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It’s been over a year since Matthew Scarborough of Consulting Philologist did one of those wonderful posts where he lays out all the resources available for a branch of Indo-European (see this LH post for an introduction, and Matthew’s roundup page is here); he explains the hiatus thus:

My progress on this series of blog posts aimed at introducing the main etymological resources for the various branches of Indo-European got somewhat halted due to my full-time teaching commitments, writing up four lecture courses that I’d never taught before at MacEwan University over course of the last academic year. As the last academic year wrapped up this spring, the additional complication of the pandemic has resulted in my summer teaching contract also being cancelled, which on the one hand gives me time to pursue some of my other unfinished projects such as my book on the Aeolic dialects of Ancient Greek and this blog series, but on the other hand, albeit without a current source of income.

(If you feel like making a contribution to his online tip-jar, he’s got a link to his Ko-fi account.) This time he’s doing the Italic branch (he’ll follow up with a post on Romance), and it’s got the usual through discussion of the good and bad points of Walde & Hofmann, Ernout & Meillet, and de Vaan, inter alia, with plenty of images; he sums up his take on them in this paragraph:

So, you may be asking, what do I (me, the author of this blogpost) do when I need to find the etymology of a given Latin word? Well, generally when I consult these works, I usually go to de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary of Latin first, since his work is up-to-date, and generally reliable in the vast majority of cases. I will usually then further check de Vaan’s dictionary against Ernout & Meillet’s work for a second opinion. I only really use Walde & Hofmann if I am doing serious work on the history of a particular word and need references to older literature. If you’re not a specialist in Indo-European, generally de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary of Latin is reliable, but it is worth bearing in mind that there are occasional Leiden school oddities of reconstruction that do exist that affect etymological interpretations, and because of this it’s still worth checking against the others.

And of course there’s a whole section on Sabellic (mainly Oscan and Umbrian), which I know shamefully little about. I love these posts and look forward to more!

Fintan O’Toole’s NYRB review (October 11, 2018) of Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World by Peter McNeil starts out like this:

When Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he was not thinking of pasta. And the author of the ditty, probably a British professional soldier mocking the New England militiamen with whom he fought during the French and Indian War in the late 1750s or early 1760s, was not indulging in mere amiable ribbing of the colonials. Macaroni was an extravagant and self-conscious fashion in male display and an arena in which anxieties about British masculinity were being played out. Over the next decade, back home in England, the image of the macaroni militia officer would become a staple of the booming market in satiric prints.

Later, O’Toole writes:

The use of the term “macaroni,” the subject of Peter McNeil’s fascinating, deeply erudite, and superbly illustrated Pretty Gentlemen, reached its height between 1760 and 1780, though the word remained in everyday use for the rest of the eighteenth century. It did indeed originate with the habit of eating pasta, an outlandish affectation picked up by privileged young men on their Grand Tours to Italy and one that deliberately affronted the cherished self-image of the English as a nation of roast beef eaters. It came, however, to refer to an outré imported style of male dress and comportment.

Of course I wanted to know what the OED had to say, and it turns out the entry was updated in March 2000, so it’s reasonably current; after “A variety of pasta formed in short, narrow tubes, usually boiled and served with a sauce, esp. in Italian cookery” we get:

2. A dandy or fop; spec. (in the second half of the 18th cent.) a member of a set of young men who had travelled in Europe and extravagantly imitated Continental tastes and fashions. Also in extended use. Now historical.
[This use seems to be from the name of the Macaroni Club, a designation probably adopted to indicate the preference of the members for foreign cookery, macaroni being at that time little eaten in England. There appears to be no connection with the extended use of Italian maccherone in the senses ‘blockhead, fool, mountebank’ (compare macaroon n. 3), referred to in 1711 by Addison Spectator 24 Apr. 178/2: Those circumforaneous Wits whom every Nation calls by the name of that Dish of Meat which it loves best:..in Italy, Maccaronies.]
[See Update below for 1757 citation — LH.]
[1764 H. Walpole Let. to Earl of Hertford 6 Feb. (1857) IV. 178 The Maccaroni Club (which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses).]
1764 H. Walpole Let. Earl Hertford 27 May (1857) IV. 238 Lady Falkener’s daughter is to be married to a young rich Mr. Crewe, a Macarone, and of our Loo.
[…]
1823 C. Lamb South-sea House in Elia 6 He wore his hair..in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies.
[…]

