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In David Quammen’s NYRB review (Nov. 8, 2018) of Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, by Menno Schilthuizen, he writes:

And then there’s a humble little fish called the mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus), a bottom-wallowing native of brackish waters along the Eastern Seaboard, including big urban ports such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, that are silted up with decades of toxic chemicals such as PCBs and other industrial waste. A genetic study of Bridgeport’s mummichogs, Schilthuizen reports, found genome changes that protect those fish from the effects of PCBs. Who says there’s no good news in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London?

I found the word mummichog enchanting; I looked it up in the OED (entry updated March 2003), where it is defined as:

A killifish; esp. Fundulus heteroclitus (family Cyprinodontidae), a small marine killifish of sheltered parts of the east coast of North America, which has dark and silvery vertical bars on the sides and is often kept in aquaria or used as bait.

The first and last citations are:

1787 T. Pennant Arctic Zool. II. Suppl. 149 Inhabits New York, where it is known by the Indian name of Mummy Chog.
1851 M. H. Perley Rep. New Brunswick (1852) 194 It [sc. the striped Killifish] is also known by its Indian name of ‘mummachog’, corrupted by the English settlers on the Gulf shore of New Brunswick, where it abounds, to ‘mammychub’.
[…]
1977 Audubon Sept. 8/1 The first modification of my reverent attitude resulted from my need for mummichogs, alias killifish.
1987 J. Hersey Blues (1988) 82 A handful of mummichogs, robust and chubby four-and five-inch light brown fish with dark bars along their flanks..swam downward from the surface.

The etymology is “< Narragansett moamitteaũg, plural (1643 in R. Williams A Key into the Language of America)”; I guess it’s not further analyzable, which is a pity. As for the almost as delightful killifish, the best the lexicographers can do is (in the words of the AHD) “Perhaps KILL² [i.e., ‘creek’] + FISH.”

A few years ago I posted about a book available from Open Book Publishers, but I had no idea how wide a net they cast or how many interesting fish they caught. Now Owlmirror has started posting links to two particularly attractive sections of the site: Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures (see Owlmirror’s recommendations here) and World Oral Literature Series (here). All pdf’s are free (though you have to pay for physical books), and David Eddyshaw has already downloaded Oral Literature in Africa. Enjoy!

Addendum. Today I found in the mailbox an Amazon package with 50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories, edited by Mark Lipovetsky and Valentina Brougher; it is a spectacular selection of authors and looks wonderful. Thanks, D20!

Yesterday I read Turgenev’s last work of fiction, Клара Милич (Clara Militch); I wasn’t going to bother posting about it because it struck me as basically a bunch of silly hugger-mugger: virginal young Yakov Aratov lives with his elderly maiden aunt and rarely goes out, but his only friend, the boisterous Kupfer, drags him out to meet the strangely alluring title character, “a girl of nineteen, tall, rather broad-shouldered, but well-built” with “a dark face, of a half-Jewish half-gipsy type,” who sings and reads Pushkin — not all that well, but passionately — and after she poisons herself onstage he becomes obsessed with her, finally having nightly visions of her and dying; on his deathbed “in his clenched right hand they found a small tress of a woman’s dark hair.” Oooh! Mystery!

But then I looked up what the ever-quotable Prince Mirsky (see, e.g., this post) had to say about it, and was so pleased that I thought I’d write a post after all. He calls it the most important of the late “fantastic” stories, but says “the mysterious element is somewhat difficult to appreciate quite whole-heartedly today. It has all the inevitable flatness of Victorian spiritualism.” And on the next page he sums up Turgenev thus:

Turgénev was the first Russian writer to charm the Western reader. There are still retarded Victorians who consider him the only Russian writer who is not disgusting. But for most lovers of Russian he has been replaced by spicier food. Turgénev was very nineteenth century, perhaps the most representative man of its latter part, whether in Russia or west of it. He was a Victorian, a man of compromise, more Victorian than any one of his Russian contemporaries. This made him so acceptable to Europe, and this has now made him lose so much of his reputation there. Turgénev struck the West at first as something new, something typically Russian. But it is hardly necessary to insist today [mid-1920s] on the fact that he is not in any sense representative of Russia as a whole. He was representative only of his class—the idealistically educated middle gentry, tending already to become a non-class intelligentsia—and of his generation, which failed to gain real touch with Russian realities, which failed to find itself a place in life and which, ineffective in the sphere of action, produced one of the most beautiful literary growths of the nineteenth century. In his day Turgenev was regarded as a leader of opinion on social problems; now this seems strange and unintelligible.

