languagehat.com

The Languages & ‘Dialects’ of Europe: Germanic page was linked in a recent thread here at LH, but I thought it should have its own post, since it’s such fun, and educational too:

Our method for measuring the phonetic divergence between any two ‘dialects’ relies strictly on comparing words that are ‘cognate’, i.e. directly related to each other in that they are derived from the same original Germanic word. Our list of words was drawn up specifically to include as many words as possible that are found in Germanic languages and dialects, and without any impact of standardisation. This is true of about 95 of the 110 words in our list.

In the remaining cases where no truly native cognate exists in one or more dialects, we signal this in our database by a superscript ! NC  for Non-Cognate. In some cases we follow with the transcription of the non-cognate word that has the same meaning in that dialect, especially where phonetic similarities might lead users to mistake the non-cognate for a cognate. For the word mouth, for instance, many German dialects use a root that is cognate not with English mouth and German Mund, but instead with German Maul (which is also slang for mouth in standard German).

The word-list — or to be more accurate then, the cognate list — is intended to form a representative sample of the phonetics of the Germanic lexicon. This entails avoiding over-representing in our list particular sounds recurring particular positions. This can be a particular problem with grammatical suffixes, so wherever possible we have recorded the bare root form of words: e.g. imperative forms of verbs rather than infinitives (which would over-represent the sounds /ən/ in the list.

Just click on the words and hear them said by native speakers.

Update. In the comments, Matthew Scarborough points out the successor website to this, adding:

Paul Heggarty and his collaborators have been putting an enormous amount of work into expanding not only the Englishes and Germanic but now has an enormous amount of data and recordings from Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Andean languages, and other projects run by the MPI for the Science of Human History including their extensive fieldwork in Vanuatu.

Too tired to do a proper post, so here are the books I got:

Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times (thanks, ktschwarz!)

Richard Tarrant, Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (thanks, bulbul!)

Curzio Malaparte, The Kremlin Ball

If I’ve forgotten anything, or if a late present arrives, I’ll add it. Meanwhile, I hope everyone had a good day, whether you celebrate the holiday or not!

I don’t seem to have posted about Tocharian, which is a bit surprising because it’s always been one of the Indo-European languages I’ve found most intriguing, for its unexpected location, its equally unexpected developments, and the history of its discovery. Matthew Scarborough has continued his survey of Indo-European etymological dictionaries (overview, Anatolian) with Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries for the Perplexed: Tocharian Languages, and far from being a mere list of a few books, it’s a general introduction to the field, with examples of etymologies, images of book pages, and a nice photo of an actual text. He starts by saying “I am no specialist in Tocharian and I have never studied Tocharian formally,” but he has some strong views which he makes clear, e.g.:

One of the more notable differences in the Dictionary of Tocharian B to most other works the Indo-European side of things is that Adams continues to reconstruct a fourth a-colouring laryngeal *h₄ which left no trace in Anatolian. If you’re familiar with some of Adams’s other work like The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World this oddity of reconstruction will probably not come as a huge surprise. My own hot take on fourth-laryngealism is that if you’re reconstructing a fourth laryngeal, there are a small handful of etymologies that you desperately want to be true, but the evidence is not actually bearing it out, so you reconstruct a whole new phoneme as a last ditch effort to make them work. Needless to say, it gives me the impression of a lower bar of rigour set for the acceptance of any given etymological proposal in general, and so I would tend tread a bit more cautiously with the etymological proposals made here. That said, Adams is in every respect one of the major world authorities on the Tocharian languages and he has also published extensively on Indo-European as well, so one should not be entirely dismissive of his proposals either.

So I was glad to see his post, and I hope you’ll take a moment to investigate this minor member of the I-E family.

I was reading Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on café culture (subscribers only, I’m afraid) when I was taken aback by a description of Charlie Chaplin’s immigrant character who “tries to put off the arrival of a check he can’t foot simply by ordering more coffee.” I’m very familiar with the expression “to foot the bill,” but for me it’s fixed — you can’t replace “bill” with “check” or anything else. Is this the case for you as well? And does anyone know how the expression originated?

Leo Livak, one of the great scholars of Russian modernism, promised me he’d have University of Wisconsin Press send me a copy of the new book he’s edited, A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg; it’s arrived, and it’s even better than I expected. Fortunately, Livak has posted a summary of the book’s contents, from which I will quote:

