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I’ve been dipping my toes into Sasha Sokolov‘s famously difficult 1980 novel Между собакой и волком, sometimes called the Russian Finnegans Wake; long thought untranslatable, it was finally rendered into English as Between Dog and Wolf by Alexander Boguslawski and published by Columbia University Press’s Russian Library in 2017. I normally don’t bother with translations, since it usually turns out that if the Russian is too difficult for me it defeats the translators too, but in this case I’m grateful for all the help I can get, and Boguslawski has extremely useful notes.

At any rate, after bulling my way through the first couple of chapters (not looking everything up — I’ll save that for when I really read the book) I decided to concentrate on the poems; there are 37 of them, gathered into five sections called “Hunter’s Notes” or variations thereof, and they’re convenient little packets of enjoyable fun with language. The second one is titled Снаряженье патронов (Boguslawski renders it “Preparation of Cartridges”; I might go for “Cartridge Loading”), and the second section begins:

Есть ящик у тебя!
В нем ты хранишь все то,
Что требует ружейная охота.
Его без дальних слов
Открой и из него
Бери картонных гильз,
Ты капсюлей бери,
Придуманных покойником Жевело,
И в донца этих гильз
Жевела те вживи
И пороху напороши.
За дело!

Boguslawski’s version:

You have a magic box!
In it you keep all things
Needed for hunting with a rifle.
So with no further words
Open it; from inside
Take out some carton tubes,
And also a few caps
Invented by the late Monsieur Gévelot.
And in these carton tubes
Thrust these Gévelot caps
And sprinkle powder there.
Go, fellow!

Not much poetry there, but never mind, it’s good to have any kind of crib. What I’m posting about, though, is that phrase “Gévelot caps.” As a note explains, Joseph-Marin Gévelot (1786-1843) was a French arms manufacturer and inventor; Wiktionary has the Russian word жевело (stress on the last syllable), but renders it “a device for the ignition of gunpowder in hunting cartridges.” The phrase “Gévelot caps” barely exists in English — Google finds only a handful of results, including a talk page for Sherlock Holmes (2013 TV Series) (“Thaddeus Sholto’s revolver is loaded with Gevelot caps, used for pyrotechnical effects”) and an 1892 issue of The Mining Engineer: Journal of The Institution of Mining Engineers (“The shots were fired by Gevelot caps, primed with Schlesinger lighters”) — but it’s clearly indispensable in this context.

You know what’s really fun, though? That Russian word жевело [ževeló], a French loan word, has been nativized with a beautiful stress pattern: the singular is жевело́, genitive жевела́, but the plural is жевёла [ževyóla], genitive жевёл [ževyól], modeled after nouns like колесо ‘wheel’: singular колесо́, genitive колеса́, plural колёса, genitive колёс. So that line “Жевела те вживи” is [ževyóla te vživí], which shows off Sokolov’s nice way with alliteration.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science Annals, an admirably open-access journal, devoted an issue (Number 2, April 15, 2011) to Rachel E. Maxson, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, and Lee Wayne Lomayestewa, “Lost in Translation: Rethinking Hopi Katsina Tithu and Museum Language Systems” (pdf); here’s the Abstract:

Museums collect and care for material culture, and, increasingly, intangible culture. This relatively new term for the folklore, music, dance, traditional practices, and language belonging to a group of people is gaining importance in international heritage management discourse. As one aspect of intangible cultural heritage, language is more relevant in museums than has been previously acknowledged. Incorporating native languages into museum anthropology collections provides context and acts as a form of “appropriate museology,” preserving indigenous descriptions and conceptions of objects. This report presents the ways in which Hopi katsina tithu—popularly known as kachina dolls—are outstanding examples of objects that museums can recontextualize with Native terminology. The etymology, or a word or phrase’s use history, of each katsina tihu’s name documents the deep connection of these objects with Hopi belief, ritual, and history. Without including the complex practices of Hopi naming, documentation of these objects in museum catalogues is often incomplete and inaccurate. Using contemporary Hopi perspectives, historic ethnographies, and the Hopi Dictionary to create a database of Hopi katsina tithu names, this project demonstrates how museums might incorporate intangible heritage into their collections through language and etymological context.

