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Angela Watercutter at Wired writes:

Sometimes bad actors can do good accents. Sometimes great actors do terrible ones. In the video here, dialect coach Erik Singer analyzes the accents of 32 different actors to see who aces the accent test. Turns out, Idris Elba is one of greatest around. From his performance as Nelson Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom to his mastery of the Baltimore accent in The Wire, he’s amazing. But he’s rare. Actors ranging from Brad Pitt to Will Smith have struggled with their ability to sound like they’re from somewhere else. Watch Singer analyze the best (and worst) in the biz above.

The sixteen minutes go by quickly, in efficient bite-sized analyses; if you have any interest in the subject, check it out.

Cara Giaimo has a fascinating investigation of a whaling mystery in Atlas Obscura:

On December 20, 1792, the whaling ship Asia was making its way through the Desolation Islands, in the Indian Ocean, when the crew decided to stop for lunch. According to the log keeper, the meal was a great success: “At 1 PM Sent our Boat on Shore After Some refreshments,” he wrote. “She returned with A Plenty of Woggins we Cooked Some for Supper.”

Right about now, you may be feeling peckish. But you may also be wondering: What in the world is a woggin?

New species are discovered all the time. Unknown old species—extinct ones, found as fossils and then plugged into our historical understanding of the world—turn up a lot, too. But every once in a while, all we have to go on is a word. New or old, known or unknown, no one knew what a woggin was until Judith Lund, whaling historian, decided to find out.

I won’t tell you the solution, because getting there is half the fun, but rest assured the mystery is solved. (I presume the answer will be discussed in the comment thread, though.) Thanks, Trevor!

Geoff Pullum has a typically witty and provocative post about the CIA report-writing style guide, Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications. There’s other stuff of interest (for instance, the CIA uses the Oxford comma), but what I want to highlight here is this passage:

Before I go on, though, I wonder if you have noticed three remarkable things already. First, the book’s title: No apostrophe on Writers! Did you spot that? Second, no apostrophe on Watchers in “Word Watchers List,” either. And third (I was toying with you) I deliberately followed suit two paragraphs back when I wrote “rogues gallery” (if the CIA can risk flouting international apostrophe conventions, so can I).

You may recall that in “Being an Apostrophe,” I reported that “I always use the apostrophe in the standard way, even when texting; I’m a conservative.” Not one of those long-haired pinko radical grammarians, the Happiness Boys. But I also said that “I wouldn’t shed a tear for it,” because “the level of harmful confusion attendant on dropping all apostrophes from written English would be zero.” Our intelligence agencies seem to take a similar view, and don’t bother to include apostrophes on modifier nouns. That way they don’t have to decide whether it should have been Writer’s Guide or Writers’ Guide. They just finesse the question. Very sensible.

I don’t think that had ever occurred to me, but sure enough, it is sensible. I’m normally a stylistic conservative myself, but like Pullum, I wouldn’t shed a tear if those apostrophes disappeared from the written language.

Two links on an interesting topic:

1) When Turkish was written in the Greek, Armenian and even Syrian script, by Michael Erdman:

The two largest allographic communities were the Armenians and the Greeks. Armeno-Turkish – a rendering of Ottoman Turkish in Armenian letters – gave rise to a vibrant publishing industry and cultural community. The orthography was largely phonetic and based upon Western Armenian readings of the letters. It was in Armeno-Turkish that many French and other Western European works came into Turkish. This was a situation assisted by the reticence of the Sublime Porte to authorise Ottoman Turkish printing presses, despite the expansion of Armenian, Greek and Jewish ones. […]

Turkish written in Greek characters also laid the foundation for a vibrant publishing industry, with a heavy emphasis on religious materials. The language, known as Karamanlidika in Greek and Karamanlıca in Turkish, was the everyday idiom of the Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians of Anatolia. Despite being ethnically and linguistically Turkish, their religion required them to be classified as Rum or Greek Orthodox under the Ottoman system.

