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Occasionally I run across remarkable people who deserve to be better remembered and post about them, and the latest is the anthropologist Robert Armstrong; I was trying to provide more information for his LibraryThing entry, which had only his birth year, and I eventually discovered the Monuments Men Foundation biography:

Anthropologist Robert Gelston Armstrong was born in Danville, Indiana on June 29, 1917. Extraordinarily adept at languages, he was conversant in Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and both Yoruba and Idoma (the official languages of Nigeria). Armstrong studied economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he became interested in Marxism. He joined the Communist Party shortly before graduation in 1939. Armstrong then attended the University of Chicago, translating his interest in socioeconomic theories to the study of cultural anthropology. As an active member of the campus antiwar movement, Armstrong served as Chairman of the Peace Action Committee and planning several “peace strikes.” In the fall of 1941 he began a year of field research among the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians sponsored by the University of Oklahoma. Just four months into his assignment, however, Armstrong was called up for service with the U.S. Army. A special dispensation allowed Armstrong to prolong his induction for six weeks in order to write an abbreviated thesis paper. […]

Following the end of hostilities, Armstrong was transferred to the Office of Military Government for Germany as a Russian translator. In September 1945 he joined the MFAA as a Scientific Collections Specialist in Berlin. During the course of his duties, Armstrong worked alongside Monuments Man Capt. Bernard D. Burks to salvage and reconstruct the collections of scientific museums and institutions in Germany. […]

Following his return to the United States in early 1946, Armstrong reenrolled in the University of Chicago and began his dissertation on economic and social organization in Africa. In 1947 he was appointed as assistant professor of anthropology at Atlanta University, where he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. His efforts included persuading the dean of the Episcopal Cathedral to allow African Americans to attend services, and participating in a conference on the report of President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. The following year, he secured a leave of absence to teach for one year at the University of Puerto Rico while conducting field research, first with anthropologist Julian Steward, and later on behalf of the British Colonial Social Science Research Council. Armstrong conducted further field work in Ibadan, Nigeria at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research of the University College (today, the University of Ibadan). He completed his doctoral dissertation, State Formation in Negro Africa in 1952.

The onset of McCarthyism in the early 1950s targeted the faculty of a number of prominent universities. In 1953, during negotiations for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, the FBI informed the university’s dean of Armstrong’s past interest in Communism: negotiations faltered. This disappointment proved to be the first of many instances in which Armstrong was passed over for a teaching position or isolated by former colleagues who feared associating with him. Armstrong did finally receive a five year appointment at Atlanta University, but only after two years of searching for a new position. The FBI continued its investigation into Armstrong’s past, culminating in a surprise interrogation at his home in August 1959.

In an effort to escape his controversial past and build a more promising professional future, Armstrong moved to Nigeria in September 1959. There, he conducted field research on the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria using a grant from the Social Science Research Council. He never returned to the United States.

Robert Armstrong died in Lagos, Nigeria in May 1987.

A good man whose career was destroyed by vile political attacks. I’ve seen the effects of McCarthyism in my own family and in those close to me; I don’t think people today realize how much was lost to its malice and amorality. I hope his last years in Nigeria were enjoyable.

Back in 2014, Buber’s Basque Page reprinted an article that originally appeared in Spanish and Basque on Kondaira’s Facebook page; it describes a remarkable language:

The Basque-Algonquian language is a pidgin that arose for intercommunication between the members of the Mi’kmaq tribe, Innu and other Amerindians with the Basque whalers, cod fishermen, and merchants in Newfoundland, Quebec, the Labrador Peninsula, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Most of its vocabulary consisted of the Micmac, Innu and Basque languages, but also had words from Gascon, since it was the lingua franca of southwest France at the time.

While the Basques were in those waters whaling and fishing cod in the late fourteenth century, it was not until about 1530 that this pidgin was spoken. The Basques established a minimum of nine fishing settlements in Newfoundland and Labrador; the largest could hold 900 people and was in found in what the Basques called Balea Badia (“Whale Bay”), now known as Red Bay (Labrador Peninsula). The French and British sent expeditions to North America, following the routes of the Basque whalers, to explore routes to the Indies shorter than those of the Spanish, as well as to map fishing grounds. The French settled in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and began the conquest of North America.