As you can imagine, I find that an admirable project, and I hope more museums are following their lead; after the article itself (the first 49 pages) there’s a long Appendix: Hopi Katsina Tithu Names from Provisional Database, followed by a bunch of gorgeous illustrations.

I got to it by googling the pleasing word “qöqlö” from this Harry Stephen Keeler tweet:

[“Qölö” means “hole.” The plural is “qöqlö,” holes. The katsina associated with holes is named “Qööqöqlö.” If several of them come to town, their plural is “Qööqöqlöm.” They bring gifts during Powamuya, bean dance season.]

Thanks, graywyvern!

Incidentally, when I checked the mailbox today I found a cardboard mailer obviously containing a small book; I assumed it was the cheap paperback copy of Tolstoy’s Воскресение [Resurrection] I recently ordered, but when I opened it, to my astonishment and delight it turned out to be a completely unexpected copy of this Gaito Gazdanov collection, containing the novels Призрак Александра Вольфа [The Spectre of Alexander Wolf] and Возвращение Будды [The Buddha’s Return], both from the late 1940s, as well as three short stories. Added to his first novel, Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], and his final three, I’ve now got quite a respectable hard-copy Gazdanov shelf. My heartfelt thanks to whichever LH reader (there was no slip in the package) chose that long-wished-for book from my wishlist and sent it to me!

Anatoly Vorobey usually posts in Russian at Avva, but he decided to write this fascinating story in English; I’ll quote part of it here and let you go to the link for the rest:

I doubt this story has been told much outside Russia – and even in Russia, most people who heard of it are probably professors or PhD students in Russian literature. It is not widely known, but it should be.

But let me begin. There are three heroes in this story, and I will introduce them one by one. First, there was Gavriil Batenkov. […] He was a Decembrist. Batenkov was an army officer, then an engineer, and a poet (a whole lot of them were poets). He was 33 at the time of the revolt, and then he spent the next 20 years in solitary confinement at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. During that time he possibly went mad (there were some very rambling writings and letters; some historians think he was faking being mad). After his release, he was exiled for 10 years to Siberia, and then finally allowed to come back and spend the last years of his life in relative peace.

Batenkov published only one poem during his life, called “The Wild One”, written at the beginning of his confinement. A tale of woe by a prisoner removed from society, it wasn’t, unfortunately, very good. He wasn’t well-known as a poet during his life, and was swiftly forgotten after his death in 1863. He doesn’t have an English-language Wikipedia entry. Historians knew there were unpublished poems and drafts remaining in his papers and letters, but there wasn’t much interest in them.

Roll forward 100 years.

[Read more…]

I’ve occasionally run across the term “intension” but never understood it; I still don’t (OED: “5. Logic. The internal quantity or content of a notion or concept, the sum of the attributes contained in it; the number of qualities connoted by a term”), but I found the discussion of its history linked by Sarah Lobar in this OUPblog post interesting enough to pass on:

“Why the “S” in “intension”?” by Mary Spencer
The peculiar spelling of the logical term “intension” has always given pause to laymen readers of English logical prose. From time to time, in fact, even the initiate tend to become confused. […] It turns out that (1) Sir William Hamilton did not introduce the word “intension ” into the logical vocabulary, and (2) neither he nor the man who did introduce it were in any sort of muddle about its meaning.

Click the link for the exciting facts!

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún writes for Popula about a new African writing system:

Yorùbá and Igbo have evolved over the years, with various twists and turns affecting usage both spoken and written. And since Bishop Àjàyí Crowther wrote the classic texts, Vocabulary of Yorùbá (1843), Isoama-Ibo Primer (1857), and Vocabulary of the Ibo Language (1882), disputes regarding the orthography of these languages—attempts to agree on how, exactly, they should be written—have continued to rage in academic, literary, and colloquial circles. It is not uncommon today to find competent speakers of both Yorùbá and Igbo who don’t know how to tone-mark written words, so that the end result appears like a standard English text, leaving room for plenty of ambiguity. […]

