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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!)

This Twitter thread begins:

So, each episode of the Simpsons is dubbed into two different versions for French markets. There’s a Quebec French version, and a France French version.

Fans of the Quebec dub hate the European dub, and vice versa.

In the France dub, the Simpsons all speak in typical Parisian accents. A few other characters have regionalized accents, like the Van Houtens who speak with a Belgian accent, but it’s mostly Parisian, and they don’t try to regionalize the US-specific jokes.

In the Quebec dub, the Simpsons family speaks with a thick working-class dialect of Montreal French called joual. They also do something the France dub doesn’t do: they regionalize the scripts, subbing in Quebecois politicians or places for the more US-centric references.

There are illustrative clips and discussion of details, such as:

Classic episode, season 1’s “The Crepes of Wrath”, Bart goes to France and foils an antifreeze wine scam by learning French. There’s no way to dub around it being some other language Bart learns, it’s very clearly France. Seems impossible to translate into French, right? In the Quebec dub, Bart starts speaking to the French police officer in Quebecois slang, and can’t be understood. (Bart: “I thought they spoke French in France”). It’s only when he learns to talk like a stereotypical Parisian that he can get through to the cop. Perfection.

Via this MetaFilter thread, with more links and discussion and links, including one to Justine Huet’s dissertation Dubbing The Flintstones and The Simpsons in French: A Comparative Perspective between France and Québec.

I’m reading Leskov’s «Некрещеный поп» (The Unbaptized Priest, translated by James Y. Muckle as “The Priest Who Was Never Baptized”), which uses a great many dialectal and Ukrainian words, and one of them is the extremely interesting волна ‘lamb’s wool.’ One point that struck me is the uncertainty as to stress; Dahl, and following him Vasmer, give initial stress, vólna, and so does my 1908 11th edition of Makaroff’s Russian-French dictionary, but both my Словарь ударений [Dictionary of stresses] (1984) and my three-volume Russian-English dictionary (1997) give it with final stress (volná). The Wiktionary entry gives initial stress (вóлна, вóлны)… but the audio file has end stress! Clearly it historically has initial stress, but being a dialectal word and probably obsolete to boot, my guess is that it’s been assimilated to the far more common end-stressed волна ‘wave.’

It’s the etymology that’s worth noting, however; it’s a basic Indo-European word, given by Wiktionary as *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂ and widespread in the major branches: Hittite ḫulanaš, Old Armenian gełmn, Ancient Greek λῆνος, Latin lāna, and many descendants in Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian. Slavic vьlna survives as the basic word for ‘wool’ in all branches but Russian, where for some reason it’s been replaced by шерсть (and here one feels the lack of a Russian equivalent of the OED). One of the Germanic descendants is, of course, English wool, so I looked that up in the AHD… and was astonished to find for an etymology only “[Middle English wolle, from Old English wull.]” Surely they didn’t dispute the Indo-European origin of that word? I checked the Indo-European Roots Appendix and found that there was nothing corresponding to *h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂. I looked up words like vellus (“[Latin, wool.]”) and lanugo (“[Middle English, pith, from Latin lānūgō, down, from lāna, wool.]”); there was no indication that they were in any way related. The whole Indo-European cluster appears to have been inadvertently ignored and omitted; you’d think by the fifth edition they might have noticed!

An interesting factor in the Leskov story is that the brutal Dukach, disliked by everyone in the village and therefore unable to find godparents for his newborn son there, tells the equally disliked Kerasivna (the villagers think she’s a witch) to take him to a nearby village to have him baptized, adding that she should make sure the priest there doesn’t spoil the boy by naming him Ivan or Nikola. She says of course she won’t allow a Christian boy to be called by a “Moscow name” like Nikola, and Dukach agrees: “Никола самый москаль.” He winds up being called Savva. I hadn’t realized there was such a sharp geographical division of acceptable names (at least in the late 1820s, when this is supposed to have occurred).

