languagehat.com

No, not this Kitchener, but a common noun that stumped my wife and me when it came up in our nightly reading of March Moonlight (the last of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series):

Everything in the brightly lit little interior, save only its inevitable kitchener, is pleasant to contemplate, each object exactly in place and bearing itself with an air of coquettish elegance; all unsightly detail contained, like the windows, with crisply starched cotton patterned with a small blue and white chequer.

Small, compact and brightly burnished, the little kitchener, the heart and meaning of the room, prevailing over its decorative surroundings, draws one’s eyes with its mystery, acquaintance wherewith places Amabel amongst the household women, shows her caught, for life, in a continuously revolving machinery, unable to give, to anything else, more than a permanently preoccupied attention.

It was not in the fat Cassell Concise dictionary I keep in the nightstand (which usually has even the most obscure UK terms), so I knew it had to be well past its sell-by date; I checked the OED and there it was:

kitchener, n.1
Pronunciation: /ˈkɪtʃɪnə/
Etymology: < kitchen n. + -er suffix¹.

1. One employed in a kitchen; esp. in a monastery, he who had charge of the kitchen.
c1440 Relig. Pieces fr. Thornton MS. 53 Penance sall be kychynnere.
1614 in W. H. Stevenson Rec. Borough Nottingham (1889) IV. 319 To the black gard the kitchinners vs.
1820 Scott Monastery II. ii*. 77 Two most important officers of the Convent, the Kitchener and Refectioner.
1884 19th Cent. Jan. 110 Capons, eggs, salmon, eels, herring, &c..passed to the account of the kitchener.

2. A cooking-range fitted with various appliances such as ovens, plate-warmers, water-heaters, etc.
1851 Official Descriptive & Illustr. Catal. Great Exhib. III. 596/2 This kitchener or cooking grate is remarkable for economy in fuel.
1867 Civil Serv. Gaz. 29 June 402/1 Improved London-made Kitcheners.
1884 Internat. Health Exhib. Official Catal. 68/1 Patent Kitchener with two low ovens, boiler, gas hob, &c.

It’s obviously definition 2 that’s used in the novel. The entry is from 1901, and I’m guessing the word went out of common use by WWI or not long after. Has anyone encountered this quaint word?

Another interesting passage from Simon Franklin’s The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (see this post); he says we tend to assume a book is equivalent to a work:

With regard to medieval manuscripts, this assumption is not valid. There is no regular one-to-one relationship between the book-as-object and the book-as-work. Nor, indeed, was there a consistent relationship between the contents of a book and its title. The contents of the book-as-object were generally determined by the function of the text for its intended users, not by considerations of authorial identity or integrity. […]

A good example is provided by the activities of the scribe Efrosin of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery in the late fifteenth century. Efrosin’s annotations have been identified in more than thirty manuscripts, but his most substantial output consists of six large volumes for which he was the principal scribe. Efrosin’s manuscripts are bulky, ranging from 421 to 638 leaves (that is, in modern terms, between 842 and 1276 pages). Two of them, including the longest (which Efrosin tells us he wrote out over the course of four years), consist of readings for monastic services. The other four, in smaller format, were probably for ‘cell’ reading. Together they include an enormous range of ‘works’, often described as encyclopedic. These are anthologies, florilegia. The full list of the titles of the works and extracts which they contain runs to more than 700 items, and the detailed scholarly description of their contents fills nearly 300 pages of a large-format, late-twentieth-century small-print journal. Many of these works are very brief, taking up no more than a leaf or three: individual prayers, homilies, extracts from canon law, accounts of miracles, advice. Some are substantial: thirteen leaves of the Tale of Drakula; fifty-eight leaves of the pilgrimage of the abbot Daniil to the Holy Land; 174 leaves of the novel of Alexander the Great.

Equivalent compilations are typical of monastic book production. […] With such compendia the line between scribe and compiler or editor, or even scholar, becomes somewhat blurred. Although most scribal production consisted of copying, few texts and compilations, especially in non-liturgical, non-scriptural functions, were fully stable. It is hard to define when a manuscript copy becomes a new ‘book’ in the compositional as well as the physical sense.