Unicode was designed to facilitate the digital rendering of languages by encoding scripts into uniquely identifiable computer codes. But because of its lack of precomposed characters for vowels requiring both the subdot [e.g. ẹ, ọ] and the tonal diacritic [e.g. ì, í, á, à, ò, ó, è, é], digital rendering of Yorùbá vowels that carry both [like ẹ̀, ẹ́, ọ̀, ọ́] often need to be overwritten with the second diacritic mark. This results in frequent font-related snafus on modern electronic platforms. […]

Enter the Ńdébé Script: a writing system that addresses the tonal peculiarities of Nigerian languages, pleasing to the eye, which might carry the burden of our literary and academic aspirations. Created by visual artist and software engineer Lotanna Igwe-Odunze, the Ńdébé script provides a suite of tools for cultural expansion through literature, calligraphy, and visual art.

Having been exposed to other logographic scripts like Hangul and Devanagari, I found Ńdébé to be quite straightforward to learn. Consonants are the main stems of the script, while the vowels are appended to the tops of characters. Tone is accounted for with dots, and the visual direction of the vowel rendered in a manner not dissimilar to our current diacriticized Latin script. The high tone conveys climbing a hill; the low tone descends. Users can intuit from their own rising or falling voices which image best represents the appropriate vowel.

In addition Ńdébé supplies, for Igbo at least, an opportunity for different dialectal variations to find harmony, a problem that has bedeviled written Igbo for years. […]

In attempting to write my name—a Yorùbá name—in Ńdébé, I ran into a problem that I believe needs to be solved even for Igbo. My last name Túbọ̀sún can only be written as Tú-bọ̀-sú-n in Ńdébé, where the /n/ is treated as a stand-alone consonant, though it’s there only to show that the -un is nasalised. […] But then Ńdébé doesn’t pretend to be a sound-based script, though its impressive attention to the rendering of tone makes it seem like one. Its main focus is the syllable, much like Hangul or perhaps other scripts like Devanagari. As a writing system, it is easy and logical to learn and easy to teach to either humans or to computers.

There’s mention of other scripts like Nsibidi (see this LH post) and much more; it ends with hopes for the future: “I want to see Ńdébé on signboards, computer decals, book covers, art installations, comics, scriptures, and yes, computer fonts (no excuses now, Unicode), textbooks, government documents, Nollywood films and literature.” And in case you were wondering:

Ńdébé is coined from “ide”, which is the Igbo verb meaning “to write”, added to the “n” morpheme for “continue to.”

This is one of those occasions when I vaguely thought I knew a word but when push came to shove it turns out I have no idea what it actually means. The word is supercargo; I supposed it was some kind of cargo, but just now I looked it up and what do you know, it means “An officer on a merchant ship who has charge of the cargo and its sale and purchase.” Etymology:

Alteration (influenced by SUPER-) of supracargo, alteration (influenced by SUPRA-) of Spanish sobrecargo : sobre-, over (from Latin super-; see SUPER-) + cargo, cargo; see CARGO

The way I came to look it up is interesting as well; I decided to reread the Strugatskys‘ 1962 Попытка к бегству (Escape Attempt; see this 2011 post), and near the start one character tells another “Будь моим суперкарго” — ‘Be my supercargo.’ That made no sense to me, so I looked it up. Interesting that Russian seems to have borrowed the English word.

Incidentally, I can’t believe I didn’t mention in that earlier post these quatrains:

Пусть тахорги в страхе воют,
Издавая визг и писк!
Ведь на них идёт войною
Структуральнейший лингвист!

Let the takhorgs [alien creatures] howl in fear,
emitting cries and squeals!
Making war on them is
the most structural linguist!

На войне и на дуэли
Получает первый приз —
Символ счастья и веселья —
Структуральнейший лингвист.

In war and in a duel
the first prize,
symbol of happiness and joy, goes to
the most structural linguist!

It’s rare to see verse celebrating structural linguists.