But then I scrolled down and discovered a couple of surprising senses:
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I’ve almost finished Kataev’s Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion), and he’s back to mourning and celebrating his old friend and mentor Bunin; among other things, he quotes Bunin’s line “Вот капля, как шляпка гвоздя” [Here’s a drop, like the head of a nail] and says lots of subsequent poets have swiped the comparison without realizing that the important thing is not the visual image but the sound of капля… шляпка [kaplya… shlyapka], mimicking the sound of the drops falling on water. I looked up the poem, which turns out to be the 1900 “Нет солнца, но све́тлы пруды,” and liked it so much I thought I’d try my hand at an English version, however inadequate:

No sun, but luminous pools
Lie like molded mirrors,
And cups of motionless water
Would seem completely empty
If they didn’t reflect gardens.

There: a drop, like the top of a nail,
Fell — and like hundreds of needles
Putting furrows in backwater pools,
A downpour sparkled and spattered,
And the garden was noisy with rain.

And the wind made a fool of the foliage,
Confusing the baby birch trees,
And a sunbeam, as if alive,
Kindled the quivering glitter,
And filled the puddles with blue.

There’s a rainbow… What pleasure to live,
And what pleasure to think of the sky,
Of the sun, of the ripening grain,
And to value the simplest of joys:

To wander with uncovered head,
To watch the children scatter
Golden sand in the bower…
There’s no other joy on earth.

My “drop… top” doesn’t do as good a job as the Russian, but at least it tries. And another item of linguistic interest: my “hundreds of needles” represents the Russian “сотнями игол,” where игол [igol] is a nonstandard genitive plural of игла [iglá] ‘needle’ — the standard form игл [igl] is normally pronounced with two syllables, so игол is a spelled-out version that makes for a better rhyme with запрыгал [zaprygal] ‘jumped.’ Blok used the same form for the sake of the same rhyme in his Балаганчик [The Fairground Booth]:

И, под пляску морозных игол,
Вкруг подруги картонной моей –
Он звенел и высоко прыгал,
Я за ним плясал вкруг саней!

And, to the dance of frosty needles,
Around my cardboard girlfriend –
He jingled and jumped high,
I danced behind him around the sleigh!

At Gasan Guseinov’s site I found a poem by Fyodor Sologub (see these LH posts from April: 1, 2) that I like very much; it’s not a great poem, but it’s warm and humane, with a sentiment close to my heart. The Russian (“Разрушать гнезда не надо”) is at that Guseinov link, and here’s my hasty and unpoetic translation:

Don’t destroy a nest,
Don’t disperse a herd;
To beat, cut, trample, burn
Is an evil enemy’s deed.
Whoever has glowed with love’s dawn
Tries his hardest to preserve
All that is gladdened by life’s gleam,
All that listens to God’s speech.
Don’t sully with human lies
Anything living by God’s word;
Devote your days to work.
Despite the earth’s vexations
Make a flowering garden
Of naked Golodai Island.
On the humble Russian rye
Create a universal church.
We don’t need destruction.
We are all God’s herd,
Each of us good in ourselves.
What bold person will bind our hands?
Who will tell us with confidence
What is true in us, what’s a lie?
In the tents of the garden we make
We will find the truth in ourselves.

May 20, 1918

The linguistic tidbit is in the name of Golodai Island, a part of Saint Petersburg known since 1926 as Dekabristov Island; as that Wikipedia article says, the old name is “possibly a corruption of a British merchant name Halliday,” changed to sound like the Russian word голод [golod] ‘hunger’ (you can see more details at the Russian article).

The first time Kataev in Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion) referred to a flower called бигнония [bignoniya], I vaguely thought it might be a Russian equivalent of begonia, but of course that’s бегония in Russian. The second time I was curious enough to investigate, and it turns out there’s a whole different flower called bignonia — flowers are as bad as fish and card games. Then unexpectedly (ни с того ни с сего, as the Russians say), as a separate paragraph, he says “Цветок бигнония имел еще другое название: текола.” [The bignonia flower had still another name: tekola.”] Naturally I googled this odd-looking “текола,” but got nothing. Then I tried searching on [bignonia tecola], and Google suggested [bignonia tecoma]; sure enough, it turns out that “Tecoma stans is a species of flowering perennial shrub in the trumpet vine family, Bignoniaceae.” As this brief, soothing YouTube clip says in its description: “Текома, кампсис, бигнония – это всё названия одного растения.” [Tecoma, campsis, bignonia — those are all names of a single plant.] So the “текола” in the text is either a typo that slipped past proofreading or Kataev’s own error; I wonder if anyone’s ever noticed it before. It seems to be in all Russian editions, starting with the first version in Novy mir; maybe the next Collected Works will either change it or at least add a footnote correcting it.

