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Silvia Marchetti’s Ozy.com piece on Italian dialects has a silly title [“Why Italians Are Giving Up Italian”] but an encouraging message:

All of Italy is seeing a renewed interest in dialects, a revival linked to a national — and greater European — identity crisis. “It’s a matter of territorial belonging,” says Andrea Maniero, a linguistics expert and resident of Nardò, where everyone understands the local lingo even if they don’t speak it. “The ones most lured to learning it are the youth, who are fascinated by the old speech of their grandparents.”

According to national statistics, half of all Italians prefer to speak in a dialect, whether it’s picturesque Napulitano (Neapolitan), Siculo (Sicilian), Francoprovenzale (an ancient Gallo-Romance language spoken in Alpine valleys), Fùrlan (Friulan, typical of the Friuli region in northeastern Italy) or Ladino (an old version of Latin) — just to name a few. In fact, Italy’s Union of Tourist Boards calculates that the country has some 11,000 dialects. The influence of Napulitano and Siculo is so strong that the iPhone offers them as language options.

To feed this demand, there are online courses; DIY books that teach archaic forms of Albanian and Greek that pirates brought to Italy centuries ago; and spontaneous get-togethers in crumbling castles to chat in Zeneize (Genoese, a dialect of the Ligurian language). A few kindergartens and middle schools in Naples have introduced courses on Napulitanamente (”the Neapolitan way”). In Rome, some curricula feature Romanesco, the colorful vernacular of the great 19th-century Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.

(Of course “Ladino” should be Ladin in English, and god knows what Marchetti means by “an old version of Latin,” but what the heck, it’s journalism, not linguistics.) Folklorist and songwriter Andrea Baccassino says of his native Neretino: “My dialect is real, richer than Italian, which is a fake construction. There are untranslatable words with no Italian equivalent.” Which, yeah, is unscientific, but I’m glad dialect speakers feel that way. Thanks, Trevor!

It’s been a couple of years since we got into the whole Indo-Europeans-and-Corded-Ware thing (e.g., here), so I thought I’d post Re-theorising mobility and the formation of culture and language among the Corded Ware Culture in Europe, by Kristian Kristiansen, Morten E. Allentoft, Karin M. Frei, Rune Iversen, Niels N. Johannsen, Guus Kroonen, Łukasz Pospieszny, T. Douglas Price, Simon Rasmussen, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Martin Sikora, and Eske Willerslev, from Antiquity 91. Here’s the Abstract:

Recent genetic, isotopic and linguistic research has dramatically changed our understanding of how the Corded Ware Culture in Europe was formed. Here the authors explain it in terms of local adaptations and interactions between migrant Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and indigenous North European Neolithic cultures. The original herding economy of the Yamnaya migrants gradually gave way to new practices of crop cultivation, which led to the adoption of new words for those crops. The result of this hybridisation process was the formation of a new material culture, the Corded Ware Culture, and of a new dialect, Proto-Germanic. Despite a degree of hostility between expanding Corded Ware groups and indigenous Neolithic groups, stable isotope data suggest that exogamy provided a mechanism facilitating their integration. This article should be read in conjunction with that by Heyd (2017, in this issue).

And here’s an intriguing excerpt:

The new data conforms well to the reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European (Mallory & Adams 2006), which provides important clues that the subsistence strategy of early Indo-European-speaking societies was based on animal husbandry. It includes, for instance, terms related to dairy and wool production, horse breeding and wagon technology. Words for crops and land cultivation, however, have proved to be far more difficult to reconstruct. These results from historical linguistics are supported by similar evidence from archaeology (Andersen 1995; Kristiansen 2007). With the recent study by Kroonen and Iversen (in press), we can now demonstrate how social and economic interaction with existing Neolithic societies also had a corresponding linguistic imprint. This should not surprise us, as similar results are well documented from the interaction of Yamnaya societies with their northern Uralic-speaking neighbours (Parpola & Koskallio 2007).

Thanks, Trevor!

The latest issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine has, as usual, a lively letters section, and I thought the following exchange was worth posting:

Admiral Grace Hopper’s name may replace John C. Calhoun’s on the college where I lived some 70 years ago, but she is not its “namesake.” Your headline has it backwards. The college itself is Admiral Hopper’s namesake, just as the university is Elihu Yale’s. She and he are eponymous.