Having read Astafyev’s 1960 novella Звездопад [Meteor shower — not, as David Gillespie renders it, “Starfall,” even though звезда is ‘star’ and пад- is the ‘fall’ root!] and enjoyed it, I looked around to see what else was published around then; Vladimir Tendryakov’s “Тройка, семерка, туз” [Three, seven, ace] came out the same year, and I remembered enjoying that back in 2011, so I thought I’d read the novella he published the following year, Суд [The trial] even though I’d seen it described as criticizing flaws in the Soviet legal system — what do I care about flaws in the Soviet legal system? But I decided to trust the writer, not the description, and I’m glad I did, because as soon as I read the first page I realized how stupid and misguided the description was (oh, how I hate sociological criticism!).

The first third of the hundred-page story is taken up with a bear hunt, and it’s perhaps the most gripping hunting story I’ve ever read — I was consistently wrong about where it was going, and when tragedy struck it came from a completely unexpected direction (even though the ground had been prepared earlier). I won’t soon forget that ravine, that bog, that shaky wooden footbridge; it’s as powerful as the best stories of men in nature, Jack London, say, or Hemingway. And then the consequences begin, leading to the final trial. Now, maybe Tendryakov actually did want to criticize the Soviet legal system, just as Dostoevsky wanted to criticize the tsarist legal system in The Brothers Karamazov; I neither know nor care. What matters in the story is the Dostoevskyan exploration of conscience that ensues; every character is presented convincingly, especially the experienced hunter at the center of events, Semyon Teterin, who had reluctantly agreed to take a diligent amateur and a drunken wannabe along with him on his nighttime expedition. It’s wonderfully written, from fine nature descriptions to a long passage about how in the drive to improve people’s lives it’s easy to take shortcuts and ignore truth; a couple of nice pithy bits: “В старину говорили: на роду написано. Пустое! Просто жизнь коленца выкидывает” [In the old days they used to say it was fate. Nonsense! It’s just life playing little tricks] and “Доброта, как и озлобление, бывает заразительной” [Kindness, like malice, can be infectious]. And of course there are the kind of interesting specialized vocabulary I love to run into, like согра [sogra] ‘swampy forested depression’ (of unclear origin; see Vasmer). It’s been translated twice, by Alex Miller as “The Trial” and by Olive Stevens as “Justice,” and it would be well worth your while to seek out one of those from your friendly local library. (If you read Russian, of course, just follow the link above.) There was a movie made from it in 1962; if anyone knows if it’s well done, do speak up.

For those who don’t care about Tendryakov but like music, I’ve got you covered; Martin Schwartz, an Iranianist who also happens to be an expert on Greek urban vernacular music (he put together one of my favorite CD compilations, Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances In The Asia Minor Style – The Golden Years: 1911-1937, from his own collection of 78s, with superb liner notes, texts, and translations), sent me a link to Radio Rebetiko, which not only plays the songs but provides the texts (in Greek), and Adam Neely explains “The Girl from Ipanema” in a very informative half-hour video (though I wish he pronounced Brazilian Portuguese better — he says “IpanEEma” and “GHilberto” and seems to think the ‘girl’ of the title is garrota rather than garota).

Interesting excerpts from A Power in the World, by Lorenz Gonschor (U. Hawaii Press, 2019), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers (Sources of Tahitian Legal Terms, Sources of Samoan Legal Terms):

Unlike the Hawaiian constitutional model with its hybrid forms combining classical elements of statecraft with Western forms, the Tahitian legal code and its derivatives primarily used concepts from either biblical or English law, for example, the word ture for “law,” a Tahitian form of the Hebrew word ה רָוֹתּ (torah), basileia (pātīreia in contemporary Tahitian spelling), deriving from Greek βασιλεία (basileía) for kingdom, or tāvana, Tahitian rendering of governor (> *gāvana > tāvana) to designate the heads of the formerly independent clans or chiefdoms that were reorganized as districts within the new Christian kingdom (Académie Tahitienne 1999, 530; Montillier 1999, 270–271).

The marked contrast to the terminology for the equivalent political institutions in the Hawaiian kingdom—namely, kānāwai, aupuni, and kia‘āina, all of which derive from classical Hawaiian statecraft—is clear. It is also hardly surprising, given the nature or Pomare’s kingdom and the other Tahitian-language realms as secondary states modeled on outside examples, and not primary states that developed endogenously, such as the classical Hawaiian predecessor states of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Hommon 2013, 184–185).

