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I still haven’t read any Chinghiz Aitmatov, though I’ve been wanting to for ages (and I got a collection of his back in 2011), so I was intrigued to see Ted Trautman’s Paris Review piece on him from a few years ago (thanks, Trevor!). I hadn’t realized quite how central he was to the cultural life of his country:

It’s hard to overstate Aitmatov’s importance to Kyrgyzstan’s national identity. In my time there, new acquaintances regularly quizzed me on the country’s national this and national that. Kyrgyzstan’s national food? A fried rice dish called plov. The national music? Anything played on the ukulele-like komuz. The national writer? Chinghiz Aitmatov, obviously. (My younger English students had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t as quickly recite the United States’ national writer, et al.) December 12, the author’s birthday, is celebrated nationwide as Chinghiz Aitmatov Day. After Kyrgyzstan gained independence, Aitmatov represented the young country as an ambassador to the European Union, NATO, and elsewhere. “One of the great charms of Aitmatov’s life,” Scott Horton wrote for Harper’s shortly after the writer died, “was that he charted first the decline of the Central Asian life and identity, and then participated in its resurrection as the Soviet Union collapsed and as the Central Asian states regained, quite unexpectedly, their autonomy and footing on the world stage.”

After describing “his masterpiece, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years,” Trautman says:

Aitmatov wrote The Day Lasts and much of his later work in Russian, seeking a larger audience, just as Vladimir Nabokov switched from Russian to English after fleeing the Bolsheviks. But the fact that Aitmatov wrote his early work in Kyrgyz challenged me to see the beauty in a language I often thought of as limited. Compared to English, the Kyrgyz vocabulary is quite small: present and future tense are one and the same; the subtle distinctions between words like similar and same are folded into a single word that hangs on its context. […]

But long before Aitmatov wrote his first words, the Kyrgyz had a robust oral storytelling tradition. The most famous of these stories is the Epic of Manas, the legendary founder of Kyrgyzstan, whose story takes days to recite. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Manas is a story of conquest—of Uighurs and Afghans, mainly—followed by a long journey home. As Aitmatov himself said of the oral tradition, while other peoples display their culture in tangible arts like architecture and written books, the Kyrgyz “expressed their worldview, pride and dignity, battles, and their hope for the future in [the] epic genre.”

Every name in Kyrgyzstan tells a story—a village called Mailuu Suu, or “Oily Water,” for example, helpfully reminds travelers that it sits on top of a nuclear-waste dump. And a shameful number of new parents give their daughters names like Boldu (“Enough”) and Burul (“Turn”), to indicate that they would have preferred a son. But less discussed is the name Kyrgyzstan itself, which means more than its primary definition, “the land of the Kyrgyz.” The word Kyrgyz is derived from the phrase körk küz, which means “forty girls”—a reference to the forty daughters of Manas, who became the mothers of the forty tribes of Kyrgyzstan. I can think of no other country whose name is derived from a work of fiction, unless you count the Bible. Even as Kyrgyzstan continues to face the struggles of a developing country, it’s worth remembering that the country came to be in part because its bards told its story again and again. It falls to the storytellers on Aitmatov’s shoulders to write the next chapter.

That starts off mildly dubious but acceptable: OK, small vocabulary, present and future tense the same, subtle distinctions between words yada yada, your basic exotic-language shtick. But that last bit made me grind my teeth. Why are writers so irresistibly drawn to obviously fake etymologies? If Kyrgyz is derived from körk küz, I’ll eat all my hats. Even frequently credulous Wikipedia calls it a “myth” (and says “The original root of the ethnonym appears to have been the word kirkün […], probably meaning ‘field people’). Ah well, hopefully no one goes to the Paris Review for linguistic science.

Lameen Souag has a fascinating post at Jabal al-Lughat about an unexpected survival of spoken African Latin:

In his recent book La langue berbère au Maghreb médiéval (p. 313), Mohamed Meouak uncovers a short recorded example of spoken African Latin from between these two periods, which otherwise seems to have escaped notice so far.