Back in January I posted about Dorothy Richardson and her sequence of semi-autobiographical novels; my wife and I are now up to Revolving Lights (#7), and for obvious reasons I have to quote the following passage from Chapter II (the first speaker is Miriam’s semi-boyfriend Michael Shatov; they are in a London café with two other Russians, the Lintoffs, in the years before WWI):

“Lintoff says that he understands not at all the speech of these young men who were only now here. I have not listened; but it was of course simply cockney. He declares that one man used repeatedly to the waiter making the bill, one expression, sounding to him like a mixture of Latin and Chinese—Ava-tse. I confess that after all these years it means to me absolutely nothing. Can you recognise it?”

She turned the words over in her mind, but could not translate them until she recalled the group of men and the probable voice. Then she recoiled. Lintoff and Michael did not know the horror they were handling with such light amusement.

“I know,” she said, “it’s appalling; fearful”—even to think the words degraded the whole spectacle of life, set all its objects within reach of the transforming power of unconscious distortion….

“Why fearful? It is just the speech of London. Certainly this tame boor was not swearing?” railed Michael. Lintoff’s smile was now all personal curiosity.

“It’s not Cockney. It’s the worst there is. London Essex. He meant I’ve; had; two; buns or something. Isn’t it perfectly awful?” Again the man appeared horribly before her, his world summarised in speech that must, did bring everything within it to the level of its baseness.

“Is it possible?” said Michael with an amused chuckle. Lintoff was murmuring the phrase that meant for him an excursion into the language of the people. He could not see its terrible menace. The uselessness of opposing it…. Revolutionaries would let all these people out to spread over everything…. But the people themselves would change? But it would be too late to save the language….

“English is being destroyed,” she proclaimed. “There is a relationship between sound and things…. If you heard a Canadian reading Tennyson…. ‘Come into the goiden, Mahd.’ But that’s different. And in parts of America a very beautiful rich free English is going on; more vivid than ours, and taking things in all the time. It is only in England that deformed speech is increasing—is being taught in schools. It shapes these people’s mouths and contracts their throats and makes them hard-eyed.”

“You have no ground whatever for these wild statements.”

“They are not wild; they are tame, when you really think of it.” Lintoff was watching tensely; deploring wasted emotion … probably.

On the one hand, since Miriam is based on Richardson herself, she presumably had felt such horror, but on the other hand, she’s presenting it in such an over-the-top fashion (and having it countered by Michael’s amused objections) that she seems to be distancing herself from it. At any rate, I have rarely seen such a fine specimen of outraged peevery.

Kate Connolly reports for the Guardian about a newly discovered parchment fragment:

It has been called the earliest form of the Vagina Monologues – an argument in verse between a woman and her vulva, originating in the Middle Ages. Now a fragment of the text, about who gives more pleasure to men, dates the poem to 200 years earlier than previously thought.

Medievalists are thrilled by the find, in the archive of an Austrian monastery, which rewrites the history of sexuality in medieval literature. Fragments from 60 lines of The Rose Thorn (Der Rosendorn) were discovered on a thin strip of parchment in the library of the baroque Melk Abbey on the banks of the Danube in Austria’s Wachau Valley. The abbey find means that the poem can now be dated to about 1300. Until the parchment discovery it was believed that Der Rosendorn had not been composed until the end of the Middle Ages, about two centuries later. Two existing versions of the poem, known as the Dresden Codex and the Karlsruhe Codex, are a constant fascination for medievalists who consider it one of the first ever erotic poems.

In the poem, a virgin woman (junkfrouwe) argues in a free-flowing, often witty dialogue, with her speaking vulva (fud) about which of them is held in the higher regard by men. The virgin argues that it is by her looks that men are won over, whilst the vulva, accusing the virgin of putting too much stress on her appearance, says it is she who provides the true pleasure. The two decide to part company, but find themselves deeply unhappy and so reunite to allay their suffering. They conclude that they are better together, as a person and their sex are quite simply inseparable.

It is not known who the poem’s author was, or whether male or female.

The word fud is ancient; the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (edited by J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams) has this entry:

*putós ‘± vulva, anus’ [IEW 849 (*pṹ-to-)]. ON fuð– ‘vulva’, MHG fut ‘vulva’, Grk(Hesychius) πύννος (< *pútno-) ‘anus’. OInd (attested only very late) putau (dual) ‘buttocks’. Sparse but widely attested. The best candidate for a word with this meaning having PIE status.