[…]

What is also intriguing about the Samoan constitutional system is that despite the absence of classical state-like political structures, the vocabulary created for concepts of modern statecraft was remarkably traditional, much more than the equivalent terms in Tongan and Fijian. For instance, the Samoan term for law is tulāfono, a concept clearly grounded in classical concepts of governance. Other terms for innovative institutions were literal translations, such as failautusi (someone doing writing or accounting) for secretary (that is, cabinet minister). Very few words, however, were direct borrowings from foreign languages comparable to Tahitian ture and basileia or Tongan lao and minisitā.

I would not have expected a Polynesian language to borrow either torah or basileia.

Edwin L. Battistella at OUPblog posts about a magnificent old term that is too little known:

It turns out that honeyfuggler is an old American term for someone who deceives others folks by flattering them. It can be spelled with one g or two and sometimes with an o replacing the u. To honeyfuggle is to sweet talk, but also to bamboozle, bumfuzzle, or hornswoggle.

The word has some twists and turns in its history. According to both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English, it was first recorded as a Kentucky term in 1829 with the definition “to quiz” or “to cozen,” both of which at the time meant to dupe.

The earliest example in the Newspapers.com database is from an 1841 story in a Tennessee newspaper, the Rutherford Telegraph, in which an editor used the term to mean insincere flattery. He said of the Speaker of the Tennessee state senate that “Some may say it is impolitic of me to talk thus plainly about Mr. Turney, and think it better to honey-fuggle and plaster over with soft-soap to potent a Senator.” […]

Honeyfuggle remained a marginal term, often characterized as slang or as a regionalism, but it popped into the national consciousness when Taft deployed it to characterize his predecessor and then-rival for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. In a speech in Cambridge, Ohio, Taft said:

I hold that the man is a demagogue and a flatterer who comes out and tells the people that they know it all. I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth straight out, and I hate to see a man try to honeyfuggle the people by telling them something he doesn’t believe. […]

Where does honeyfuggle come from? One theory, found in Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms is that it is a variation of a British English dialect word coneyfogle, which meant to hoodwink or cajole by flattery. Coney is an old word for an adult rabbit and was sometimes used to indicate a person who was gullible. Fugle, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is older dialect term meaning “to trick or deceive.” So to coneyfogle or coneyfugle meant to cheat a mark.

Today the OED reports that honeyfuggle is “Now somewhat dated.” Perhaps we should try revive it.

Amen!

Dan Nosowitz has a typically compendious post at Atlas Obscura, Why North Carolina Is the Most Linguistically Diverse U.S. State:

Walt Wolfram grew up in a city so linguistically fascinating that the first time he met Bill Labov, the godfather of American sociolinguistics, Labov simply cornered him and made him say different words. Yet he left his native Philadelphia for a teaching job elsewhere—a place of even greater linguistic intrigue. “I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, Wolfram says, “to die and come to dialect heaven.”

Wolfram is coauthor of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, an examination of his adopted home, where he works at North Carolina State University (alongside his coauthor Jeffrey Reaser). He also happens to be one of the great American linguists of the past 50 years, with a specialty in ethnic and regional American English dialects. He has been a central figure in getting stigmatized dialects, such as African-American English and Appalachian English, recognized as legitimate language systems.

Wolfram has called North Carolina the most linguistically diverse state in the country, but that diversity is waning. The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

There’s interesting history, e.g.:

Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) “The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,” says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.

And there are descriptions of dialect diversity:

North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks.

Only a few generations ago, you could find an Appalachian speaker in the mountains of the west, a Tidewater speaker in the counties bordering Virginia, a Black Belt speaker in the eastern lowlands, and a Pamlico Sound speaker out on Ocracoke and Harkers Island, all without leaving the state.

These are dramatically different ways of speaking. Frankly, it would take too long to get into what makes them unique, but it’s easy enough to hash out a few of the best-known distinguishing features.

The whole thing is well worth your while. Thanks, jack!