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This week’s New Yorker has a review of Rezdôra, a new Italian restaurant; of course I was curious about the name, which is explained thus: “rezdôra means ‘grandmother’ in Modenese dialect.” OK, great, but it’s an odd-looking word, and I wanted to know more. Googling quickly revealed that every review mentions the meaning, and the restaurant’s website leads with it: “Rezdôra, the Modenese word for grandmother, is a rustic Italian restaurant highlighting the cuisine of Emilia Romagna in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood.” But I had trouble finding any further discussion of the word. Google Books gave me snippets like “Working alongside the rezdora Lidia Cristoni and applying techniques learned as an apprentice to French chef Georges Coigny,” “He explained how the barnyard and kitchen garden were the family matriarch’s (she is called rezdora in local dialect) domain,” and “Loosely translated, rezdora means ‘housewife,’ but what it really means is queen of the kitchen. It is the word that is used to describe the women, usually older, who are keeping alive the traditions of the recipes of Emilia-Romagna.” Which makes it sound like it doesn’t actually mean ‘grandmother’ after all. And it’s still an odd-looking word, and I still want to know its origin. Any suggestions?

A decade ago I posted about the ways different languages have of expressing what English-speakers term “Greek to me,” and there was a lively discussion; it seems a good time for a follow-up, and Dan Nosowitz has posted It’s All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks? at Atlas Obscura. It starts with the phrase “It’s Greek to me” and asks “So where did the phrase come from, and why is its sentiment so universal?”

As with far too many linguistic questions like this, there is no definitive answer. One theory ties it to medieval monks. In Western Europe at this time, the predominant written language was Latin, but much of the writing that survived from antiquity was in Greek. The theory holds that these monks, in transcribing and copying their texts, were not necessarily able to read Greek, and would write a phrase next to any Greek text they found: “Graecum est; non legitur.” Translated: “It is Greek; it cannot be read.” […]

Though Greece is nominally part of Europe, its deep ties with the Middle East, North Africa, and the Slavic countries have meant that Greek culture sometimes doesn’t seem fully of a part with Western Europe. The alphabet used there today, called the Euclidean alphabet, was ironed out just after the Peloponnesian War, in around 400 B.C. But there were several versions of the Greek alphabet and language before then, and one of those, it’s generally believed, was used by a Greek colony in southern Italy. That one was adopted by people who inhabited early Rome, and steadily evolved on its own into Latin. By Shakespeare’s time, the Greek alphabet looked like a weird fifth cousin to the Latin alphabet. […]

English is not the only language to rely on Greek as a shorthand for gobbledygook. Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Afrikaans do as well. You’ll notice those are all European languages except for Afrikaans, and Afrikaans is Germanic in origin.

Harry Foundalis, a cognitive scientist who studies Greek linguistics, says many Greek people know that in English and other languages, Greek serves as an indecipherable tongue, and many Greek people, especially young ones, speak English anyway, so they’ve encountered it before. “How do we feel about it? We find it funny,” says Foundalis. “Those of us who know it make jokes with it. For example, I’ve noticed that every time I talk to an English-speaking audience and I use the phrase ‘That’s all Greek to me,’ and the audience knows I’m Greek, I get a thunderous laughter as a response. So, the phrase works well for me.”

There are, however, an awful lot of other languages that have some version of this phrase that doesn’t use Greek. Some of these are weird in their own right. What’s up with the Baltic countries, which think Spanish is so impenetrable? Why do the Danish use Volapük, a short-lived Esperanto-type constructed language created by a German in 1880? When a Bulgarian says “Все едно ми говориш на патагонски,” which uses “Patagonian” instead of Greek, what the hell are they talking about? Do they mean some extinct indigenous Chonan language, or Spanish, which is the dominant language there, or Patagonian Welsh, which also apparently exists?

Nosowitz goes on to talk about Chinese, which “happens to be the most common replacement for Greek in the idiom around the world.” Thanks, Terry!