The first part treats Petersburg’s rapports with Russian and European intellectual life in Bely’s day. Lynn Patyk elucidates the historical circumstances informing Petersburg’s terrorist intrigue, with an eye on the range of meanings that intrigue had in Bely’s modernist circle and in contemporary Russian society at large. Maria Carlson draws attention to Bely’s fascination with Theosophy and with its offshoot—Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical doctrine, which freshly captivated the writer midway through his work on Petersburg. Bely’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconoclastic thought predated his work on the novel. The formative role in modernist philosophies of art and life of Nietzsche’s intellectual heritage all but assured that Bely would engage with it in Petersburg, as Edith Clowes illustrates. Neo-Kantianism is yet another philosophical current informing the novel. As Timothy Langen explains, it shaped Bely’s thought in the decade preceding his Petersburg project, and it is present there as one of the novel’s competing philosophies. Henri Bergson equipped Bely with polemical tools for a critical reexamination of Nietzscheanism and Neo-Kantianism, whose philosophical virtues, Hilary Fink argues, the writer no longer took for granted during his work on Petersburg. Judith Wermuth-Atkinson shows that Bely’s modernist search for alternatives to the materialist understanding of the world and the human being led the author of Petersburg to heed the new science of psychology, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud. A special place in Petersburg’s imaginative universe is occupied by racial theories, whose narrative manifestations are explored by Henrietta Mondry. Closing the book’s first part, David Bethea demonstrates the centrality of eschatology—speculation about the end of history, framed as the demise and rebirth of the world and humankind—in Petersburg’s narrative and stylistic economy.

[Read more…]

I’ve started reading Leskov’s 1872 novel Соборяне [The Cathedral Folk], and am enjoying it tremendously — he’s great at creating memorable characters and telling good stories about them. But he also loves using odd bits of language, often dialectal, which means the reading is slow, since I’m constantly looking things up. Well, one of the odd words was взвошу, and while googling it I came across Jack Matlock’s 2013 dissertation, Leskov into English: On Translating Soboryane (Church Folks) (from that link you can download the pdf), which discusses this passage and many others, comparing existing translations and providing his own commentary — what a wonderful gift from the internet! Here’s his passage on взвошу (pp. 193-4):

19 (28) взвошу: Dal’ defines звошить as meaning to lift something, as with a lever, or, dialectically, to anger someone. Neither meaning fits here, and a note to the 1957 Russian edition of the text says simply “здесь: наказать.” It therefore is not clear whether this is an aberrant use of the word by Leskov or a rare or dialectical meaning. In all its meanings the word is unusual and does not appear in most dictionaries. The translator should, therefore, seek something less ordinary than “punish” to translate it.

Hapgood comes up with “pay off,” which is not bad, for a change. Mongault used “frotter les côtes,” and Luther “abrechnen.” I wish I could find something more exotic, but at this writing I have nothing better to suggest than “settle scores with.”

A great resource, which I discovered at the perfect time.

I just got my first Christmas present in the mail; frequent commenter Trond Engen had warned me it was coming, saying that Amazon didn’t carry it so he was having the Norwegian publisher send me a copy, and today it arrived. It turned out to be a copy of the brand-new Norsk banneordbok [Norwegian curse-word dictionary], by Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld, and there’s a nice interview with Ms. Fjeld, with a conveniently subtitled video, here (Google Translate; note that they render the title in one place as “Norwegian Punching Dictionary,” though in the teaser above the title it’s correctly given as “Norwegian Swearword Dictionary” — mysterious!). It’s hard to think of a more appropriate gift; it was over a decade ago that I issued a call for curses for my forthcoming book of international curses and insults, and I specifically asked for Norwegian examples. (My mother was Norwegian-American, so I have a personal interest in the topic.) Per Jørgensen responded:

Faen i helvete as in faen, Satan, and helvete, Hell.
Svarte faen, “black Satan.”
Jævla and jævlig, literally “devilish,” roughly equivalent to English f***ing.
That’s basic Norwegian swearing for you. Want more?

(He added more in this comment.) This dictionary gives me plenty more, and it will inspire me to improve my (presently minimal) skill at reading Norwegian. The entry for faen i helvete starts “Sannsynligvis det mest vanlige og mest direkte banneuttrykk in norsk” [Probably the most usual and most forthright cursing expression in Norwegian], and it has three lightning bolts (a measure of “grad af tabu” [degree of taboo]). One of the expressions quoted in the interview is “i all verdens land o pannekaker” [in(to) all the world’s lands and pancakes; no lightning bolts], which provides a visual chuckle in the video. I was surprised, but on reflection shouldn’t have been, to find so many English words included (fuck gets three bolts and has examples like “Fuck deg, Giske!”]; the worst word is apparently fitte ‘cunt,’ which gets the maximum of four lightning bolts [“Et av de sterkeste banneordene i moderne norsk”]. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this and sharing it with other Norsk-related persons of my acquaintance; mange takk, Trond!