Dick Mooney ’47
New York, NY

We paused over the headline, for exactly that reason. But our house dictionary, Merriam-Webster, has ruled that a “namesake” can be either party. Interestingly (at least for us word geeks), the quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary also have it both ways.—Eds.

I had the same reaction when I saw the headline in the previous issue, and I’m glad to have it cleared up, with references to two of my favorite dictionaries!

Elon Gilad has another good Haaretz column, this time on an interesting surname:

Many Israelis welcomed the news that the Israel Defense Forces’ new chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, will be the first Israeli of Moroccan descent to attain the senior post. While it is true that both Eisenkot’s parents were born in Morocco, many – including a headline in the cover of Yedioth Ahronoth Sunday – asked how it is that the first Moroccan chief of staff has such an Ashkenazi sounding last name. […] Eisenkot is far from being a common name among European Jews since in German it means “Iron feces.”

On the other hand, Azenkot and other variations on that spelling are quite popular among the Jews of Tunisia and Morocco, and have been so for centuries, much earlier than the small trickle of European Jews to Morocco mentioned by Biton. The name is recorded among Sephardic Jews as early as the 17th, when we have the first record of the name inn the person of Rabbi Saadia Azencot, who lived in the Netherlands at the time, where he was teacher of famous Swiss theologian Johann Heinrich Hottinger. […]

The name Azenkot comes from the Berber languages, where azankad means ‘deer.’ It appears in names of several Berber tribes such as the Aza Izenkad tribe of the Tata oasis and the Old Izenkad tribe, both in south Morocco. Jews with names derived from this Berber word probably had an ancestor who had some kind of relationship with these or other Berber tribes, such as trading with them or living among them.

Apparently, the name turned from Azenkot to Eisenkot, when the new chief of staff’s father immigrated to Israel.

I love stories like that! Kobi, who sent me the link, added:

I know a person with the name Tarabulski, which is even more unlikely. His parents came from Syria and the name was Tarabulsi which means “from Tripoli,” which is from the town of Tripoli in Lebanon. At the time of immigration the Syrians, who didn’t know Hebrew, had to deal with an Ashkenazi immigration officer and the result was “Tarabulski”. In the present phone book there are 28 Tarabulskis. Interestingly, I find 7 people with a similar name in the US. I wonder what else can we find about this name, maybe languagehat readers can tell us more.

So any stories about the name Tarabulski will be welcome.

This is not a profound post, but my curiosity has been aroused and must be satisfied. I looked up the Russian word чайница and found it defined as “tea caddy.” I called to my wife “What’s a tea caddy?” She had no idea. Fortunately, the internet came to our rescue in the form of Wikipedia: “A tea caddy is a box, jar, canister, or other receptacle used to store tea.” (They go on to add that “the word is believed to be derived from catty, the Chinese pound,” which is interesting in itself.) Simple and straightforward, except that I’ve never heard of such a thing; if I had a jar of tea I’d just call it a jar of tea. Is this a UK word, an obsolete word, what? Are you familiar with the term?

I’ve just finished reading Goncharov’s Oblomov in Russian, something I’ve been looking forward to since I read it in English (in Magarshack’s translation) decades ago. It’s a different book than I had remembered — less jolly, more divided. Oblomov the character is one of the great creations of world literature; the novel to which he gives life is something of a mess. I’ll start by quoting Richard Freeborn’s description in The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (warning: spoilers from here on out):

[T]he novel as a whole divides into two appreciably different segments, the first being theatrical in form, with Oblomov presented to us scenically in the squalor of his St. Petersburg apartment leading a “dressing-gown existence.” The second is a more conventional novel form of the love-story type which tells of the hero’s relations with Olga, their eventual parting and Oblomov’s return to his former state of near-hibernation in the company of the peasant woman Pshenitsyna who becomes his wife.