The 11th-century Ibadi history of Abu Zakariyya al-Warjlani, he gives a brief biography of the Rustamid governor Abu Ubayda Abd al-Hamid al-Jannawni (d. 826), who lived in the Nafusa Mountains of northwestern Libya. Before assuming his position, this future governor swore an oath:

Bi-llaahi (by God) in Arabic, and bar diyuu in town-language (بالحضرية), and abiikyush in Berber, I shall entrust the Muslims’ affairs only to a person who says: “I am only a weak being, I am only a weak being.”

In al-Shammakhi’s later retelling, the languages are named as Arabic, Ajami, and Berber (بلغة العرب وبلغة العجم وبلغة البربر). As Mohamed Meouak correctly though hesitantly notes, diyuu must be Deo; he leaves bar uninterpreted, but it is equally clearly Latin per, making the expression an exact translation of Arabic bi-llaahi. The Berber form is probably somewhat miscopied, but seems to include the medieval Berber word for God, Yuc / Yakuc.

The earliest Romance text is the Old French part of the Oaths of Strasbourg, made in 842 and opening Pro Deo amur… “for the love of God”. The Ibadi phrase recorded above curiously echoes this, although it predates it by several decades.

There is speculation in the comments on what African Latin would be like if it had survived; Hugelmann Alexis writes that “Martin Posthumus, a conlanger (language inventor) imagined such a descendant of North African Romance which he named ‘Tunisian’ : https://www.veche.net/tunisian.”

Yes, I know that post title reads oddly, but I’m trying to mash together the titles of two new books by David Crystal which I received in the same review-copy package from Oxford: Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar and The Story of Be: A Verb’s-Eye View of the English Language. As you would expect (I’ve praised Crystal many times here), they’re excellent.

Making Sense is a combination of a practical guide for improving the instruction of grammar, with which I am not concerned, and an explanation of how English grammar works, which he carries out with gusto. His “top ten” manifesto begins with the points that “Grammatical change is normal and unstoppable” and “Grammatical variation is normal and universal,” which warms my heart — I’ve long since boiled down my descriptivist approach to the basic points that both language change and language variation are inevitable, and that’s OK. He finds gems like John Keats writing to his publisher in 1819 “I should not of written,” a good example from 200 years ago of a confusion many people assume to be a product of these degenerate times. He has a chapter on the benefits of the internet to language investigation; you can find out about, say, Singaporean usage without having to go to Singapore or buy Singaporean newspapers, simply by going online, and you can study grammatical change as it happens. It’s Crystal at his best, regardless of whether you agree with his grammatical theories (“My approach to grammar is expounded in its fullest form in the two reference grammars written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, A Grammar of Contemporary English […] and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language“).

The Story of Be is a detailed look at the history and uses of the most complex English verb; it has chapter titles like “Being, as was,” “Time being,” and “You’re cheeky, you are,” and a great many vintage cartoons with piquant captions like:

Squire. “Well, Matthew, and how are you now?”
Convalescent. “Thankee, Sir, I be better than I were, but I beant as well as I were afore I was bad as I be now.”

Of course, I particularly enjoy detailed historical exegeses like the sidebar “The infinitive form, be,” with sentences like “That depends on how you date the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, south-west Scotland.” I’m looking forward to delving into it more thoroughly; this is exactly the sort of book I like to keep around for random perusing.

While I’m here, I’d like to thank effusively whatever LH reader sent me a copy of China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, by Peter C. Perdue; it’s absolutely gorgeous (the maps! the color plates!), and I can’t wait to dig into it and learn all about the tragedy of the Dzunghar Mongols.