This comparison is going to be superficial and unfair, but I don’t care, it’s in me and it’s got to come out. I finished Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring (see this post) with a certain amount of irritation, though somewhat mollified by the appearance in the text of a NYC street address, 501 Broadway; it took him 150 pages to tell a very simple story — boy meets girl, boy betrays girl, boy feels very bad — and he tells it in an ostentatiously antiquated way, full of exclamation marks and a jovially intrusive narrator (who at one point says “history is silent about what he thought then,” drawing a marginal exclamation point from me). It’s as if he’d regressed instead of progressing from the brilliantly subtle narration of A Sportsman’s Sketches, a quarter of a century earlier; it’s basically a romance novel, written as though the author were being paid by the word and needing every kopeck, and I can see why the critics of the day trashed it while the public ate it up so avidly that Vestnik Evropy had to reprint the January 1872 issue in which it appeared.

So the next item in my chronological reading list was Tolstoy’s Кавказский пленник [The Prisoner of the Caucasus]; I’m pretty sure I read it many years ago, but probably in translation. It’s only twenty pages long and written in a mildly off-putting fake-folk style suitable for children and the illiterate (it starts “Служил на Кавказе офицером один барин. Звали его Жилин. Пришло раз ему письмо из дома,” something like “Once upon a time an officer was serving in the Caucasus. His name was Zhilin. One day he got a letter from home”), and in fact it was published widely in children’s readers (and was extremely popular). It too tells a very simple story — hero is captured, tries to escape, fails, tries again — but damned if it isn’t so gripping I gobbled it up in one go. How does he do it? Whether he’s using the labyrinthine, French-infused sentences of War and Peace or the storybook ones here, he convinces you that what he’s telling you is of vital importance and you have to follow wherever he leads. I know it’s a hackneyed observation, but I’ll say it anyway: Tolstoy was a genius, a master storyteller, and it’s a crying shame he mostly gave it up for religious propaganda.

I’m reading Turgenev’s Veshnie vody, translated The Torrents of Spring or Spring Floods, and occasionally checking my understanding of obscure bits by consulting the 1895 Edward Richter translation; I was amused just now to see this bit of dialogue:

“Well, I will not — I will not go on,” said Maria Nikolaievna, hastily. “You are displeased with this. Forgive me — I will not! Don’t be angry!”

That’s Richter’s ridiculously formal version of this:

— Ну, не буду, не буду, — поспешно проговорила Марья Николаевна. — Вам это неприятно, простите меня, не буду! не сердитесь!

Marya Nikolaevna, to whom poor besotted Sanin is trying to sell his estate so he can marry his beloved Gemma, is a hard-headed businesswoman but presents herself as a flighty, flirtatious girl, and a more situationally appropriate translation might be something like:

“I’ll be good, I promise!” Marya Nikolaevna quickly said. “You didn’t like that, I’m sorry and I won’t do it any more! Don’t be mad!”

But what struck me linguistically is the absence of an equivalent in English for this use of “не буду” (‘I won’t’) as a child’s exclamation. In Russian it can be either negative (“Не буду и все!” [I won’t do what you want, that’s all!]) or a repentant promise (“Прости меня, я больше так не буду” [Forgive me, I won’t do it any more]), and we only have the former (“I won’t!!”), but it’s the latter that’s used here; the scene of a crying child saying “не буду, не буду” when caught in a misdeed and trying to avert punishment is primordial, but in English kids don’t say that, they say “I’m sorry” or “I didn’t mean to” or whatever. So poor Richter has entirely misunderstood the line in Turgenev.

This five-minute clip is a wonderful bit of dialect conversation from Ireland:

This short film is part of a larger collection of folklore recorded by Michael Fortune featuring two men John Murphy and Ned Kavanagh from Kilmuckridge, Co. Wexford. The recordings are based around sites of folkloric importance, and this particular recording relates to Ballyscough Bridge which borders the villages of Oulart and Kilmuckridge in Co. Wexford. The recording was undertaken by Michael Fortune in July 2015 in John’s yard in the townsland of Morriscastle.

The recording session was unplanned, and the only equipment Michael had with him was a small dslr camera without external microphone or tripod. Regardless of this, the camera captures the natural conversation between two neighbours as they re-count stories from the places around which they live.

Both men have distinctive accents. John’s in particular is an old accent found along the East Coast of County Wexford. John’s accent and dialect is sadly disappearing along this stretch of coast and it’s demise is due to a variety of reasons; primarily tourism, educational development and the influx of people from Dublin. John’s yard is surrounded by holiday homes and mobile home parks. Many of the people in which both men speak of have either passed away or the places have been consumed into the tourist bubble which has engulfed the fields and roads of the area.

Kilmuckridge lies to the south of an area called “The Macamores”, an ancient Gaelic controlled territory which ran from Kilmuckridge, County Wexford to Arklow in County Wicklow. Overlooked by many, the area is steeped in a rich folklore and dialect, and contains many intriguing cultural and linguistic links between neighbouring Wales, West Country England, Cornwall and the North of Ireland.

The casual swearing is great; perhaps the most startling linguistic element to me was the two-syllable pronunciation of the verb in “I seen.” I’m not sure of the subtitle in “going study and all”: shouldn’t it be “steady”? (Thanks, Trevor!)