Oh, and if you’re curious (as of course I was) about the origin of tecoma, the OED (entry from 1911) says:

Etymology: modern Latin (Jussieu 1789), < Aztec tecomaxochitl, mistakenly supposed by Jussieu to be the name of a species of the genus to which he gave this name (but really the name of Solandra guttata, N.O. Solanaceæ).
The Aztec name is a compound of tecomatl + xochitl ‘rose, flower’; the plant being named from the resemblance of its flower to that of the tecomatl or Calabash-tree (Crescentia Cujete, N.O. Bignoniaceæ), lit. ‘pot-tree’, < tecomatl earthen vessel, pot.

It’s a long if occasional tradition at LH, for some reason, to have posts on obscure card and dice games; examples are Galbik, passe-dix, passage (2005), Tintere(t) (2013), and Klabyasch! (2017). Now I’ve run across another such game, apparently wildly popular but hitherto unknown to me: belote. That Wikipedia article begins:

Belote (French pronunciation: ​[bəlɔt]) is a 32-card, trick-taking, Ace-Ten game played primarily in France and certain European countries, namely Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Moldova, North Macedonia and also in Saudi Arabia. It is one of the most popular card games in those countries, and the national card game of France, both casually and in gambling. It was invented around 1920 in France, and is a close relative of both Klaberjass (also known as bela) and Klaverjas. Closely related games are played throughout the world. Definitive rules of the game were first published in 1921.

Klaberjass is referred to in that Klabyasch! thread, where you will also find Alexei K. mentioning белот [belot]. In the Klaberjass Wikipedia article, it says:

According to David Parlett, this “popular and widespread two-hander has so many names, mostly variations on the same one, that it is hard to know which is best for universal recognition. Klaberjass is probably closest to the original.” He lists the alternative names as “Clob, Clobby, Clobiosh, Klob, Kalabrisasz, Bela, Cinq Cents, Zensa”. Other sources also list “Klabberjass, Senserln, Clobyosh, Kalabrias, Klab, Clabber, Clobber, Clubby”. Another common name is Klabrias. This truly international game originates from the Low Countries and is particularly strong in Jewish communities. […] It can be interpreted as a two-handed variant of Belote, and indeed three-handed Belote can be played in exactly the same way.

And in the (very long) Belote article, we find:

Worldwide variants

Quebec: Bœuf
Bulgaria: Бридж-белот, Bridge-Belote
Greece: Βίδα, Vida; Μπουρλότ, Bourlot
Cyprus: Πιλόττα, Pilotta
Croatia: Bela or Belot
Republic of Macedonia: Бељот, Beljot
Armenia: Բազար բլոտ, Bazaar Belote
Saudi Arabia: بلوت, Baloot
Russia: Белот, Belot
Tunisia: Belote
Moldova: Belote
Madagascar: Tsiroanomandidy or Beloty

Tsiroanomandidy! The names of card games are like the names of fish: there are too damn many, and it’s hard to tell them apart. And even the origin of this one is mysterious; OED:

Etymology: < French belote, (also) belotte (1925 or earlier), of uncertain origin.
The French word is often said to be from the name of a certain F. Belot credited with having developed the French version of the game, but this cannot be substantiated.

Back in 2004 I wrote a couple of posts about the Narts, the mythical race of giants whose tales are told throughout the North Caucasus (here and here), and now Victor Mair has done a Log post about them. There’s a lot of stuff about cattle-raiding, which doesn’t particularly interest me, but I was fascinated by Martin Schwartz’s etymological comments, which I reproduce below (I’ve added italics):

As to the etymology of Oss. nart(æ): While in contemporary Ossetic there is unquestionably a word nar ‘hero’, and in fact Prof. Foltz sent me a picture of the Nar Hotel in Vladikavkaz, where he was married, the word is a recent extraction (by back-formation) from nart(æ), which has the appearance of a plural, interpretable from context as a plurale tantum. In fact the word is not listed in Vsevolod F. Miller’s Ossetic-Russian-German dictionary (1929-1934), which very much quotes from Nart tales and whose learned native assistants included the folklorist Abaev.