David Shariatmadari, whose has written well about language for the Guardian and has been featured at LH before (e.g., here), has published a book called Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language that sounds well worth reading, according to Joe Moran’s review:

As a boy, David Shariatmadari would sit in the hallway and listen to his Iranian father speaking Farsi on the phone to his family in Tehran. It was an early introduction to the estranging beauty of unfamiliar language. So began an interest in linguistics that has given birth to this book, a skilful summation of the latest research on how languages emerge, change, convey meaning and influence how we think.

Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.

Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. It amuses us to think that there are 27 words for eyebrow in Albanian. But we only really think this because of our grammar-blindness about Albanian, which can easily form adjectival compounds by joining two words together. […]

[Read more…]

A Linguistic Society of America news release summarizes a forthcoming article in Language, “Syntactic variation and auxiliary contraction: The surprising case of Scots” by Gary Thoms, David Adger, Caroline Heycock, and Jennifer Smith:

Contractions are widespread in English. However, there are certain rules about what can be contracted where–rules that speakers follow without ever having been taught them, and without being consciously aware of them. For example, speakers happily say It’s in the box but not I don’t know where it’s. Such rules seem to apply to every variety of English, whether it be spoken in Philadelphia, London or the Caribbean.

The starting point for the article is the rule that forbids contraction in examples like I don’t know where it’s, which is one of the most exceptionless rules of contraction in English varieties. […] In the article, the authors investigate what looks like a curiously specific exemption from this restriction found in some dialects of Scots: speakers readily allow contraction in examples like Here it’s! or There it’s!, which are used in the context of discoveries or sudden realizations (Where’s my book??? Ah, there it’s!). The authors seek to explain why contraction is possible just in these types of sentences, which they call locative discovery expressions, and only in one specific subpart of the English dialect continuum.

To investigate this, the authors analyzed data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, a new online digital resource for the study of Scots. The atlas provides original data on hundreds of grammatical phenomena from more than 140 locations across Scotland, gathered in face-to-face interviews by community-insider fieldworkers. The authors found out that many varieties of Scots also allow a kind of locative discovery expression where speakers repeat the word there (or here), so they say things like There it’s there!. And it turns out that all speakers who can say There it’s! can also say There it’s there!, but not vice versa.

I’ll spare you the implausible (to me) explanation involving “an unpronounced there after the verb,” but the phenomenon itself is interesting. Thanks, Terry!

Frequent commenter pc writes:

I’m doing some research on a relative of mine and she participated in a “U·rid”, which the papers described as a “replica of a Russian county fair”. In Googling around, in English and in my very limited Russian, I can’t find anything that would indicate what a “urid” actually is. Do you have any thoughts?

I am equally at a loss, so I turn to the Varied Reader in hopes of enlightenment.

And pc adds:

Additionally, this may be of interest to you and some readers: CeLCAR at Indiana University has finished Season 1 of their podcast exploring the languages and cultures of Central Asia. The host’s pronunciation is insufferable, but the experts she brings on are fun to listen to — many recite poems or sing songs demonstrating the various Turkic and Persian languages of the region.

Enjoy!

Claire Burke reports for the Guardian about what is apparently a phenomenon, British cities banning swearing:

When Salford ditched its ban on swearing last week, Mark Thomas’s reaction was apt. “Hoo fucking ray” the comedian tweeted, shortly followed by a “Whoo- fucking -hooo”. Introduced by the city council in 2016, the public spaces protection order (PSPO) outlawed “foul and abusive” language in Salford Quays, the former site of the Manchester Docks that has now been transformed by upscale developments. Offenders faced an on-the-spot fine, which could increase to £1,000. The order immediately alarmed critics and free speech campaigners. What, after all, constituted foul language? Would a “bloody hell” get you into trouble? Could you be fined for a “damn”?