I’ve finished Kataev’s Растратчики (The Embezzlers — see this post), and once again I’m reminded of the vast difference between knowing about something and actually experiencing that thing. I had known of the book for decades as a famous NEP novel, a satire of Soviet bureaucracy in which two bozos steal money and travel, and that indeed is what it is, but that tells you nothing about the experience of reading the book, any more than knowing someone is a hockey fan who works at a coffee shop tells you anything about what it’s like hanging out with them. It starts out pretty much the way you expect (chief accountant Filipp Stepanovich Prokhorov goes to work, the messenger Nikita mentions a spate of recent embezzlements, Filipp Stepanovich and the cashier Vanechka go to the bank to get cash for the payroll, and the suspicious Nikita follows them to make sure he gets paid before they take off with the money), but then it descends into a maelstrom of drunkenness and madness. Filipp Stepanovich and Vanechka wind up on a train to Leningrad with a pair of adventuresome women (when I read “Здрасте, – ответила Изабелла, – с Новым годом! К Ленинграду подъезжаем” [“Hello,” answered Isabella, “Happy New Year! We’re going to Leningrad”] I immediately thought of Ирония судьбы [The Irony of Fate]) and wind up being fleeced in an increasingly wild series of venues, culminating in a club where actors and actresses playing imperial personages in a film about the downfall of Nicholas II pretend to be their characters for paying customers — the kicker is that many of them actually were the generals and courtiers they’re playing, and were initially afraid to get involved but were seduced by the high pay. This part was reminiscent of Двенадцать стульев [The Twelve Chairs] minus Ostap Bender, and as soon as that occurred to me I remembered that Kataev was the brother of Petrov (real name Evgeny Kataev) of Ilf and Petrov, the authors of that greatest of Soviet satirical-picaresque novels.

After they finally extricate themselves from the clutches of Isabella and Leningrad, they wind up getting off another train at the provincial town of Kalinov because Vanechka remembers the town he grew up in is near there (there’s a lyrical patch of reminiscence straight out of “Oblomov’s Dream”); it’s cold and there’s no vodka to be had in Kalinov, but they find a cabman who’s willing to drive them to Vanechka’s house where he’s sure they’ll find plenty of moonshine, which they do. At this point it swerves into a more and more nightmarish version of Gogol (who is namechecked in chapter 9), with touches of Dostoevsky (Vanechka tries to hang himself); they skip town just ahead of the police and wind up on yet another train, getting off at Kharkov because a fellow traveler tells them they should buy tickets there for the Caucasus. However, they discover they have barely enough to get them back to Moscow (and the increasingly befuddled and miserable Filipp Stepanovich has to sell his fur coat even to manage that); by this point I was thinking of a more recent and more hellish novel of alcoholic train travel, Venedikt Erofeev’s Москва — Петушки [Moscow-Petushki]. They even return to Moscow via Kursk Station.

It’s not a perfect novel — it lurches from one chronotope and style to another in a somewhat undisciplined manner — but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. I’m currently reading Leskov’s famous Левша [The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea]; after that, who knows? Maybe more Strugatskys (I hear good things about За миллиард лет до конца света [Definitely Maybe]). As always, I follow my nose.

A few years ago I read Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300 and found it very enlightening (see this post), so when Jonathan Morse alerted me to his new book, The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850, I went to the Amazon page, saw (with sadness but no surprise) that the price was outrageous (for shame, Cambridge University Press!), and had the free Kindle sample sent to me forthwith (thanks, Amazon!). Much of the introduction is laying out of concepts and intentions, but I thought the section about the chronological benchmarks was interesting enough to share. He says the range 1450-1850 will seem banal to historians of Western Europe but will probably surprise Russianists, ignoring as it does the supposedly fundamental shift brought about by Peter the Great, and goes on to explain the start and end points:

