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Back in 2007, I posted about Free Rice, explaining it thus: “They give you a word with four possible definitions; pick the right one and they donate ten grains of rice to a hungry person through an aid agency.” Well, Lars (the original one) was kind and/or cruel enough to post a comment letting everyone know “This still works, and now has levels up to 60. […] The challenge is on!” I immediately got sucked back in, spending way too much time on it: I got 132 in a row right before guessing wrong on “ragi,” and I managed to get up to level 59 before leaving it alone for long enough it (mercifully) forgot who I was and wanted to start me at level 1 again, at which point I closed the tab. (One nice feature: when you guess wrong, it will give you the same word again soon enough you’ll probably remember the correct definition.) At any rate, give it a try; it’s still fun, and it still feeds people.

And in trying to find out about one of the wildly obscure words, I discovered the online Māori Dictionary, which is wonderful: you can click on a button and hear the words said aloud, and their About page says “In 2009 the sounds of all the native birds were added to the dictionary.” What a great thing to put online!

My wife was listening to the radio and was surprised to hear a piece by Percy Grainger identified as “The Gumsuckers’ March.” Upon investigation, it turned out that gumsucker means ‘an Australian especially from Victoria,’ “probably from the children’s habit of sucking gum exuded by eucalyptus trees.” Is this piquant term still in use?

My wife and I were watching the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston, which is not as bad as I had vaguely remembered (though it is too slow and full of over-the-top pompous music), and it occurred to me to wonder about the name. The Wikipedia article Judah Ben-Hur has an etymology section that reads as follows:

Wallace wrote that he chose the name Ben-Hur “because it was biblical, and easily spelled, printed and pronounced.” The name appears once in the Bible (Hebrew: בן־חור‎), as the name of one of King Solomon’s twelve district governors (1 Kings 4:8). Whether that was a proper name, or the person was being referred to as “the son of Hur” is not clear. The specific meaning of “Hur” is also unclear; among other possibilities, it may mean “something white” or “hollow or depressed ground”.

I imagine they’re right about Wallace’s vague ideas on the subject, but I was wondering if any of my readers might have useful thoughts about Hur, the Hebrew name/word.

I love Maciej Cegłowski’s writing; his blog Idle Words is well worth keeping an eye on, and his latest post, Gluten Free Antarctica, is part of his hilarious account of a trip to that fabled continent. I knew I’d enjoy it but didn’t expect to be posting about it here; fortunately, there’s a linguistic hook, however feeble, that gives me an excuse:

Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast. […]

Rodney convenes a summit in the ship’s auditorium to address the gluten crisis. Only passengers with dietary restrictions are invited. The rest of us must huddle around the open hatch one deck above, straining to hear. We are deep in the Ross Sea, five hundred miles from the nearest human being, and this is the most exciting thing that has happened on the ship in weeks.

There are tears of laughter on the bridge when I tell the Russian crew about the Great Antarctic Glutiny.

[Read more…]

Yesterday a package arrived which turned out to be a Christmas present from jamessal, Russian Literature since 1991 (thanks, Jim!), and I’ve already started reading it; rather than a general survey (“chapters with a large number of unknown authors’ names can easily overwhelm the reader”) the authors discuss “twenty-eight prose texts, three plays, and ten poetic oeuvres,” which makes for a meaty read. Evgeny Dobrenko’s chapter “Recycling of the Soviet” includes an account of what sounds like a wild novel, Мифогенная любовь каст [The mythogenous love of castes, pub. 1999-2002] by Pavel Peppershtein and Sergei Anufriev, in which party organizer Vladimir Dunaev, shell-shocked at the beginning of WWII, ends up in a forest where he lives on hallucinogenic mushrooms and participates in the war only in delirium; Dobrenko writes:

The narrative of The Mythogenic Love of Castes unfolds as a reworking of children’s images in a narcotic nightmare in which a war turns into unspeakable violence that nonetheless reads like a child’s game. This veritable hybrid of terror and a game turns out to be a window into reality. As Peppershtein recalled, he “as a child learned how to fall asleep to Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories, which were read on the BBC after the View from London broadcast. They worked like a tranquilizer, although – or indeed because? – their content was horrifying.”

What a thing to experience as a child! (I wrote about the Shalamov book here.) Here’s the Russian version of the BBC memory:

Он вспоминает, как в детстве научился засыпать под “Колымские рассказы” Шаламова, которые читались по Би-би-си после передачи “Глядя из Лондона”. Они действовали как транквилизатор, хотя — или именно потому что? — их содержание было ужасным.

Incidentally, Peppershtein’s parents were Viktor and Irina Pivovarov, but neither the English nor Russian Wikipedia article explains when and why he changed his name. The same is true of another Moscow Conceptual artist, Andrei Monastyrski (English, Russian Wikipedia): when and why did he change his name from Sumnin? And where is the stress on the unusual name Sumnin? So many questions!