All true. (Mind you, if you like ghost stories and that sort of thing, you may well like Clara Milich; by all means give it a try.)

C.S. Lewis makes a good point and a nice comparison (from An Experiment in Criticism, via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

‘Why’, they ask, ‘should I turn from a real and present experience— what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—to inquiries about the poet’s intention or reconstructions, always uncertain, of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?’ There seem to be two answers. One is that the poem in my head which I make from my mistranslations of Chaucer or misunderstandings of Donne may possibly not be so good as the work Chaucer or Donne actually made. Secondly, why not have both? After enjoying what I made of it, why not go back to the text, this time looking up the hard words, puzzling out the allusions, and discovering that some metrical delights in my first experience were due to my fortunate mispronunciations, and see whether I can enjoy the poet’s poem, not necessarily instead of, but in addition to, my own one? Do we not all still enjoy certain effects which passages in classical or foreign poets produced in us when we misunderstood them? We know better now. We enjoy something, we trust, more like what Virgil or Ronsard meant to give us. This does not abolish or stain the old beauty. It is rather like revisiting a beautiful place we knew in childhood. We appraise the landscape with an adult eye; we also revive the pleasures—often very different—which it produced when we were small children.

Admittedly, we can never quite get out of our own skins. Whatever we do, something of our own and of our age’s making will remain in our experience of all literature. Equally, I can never see anything exactly from the point of view even of those whom I know and love best. But I can make at least some progress towards it. I can eliminate at least the grosser illusions of perspective.

Also, for those of you who miss libraries and their ambience, Oxford has you covered with Sounds of the Bodleian. You can choose between the rustlings, shufflings, and discreet coughs of four different reading rooms, each with a glorious image that enables you to experience that great institution vicariously. (One of my favorite lines in all science fiction, from the thoroughly delightful “The Last of the Spode” by Evelyn E. Smith: “Pity about the Bodleian, though.”)

I thought I’d pass along couple of tidbits from the Jabotinsky novel that didn’t fit into yesterday’s post. At one point he refers to the institution of the Überbrettl:

Überbrettl […] was the first venue in Germany for literary cabaret, or Kabarett, founded 1901 in Berlin by Ernst von Wolzogen. The German Kabarett concept was imported from French venues like Le Chat Noir in Paris, from which it kept the characteristic atmosphere of intimacy. But the German type developed its own peculiarities, most prominently its characteristic gallows humour.

The distinct cabaret atmosphere was sketched by Otto Julius Bierbaum in his 1897 novel Stilpe, which inspired Wolzogen in the foundation of the Überbrettl. He chose the initial name both to parody Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch concept and to contrast the widespread Brettl (i.e. “(stage-)board”) variety shows without further artistic ambitions.

I don’t know if German speakers will agree with me, but I think that’s a funny word.

And there’s a passage where he mentions the “седьмая держава” [seventh power] in a context that makes it clear the referent is the press — what in similar contexts in English is called the “fourth estate”; a little googling showed me that the “correct” term is шестая держава [sixth power], the term having been coined at a period when the “five powers” were England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. I don’t know how or when it got turned into the seventh, but somehow that expression has wound up in a Russian-Hebrew dictionary.

I’ve been trying for a couple of days now to come up with some sort of focused approach to a post on Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel Пятеро (The Five; see this post), but between the heat and the humidity and the general coronafog (does anybody really know what time it is?) my brain is refusing to enter focus mode, so I’m just going to type away and see what I wind up saying.

A minor point, but I care about these things and I don’t want to forget to mention it: in that earlier post I dated it to 1936, and that’s when it was published as a book, but in fact almost all of it had appeared in Jabotinsky’s Paris journal Rassvet in 1932-34 and early versions of a couple of chapters as far back as June 1910 in the newspaper Odesskie novosti, so the writing was not as distant from the events as I had thought (it takes place in the first decade of the century).