The ‘graphospheric’ excuse for beginning from the second half of the fifteenth century is derived from a cluster of disparate phenomena, few (or none) of which may be regarded as particularly dramatic or decisive in themselves, but which together reflect initial stages in the emergence of the early modern graphosphere. A continuous practice of public inscription in Muscovy can be traced to the late fifteenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, after decades of coexistence, paper replaced parchment as the almost exclusive material for the production of manuscripts. The same period also saw the end of the continuous or regular tradition of using birch bark as a material for inscription. Wax replaced metal as the normal material for seals. With regard to the linguistic landscape, in the late fifteenth century coinage ceased to be bi-scriptal in Cyrillic and Arabic, becoming monolingually Slavonic. Towards the end of the century Muscovites could also see the first prominent public lapidary inscriptions in Latin. With regard to technologies of the visible word: the craft of casting cannons in bronze was brought to Moscow in the late 1480s, and cannons (and bronze-cast bells) became regular bearers of monumental inscriptions. Or, with respect to a more familiar technology: although Muscovite printing did not start until the middle of the sixteenth century, active engagement with products of the printing press (via imported books) can also be dated to the final decade of the fifteenth century. Finally, with regard to institutions of production: the emergence of regular specialised administrative personnel is normally traced to the second half of the fifteenth century, an initial phase in the emergence of a state bureaucracy.

Back in 1910, the OED called talionic (“Of or pertaining to the law of talion, or to the rendering of like for like,” from lex talionis) “rare” and had only one citation (where it seems oddly misused):

1886   G. MacDonald What’s Mine’s Mine v   The growing talionic regard of human relations—that, namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is fulfilled between the bargaining parties.

Now it seems to be… well, not everywhere exactly, but used in a lot of places as if its meaning is self-evident; a Google Books search gives “The Talionic Impulse originates from Biblical Principles,” “Judge Walter Williams of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is especially good at the art of talionic restitution,” “The obscenities of talionic conduct – if one can indeed dignify it with such a phrase – are as much in evidence in the British tabloid newspaper front pages screaming for vengeance […],” “If a nuclear talionic reprisal terminates nuclear violence, the process may be considered a kind of nuclear peacekeeping,” “Early in the evolution of humankind, the talionic impulse emerged […],” etc. It’s always interesting to me to see an obscure word climbing up the charts for no apparent reason.

We discussed the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae a few years ago, but the NY Times has a nice piece by Annalisa Quinn that provides a useful update and has some great illustrations:

The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too. […]

The poet and classicist A.E. Housman, who died in 1936, once referred to “the chaingangs working at the dictionary in the ergastulum [dungeon] at Munich,” but the T.L.L. is now housed in two sunny floors of a former palace. Sixteen full-time staffers and some visiting lexicographers work in offices and a library, which contains editions of all the surviving Latin texts from before A.D. 600, and about 10 million yellowing paper slips, arranged in stacks of boxes reaching to the ceiling.

These slips form the heart of the project. There is a piece of paper for every surviving piece of writing from the classical period. The words, arranged chronologically, are given in context: they come from poems, prose, recipes, medical texts, receipts, dirty jokes, graffiti, inscriptions, and anything else that survived the vicissitudes of the last two thousand years.

Most Latin students read from the same rarefied canon without much contact with how the language was used in everyday life. But the T.L.L. insists that the anonymous person who insulted an enemy with graffiti on a wall in Pompeii is as valuable a witness to the meaning of a Latin word as a poet or emperor. (“Phileros spado,” reads one barb, or “Phileros is a eunuch.”) […]

[Read more…]

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series (“starting with our traditional opener from Languagehat’s Stephen Dodson” is the way they put it). This year I talk about Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical novels (see this post, in which I introduced her, and this one, which quotes some of her ruminations about language and links to others); I also mention a couple of up-and-coming writers named Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and if you aren’t familiar with them you’ve got some treats waiting for you! There are briefer mentions of novels by Joseph Conrad and Cathleen Schine, as well as a passel of excellent scholarly histories, some of which I’ve discussed here and some not. My thanks to The Millions for giving me the podium, and to those who support them so they can keep doing so.