Elie Wardini at Qifa Nabki posted back at the start of 2010 about an interesting Lebanese New Year’s greeting:

In Lebanon, and I am told that it is also the case among Christians in Jordan and Syria, we have a traditional new year’s greeting:

we say: bistraynte @layk/ @layke/ @laykon etc.

What this greeting means is that my *bistrayne* (i.e. new year’s gift) is on you, [so] you have to give me the gift.

He says Anis Frayha derives this from Latin strenae, “the gifts that Romans exchanged on January 1st,” and continues:

Frayha’s explanation seems to be acceptable, but what do we do with the initial *b* in *bistrayne*.

One possibility could be to consider *b* as the English *by God*. cp. to Lebanese (considered to be vulgar nowadays) *balla* meaning *by God* so our term becomes *b-strayne* = by Strenae => becomes lexicalized to gift. It istreated as any feminine noun: => bistraynt- in construct state.

The element *ay* may be concieved of as a deminutive. But could also be a diphthongisation of the *e* in *Strenae* (if Frayha’s explanation holds).

Commenters discuss French étrennes ‘New Year gifts,’ which of course derives from the Latin, but as Wardini says, this does not have the -s- and so cannot be the direct source. I’ll be interested in whatever thoughts people have about this, and I thank Steven for the link; in any case, I wish all my readers a happy new year in 2019!

Anatoly Liberman is an etymologist whose style I often find confusing and off-putting, and in this OUPBlog post from last year I have a hard time figuring out what he’s saying. He’s discussing the etymology of hundred, and after his usual rambling introduction he gets to the heart of it:

In the remotest past, hund– must have meant “ten” rather than “hundred”; however, the picture is confusing. In Gothic, a Germanic language recorded in the fourth century, the word hunda (a neuter plural noun) means “a hundred” (like Latin centum). Yet taihun-tehund (read the digraph ai as English short e), either “ten-ten” or “tenth-ten,” depending on how we divide this word (not inconceivably, taihunte-hund), also existed and also meant “a hundred.” In Old English, we find similar words, for instance, hund-seofontig “seventy,” and wonder how hund “ten” and –tig, another word for “ten,” coexisted in one language and in one numeral. There can be only one answer. By the time of our recorded monuments (and Gothic predates the texts in Old English by more than three centuries), at least some of those compounds must have become so opaque (“disguised”) that the tautology was no longer heard. Let us keep in mind that Engl. ten goes back to Old Engl. tēn and further to some form like Gothic taihun. Since Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k, the pair taihun ~ Latin decem is perfect. With regard to ten, whose distant origin does not interest us at this moment, we have no problems.

The natural question arises whether hund– and ten, the alleged synonyms, can be related, and why have two words for “ten”? [Excursus on ablaut omitted.] Fortified with this information, we may look at hund– ~ cent and ten. In Germanic, the zero grade was usually filled by the vowel u. And this is exactly the vowel we find in hund-. Consequently, the initial stage of hund– was hnd– in an unstressed syllable. Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k, just as t corresponds to d (taihun ~ decem). […] Hund– (from hnd-) is a good match for cent(um), except that it has the zero grade, while centum has a so-called full grade. It appears that Indo-European did have two words for “ten.” In Germanic, they were represented by some forms like hnd– and tehn-.

Gothic hunda means ‘hundred.’ Latin centum means ‘hundred.’ Hundred means ‘hundred.’ Where is he getting this “two words for ‘ten’” thing? Can anyone make sense of this?

Last year Dick & Garlick had a couple of posts about what sounds like a delightful dictionary. Dipping into Fallon’s Dictionary begins:

S W Fallon’s A New Hindustani-English Dictionary (1879) is regarded as one of the most remarkable works of Indian lexicography. With its illustrations from folklore, proverbs, songs, and literature, it is a lot more than a mere dictionary: like that other great glossary of the colonial era, Hobson-Jobson, it carves up an entire culture and serves it up in tasty, chewable bits. Fallon took up the language of north India in the late 19th century as his field of study, the common colloquial speech which was then being thrust out of sight in official use as well as literature by an artificial written language of ‘stiff pompous words, strange Arabic sounds which have no meaning for the people, and the dull cold clay of Sanskrit forms’. As Ambarish Satwik writes in his column, to open Fallon is to ‘see the invisible stream that flows all around us, full of things we have left unsaid’:

On its pages is found the sap and wit of the north Indian vernacular: the common stock of allusions that once played in the minds and memories of its speakers and disseminators. Language that is both ordinary and heightened, rank and sweet, and lingers in the mind. To borrow from Kenneth Burke, language that brings out the thisness of that or the thatness of this.