Unfortunately, the first segment is by far the best, and it makes up only a quarter of the novel (the first of four parts). Oblomov and his lazy, incompetent, but loyal servant Zakhar (who’s looked after him since childhood, pulling off and putting on his boots and brushing his coat) are magnificent characters, straight out of Gogol (like so much of Russian literature); a couple of minor characters are also Gogolian, like the one introduced here (Magarshack’s translation):

A man of indefinite age and of an indefinite appearance came into the room; he had reached the age when it was difficult to say how old he was; he was neither ugly nor handsome, neither tall nor short, neither fair nor dark; nature had not bestowed on him a single striking or outstanding characteristic, neither good nor bad. Some called him Ivan Ivanich, others Ivan Vassilyevich, and still others Ivan Mikhaylovich. People were also uncertain about his surname: some said it was Ivanov, some called him Vassilyev or Andreyev, and others thought he was Alexeyev. A stranger, meeting him for the first time and being told his name, immediately forgot it, as he forgot his face, and never noticed what he said.

Alexeyev (his conventional name in the novel) is a surprisingly useful character, showing up and providing a sympathetic ear just when one is needed, and of course demanding nothing for himself. Another such is the maid Anisya, whose dominant feature could not be more Gogolesque: “Her eyes had grown even brighter, and her nose, that speaking nose of hers, was thrust forward, glowing with cares, thoughts, and intentions, seeming to speak though her tongue was silent.”

But alas, the main characters apart from Oblomov are his childhood friend Stolz (whose father was German and mother Russian) and his great love Olga, and they are both straight from the prop room. They are of the finest cardboard and lovingly decorated, but still, he is the active Role Model (to set against Oblomov’s passive Bad Example), and she is the Angelic Woman, and as soon as they enter the picture the novel goes dead as a work of art. They take turns sternly telling Oblomov he must pull himself out of his sloth and Do Something (though what exactly is never clear, any more than it is clear what Stolz is up to in all his travels and feverish activities), and eventually give up and marry each other (and live a tediously virtuous and active idyll in Crimea which for some reason Goncharov feels he has to describe in detail). There are wonderful moments and descriptions throughout, but basically the book turns into one of those sad realist works in which the characters illustrate life principles that it hopes to inculcate into the reader and society at large (Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done being the locus classicus). The last section should have been cut altogether, and the previous two should have been much shorter and funnier. But then I always seem to want novels to be shorter (the locus classicus, where I see I quoted a nice passage from Goncharov).

I’m making it sound worse than it is — I should probably have waited until the irritation wore off. Everyone should read at least the first part, and having done so you will want to know what becomes of the characters and will probably read on, and you may very well be more tolerant of the plottiness and the cardboard than this hardened old aesthete. But at least you have been warned to lower your expectations.

Matt sent me the following request for information:

I’m writing to ask you about the phrase “more fool me.”
I recently used it in a translation, only to have it changed by the editor to “More the fool me.”
I was going to ask him to change it back, but I did a quick Google search and found that “More the fool me” is completely acceptable (Google actually claims to have more hits for it, although of course those figures aren’t reliable).
Just out of curiosity, which one do you use? Do any of your references have anything to say about which is original etc.?

I responded:

Huh! I don’t recall using it myself, but I think of it as “the more fool me.” I find the version without “the” completely acceptable, and “more the fool me” completely weird — I don’t remember ever encountering it, and it astonishes me that it’s possibly the most used (according to Our Lord Google).

I just checked Partridge’s Dictionary of Catch Phrases, but he doesn’t include it (even though it’s exactly the sort of thing the book focuses on). So I turn to the Varied Reader: is it “the more fool me,” “more the fool me,” or just “more fool me”? And does anybody know anything about the history of the expression?

A correspondent writes that he was puzzled by Oscar Wilde’s reference to “vowelled” Greek, which apparently alludes to this passage from Keats’s Lamia:

Soft went the music the soft air along,
While fluent Greek a vowelled undersong
Kept up among the guests.

