was found on an Egyptian papyrus. It was a conversational handbook in which Greek phrases were transcribed into Armenian letters, so that the owner could discuss, in perfect Greek, the pithy sayings of Diogenes the Cynic, among others. [fn: See James Clackson, “A Greek Papyrus in Armenian Script,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Vol. 129 (2000).]

Anthony Bladon at the Log has a great list that starts:

• A verb walks into a bar, sees an attractive noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

Plenty more at the link, including the comments (which are, alas, marred by foolish carping about where to put periods in combination with quotation marks, as if anything about language was “logical”).
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JC sent me the link to “Constituent order in Maltese: A quantitative analysis,” by Slavomír Čéplö [in fact, his dissertation], with the comment “It’s not only well-written, it’s charming. And it trounces the Chomskyites good and proper, with much reference to Haspelmath. What’s not to like?” What indeed? (Slavo, of course, posts here as bulbul; if you do tweets, his are here.) Thanks, John!

Addendum. I should mention that all Hatters are thanked in the acknowledgments; see comment thread.

I’ve had Margaret Paxson’s Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village since 2011, and now (for whatever mysterious reason applies in such cases) I’ve finally gotten around to reading it — slowly, as with John Burnside (see this post), because it’s dense and provokes much thinking. I’ve gotten to chapter 5, “Wonders,” and I found this passage about words and otherworldly forces relevant enough to quote here (compare a couple of posts from 2003, Kazakh Word Magic and Translating Magic; “Solovyovo” is her pseudonym for the North Russian village where she did her anthropological research):

In Solovyovo’s stories, words—and sometimes simply thoughts—are uttered. Then, these words are perceived by the leshii, or domovoi, or some other unspecified set of actorless ears. Something is uttered—even in private—and that which is uttered is heard or received. This can happen because these beings, distinct and indistinct, are everywhere:

Anna Grigorievna: There is a host of the forest, a host in every [little] village. Of course. A host of the bathhouse. They are everywhere. […]

Fedor Sergeevich reminded me in several of his stories that “chto-to est’ (“there is something”). Some kind of force existed; the form was incidental: It could be God or it could be one of the khoziaeva [‘hosts’] or it could just be that amorphous force. […] There are two important points here: first, the supernatural world is a ready recipient for invocations (both intentional and otherwise); and second, The imagination of the chudesnoe [‘wondrous, miraculous’] little cares which ideology it springs from. The forces that fill it are form- and name-seeking, regardless of whether they fall into any given ideological taxonomy.

Readiness comes from the teeming supernatural world itself. But reactions—where forces come into being and act in the world—are set off by (among other things) words. Words are uttered, and things happen. Mikhail Alekseevich warned luliia when she cursed using reference to the devil, “all words will be remembered.” Curses such as, “The leshii take you away!”, were common in the village. Usually, I was told, they are uttered in moments of frustration, without thinking (“without behind-thought”). So, after one man spent a long day working and his calf would not walk where it should, he smacked the calf and let out a curse, and dedushka lesovoi [‘forest grandfather’] caused the cow to disappear […]

Stories in which curses were the operative words that awakened the attention of otherworldly powers were common. Yet other kinds of words were also ready to be heard. Just as a person can trigger the supernatural into action with misdirected curses, the correct attention to supernatural beings and forces — affectionate and respectful — can help a person, once lines have been crossed and magical space has been entered. When asking grandfather forest for permission to enter the woods, warm words must be used. The words should be, Anna Grigorievna told me, “totally affectionate — totally kind!” When she knew she would have to sleep in the forest alone at night, Anna Grigorievna herself would sometimes invoke not only grandfather forest, but “mother pine.” She would say, “Mother pine tree, sweet one. Allow me to sleep here. Save, guard me. Allow me.” [fn: Esli zabludish’sia i nado tam nochevat’, skazhi: ‘Mat’ elochka, milaia. Otpusti nochevat’. Spasi, sokhrani menia. Pustite.’] The tone of these words is warm and humble, and is sharply different from the sound of curses, such as “The leshii take you!”, which can cause great harm. Sweetness and affection, regardless of the words of address chosen, bring about protection and patronage. The lilt of the phrase is clearly no less important than its content. [fn: Every time I asked about the words of a particular spell, they changed a bit. The practice of magic does not seem to rely on getting all the words exactly “right,” but on the proper positioning of the invocation.]

I don’t believe in magic or forest spirits, but sweetness and affection are generally better bets than curses in all realms of life. (I do find it odd that Paxson doesn’t mention W. F. Ryan’s magisterial The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, which would seem to be right up her alley.)
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Reviewing Nature’s Embrace the other day reminded me that two books sent by the publisher, the excellent New York Review Books, have been sitting around for months waiting for me to get around to them; for one reason and another, even though I’m excited about them and am looking forward to reading them, I haven’t yet and probably won’t get to them for some time, so guilt is forcing me to at least let you know that they exist and are worth having.

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is the precursor to his great Life and Fate (which I wrote about here); it’s been translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and you can read the publisher’s blurb and quotes from rave reviews here.

Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World, translated by Donald Rayfield, contains those Kolyma stories not included in the collection I raved about here; I’m sure everything I said there is applicable to this handsome volume, and it’s wonderful that these dense, sometimes unbearable masterpieces are available in full to the English-speaking reader.

My thanks go out as always to NYRB, which publishes great books and makes them available to a wide audience. Keep it up!

Another from the e-mail archives, Plautdietsch:

Welcome to this Plautdietsch Web Site. This site is intended to help preserve and promote the use of Plautdietsch as a spoken language. Most text in this web page will be in English but the audio/video resources available through this web site are primarily in the Plautdietsch language. It is hoped that people will be able to use these audio resources to listen to, and enjoy the sound of this ancient language being spoken.

There is much confusion between the meaning of Mennonite as a religion, and the association of the European origin Mennonites with the Plautdietsch language they evolved from the local Low Saxon language of the Vistula Valley in what was then Prussia, and the Pennsylvania Dutch that evolved in Switzerland and the closely surrounding areas of Germany. Many people are not aware that there are currently more non-European origin religious Mennonites around the world than there are the historical Mennonites that at one time or currently speak either Plautdietsch or Pennsylvania Dutch.

“Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, was originally a Low Prussian variety of East Low Saxon (German), with Dutch influence, that developed in the 16th and 17th Century in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia, today Polish territory. The word is etymologically cognate with Plattdeutsch, or Low German. Plaut is the same word as German platt or Dutch plat, meaning ‘Low’, but the name Dietsch = Dutch Diets, meaning ‘ordinary language, language of the people’; whereas Deitsch can only refer to German Deutsch.

The language (or groups of dialects of Low German) is spoken in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Belize, and Argentina by over 300,000 Mennonites. They are members of a religious group that originally fled from Holland and Belgium in the 1500s to escape persecution, and who eventually resettled in these areas. They introduced and developed their particular East Low German dialect, the so-called Weichselplatt, while they came to and lived in the Vistula delta area, beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. These colonists from the Low Countries were especially welcome there because of their experience with and knowledge of land reclaiming and making polders. As Mennonites they kept their own (primarily Dutch and Low-German) identity, using their Dutch/Low German language. Their East Low German dialect is still to be classified as Low Prussian, or simply Prussian.

Again, the fact that it’s a seven-year-old link is regrettable in terms of my ability to keep up with correspondence, but that the site has lasted so long is a recommendation. Thanks, Al!