In an article in Dawn, Rauf Parekh writes that Fallon knew the value of field research in lexicography. With the help of his native informants, he recorded the words and idioms used by women, and interviewed ordinary people to understand usage and pronunciation. In an aside, Parekh notes that this led Fallon to use lewd or taboo words ‘and he sort of developed a taste for such expressions’.

Fallon’s lack of prudery and his emphasis on descriptive rather than prescriptive lexicography is what sets him apart from most Hindi/Urdu lexicographers. It also makes his dictionary a great read. Satwik recommends a weekly dip into its pages, which I think is a most excellent idea. So here’s a first dubki into Fallon’s ocean of words […]

I’ll leave you to discover the delights of Ardor urinae at the link; the following week’s post was Dipping into Fallon – 2, where he cites the entry for “خايه/ khā’yā, n. m. 1. Membrum virile. […] 2. Testicles.” Lexicography can be a lot of fun.

This appears to be the season of Leonid Livak for me. I first wrote about him back in 2015 after reading his How It Was Done In Paris: Russian Emigre Literature & French Modernism, a book I still consult with profit and pleasure; last week I got A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and wrote about it here, and now Johns Hopkins University Press has sent me a copy of his In Search of Russian Modernism, which I had the good fortune of copyediting a couple of years ago. It’s rare that I reread books I’ve edited, but this is different: its argument was so original, and the discussion so dense, that I can only really appreciate it now that it’s sunk in a bit (and I’ve learned more about the period). I’ll quote some passages from the introduction so you can see what he’s up to (you can also read the JHU Press Blog newsletter post he wrote about it).

He begins by saying “the disintegration of the Soviet empire brought about the implosion of the established vision of twentieth-century Russian cultural history” and “unleashed a Copernican revolution in the study of Russian modernism,” then adds this personal anecdote:

Although this book had been long in the making, the impetus for writing came as I answered a student’s query about my reasons for excluding Leonid Andreev from a course on fin-de-siècle Russian culture. I reflexively justified the omission by the need to prioritize authors, chosen for a semester-long sprint according to their aesthetic, historical, and typological importance. On second thought, that explanation sounded hollow with respect to Andreev. I had to admit, above all to myself, that my choices had been dictated by the biases I had absorbed, in part, from the partisan canon codified by Russian modernists and later espoused by my own teachers as a counterweight to the official Soviet literary canon, and, partly, from that very Soviet canon whose aversion to the modernist sensibility of Andreev’s mature work had relegated him to the literary-historical periphery.

In general, Livak has a disarming willingness, rare in the touchy world of academics, to call attention to his own errors and biases. And I approve of his refusal to aim for totalizing explanations:

To be sure, my book will not propose a coherent revisionist picture of Russian modernist experience, since no overarching historical narrative is possible or indeed desirable, given the state of Russian modernist studies. Instead, I will interrogate the field’s methodological assumptions, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking Russian modernism. Nor do I intend to refute extant interpretations of modernist experience, for I am more interested in exposing their limitations. I will advocate for many “partial truths,” as Virgil Nemoianu puts it with reference to romantic studies, when he proposes “a framework inside which the truths of other scholars could can coexist,” provided one did not treat “romanticism” as “a fixed quantity [but rather] as a cultural process.”

He also deprecates the tendency of academics to treat past artists condescendingly, as if they could not see what is so obvious to us, pointing out that “the modernist artist was, more often than not, aware of the hyperbole and abstraction inherent in her concept of modernity.” He goes on:

It seems more productive to focus our inquiry on the varied uses, rather than the empirical veracity, of claims to the uniqueness of the historical circumstances informing the sensibility of a modernist cultural community, in Russia or elsewhere. Such a pragmatic approach to modernist self-modeling is justified by the fact that we are dealing here with symbolic behavior – “an intervention in the field of the politics of time” – as Peter Osborne calls modernist self-stylization […]. Debunking the rhetoric or specific tropes of modernist identity – be it disruption, impermanence, chaos, degeneration, or eschatological anxiety – as mythical, because unoriginal from a longue durée historical perspective, is a tautological exercise. This is because such critical deflation has been performed repeatedly by our own modernist research objects, who, nonetheless, imbibed the “hypertrophied historicism” of their culture as a mode of cognition. In contrast, exploring the uses and evolution of the imaginative language informing modernist self-fashioning, one ultimately arrives at a pragmatically functional methodology that offers a descriptive alternative to the definition-centered approach hitherto dominant in Russian modernist studies and grounded in the literal reading of self-legitimating practices among the carriers of the modernist sensibility.