The golden age of Basque-Algonquian would occur between 1580 and 1635. In 1612, Marc Lescarbot, writing in his “Histoire de la Nouvelle France” (History of New France), indicates that the local population spoke a language to communicate with the Europeans which had Basque words. In 1710 there was still evidence of the use of Basque-Algonquian. […]

The result of this pidgin is that the Micmac integrated Basque words into their language. From the Basque word atorra (shirt), the Basque-Algonquian word “atouray” derived and from this the actual Micmac word “atlei”; “king” is said in Micmac as “elegewit” (from the Basque-Algonquian “elege” which, in turn, is from the Basque errege) or, for example, France is called “Plansia” (from the colloquial Basque “Prantzia”).

There are quotes from the period at the link, as well as illustrations and some examples of Basque-Algonquian.

Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul wrote me about the YouTube channel Abralin Ao Vivo, saying:

It contains a bunch of online lectures from various linguists – all free, naturally – some of them in Portuguese, some in English. Past highlights include David Crystal and Salikoko Mufwene, but it really gets rolling this week with lectures by Dan and Caleb Everett, Barbara Partee and Andy Wedel.

Looks good — thanks, Slavo!

I’m slowly making my way through Leonid Girshovich’s 2001 novel Суббота навсегда [Saturday forever], which is very complex and allusive but also very funny, and I’ve run across several bits of Hattic interest that I thought I’d share. At one point he’s talking about old-fashioned Jewish families:

кто-то даже в пенсне, а кто-то по-русски (по-английски, по-испански, по-вавилонски) сказать двух слов не может: оф дем полке ин кладовке штейт а банке мит варенье.

even somebody in a pince-nez, and somebody who can’t say two words in Russian (English, Spanish, Babylonian): of dem polke in kladovke shteit a banke mit varenye.

That last bit is a distorted version of what is apparently a common example of Russo-Yiddish jargon, ин кладовке аф дер полке штейт а банке мит варенье [in kladovke af der polke steit a banke mit varenye], ‘in the pantry on the shelf is a jar with jam,’ where the words I’ve bolded are Russian stuck into a Yiddish sentence.

I was almost thrown by “в Степуне, этом почти что тезке Хайдеггера” (‘in Stepun, who had almost the same name as Heidegger’) — Stepun was Fyodor or Friedrich, Heidegger was Martin — until I realized that in Степун you can see степь ‘steppe,’ while Heidegger has Heide ‘heath.’ Clever!
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Yes, Which Indo-European Subfamily Are You? is just another dumb Buzzfeed quiz, but obviously it’s not one I could resist. You get eight or so silly questions and then it tells you your subfamily. The first time I got Germanic; the second, picking different answers for everything, Armenian (“Exasperation of aspiration, sensitive to satemization. Only God can judge you but that doesn’t stop every philologist from trying”). Enjoy!

John Byron Kuhner’s Leo Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories Will Devastate Your Children and Make You Want to Die begins:

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, also a gentleman farmer, operated an ancestral estate called Yasnaya Polyana that included a small school for the children of the peasants who labored there. Tolstoy was known to drop by from time to time and share stories that he wrote himself, which, in his typical modesty, he predicted would be read by “thousands, even millions.”

In 1988, the children’s novelist and Russia expert James Riordan translated several of these for a collection called The Lion and the Puppy: And Other Stories for Children, published first by Henry Holt and Company. The cover has a nice picture of a lion and a puppy; the illustrations by Claus Sievert are lovely throughout. My children fell in love with that picture, and they wanted me to read them the book. My first thought was: Children’s stories by the author of the inspirational The Death of Ivan Ilyich? But pestilence has closed the schools and home reading was important. Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.

The first story turned out to be the only one we endured together. It’s about a hungry lion in the zoo, whose keepers comb the streets for stray cats and dogs to feed him. Tolstoy recounts the lion coming for a puppy that got lost by its master: “Poor little dog. Tail between its legs, it squeezed itself into the corner of the cage as the lion came closer and closer.”