This is not surprising, since Old Iranian nar– (nominative nâ, from the PIE nom.(!) which Victor Mair cites) is nowhere reflected in Middle and New Iranian languages, which however do reflect the adj, *narya-, ‘male’, which as expected gives Oss. næl (with the Alan -l- from *-ry- as in the Alan ethnonym < *Arya– and many Ossetic examples).

Recently in my article (in A. Korangy and C. Miller, eds., Trends in Iranian and Persian Linguistics) “On some Iranian secret vocabularies as evidenced by a fourteenth century Persian manuscript” (the whole article is online via googlebooks), in Section (20) at the end I have a long discussion with new evidence for the the verbal root of the PIE noun h2ner– , i.e. √h2ner ‘to be strong, potent’, with various interesting semantic developments. Inter alia, I derive the Oss. Nart word from Proto-Iranian *narθrâ, a deverbal noun.

I should add that Proto-Iranian *rθ regularly gave Ossetic rt, so that *nar-Ørâ ‘strength, viritility’ would give *narrt(æ) > nart(æ) *’the milieu of heroism’, i.e. the Nart (tales). The suffix is cognate with the Skt., Gr., etc. deverbal derivative –trV-.

Elsewhere he says, on Ossetic Ir, “the *æl- of Alan < *arya-…will not give ir, but since attested Scythian, from sufficient examples, shows quite different phonological development vis-a-vis Sarmato-Alanic, it could be that *arya– went to *ir, and this is preserved as the Ossetic auto-ethnonym, as it were.” (In the Log thread, Germanist links to a webcomic based on Nart sagas!)

I’ve gotten to the part in Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion) where Kataev describes a funny and awful evening during Bunin’s time in Odessa (1918-20). His friends decided to help him financially by arranging a public reading of his new story «Сны Чанга» (The Dreams of Chang — Chang is a dog remembering the life of his master). Bunin kept refusing, saying nobody would be interested, nobody knew him, nobody would show up, and nobody would want to spend an evening listening to a single story; he finally gave in, but insisted on getting an agreed-on sum no matter what the receipts were, saying he wasn’t rich enough to disgrace himself in public for free [“Я не настолько богат, господа, чтобы публично срамиться, да еще и бесплатно”]. Sure enough, hardly anybody came (Bunin said “It’s a little awkward, there’s only one and a half people here” [Даже как-то неловко, в зале полтора человека]); Kataev says that if Igor Severyanin, Leonid Andreyev, or the popular cabaret singer/actor Vertinsky had been featured, not to mention Gorky, the hall would have been packed, but what can you do — those were rulers of men’s minds [“Ничего не поделаешь – властители дум!”], while only true lovers of literature appreciated Bunin.

There followed an awkward period waiting for more arrivals, during which the following incident occurs:

– Да уж вы меня не утешайте, – решительно сказал Бунин и поднес к глазам афишку, где ему сразу же бросилась в глаза глупейшая, чисто провинциальная опечатка: вместо «Сны Чанга» были жирным шрифтом напечатаны бессмысленные слова «Сны Чашка».

“Don’t try to comfort me,” said Bunin decisively and raised his eyes to a poster [advertising the evening], where a stupid, purely provincial misprint caught the eye: instead of «Сны Чанга» [Sny Changa, Dreams of Chang] were printed in bold lettering the meaningless words «Сны Чашка» [Sny Chashka, Dreams Cup].

Bunin attacked Blok’s wildly popular revolutionary poem Двенадцать (The Twelve), saying “Russian literature has never seen such a falling-off” [До такого падения еще никогда не доходила русская литература], which gives Kataev an opportunity to tell the reader how much he loved the poem and go on an embarrassing paean to the revolution which goes on for pages and was presumably the kind of thing you had to do in 1967 to get a book published featuring a notorious exile and anticommunist like Bunin. Then the reading finally takes place, and what audience there is is mesmerized, only briefly distracted by machine-gun fire in the street outside.