What the devil did he mean by “vowelled undersong”? My correspondent did some googling and “found Browning, of all people, discussing it in the preface of his Agamemnon”:

Just a word more on the subject of my spelling — in a transcript from the Greek and there exclusively — Greek names and places precisely as does the Greek author. I began this practice, with great innocency of intention, some six-and-thirty years ago. […] I supposed I was doing a simple thing enough: but there has been till lately much astonishment at os and us, ai and oi, representing the same letters in Greek. Of a sudden, however, whether in translation or out of it, everybody seems committing the offence, although the adoption of u for υ [upsilon] still presents such difficulty that it is a wonder how we have hitherto escaped “Eyripides.” But there existed a sturdy Briton who, Ben Jonson informs us, wrote “The Life of the Emperor Anthony Pie” — whom we now acquiesce in as Antoninus Pius: for “with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes satin.” Yet there is, on all sides, much profession of respect for what Keats called “vowelled Greek” — “consonanted,” one would expect […]

I welcome all thoughts about this odd meme. And I share with you “Flatulence – a sonnet,” discovered in the course of the googling and passed along for my delectation; it begins:

My “vowelled undersong” is not in Greek,
Nor has it, really, much to do with vowels.
It’s not apparent when I try to speak,
But rumbles unimpeded from my bowels.

Thanks, Bruce!

Mary Dockray-Miller (Professor of English at Lesley University) has a JSTOR Daily post that features a bit of history hitherto unknown to me:

The male professors who led the field of Anglo-Saxon studies in the late nineteenth century emphatically defined English Philology—the study of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English—as a scientific, empirical subject that was also (appropriately) masculine. The study of Anglo-Saxon thus allowed nineteenth-century women to engage in quasi-objective processes of grammatical description and translation, as opposed to more belletristic appreciation of literary texts, a potentially emotional and “feminine” activity considered better suited to the parlor than the library or classroom. […]

Women’s colleges that sought to prove their academic rigor thus offered Anglo-Saxon. Girls’ academies and seminaries that sought to become full-fledged colleges added Anglo-Saxon to their catalogs. Some of these women’s colleges did “feminize” the Anglo-Saxon class: They included the Anglo-Saxon “women’s poems”—Judith, Juliana, and Elene—in their curricula. (Those texts were not part of the syllabus at the equivalent men’s schools.) Before World War I, at least 32 women’s colleges throughout the United States offered Anglo-Saxon; these range from Smith College in Massachusetts to the Florida State College for Women (now the coeducational Florida State University) to Mills College in California. Many graduates of these colleges became classroom teachers in K-12 schools, providing staffing for the growing numbers of public schools throughout the U.S.

Female college graduates and advanced-degree holders who had expertise in Anglo-Saxon were able to enter the female professoriate as English professors, though they were employed almost exclusively at women’s colleges. The growing number of coeducational colleges and universities at the end of the nineteenth century actually worked against the development of women faculty, since women were only very rarely hired to teach men, while men were routinely hired to teach women. Women faculty hired by coeducational universities in the U.S. were confined to teaching in the “ladies” or “domestic science” departments; women who wished to teach natural sciences, history, mathematics, or Anglo-Saxon had to do so at colleges exclusively for women.

Isn’t that interesting? (I regret to say that, less surprisingly, there is a racist aspect to the study of “Anglo-Saxon”; you can read all about it at the link.) Thanks, Paul!

I remember reading about this years ago, but I’d forgotten it because it’s so counterintuitive: the state Wyoming, to quote that Wikipedia article, “was named after the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, with the name ultimately being derived from the Munsee word xwé:wamənk, meaning ‘at the big river flat.'” The name is so indelibly associated with a western state that my brain refuses to accept it’s originally from Pennsylvania. And the Wyoming Valley article adds a piquant detail:

During the American Revolutionary War, the Battle of Wyoming took place here on July 3, 1778, in which more than 300 Revolutionaries died at the hands of Loyalists and their Iroquois allies. The incident was depicted by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell in his 1809 poem Gertrude of Wyoming. […] The popularity of the poem may have led to the state of Wyoming later being named after the valley.

The Gertrude of Wyoming article quotes the opening of the poem, whose first four lines are as follows:

On Susquehanna’s side, fair Wyoming!
Although the wild-flower on thy ruin’d wall,
And roofless homes, a sad remembrance bring,
Of what thy gentle people did befall;

And from this we learn (as might be expected from the accented initial syllable of the Munsee word) that the stress was originally on the first syllable, WY-oming (or possibly on the last, but that seems less likely). I wonder when it shifted to the current Wy-O-ming, with penultimate stress?