Yet another long, dense essay of which I can only quote a few appetizing bits; this one, The Harmony of Languages, is by old LH favorite Justin Erik Halldór Smith (see this post). It starts with the “so-called Muscovy duck,” which “is so called not in view of its homeland in the vicinity of Moscow –for in fact it is native to Central and South America– but rather in mistranslation of its Latin designation, Anas moschata, the ‘musky duck'”:

We may wonder, then, what led Daniel Gottlieb Messerchmidt, in his Forschungreise durch Sibirien [Research Voyage through Siberia], to suppose that he had seen such a bird, or that such birds could be seen, on his arrival in the far eastern region of the Siberian Governorate known as “Yakutia”. In his list of vocabulary items recorded in the Yakut or Sakha language of on February 4, 1724 –thus, following the Dutch traveller Nicolaes Witsen’s Noord en Oost Tartarye [Northern and Eastern Tartary] of 1692, the second oldest attempt in the history of Sakha to record the spoken language in writing–, the German explorer gives the word Turpàn as the equivalent of “the Moscowy duck Willughbeji”, referring, as contemporary readers would have known, to Francis Willughby and John Ray’s 1676 Ornithologia. But turpan is not a Sakha word; it is a Russian word, and it designates not the Anas moschata, but rather the Melanitta fusca, commonly known in English as a “velvet duck” or “velvet scoter”, whose habitat centers around the Yenisey River basin in Siberia, and whose feathers are an iridescent black.

Messerschmidt’s mistake is noteworthy, as it is the largest one in a list of forty-two Sakha vocabulary items, which includes forty-one names of different sorts of animal, plus the word for snow (Chár in Messerchmidt’s orthography, хаар in modern Sakha). Fifteen mammals are identified, seven species of fish, and nineteen of birds. Most of Messerschmidt’s mistakes make at least some sense. He correctly gives the name of the domesticated reindeer (Taba/таба), but wrongly infers that the generic term for any wild beast (Kýll/кыыл) is the specific term for the wild reindeer, as he presumable heard the term being used adjectivally (Kýll Taba/кыыл таба) but failed to notice that the noun it was modifying was the same as the name for domestic deer. For the Canis marinus or Seehund, which is presumably the name he uses for the so-called ringed seal or Phoca hispida common in Kamchatka and the far north of the Pacific Rim, Messerschmidt again gives the Russian name (Nérpa/нерпа), evidently unaware that the Sakha people of the Lena River basin with whom he was in contact had no native words for marine or littoral fauna.

Messerschmidt gives signs of only a cursory familiarity with the phonology of the languages he records. Thus he combines vowels that cannot occur together in Sakha according to the strict laws, common to all Turkic languages, governing vowel harmony. For example, he writes the word for “red” as Kysil rather than kyhyl/кыһыл: the s where we today write an h is comprehensible within the rules of Sakha phonetics and dialectal variation; the i where there should be a y is simply a result of imperfect hearing. One might be tempted to say that Messerchmidt is not searching for harmonies, and so does not detect them.

[Read more…]

Bathrobe is delving into translation studies, and he’s found another good link to send me: The Art and Craft of Translation, by Elborg Forster (from Johns Hopkins Magazine, way back in February 2001). As with the Johanna Hanink piece I posted recently, it’s full of good things, so I’ll just quote a few bits to pique your interest:

First, a few words by way of characterizing myself: although my first language was German, I am now a translator with many years of experience translating texts in such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, and history of science and medicine from French and German into English. Having stopped using German in my daily life 45 years ago, I now find it rather difficult to translate into German. This has to do with lack of practice, of course, but also with the fact that there are many areas of life and letters with which I was not familiar as a 20-year-old. Indeed I sometimes feel–no doubt erroneously–that I learned everything I know in the medium of English: politics, French history, child-rearing, cooking, life and death, gardening, healthcare, automobiles …. In any case, whenever these days I translate something into German, I send it to my verbally highly gifted sister in Germany, who usually finds a few anglicisms and some expressions “that we don’t use any more,” for of course the German language itself has evolved over the last 45 years. […]

My greatest adventure as a translator was a collection of letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, the 17th-century German princess living at the court of Louis XIV. It did not take me long to realize that her very lively and expressive German had become somewhat archaic after she had spoken mostly French for many years (a situation I intimately understand!). I therefore chose a somewhat old-fashioned American idiom, often using expressions marked ant. or F. in the dictionaries. I also realized that “Madame,” as she was called at the French court, varied the level of her style depending on the subject of the letter, her level of familiarity with the recipient, and especially that person’s position in the hierarchy of court society.