The lion decides not to eat this puppy, and they become friends. Until we get to page two, when the puppy, now a year old, suddenly sickens and dies. So what does the lion do? “[H]e put his paws about his cold little friend and lay grieving for a full five days. And on the sixth day the lion died.” The end.

“Daddy,” my stunned four-year-old son asked, “why did the lion die?”

“Daddy Daddy,” my daughter asked, still wondering about the now-dead lion’s lifestyle, “why did the people feed the lion puppies?”

So I took the book away and hid it from the children. Later I read it through. If you do this, be sure to read something lighter afterward, like perhaps Anna Karenina’s suicide scene, or a biography of Sylvia Plath. The rest of the stories are just as dark as the first one.

He goes on to describe a bunch more, e.g.:

“The Little Bird.” A boy catches a bird in a cage. His mother says he shouldn’t do that. He leaves the door of the cage open. The bird flies out, straight into a glass window, knocking itself out. It suffers for a few days, then dies. The end.

It’s very funny, and ends with a warning about the most recent edition, whose publicists say things like “children will be able to take away important lessons, as well as laugh at silly mishaps and characters, from this timeless collection” and “sure to captivate and delight children of all ages.” Kuhner pleads: “Do not give this book to children. Anything is better than this. Jude the Obscure. Maybe some Elie Wiesel. Spengler.” (As counterpoint, a commenter says “I remember absolutely loving these stories as a fifth-grader — so much so that I tried to convince my teacher to read them to our class!”)

Kelly Grovier at BBC Culture writes a piece that perfectly illustrates the pitfalls of the popular belief that earliest attestation is the same thing as word creation. HerHis thesis is that “it was often female writers who sculpted the fresh coinages that kept language rippling with poignancy and power.” She He illustrates it by combing the OED for citations by women; her his first example is:

The word ‘frustrating’ itself, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, makes its first appearance in print in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, where she presciently describes “the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity”.

SheHe doesn’t even bother to provide the date of the novel, 1872; alas, it’s trivially easy to antedate the usage to 1841 with a quick glance at Google Books (Catherine Grace Frances Gore, Greville; Or, a Season in Paris, p. 9: “He was master of himself and his yacht; and dearly as he loved his mother, it was something to feel freed from a frustrating influence”), and I’m sure a little more effort would push it back farther. SheHe lists a number of “rules”; I’ll quote the first in extenso to show the general nonsense involved:

Rule no 1: Get your ‘-ness’ on
The suffix ‘-ness’ can transform an otherwise unremarkable word into something stranger and more affectingly abstract. The adjective ‘dark’, for example, on its face is frank and factual, whereas ‘darkness’ is more movingly evocative and poetic. Dorothy Wordsworth understood that linguistic trick profoundly and exploited it to memorable effect when describing an uncanny walk she took with her brother, William, in Scotland in 1803 […]. The soulful scene, Wordsworth said, magically contained “that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature”. It was the first time, according to the OED, that the words ‘visionariness’ and ‘unworldliness’ are known to have been used. Today, unnerving-nesses stack up around us: the unvisitedness of our parents and grandparents. The unembracedness of our friends. The egglessness of our pantries.

“The adjective ‘dark’, for example, on its face is frank and factual, whereas ‘darkness’ is more movingly evocative and poetic”: WTF?! As for the particular words, “visionariness” is a random example of an adjective with -ness stuck on, such as can be formed at any time by anybody, and “unworldliness” is just as easily antedated as “frustrating” (1732: J. Morgan, Phœnix Britannicus, p. 22, “the Unworldliness of Mind”). Rule no 2 is “To demonstrate the profound depths of one’s connection with a place or feeling, simply fastening an ‘-r’ or an ‘-er’ to the end of a noun can confer a new existential title” (“it was Jane Austen who, in a letter she wrote in 1800, seized upon the alienness of a group of random gamblers who had gathered around a casino table, none belonging to the place itself and all having come from an undefined ‘outside’, to christen all such future strangers as ‘outsiders’”); Rule no. 3: “Join the Hyphen Nation” (“Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To her it is likely we owe the origin of ‘self-doubt’ and ‘Wild-West’ as well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly engaging with obsessive vigour: ‘spring-clean’, which Brontë niftily neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848”); and Rule no. 4: “The Wisdoms of ‘-isms’” (“The novelist George Eliot […] is also credited with formulating, in a letter she wrote in 1885, something rather less negative in its outlook and attitude: the term ‘meliorism’, or the belief that the world’s suffering is healable if we all work together for that end”). Surely the blithering idiocy of all this is evident on its face; I make the charitable assumption that there was a pressing deadline involved, and perhaps a few glasses of wine, but still it’s depressing to think that this sort of drivel can be published in the year 2020 — I thought we’d come at least a bit farther. (Thanks, AJP!)