First things first: it’s a delightful and powerful read, and I think pretty much anyone would enjoy it — especially those with an interest in prerevolutionary Odessa or Jewish life in Russia. That said, I disagree with those who call it a great Russian novel; in one sense it’s barely a novel at all, more a series of character sketches and anecdotes held together by the conceit of the Milgrom family and the narrator’s relationship to it. (The narrator is a barely disguised version of the author; he works as a reporter in the same Passage building where Jabotinsky worked, and biographers have said the novel provides a truer version of his life at the time than his tendentious memoirs.) Mind you, it’s wonderfully written; in 1910, by which time Jabotinsky had pretty much given up literature for Zionist activity, Alexander Kuprin told an audience of Odessa Jews «У Жаботинского врожденный талант, он может вырасти в орла русской литературы, а вы украли его у нас, просто украли…» [Jabotinsky has innate talent, he could have grown into an eagle of Russian literature, but you stole him from us, just plain stole him]. But it’s not the work of a novelist but of a newspaper feuilletonist with a good style and a clear eye for people and their doings. Actually, what it reminds me of most is the fiction of Victor Serge (see my post on his novel Unforgiving Years), another excellent writer who chose to focus his energies on politics. (For that matter, so was Trotsky.) When reproached (by Chaim Weizmann’s wife!) with his choice, Jabotinsky replied “But Vera Yasaevna, my dear, politics are my greatest gift and talent!”

“The five” are the children of the assimilated Milgrom family, Marusya, Seryozha, Marko, Lika, and Torik. The first two are the main characters; the narrator claims not to have been in love with Marusya (unlike the dozens of men who kept packing the Milgrom apartment during her at-home evenings) but is very close to her and can’t forget her, and the omnicompetent but amoral Seryozha is a good, if exasperating, friend. The other three are more one-note: Marko is lovable but feckless, Lika was born with a hate-filled heart (someone calls her an executioner), and Torik, the youngest, is calm and hyper-rational (spoiler: in the end, he converts to Christianity so he can be more successful). Eventually you realize they represent a spread of possibilities available to Jews at that time and place, and the biographer Hillel Halkin (see this post) says:

The Five is not a divertissement at all. It is a classic Verfallroman, the story of the decline of a pre–World War I Russian Jewish society doomed by forces stronger than its own innocence. Despite its very different setting, style, and register, the work of fiction it most resembles is Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, in which each of the children of a large Jewish family similarly undergoes a representative fate.

I think this hurts it as a work of art, since the characters are forced to play out predetermined roles; Dostoevsky (another former feuilletonist) also intended his characters to play roles, but since he was a true novelist they kept getting away from him and becoming complicated, contradictory people. And now that I mention Dostoevsky, Seryozha’s corrosive “а почему нельзя?” [why not? why is it forbidden?] reminded me of Ivan Karamazov’s famous всё позволено [everything is permitted].

But enough quibbling; I’ve been pushing back against the “great novel” idea, which is pretty pointless, since hardly anyone has even heard of the book and I think it should be much more widely known. I haven’t even mentioned the best part, the loving portrait of Odessa, whose original blissful, carefree state, before nationalism tore it apart, Jabotinsky spent the rest of his life missing. The streets (especially Deribasovskaya), the buildings, the cafes, the port, the slopes down to the shoreline — all are unforgettably portrayed, and you want to visit that magical place yourself (you can at least see some striking pictures here). And there’s a bit where he interrupts his story to say “I can’t continue right now, so let me put in a chapter about nature — a reviewer once complained that I didn’t have descriptions of nature in my work, and it stung.” Which is hilarious because it’s true: all the Great Russian Writers, from Gogol to Pasternak and beyond, insert lavish descriptions of fields, orchards, meadows, sunlight slanting through trees, etc. etc., so if you want to be accepted you’d better do it yourself.

One thing that kept striking me was affinities with Valentin Kataev, another Odessa writer from the same period. Lika falls in love with a right-winger she betrays, which is startlingly similar to a plot line in Трава забвения [The Grass of Oblivion] (see this and subsequent posts). At one point he mentions the “малорослый пароход «Тургенев», возвращавшийся перед вечером из Очакова” [the little steamer Turgenev, returning before evening from Ochakov], which is the very ship the Potemkin sailor escapes from, jump-starting the plot of Белеет парус одинокий [A White Sail Gleams] (see this post), and Месаксуди (Mesaxoudes = Μεσαξούδης, an Ottoman-Greek tobacco firm in Kerch), briefly mentioned by Kataev, becomes a funny little plot point in The Five.