Thomas was due to perform at the Lowry theatre when the order came down in 2016, and has been known to “drag audiences through the streets” on post-gig demos. “In the interests of remaining within the law, I sent Salford City Council a list of words I’m considering using, and asking which are permissible and which are not,” he wrote at the time. “The list runs to 425 words, in alphabetical order, starting with ‘arse’, ending with ‘winnit’ and including the term ‘cat twinky’. I have no idea what that last one means but thought we should check nonetheless.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang tells us that winnet is “a piece of excrement adhering to the anal hairs”; the “cat twinky” may involve twinkie n. (also twinky):

1. (US gay) a young, inexperienced homosexual man.
2. a young (underage) sex object, whether male or female and seen as suitable for exploitation.
3. anyone considered odd or eccentric.
4. the penis.

In any case, I’m glad the ban is ended. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Courtesy of John Cowan, two more online treasures:

1) Du Cange, et al., Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis. Niort : L. Favre, 1883-1887. JC says:

This edition is about twice as long as the original and insanely comprehensive: 10 volumes in print, who knows how many lemmata. The site itself is in (modern) French, but easy to follow with or without GT; the glosses are of course in Latin.

I occasionally consulted Du Cange (as everyone calls it) in grad school, and it’s great to have it available at the touch of a cursor.

2) Lyle Campbell, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. JC again:

It’s from 2007, so no entries for “Dene-Yenis(s)ean” or “Trans-Himalayan”, and there are a fair amount of Campbell-type opinions: “However, since not even Na-Dené has been satisfactorily demonstrated, Na-Dené could hardly be shown successfully to be connected to these various Old World groups.” But still, a damn useful resource. Searchable PDF.

Thanks, John!

I’m reading Saltykov-Shchedrin’s brutally funny Современная идиллия [A contemporary idyll], in which the hapless narrator and his pal Glumov get caught up in the intrigues and corruption of the Petersburg police, and they’ve just discovered that a magazine editor visiting a sleazy lawyer in an office that used to be a whorehouse they visited in their youth was the piano player in that very whorehouse, and he’s telling them of his adventures in the intervening years; at one point he says:

Вы знаете, ведь я, было, в политике попался… как же! да! Ну, и надобно было за границу удирать. Нанял я, знаете, живым манером, чухонца: айда́, мина нуси, сколько, шельма белоглазая, возьмешь Балтийское море переплыть?

So you know I managed to get myself involved in politics back in the day… yup, you bet! Well, one time I had to skip town, leave the country. So quick as a bunny I hired this Finnish guy: Let’s go, mina nusi, how much do you want, you white-eyed rascal, to take me across the Baltic Sea?

I have a Finnish dictionary, of course, but I don’t actually know the language, and the Russian form could conceal so many possibilities involving umlauts and double letters that I thought I’d turn to the Varied Reader in the hopes that one of you might know what this “mina nusi” might mean.

Also, and this is a long shot but it’s driving me crazy so I’m hoping someone might know, there’s a scene in Dostoevsky (I’m pretty sure it’s Dostoevsky — The Idiot, maybe?) where a man sees a young woman being accosted (in Petersburg, I think in the Admiralty/Winter Palace area) and rushes up to protect her, almost getting into a fight with the accoster, but then is distracted by someone or something and rushes off, leaving her to her fate. Does this ring any bells? It’s not the kind of thing you can easily search for.

An amusing passage from Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (he has escaped from a Petersburg prison in mid-1876):

When I landed at Hull and went to Edinburgh, I informed but a few friends in Russia and in the Jura Federation of my safe arrival in England. A socialist must always rely upon his own work for his living, and consequently, as soon as I was settled in the Scotch capital, in a small room in the suburbs, I tried to find some work.

Among the passengers on board our steamer there was a Norwegian professor, with whom I talked, trying to remember the little that I formerly had known of the Swedish language. He spoke German. “But as you speak some Norwegian,” he said to me, “and arc trying to learn it, let us both speak it.”

“You mean Swedish?” I ventured to ask. “I speak Swedish, don’t I?”