I enjoy his casual swipes at leftist pieties: “In the culture of Russian Marxism – the intelligentsia’s fin-de-siècle offshoot that replaced the fetish of narod with the equally mythical figure of ‘the proletariat’…” And as a lover of maps, I approve of his use of cartography as the book’s “controlling metaphor”:

I cannot but agree, then, with Gabriel Josipovici that there is no “true story of modernism” but rather a multiplicity of stories, none of which can be told as a linear succession of significant events. This is because the significance of an event depends on the thematic filter through which we examine a national modernist culture. No story can do justice to life’s complexity. The description of cultural processes is no exception to this truism. Like cartography, which tells white lies about reality in order to produce usable maps, students of Russian modernism must rely on selection, simplification, enhancement, and other mapping tools in order to tell many complementary, and often contradictory, stories about their object of investigation. Each story, or map, would differ in accordance with the thematic filter generating it, making visible some actors, practices, and events, while obfuscating others, even though all such filters are applied to the same material circumscribed in concrete historical time and geographic space.

This is what I propose to do in my book. After a critical revision, in the first three chapters, of the extant terminology and mental cartography of Russian modernism, I will apply to its newly named and outlined “misty lands” two of the many possible thematic filters – those which appeal the most to my own intellectual curiosity thanks to their potential to yield maps that help us see more clearly in Russian modernist culture.

His main point is that in his framework, the “modernist” marker “does not refer to immutable qualities characterizing authors, ideas, practices, and artifacts”:

Calling an author, a text, a practice, or an idea modernist, I signal its place in Russian and transnational modernist culture at a given historical moment – a place that is most often fleeting, because no idea or practice is exclusive to modernism, and few individuals and artifacts retain their central position in a national modernist community throughout its existence.

He has a brief discussion of Bunin, “whose oeuvre has been read as antithetical to modernism” and who allied himself mostly with anti-modernists:

Yet his first poetic collection, Listopad (1901), was published by the modernist publishing house Skorpion, whose milieu Bunin frequented for a while, and where he was accepted, albeit grudgingly and condescendingly, as a figure from the periphery of modernist culture. And the story repeats itself after Bunin leaves Gorky’s faction, in 1906, becoming a contributor to the modernist journals Pereval, Fakely, and Zolotoe runo. Accepted in modernism’s less factionalist circles, Bunin was rejected as not “pure” enough by the militants at the culture’s core (to wit, the publishing house Sirin). It is no wonder that contemporaries struggled to define Bunin’s mercurial place, now excluding him from modernism, now listing him along with its prominent Russian and foreign representatives. The fact remains, however, that during his long artistic career Bunin experimented with a variety of styles and themes in poetry and prose, shuttling in and out of the modernist community in sync with his changing views and in pursuit of professional advantages.

I was particularly pleased to see that because I’ve been reading Bunin lately and marveling at how modern he seems: he’s often thought of as a follower of Chekhov (who in fact said in 1904 “Soon I will die, but as regards my place in Russian literature, I see a worthy successor in Bunin”), but his stories sound nothing like Chekhov’s and occasionally remind me of Pasternak’s prose, especially Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers], with its focus on nature and its unexpected conjunctions of words, as in Bunin’s story Туман [The fog], where he describes the fog as “тоскливой аспидной мутью, за которой в двух шагах чудился конец света, жуткая пустыня пространства” [like a melancholy slate murk, beyond which the end of the earth seemed two steps away, a terrifying desert of space]. No premodern writer could have written that.

I could go on quoting, but by now you should have a decent idea of what it’s about. If you have any interest in questions like “who was a modernist?” and “is there any real dividing line between symbolism, acmeism, and futurism?” then you’ll want to read this book. My thanks go to Livak for writing it and to Johns Hopkins UP for publishing it (and doing a bang-up job, with no typos I’ve seen and a splendid cover).

This has, technically speaking, nothing to do with language, but it has to do with books, and it’s so beautiful I can’t resist posting it: 40 Hidden Artworks Painted on the Edges of Books.

A fore-edge painting is a technique of painting on the edges of the pages of a book. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned, as seen in the animation below. When the book is closed, you don’t see the image because it is hidden by the gilding (i.e., the gold leaf applied to the edges of the page). According to Encyclopedia Britannica, fore-edge paintings first arose during the European Middle Ages but came to prominence during the mid-17th century to the late 19th century. Anne C. Bromer for the Boston Public Library writes, “Most fore-edge painters working for binding firms did not sign their work, which explains why it is difficult to pinpoint and date the hidden paintings.”

Thanks to the generous gifts from Anne and David Bromer and Albert H. Wiggin, the Boston Public Library holds one of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings in the United States. Most of the collection has been put online for the world to enjoy and features more than 200 high-resolution images; complete with additional videos, articles and information. The University of Iowa and Colossal recently featured a few fore-edge paintings with animated gifs that can also be seen below.

15. The rambler, v.1 1825 by Samuel Johnson (Old Wych Street, London) and 31. Lalla Rookh, 1818 by Thomas Moore (Tyburn Turnpike, London) are particular favorites of mine — I’m a city boy, and I love street scenes.