I’ll end with this passage from the final chapter, “L’Envoi”:

In my childhood, chimneys and masts stuck up like a forest in all the harbors, when Odessa was a queen; later it became feebler, much feebler, but I want it the way it was in my childhood: a forest, and everywhere sailors, boatmen, and stevedores shouting to each other, and if you could hear it, you’d hear the best song of humanity: a hundred languages.

В детстве моем еще лесом, бывало, торчали трубы и мачты во всех гаванях, когда Одесса была царицей; потом стало жиже, много жиже, но я хочу так, как было в детстве: лес, и повсюду уже перекликаются матросы, лодочники, грузчики, и если бы можно было услышать, услышал бы лучшую песню человечества: сто языков.

Robert Mailhammer at The Conversation (Phys.org) writes about a study of contact between the early Germanic peoples and the Carthaginian empire:

The presence of the Carthaginians on the Iberian Peninsula is well documented, and it is commonly assumed they had commercial relations with the British Isles. But it is not generally believed they had a permanent physical presence in northern Europe. By studying the origin of key Germanic words and other parts of Germanic languages, Theo Vennemann and I have found traces of such a physical presence, giving us a completely new understanding of the influence of this Semitic superpower in northern Europe.

Identifying traces of Punic in Proto-Germanic languages tell an interesting story. Take the words “shilling” and “penny”: both words are found in Proto-Germanic. The early Germanic people did not have their own coins, but it is likely they knew coins if they had words for them. In antiquity, coins were used in the Mediterranean. One major coin minted in Carthage was the shekel, the current name for currency of Israel. We think this is the historical origin of the word “shilling” because of the specific way the Carthaginians pronounced “shekel,” which is different from how it is pronounced in Hebrew.

The pronunciation of Punic can be reasonably inferred from Greek and Latin spellings, as the sounds of Greek and Latin letters are well known. Punic placed a strong emphasis on the second syllable of shekel and had a plain “s” at the beginning, instead of the “esh” sound in Hebrew.

But to speakers of Proto-Germanic—who normally put the emphasis on the first syllable of words—it would have sounded like “skel.” This is exactly how the crucial first part of the word “shilling” is constructed. The second part, “-(l)ing,” is undoubtedly Germanic. It was added to express an individuating meaning, as in Old German silbarling, literally “piece of silver.” […] Similarly, our word “penny” derives from the Punic word for “face,” panē. Punic coins were minted with the face of the goddess Tanit, so we believe panē would have been a likely name for a Carthaginian coin. […]

One area of Carthage leadership was agricultural technology. Our work traces the word “plow” back to a Punic verb root meaning “divide.” Importantly, “plow” was used by Proto-Germanic speakers to refer to a more advanced type of plow than the old scratch plow, or ard. […] The Old Germanic and Old English words for the nobility, for example æþele, are also most likely Punic loanwords. We found Punic also strongly influenced the grammar of early Germanic, Germanic mythology and the Runic alphabet used in inscriptions in Germanic languages, until the Middle Ages.

I grew more and more skeptical as I read, but it’s interesting stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what people say. Thanks, Dmitry!

Update. David Marjanović cites this post by “The Linguistic Physicist,” which begins:

Vennemann’s at it again and with no more evidence than the last time. It’s overblown surface level similarities with no real evidence.

There’s very little evidence of Punic accentuation, but certainly none to demonstrate that Punic lost or reduced the first vowel in šeqel (in fact, Punic seems to have preserved the first vowel in the plural of segolates, whilst Hebrew lost it, i.e. Punic had šiqelim where Hebrew has šqalim). The evidence that Punic had merged š into s before their domination by the Romans is also lacking (although the literature does frequently claim such a merger). Early Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are pretty consistent with which words they spell with s and which š suggesting the distinction was still present, they just don’t always agree with Hebrew […]

And summarizes thus: “It’s nonsense built on nonsense.” Pretty devastating.

I just finished one of the best things I’ve read on the difficulties and joys of being a parent, Carvell Wallace’s piece in the June 21 NY Times Magazine (and I continue to be impressed by the way the magazine has improved by leaps and bounds); I gobbled it up, but I had to stop at one point to look up a word:

My son’s school is only a few blocks away. He has, I presume, ditched class here, shopped for shoes here, watched drug deals and fights here, gotten boba here, gotten sandwiches from the shop here where the lady knows every student by name, sat on a bench after school here, just growing up, minute by minute, experience by experience.