Update. My thanks to Conrad H. Roth for setting me straight on the gender of the blithering idiot.

I’ve long been intrigued by Andrei Bely’s first published prose works, his set of four “symphonies,” and since everyone seems to agree that the first to be published [in 1902], Симфония (2-я, драматическая) [Symphony: Second, Dramatic], is without question the best of them and perhaps the only one really worth spending time on, I bought a copy of it. Unfortunately the edition I got is crappy (print-on-demand, shoddily bound and produced, horrible cover, doesn’t reproduce Bely’s numbered lines and line breaks), but hey, it was cheap and gives me something to make notes in, and thanks to the amazing Bely Memorial Apartment Site with its online versions of all editions of his work published in his lifetime, I am able to consult the first edition whenever I want.

But before I get to the symphony, I’ll say something about Bely in general. He’s been called the most difficult of Russian writers, and while once I would have scoffed at that, I’m now inclined to believe it. There are writers with weirder vocabulary (Remizov), more opaque style (Platonov), general craziness (Khlebnikov), and so on, but nobody combines so many forms of difficulty as Bely. He doesn’t use as many strange words as Remizov, but some of them are impossible to interpret even for Russians (a good example is безмирный, which he used repeatedly; there’s a whole WordReference.com forum discussion of what he might have meant by it, somewhat vitiated by the fact that nobody bothers to check the old spelling — it’s written with і, not и, as you can see in the sixth line of p. 64, so it can’t possibly mean ‘without peace’). His style is so musical it’s easy to be seduced by the sound into not bothering to figure out what’s going on or what he’s trying to say. He alludes to so many people, ideas, and phenomena of the period that to really get it you’d have to do a separate study (and there is an excellent book that allows you to do just that — see my review). And, perhaps most importantly, he was obsessed throughout his life with a mix of philosophy and mysticism that lurks behind everything he wrote and is essential to interpreting it in a way he would have approved of (though not to enjoying it, which you can do in all sorts of ways). Here’s a quote from the Introduction to J. D. Elsworth, Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (CUP, 1984) that will give you an idea of his multifariousness:
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Evelina Leivada, a psycholinguist at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, has an article in Inference, Misused Terms in Linguistics, that begins:

The evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry observed that linguists “would rather share each other’s toothbrush than each other’s terminology.” This is far from an isolated view. Peter Hagoort, an eminent cognitive neuroscientist, voiced similar concerns. […] Tanja Kupisch and Jason Rothman, psycholinguists working primarily on bilingual development, recently noted that “[o]nce offered to the public domain, terminology can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects, even—perhaps especially—when these are unintended by their original promoters.”

An effort to improve the terminological clarity and coherence of theoretical and experimental linguistics is long overdue. In this respect, linguists might consider following the lead of psychologists in identifying and discussing lists of inaccurate, ambiguous, misused, and polysemous terms. The focus throughout should be on key notions of the field. Terms such as feature, parameter, (grammaticality/acceptability) judgment, (language) universal, and Universal Grammar are omnipresent in linguistics. These notions are fundamental to the discipline and their misuse has important implications, not only for the coherence of the field, but also for its standing in the broader context of cognitive science. The following terms do not all satisfy the same criteria of inaccuracy, ambiguity, and misuse. The degrees to which they exhibit these characteristics vary, and this is part of the problem. This review will not focus solely on the conceptual clarity of these ten terms, but also on their inconsistent usage.