Joel of Far Outliers is quoting passages from Edith Durham’s 1909 travel book High Albania, and I thought this one was so striking I couldn’t resist quoting most of it myself:

In early days an alphabet was made by Bishop Bogdan, and used by the Jesuits for all Albanian printed matter required by the church. Briefly, it is the Latin alphabet with four additional fancy letters. The spelling used is otherwise as in Italian. Help from without had enabled Greek, Serb, and Bulgar under Turkish rule to have schools in their own tongues. The natural result has been that each in turn has revolted, and, so far as possible, won freedom from Turkish rule. And those that have not yet done so look forward, in spite of the Young Turk, to ultimate union with their kin.

Albania awoke late to the value of education as a means of obtaining national freedom, and demanded national schools. But the Turks, too, had then learnt by experience. They replied, “We have had quite enough of schools in national languages. No, you don’t!” and prohibited, under heavy penalty, not only schools, but the printing of the language.

The only possible schools were those founded by Austria and Italy, ostensibly to give religious instruction. These used the Jesuits’ alphabet. Ten years ago some patriotic Albanians, headed by the Abbot of the Mirdites, decided that the simple Latin alphabet was far more practical. They reconstructed the orthography of the language, using only Latin letters, and offered their simple and practical system to the Austrian schools, volunteering to translate and prepare the necessary books if Austria would print them – neither side to be paid. A whole set of books was made ready and put in use. Education was at last firmly started; it remained only to go forward. But a united and educated Albania was the last thing Austria wished to see. Faced with a patriotic native clergy and a committee striving for national development, Austria recoiled. Three years ago the simple Latin alphabet was thrown out of the Austrian schools and a brand new system adopted, swarming with accents, with several fancy letters, and with innumerable mute “ee’s” printed upside down – a startling effect, as of pages of uncorrected proofs!

It was invented by an influential priest. Its adoption enabled Austria to split the native priesthood into two rival camps, and – as it was not adopted by the Italian schools – to emphasise the difference between the pro-Italian and pro-Austrian parties; and that it was expressly introduced for these purposes no one who has heard all sides can doubt.

Nor can Albanian education make any progress till it has schools in which no foreign Power is allowed to intrigue. Such are now being started.

I read High Albania years ago (and probably still have it around somewhere) and highly recommend it; she was observant, intelligent, and a good writer.

CBC News reports:

Sometimes, it takes an outsider to notice the obvious. Such was the case for linguistics professor Marie Odile Junker when she came to Canada from France.

“It struck me you could learn any immigrant language of this land. Chinese, Spanish, but you could not learn those (Indigenous) languages. So, as a linguist, of course, I became interested.”

That’s when Junker began thinking of a way to study and learn about Indigenous languages. What she came up with, was more than a dictionary or phrase book, it was an interactive, multimedia atlas.

“We started in 2002 with a conversation manual for east Cree and then it went viral. Everybody was asking for it. So, I thought of putting all of this on a map and we’ve been collaborating with communities and speakers ever since. We today have over 52 languages, 20,000 sound files, on this atlas.”

The atlas, Junker said, is a portal into Indigenous dictionary building. […]

Junker said, in addition to the atlas, there is an oral stories database, online lessons, and online dictionaries.

Good for her! And in related news, Grocery stores bring Indigenous languages to the aisles. Thanks, Jeff!

Bathrobe sent me Isham Cook’s recent post Anglish and English: Why our language is 750 and not 1,500 years old; both the confrontational title and the fact that the page features a misspelled label “Miscellania” suggested crackpottery to me, but I thought I’d pass it along for discussion. The basic thesis is in this passage:

The answer to the riddle of how the Anglo-Saxons were able to force the Britons in England to assimilate to their language and culture so rapidly after 449 is likewise shockingly simple: the indigenous Britons in southern and eastern England were not Celts but were ethnically kin to the invaders and spoke a related language. “Anglo-Saxon,” as we will see, is not quite the right term for this language but refers to the invaders’ tongues. It could simply be called “English,” though it is distinct and foreign to the English spoken today. According to recent computational research (Forster and Renfrew), this archaic English, which I call “Anglish,” broke off from Common Germanic during earlier waves of migration to England hundreds or thousands of years before the Anglo-Saxon invasion of 449, and forms its own branch on the Germanic tree. The conventional view is that English descends directly from the West Germanic family of languages (Frisian, Dutch, and German); in the revised view, English is more closely related to the eastern branch of North Germanic (Danish and Swedish).