“Well, I should say it is rather Norwegian; surely not Swedish,” was his reply.

Thus happened to me what happened to one of Jules Verne’s heroes, who had learned by mistake Portuguese instead of Spanish. At any rate, I talked a good deal with the professor, — let it be in Norwegian, — and he gave me a Christiania paper, which contained the reports of the Norwegian North Atlantic deep-sea expedition, just returned home.

On the fictitious nature of the Swedish language, see this post.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith (who has appeared before at LH under the alias Justin E. H. Smith, e.g. here and here) has done a wonderful thing:

I began studying Sakha using L. N. Kharitonov’s Soviet-era textbook, the Самоучитель якутского языка. This is an excellent resource for learning Sakha, indeed I think the best in existence, and it occurred to me as I was working through it that it would be useful to make it available in English. At present, there are virtually no resources for learning Sakha that are accessible to non-Russian speakers. I therefore began systematically translating into English not only the Sakha exercises, but also the Russian explanatory apparatus, the remarks on grammar, and the Russian texts intended for translation into Sakha. This took a considerable amount of time, but I worked slowly and steadily and now have a fairly polished translation of Kharitonov’s great work, which I am making available here in a set of pdf files. At present I am only posting Part One (Lessons 1-40), as I am still polishing and correcting the second half. I am certain there are many errors in Part One that I have not caught, and I would be grateful to any reader who draws them to my attention. […]

It would be fairer to describe what I have done as an adaptation of Kharitonov’s work, rather than as a translation. I have made a somewhat inconsistent effort to de-Sovietize the work. In the Soviet period there were generally more unaltered Russian loan words in Sakha than today, and I have changed the spelling of most such words to reflect current usage. This includes both common and proper nouns: I have, e.g., changed врач (doctor) to its Yakutized form, быраас; and Лена (the Lena river) to Өлүөнэ. I have also systematically changed the names of people from typical Russian names (e.g., Вася, Пётр, Мария) to traditional Sakha names (e.g., Ньургун, Кэскил, Сайаана). In a way this adaptation is also a distortion, as even in the post-Soviet period most Sakha people continue to have Russian names, and my uneasiness about such distortion is what explains the inconsistency in the alterations. A greater challenge than proper names was mounted by the particular themes of the lessons. In the early lessons I systematically changed references to, e.g., working at the kolkhoz, to, e.g., working at the hospital. But as the lessons grew more complex, it became clear that the thematization of Soviet realities was ineliminable. And arguably it is wrong to eliminate it: even if the Sakha language has evolved significantly in the past half-century, and most of all since the fall of the Soviet Union, any learner of Sakha will inevitably find herself reading a good number of Soviet-era texts, and so must become familiar with the orthographic and grammatical conventions and with the subject matter of the period.

The result, then, is a hybrid of adaptation and fidelity, and a sequence of difficult judgment calls. I have corrected some small errors in Kharitonov’s work, and have moved the ‘Remarks on grammar’ section from the end to the beginning of each chapter. Kharitonov frequently introduces vocabulary items without providing a translation for them, where a Russian-speaker would easily understand their meaning but a non-Russian speaker would not. In these cases, I have included a translation or explanation, and have added the word to the dictionary (the third of three pdf’s here). Kharitonov sometimes does the same with the introduction of new elements of grammar, relying on a coincidental (or perhaps artificially constructed) similarity between Russian and Sakha. In such cases, I have also provided more explanation, for the non-Russian speaker, than he has given. In general, my interest is to provide access to the Sakha language without having to pass through Russian. The relationship between the two languages is complex and deeply rooted over the past five centuries, but in its earlier development and in its deeper structure Sakha is entirely unrelated to Russian, and decoupling the two is an important part of studying the language on its own terms.

Go to Smith’s site for the links; I confess his alterations make me uneasy, especially the haphazard attempt to eliminate Soviet realities, but that is a minor matter beside having the material available in English. (Thanks, Trevor!)