Afterwards, Kataev walks with Bunin through the quiet city, and wanting to distract him, he says “You must have been translated into a lot of languages.” This sets Bunin off:

– Боже мой!… – раздраженно ответил он. – Ну, посудите сами: у меня, например, один рассказ начинается такой фразой: «На Фоминой неделе в ясный, чуть розовый вечер, в ту прелестную пору, когда…» Попробуйте-ка это сказать по-английски или по-французски, сохранить музыку русского языка, тонкость пейзажа… «В ту прелестную пору, когда…» Невозможно! А что я стою без этого? Нет, меня очень мало знают за границей… как, впрочем, и у нас в России, – с горечью прибавил он.

“My God!” he answered in irritation. “Well, judge for yourself. For example, one of my stories starts this way: ‘In Thomas week [the first week after Easter], on a clear, barely pink evening, at that lovely time when…’ Try to say that in English or French, keeping the music of the Russian language, the subtlety of the landscape… ‘At that lovely time when…’ Impossible! And what is my value without that? No, they have very little knowledge of me abroad — and, for that matter, here in Russia,” he added bitterly.

I love that; with most writers, if they started going on about how great their writing was you’d roll your eyes, but Bunin was that great — in my opinion, he’s the all-time master of Russian prose — and it must have been very hard not to be recognized to the extent he knew he deserved (I hope he got appropriate satisfaction from winning the Nobel in 1933). And he is that hard to translate; as I said in presenting my own attempt in 2009, his style “shows a mastery of Russian prose that is impossible to adequately render.”

Erik McDonald of XIX век (which reached its tenth anniversary in January) has gotten back to regular posting, which is a great pleasure to me (and should be to anyone interested in Russian literature and culture), and last week he had a good post, Black boxes, taking off from a quote from Gleb Stashkov’s Интербригада (International Brigade, 2015) that includes the line

— Правильно, — обрадовался Шрухт и неожиданно закричал: — Приз в студию!

“Correct,” Shrukht said, pleased, and unexpectedly shouted, ”Prize to the studio!”

Erik explains that this is a reference (which would have gone right past me) to “the game show Field of Wonders (Поле чудес), the Russian equivalent of Wheel of Fortune,” where a black box contains a mystery prize for a contestant. He follows it up with an even more interesting post, What a game show tells us about the intelligentsia and the shestidesiatniki,” that does what it says on the tin. I should clearly watch more Russian TV. (His latest post is on what appears to be a mistake in translation in the published English edition of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.)

I’ve started Valentin Kataev’s 1967 memoir Трава забвения (translated by Robert Daglish as The Grass of Oblivion) and have already fallen in love with it. He starts off describing a nervous visit to Ivan Bunin sometime in the early 1910s accompanied by a high-school classmate, each of them with poems they want the great man to look at (and hopefully praise). Then he backs up to explain how he came to know about Bunin. He grew up in Odessa as a not particularly literary adolescent, but like every literate person in the Russian Empire around the turn of the century he was obsessed with poetry and filled a journal with verse that he recited to everyone he knew; nevertheless, he felt he was ignorant of some vital secret that would explain what all those rhymes and meters and stanzas meant. He describes making the rounds of the newspaper offices and being told “Poems? Fine. Drop them off and come back in two weeks.” When he returned, he’d usually be told they weren’t needed (“We’re not taking poems any more, we’ve got too many”), but once in a while he’d be told one had been accepted:

“Which one?”
“I don’t remember — something about nature. Eight lines. As filler.”

Eventually one editor takes pity on him and says “Listen, kid, I’ll tell you the truth — nobody here knows a thing about poetry, including me. You should have a real writer read your stuff.” And he says there happens to be a real writer living in Odessa. We’re primed to think “Ah, now he discovers Bunin!” But no, the editor names Aleksandr Mitrofanovich Fyodorov. “You’ve surely heard of him?” “I haven’t.” He quotes a line about a barrel-organ playing outside a window at evening, wipes away a tear, and says “You have to know him. A. Fyodorov! He’s even in the encyclopedic dictionary!” This is marvelous comedy; the doughty Fyodorov was a writer, all right, who had an eight-volume Collected Works published in 1911-13 and even has his own Wikipedia entry, but he was never of more than local significance, and all the time we’re thinking “Bunin! What about Bunin?!”
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