Though I’m not sure what “this meaning” is. (Thanks, Trevor!)

I just finished reading a very silly but enjoyable book, Rose Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings, of which the author’s note says “It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on, actual conditions at Geneva, of which indeed I know little, the only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.” It is set in an alternative early-1920s in which monarchists have retaken Russia and the Bolsheviks are bitter émigrés, and there’s lots of skulduggery in the streets, hotels, and parks of Geneva, which is the sort of geographical specificity that enables me to enjoy silly fiction. At any rate, at one point “the great detective” Cristofero is introduced, along with his linguistic accomplishments:

He spoke the Italian of the Lombardy Alps, the French of Marseilles, the English of New York, the German of Alsace, the Russian of Odessa, the Yiddish of the Roman Ghetto, the Serbian of Dalmatia, the Turkish of the Levant, the Greek of the Dodecanese, and many other of the world’s useful tongues. He addressed the committee in French, speaking rapidly and clearly, illustrating his story with those gestures of the hands which in reality (though it is not commonly admitted) make nothing clearer, but are merely a luxury indulged in by speakers, who thus elucidate and emphasise their meaning to themselves and to no one else. However, Signor Cristofero’s words were so admirably clear that his confusing gestures did not matter.

Now, the French of Marseilles, the English of New York, the Russian of Odessa, and the Turkish of the Levant are all of a piece, the lively bastardized dialects of port cities, but I have no concept of what makes the Italian of the Lombardy Alps, the Yiddish of the Roman Ghetto, the Serbian of Dalmatia, and the Greek of the Dodecanese fit into this company. Is anyone familiar with these useful tongues?

Boris Dralyuk, sterling son of Odessa that he is, has been posting about his visit to that storied port, and in this post he mentions an old Soviet favorite whose films were screening at the City Food Market:

That evening, as bevies of Odessans ate and drank, a little tramp got up to all sorts of antics above their heads. The Market was screening short films featuring Charlie Chaplin, and this brought back a flood of memories from my childhood. Chaplin’s character was a hero of the Soviet public; neither the highbrows nor the lowbrows could resist him. Owen Hatherley has analyzed the early Soviet avant-garde’s fascination with the Little Tramp in The Chaplin Machine (2016), which Tim Kohut reviewed for LARB, and Clare Cavanaugh has offered a brilliant reading of Osip Mandelstam’s two poems on Chaplin from 1937, among the last he ever wrote, in a chapter of Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1994).

Of course, my little friends and I didn’t know thing one about Mandelstam’s poems in the late 1980s, when we were getting up to Chaplinesque antics of our own. We did know this little song, of unknown origin, that is sung to the tune of Léo Daniderff’s foxtrot “Je cherche après Titine,” which Chaplin immortalized as “The Nonsense Song” in Modern Times (1936).

I’ve long loved “The Nonsense Song” (which you can see in a clip at Boris’s post), but I’ve always wanted a transcription of the lyrics, and it occurred to me that in this day and age, such a thing must be available online. Of course it was, so here they are for your edification:
[Read more…]

The Daily Sabah reports on some lexicographical news:

A Turkish researcher and author has prepared a dictionary for an endangered Indo-European language spoken by some inhabitants of northern Turkey’s Trabzon province in the Black Sea region. Vahit Tursun prepared the dictionary for Pontic Greek, also called Romeika by the Turks, over eight years by speaking to people of the region who still remember and speak the language, Turkish daily the Hürriyet reported. The language, which is actually a dialect of Greek, was originally spoken in the Pontus area on the southern shores of the Black Sea.

Tursun said it was his dream to prepare this Turkish-Romeika dictionary, and he has been recording and writing down new words he has heard for the last 30 years. “I was always inclined toward doing something (a project) about my own culture. I saved words like they were pennies I put in a penny bank. Now the day this penny bank has become a dictionary has finally come,” Tursun said, adding that a language is the work of thousands of years of human history and knowledge. Peter Mackridge, Professor Emeritus at the Modern Greek Department of Oxford University, also worked as an adviser in the process of creating the dictionary.