I’m so far removed from the kind of linguistics that depends on such terms that I find much of it hard to understand, but it will probably be of interest to some Hatters, and I am amused by her attempts to salvage a system in which she is apparently invested:

The identification of FLN and UG is wrong. If UG equals FLN, and if FLN is, indeed, an empty set—a possibility that Chomsky has once again left open in his latest book with Robert Berwick—scholars outside generative linguistics would inevitably question the need to assume a UG-shaped form of innateness. Furthermore, if UG and FLN are indeed the same, why are two terms needed to denote one object?

But, of course, FLN is not the same thing as UG. […]

Of course not! Perish the thought!

A few tidbits of interest:

1) Via Laudator Temporis Acti, W.S. Merwin describes a visit to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s:

He told me he imagined I was serious, and that if I was I should learn languages, “so as not to be at the mercy of translators.” And then I should translate, myself. “If you’re going to be a poet,” he said, “you have to work at it every day. You should write about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to work translating. The Provençal is the real source. The poets are closest to music. They hear it. They write to it. Try to learn the Provençal, at least some of it, if you can. Meanwhile, the others. Spanish is all right. The Romancero is what you want there. Get as close to the original as you can. It will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it.”

2) Paul Goble, Coronavirus has Radically Affected the Language Russians Speak, Basovskaya Says:

One measure of the seriousness of any development is how deeply it affects not only the behavior of the people but also the language they use to describe what is going on. By that measure, Yevgeny Basovskaya says, the coronavirus pandemic, which has had a “radical” impact on the language Russians speak, is an especially serious one.

The specialist on public speech at Moscow’s State University of the Humanities says that the impact begins with the word coronavirus, which includes the letter “a” in the middle of it in complete violation of Russian orthographic rules. It should by rights be an “o” but it isn’t and so feels alien for that reason alone […]

Then, there is the increasingly widespread use of the word pandemic. “Even the uneducated recognize this word,” but to recognize it is not to understand it. Basovskaya recalls than in 2008, people on the street told her that default meant there were no matches in the stores. Now, many Russians probably think that pandemic means there is no buckwheat.

The word “distancing” (udalyonka), of course, has been formed according to the same rules that lead Russians to speak about elektrichka for a local train or sotisalka [sotsialka] for public benefits. But it has also been given a popular connotation that puts it at a distance from government orders for “self-isolation” (samoizolyatsiya), a truly bureaucratic term.

“Radically” is silly, of course, but there are some interesting examples.

3) Jonah Mandel, Letter shows first dictionary editor thought ‘anti-Semite’ wouldn’t be used:

A short-lived term unlikely to have use in the future: that was how the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary viewed “anti-Semite,” recently uncovered archival documents show. Celebrated British lexicographer James Murray, who with his team began working on the first OED in 1879, planned several dedicated entries of words beginning with the prefix “anti.” But when a prominent member of Britain’s Jewish community, Claude Montefiore, learnt that “anti-Semite” and its derivative terms would not have an entry, he wrote to Murray expressing concern.

Murray replied to Montefiore on July 5, 1900, as the original OED was being published in installments — a process that ran from 1884 to 1928. In Murray’s letter — recently uncovered by Israel National Library archivist Rachel Misrati — he noted that the term anti-Semite had only migrated from German to English in 1881 and did not look likely to take hold given its limited usefulness. […] “Hence they did not receive treatment in a separate article,” he added, arguing in the letter’s postscript that “the man in the street would have said Anti-Jewish.” […]

Murray’s letter reveals his evolution in thinking and said that by 1900 he had doubts that leaving anti-Semite out of the OED was the right decision. “Would that anti-Semitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!” he wrote. […] “It is unutterably saddening to one like myself who remembers ’48 and the high hopes we had in the fifties.”

“Probably if we had to do that post now, we should have to make Anti-Semite a main word,” Murray wrote.

(Thanks, Alon!)

4) Jay Serafino, The Russian Family That Cut Itself Off From Civilization for More Than 40 Years: “The Lykov family left Russian society under persecution in the 1930s and remained hidden until 1978.” A fascinating tale of Old Believers hiding out from persecution. (Thanks, jack!)