The post is very long, but you can skim it (as I did) and get a good idea of what’s going on. Have at it, and throw your brickbats or laurel wreaths in the comments below.

I greatly enjoyed reading the play Свадьба Кречинского (Krechinsky’s Wedding) by Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin (and I call your attention to the truly remarkable facial hair visible at that link), and then I enjoyed watching two versions of it on YouTube, the 1953 Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre one and the 1975 Maly Teatr one (the latter is far better in almost every way, but it’s slightly cut, and you can only see the bit in which Krechinsky sings the start of an aria from Der Freischütz in the earlier one). At first I thought it was going to be yet another marriage-plot drama in which the lovely young woman has to choose between the guy she wants, who dances divinely, and the boring guy her father wants, who has an estate on the adjacent property, but after the first act it became apparent that the focus of the play was on the gambler and conman Krechinsky and his pathetic sidekick Rasplyuev and his servant Fyodor, and it got a lot more interesting, reminding me of Gogol’s play The Gamblers (see this post).

During that first act, when all we know about Krechinsky is that he’s a charming fellow who dances divinely and of whom Muromsky, the father, disapproves, he’s talking with the skeptical Muromsky, who says “But I hear you don’t care for village life…” Krechinsky replies heatedly:

Кто вам сказал? Да я обожаю деревню… Деревня летом – рай. Воздух, тишина, покой!.. Выйдешь в сад, в поле, в лес – везде хозяин, все мое. И даль-то синяя и та моя! Ведь прелесть.

Who told you that? But I adore the village… The village in summer is heaven. The air, the silence, the peace!.. You go out into the garden, the field, the woods — I’m the boss everywhere, it’s all mine. And the blue distance, that’s mine too! It’s just delightful.

We have no way of knowing at this point that it’s all a lie, that he despises country life and wants to get his hands on the daughter’s money so he can move to Petersburg and get into really high-stakes games, but if we know our Gogol we can guess, because that little speech is a clear allusion to the boastful, lying Nozdryov’s similar one in Dead Souls:

– Вот граница! – сказал Ноздрев. – Все, что ни видишь по эту сторону, все это мое, и даже по ту сторону, весь этот лес, который вон синеет, и все, что за лесом, все мое.

There’s the border! – said Nozdryov. – Everything you see on this side, it’s all mine, and even on that side, all those woods, that show blue over there, and everything beyond the woods, it’s all mine.

But to pick up on that allusion, you have to have read Dead Souls. This is one reason I’m reading as much Russian literature as I can, so that I can catch allusions (as well as, of course, the pleasure of the reading itself), and I’ll point out that this is why it’s not enough to know about books, movies, etc. — you might impress people at parties, but unless you experience those things yourself, they’re not doing you any good.

The indefatigable John Cowan sent me this link about a remarkable man:

Linguist Ken Hale had a preternatural ability to learn new languages. “It was as if the linguistic faculty which normally shuts off in human beings at the age of 12 just never shut off in him,” said his MIT colleague Samuel Jay Keyser.

“It’s more like a musical talent than anything else,” Hale told The New York Times in 1997. “When I found out I could speak Navajo at the age of 12, I used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself.” Acquiring new languages became a lifelong obsession […]

He estimated that he could learn the essentials of a new language in 10 or 15 minutes, well enough to make himself understood, if he could talk to a native speaker (he said he could never learn a language in a classroom). He would start with parts of the body, he said, then animals and common objects. Once he’d learned the nouns he could start to make sentences and master sounds, writing everything down.