We talked about Pontic Greek/”Romeyka” in 2011, and Nick Nicholas had a lot to say about them in a 2010 Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος post; Trabzon is the city once known as Trebizond, the last holdout of the Byzantine Empire. Thanks, Trevor!

Seventeen years! Seems like just yesterday I was celebrating six months. When I started, blogs were still a happening thing (and in the first year of operation I was making erudite jokes about the fancy new word), but for quite some time now they’ve been a relic (hey, remember the first decade of the 21st century?); the cool kids moved on to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Ghu knows what all. But I keep blogging along, and it’s not just because I’m stuck in the past (though it’s not not because I’m stuck in the past): I simply can’t see any of those shiny new venues as a replacement. Sure, you can put your thoughts (and pictures of meals, if that’s your thing) on any of them and get feedback, but all they are is dust in the wind — yesterday’s tweet or Facebook post isn’t even used to wrap fish before it’s forgotten (unless Facebook decides to show it to you in an unwanted anniversary slideshow). I know they’re not literally gone (the internet never forgets), you can retrieve an old tweet if you really want to, but how often do people do that unless they want to play gotcha?

Whereas as long as a blog is around and the comments are open, conversations can go on forever. People can respond to questions from a decade before, and I’m still getting comments on my very first post. I go back to old posts (there must be over 6,000 of them by now) and enjoy the dialogue, which sometimes sparks fresh thoughts. And of course LH is a substantial part of my intellectual history by now; losing it would be like losing a chunk of my brain. So my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have taken part in it over the years, and I hope you’ll continue to drop by for links, thoughts, jokes, et alia varia.

John Hooper’s Guardian obituary of the late-blooming writer Andrea Camilleri discusses the very interesting linguistic elements of his popular novels featuring the Sicilian detective Salvo Montalbano (or, per Sicilian Wikipedia, Salvu Muntalbanu):

In one sense, the Montalbano novels were not at all innovative: Camilleri named his hero after the Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and admitted he had given him some of the traits of Montalbán’s gourmet investigator, Pepe Carvalho. Moreover, Camilleri churned out the exploits of his most popular character in a way that was decidedly more industrial than creative. “All the Montalbano novels are made up of 180 pages, tallied on my computer [and] divided into 18 chapters of 10 pages each,” he once told an interviewer.

But in an important respect, the Montalbano stories were utterly original. What is not apparent to readers of the stories in translation or to the many non-Italian fans of the television series that sprang from them is that they are written in a language of the author’s creation: a blend of standard Italian with Sicilian dialect.

In La Lingua Batte Dove il Dente Duole (2013, literally Where the Tongue Touches the Toothache), a book-length interview with the linguist Tullio De Mauro, Camilleri explained that the idea arose from the circumstances of his father’s death in the late 1970s and inspired him to try out the technique, unsuccessfully, long before the first Montalbano book appeared.

“One day, to distract him, I said: ‘You know, Dad. I’ve thought of a story,’ and I told him the plot of my first novel … My father goes: ‘Why don’t you write it?’” Camilleri replied that he found it difficult to write in Italian, to which his father replied: “And why do you have to write it in Italian?”

To publishers, Camilleri’s linguistic mish-mash, which even non-Sicilian Italians have difficulty in understanding at first, must have seemed like a refined form of literary suicide. The author was no stranger to rejection slips. But over the course of his much-delayed career Camilleri sold more than 10m books. They were translated into more than 30 languages and adapted for a hugely successful television series that has been sold to more than 20 countries. It was Montalbano’s success on screen that turned Porto Empedocle, the model for his beat, Vigata, into a holiday destination for his many fans. So proud was the town of its most famous son’s literary creation that from 2003 to 2009 it called itself Porto Empedocle Vigata.

I have to correct Hooper’s translation of La Lingua Batte Dove il Dente Duole; it’s The Tongue Hits Where the Tooth Hurts, not “Where the Tongue Touches the Toothache.” Thanks, Trevor!