Even in letters to close relatives, Madame used the address “Your Grace” (Ew. Liebden) as a matter of course; it was obligatory for persons of a certain rank and gives modern readers a feel for the distance that separates us from 17th-century court society. It seemed necessary to make a point of this distance, for much of Liselotte’s writing calls for such colloquial translation that we might take her for our contemporary. Yet that would be unfortunate, for it would prevent the reader from realizing that in many respects this woman was way ahead of her time.

Translating Liselotte thus sometimes called for a simple vocabulary (“rumors flying,” “go after,” “do away with,” “a lot of useless information”) and a straightforward sentence structure (essentially run-on sentences) to convey easy familiarity. But at other times I had to search out inflated terms to render the painfully constrained formality of a letter, so that I used such expressions as “favor me with a letter or any word,” “filial trust,” “pay my respects in person,” “bestow,” “hard put to give credence,” “at length…” and a host of others. And I certainly had no right to cut up the endless sentences.

Sometimes authors are not consistent in their level of style, and then the translator gets into trouble with copy editors. In one rather formal German study of Weimar Germany published in the 1970s, the author suddenly–and effectively, I thought–used the word “aufgehübscht,” which I literally translated as “prettified,” but the copy editor felt that this kind of expression “did not belong into serious academic discourse.” Unable to persuade him that it might, I dropped it, to my regret.[…]

To begin with, linguistic communities have different historical memories, which are rendered in a kind of shorthand but must be spelled out in another language. Thus I once gave a word-for-word rendition of “a portrait of the King of Rome,” whereupon my copy editor suggested that for simplicity’s sake I make it “the pope.” Seeing that even this educated person had missed a cultural allusion that would be obvious to every French reader, I therefore wrote: “Napoleon’s son, who bore the title King of Rome.” A translator from American English, of course, would have to add similar glosses to “crossing the Delaware” or “the man from Independence”–and these examples only refer to historical allusions. Every language is full of cultural concepts that require paraphrasing and sometimes a complete transposition.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

Andrew Trounson writes for Pursuit about the ongoing quest to decipher Linear A:

How do you go about deciphering the script of a wholly different language that was lost more than 3,000 years ago? Linguist and archaeologist Dr Brent Davis says it’s like walking out on a tightrope anchored at just one end and supported by nothing but thin air, hoping you find something to stop you from falling. […]

Dr Davis, a lecturer in Archaeology and Ancient Egyptian at the University of Melbourne, is one of only a handful of people around the world to have made any significant headway on solving Linear A in the last 50 years. He established for the first time the word order of the language as being Verb-Subject-Object, like ancient Egyptian. So rather than ‘Minos has a minotaur’, a Minos would write ‘has Minos a minotaur’. […]

It was while he was doing his PhD at University of Melbourne that Dr Davis began to make real headway on solving Linear A. By establishing the word order of the language, linguists can identify the function of a word in a sentence just from its position. It’s like finding a key word in a massive crossword puzzle.

“The definite word order in English is Subject (S)-Verb (V)-Object (O), as in the phrase John likes cats. And we know that about 97 per cent of human languages are either in this form or S-O-V (John cats likes) or V-S-O (Likes John cats).” But when Dr Davis looked at other Bronze Age languages of this period in the region, none were like English. They were either S-O-V (like early Greek and Sumerian), or V-S-O (like ancient Egyptian). He guessed Linear A was likely to have one of these two word orders.

He then applied this framework to a series of inscriptions that appear on Minoan offering bowls. To put it simply, he found that the words on the bowls tended to recur in what was obviously a formula, except for the second word in the inscription, which was always different from bowl to bowl. His guess was that this word was probably the name of the person (the subject) making the offering. If correct then Linear A was likely a V-S-O language. That was confirmed when he found the Linear B sign for ‘olives’ (which had been borrowed from Linear A), occurring after the name as the object of the phrase. The repeated start of the phrase was therefore a verb, like “gives”, yielding the phrase gives Yasumatu olives, or in English [order] Yasumatu gives olives.

Davis points out that to actually decipher the language, more signs are needed:

“Discoveries are still being made, so I’m optimistic, but what we really need to find is a palace archive, which is where we are likely to find enough Linear A to finally decipher it.”

Thanks, Trevor!