He devoted much of his time to studying vanishing languages around the world. He labored to revitalize the language of the Wampanoag in New England and visited Nicaragua to train linguists in four indigenous languages. In 2001 his son Ezra delivered his eulogy in Warlpiri, an Australian aboriginal language that his father had raised his sons to speak. “The problem,” Ken once told Philip Khoury, “is that many of the languages I’ve learned are extinct, or close to extinction, and I have no one to speak them with.”

“Ken viewed languages as if they were works of art,” recalled another MIT colleague, Samuel Jay Keyser. “Every person who spoke a language was a curator of a masterpiece.”

Lucky him!

I’ve found references to a couple of African scripts that I thought were interesting enough to post; I’ll link to the Wikipedia articles and quote the first bit of each:

Nsibidi (also known as nsibiri, nchibiddi or nchibiddy) is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently an ideographic script, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements. The symbols are at least several centuries old—early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region, with a range of dates from 400 to 1400 CE. […] The origin of the word nsibidi is not known.

The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by King Njoya of Cameroon at the turn of the 19th century. They are notable for evolving from a pictographic system to a partially alphabetic syllabic script in the space of 14 years, from 1896 to 1910. Bamum type was cast in 1918, but the script fell into disuse around 1931. A project began around 2007 to revive the Bamum script.

Parul Sehgal reviews (for the NY Times) several books by Leonora Carrington, a writer I was unfamiliar with; her story is a fascinating one:

Carrington is also a member of a select group of writers — exophonic writers, they’re now called — who work outside their mother tongues. Her memoir, “Down Below,” has perhaps the most unusual translation story I’ve heard. After her first husband, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, was sent to a concentration camp, Carrington suffered a nervous breakdown and began to believe that by purging she could purify the world. She was sent to an asylum in which treatment amounted to a form of torture: She had artificial abscesses induced in her thighs to keep her from walking and was administered drugs that simulated electroshock therapy. She first wrote of these experiences in English in 1942 and promptly lost the manuscript. Later, she told the story to friends in Mexico City, one of whom jotted it down in French. It was then translated back into English to be excerpted in a Surrealist journal in 1944. The blurriness in tone is partly intentional and partly, one suspects, a consequence of being much handled. Many of her pointed short stories were also written in her rudimentary French or Spanish. Her tentativeness with the languages accounts for the “delinquent pleasure of her voice,” Marina Warner writes in a new introduction to “Down Below.” “Unfamiliarity does not cramp her style; rather it sharpens the flavor of ingenuous knowingness that so enthralled the Surrealists.”

There follows a discussion of other writers who changed languages, including Nabokov, Conrad, Yuko Otomo, Jhumpa Lahiri, Emil Cioran (“When I changed my language, I annihilated my past. I changed my entire life”), and Yiyun Li (who “has written that she adopted English in her 20s with a kind of absoluteness that was tantamount to suicide”); then:

The opposite ambition spurred on Carrington. Other languages seem to afford her more life, more lives. She relished feeling ungainly and unsure. Far from feeling impoverished by a smaller vocabulary she felt liberated. “The fact that I had to speak a language I was not acquainted with was crucial,” she wrote of her time in Spain. “I was not hindered by a preconceived idea of the words, and I but half understood their modern meaning. This made it possible for me to invest the most ordinary phrases with a hermetic significance.” […]

She was a writer who insisted on more veils, more masks. It’s said she loved the Egyptian room at the Met, that the sight of all those tightly wrapped mummies was deeply reassuring to her, that she loved basement apartments and living below the ground. Every language she learned seemed to offer a new place to conceal herself, to hide in plain sight — but never out of cowardice. In her elaborately surreal English, in her simple French and Spanish, she kept revisiting her places of fear, almost compulsively retelling her story. “The more strongly I smelled the lion,” she ends one story, “the more loudly I sang.”

The more such writers I learn about, the more interesting the phenomenon seems. Thanks, Trevor!