“Boba?” (I thought) — “what the hell is boba?” So I googled and discovered it’s another name for bubble tea, something I have heard of but never seen; it hadn’t been invented yet when I was in Taiwan in the 1970s. That Wikipedia article says “In the United States there is a geographic split with the west coast referring to the drink as ‘boba’ and the east coast calling it ‘bubble tea,'” so I guess my East Coast residence explains my ignorance. (Apparently boba is a Chinese word, 波霸 — anybody know anything about its history?) In any event, consider this a public service message for those as ignorant as I.

Graywyvern has been reading The Ring and the Book and thought I’d be interested in the oft-mentioned Mannaia (“Esteems it nobler to die honored man/ Beneath Mannaia”; “at the worst, what’s worse/ Than this Mannaia-machine”; “Two gallows, and Mannaia crowning all”; etc.). It’s glossed “guillotine” in graywyvern’s edition, but apparently that’s a special use of a more general Lombard word meaning ‘large knife requiring two hands to wield it’ [it’s standard Italian for a cleaver, as Giacomo Ponzetto says in the comments] — it’s from Vulgar Latin manuaria, derived from manus ‘hand.’ I can see why Browning found it attractive, and I really have to read The Ring and the Book one of these days.

An even more mysterious word is hagoday, said to mean ‘sanctuary knocker‘ (Ronald Sheridan and Anne Ross, Grotesques and Gargoyles: Paganism in the Medieval Church [1975]: “The hagoday, the sanctuary knocker, comprises a large escutcheon of bronze decorated with the head of some monstrous beast…”); it gets a fair number of Google Books hits (e.g., William Wood Seymour, The Cross in Tradition, History, and Art [1898], “Here was the knocker ‘hagoday,’ of which the fugitive laid hold”), but it’s not in any dictionary I have access to — anybody know anything about it?

Yesterday I wrote to Alexander Anichkin, who comments as Sashura, as follows:

As I was lying in bed unable to sleep last night, it occurred to me to wonder why China plays so insignificant a part in Russian literature. The only work I can think of that focuses on it is Tretyakov’s 1926 play «Рычи, Китай!» [Roar, China!], which I presume hasn’t been much read in the last few decades. Contrast with Japan, which while hardly central has been featured by authors from Goncharov to Pilnyak and Akunin — and yet it’s a tiny country farther away, while China is huge and right next door (and was a close Soviet ally for a decade)! Russian readers have been made familiar with towns as minor as Como and Baden over the years, but not a world city like Peking/Beijing. Any thoughts?

He said “It is curious, isn’t it?” adding “part of the explanation is the historical mix of fear and loathing, going back centuries and very strong in my generation, we grew up with a constant expectation of a big war with China, which nearly happened during the Damansky Island incident in 1969, […] the language barrier and the fact that China remained a closed country for a long period.” He turned up a master’s thesis at Petersburg University by Ван Ци (Wang Qi), Образ Китая в русской литературе первой половины ХIХ века [‘The Image of China in Russian Literature of the First Half of the XIX Century’], which is very useful in this context, discussing stories by Vladimir Odoyevsky and Osip Senkovsky (Sękowski) as well as Rafail Zotov’s 1840 novel Цын-Киу-Тонг, или Три добрые дела духа тьмы [Tsyn-Kiu-Tong, or Three good deeds of the spirit of darkness] (which Zotov presented as a translation of a Chinese novel), but that’s slim pickings, especially since Russia’s founding Sinologist Father Iakinf (Nikita Bichurin, 1777–1853), had spent many years in China, learned the language fluently, and done his best to spread awareness of the country — he was a friend of Pushkin, Odoevsky, and Krylov, among others, so it’s not as though he was an isolated figure, but his efforts had little effect on literature. Sashura mentioned Mikhail Shishkin’s 2010 novel Письмовник [The letter-writing manual, translated as The Light and the Dark], which has China during the Boxer Rebellion as part of its subject matter, and I am aware of Master Chen (Dmitry Kosyrev), who sometimes sets his fiction in China, but still… slim pickings. Thoughts?