Lots of great illustrations; thanks, Trevor!

2) You should learn Ottoman Turkish, by David Selim Sayers:

If you reduced the Ottomans to Islam or Turkishness, they themselves would be the first to object. They rarely even used the word “Turk” without adding an insulting adjective like “idiotic,” “misshapen,” or “mad”. An Ottoman Empire consisting only of Turkishness would be just that: idiotic, misshapen, and mad.

You should learn Ottoman Turkish. However, that isn’t enough. Once you know the language, you have to forget everything you’ve learned about the Ottoman Empire, stand up for those rotting and looted archives you’ve never seen, dig into them, and rewrite Ottoman history. You have to read everything —from the poems Mehmed the Conqueror wrote for young boys to the correspondences of the Young Turks regarding the Armenians— and you have to share what you read with everyone. You cannot entrust this task to anyone else. Because entrusting history to others means allowing others to dictate your identity, attitudes, and life.

Elif Batuman has a story in last week’s New Yorker, “Constructed Worlds” [archived], that appeals to me greatly. It’s an evocation of what it’s like to find yourself immersed in the college experience that is often laugh-out-loud funny (I did in fact laugh out loud, and even kept reading bits to my wife even though she had already read the story); furthermore, as you will see from the excerpts below, it might have been written expressly for me:

I got a free dictionary. The dictionary didn’t include “ratatouille” or “Tasmanian devil.” […]

“Hey—no one gave me a dictionary!”

“It doesn’t have ‘Tasmanian devil,’ ” I said.

She took the dictionary from my hands, riffling the pages. “It has plenty of words.”

I told her she could have it.
. . .

I went to Linguistics 101, to see what linguistics was about. It was about how language was a biological faculty, hardwired into the brain—infinite, regenerative, never the same twice. The highest law was “the intuition of a native speaker,” a law you couldn’t find in any grammar book or program into any computer. Maybe that was what I wanted to learn. Whenever my mother and I were talking about a book and I thought of something that she hadn’t thought of, she would look at me and say admiringly, “You really speak English.”

The linguistics professor, a gentle phonetician, specialized in Turkic tribal dialects. Sometimes he would give examples from Turkish to show how different morphology could be in non-Indo-European languages, and then he would smile at me and say, “I know we have some Turkish speakers here.” Once, in the hallway before class, he told me about his work on regional consonantal variations of the name for some kind of a fire pit that Turkic people dug somewhere.

I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the city and the novel in nineteenth-century Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian to show how bad the translations were. I didn’t understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.
. . .

You were supposed to take only four classes, but when I found out that they didn’t charge extra for five I signed up for Beginning Russian.

The teacher, Barbara, was a graduate student from East Germany—she specifically said “East Germany.” She said that in Russian her name would be Varvara. We all had to choose Russian names, too. Greg became Grisha, Katie became Katya. There were two foreign students whose names didn’t change—Iván from Hungary and Svetlana from Yugoslavia. Svetlana asked if she could change her name to Zinaida, but Varvara said that Svetlana was already such a good Russian name. My name, on the other hand, though lovely, didn’t end with an –a or a –ya, which would cause complications when we learned cases. Varvara said I could choose any Russian name I wanted. Suddenly I couldn’t think of any. “Maybe I could be Zinaida,” I suggested.

Svetlana turned in her seat and stared into my face. “That is so unfair,” she told me. “You’re a perfect Zinaida.”

It somehow seemed to me that Varvara didn’t want anyone to be called Zinaida, and in the end my name was Sonya.

If every issue included a story with dictionaries and linguistics and literature and translations and Russian, I’d… oh, wait, I already subscribe. I guess I have nothing to bribe them with.

Stan Carey posts about words or usages “characteristic of Irish English (aka Hiberno-English), whether integral to its grammar or produced on occasions of unalloyed Irishness.” A couple of samples:

1. Plámás is an Irish word borrowed into Irish English meaning ‘empty flattery or wheedling’. It’s sometimes used witheringly in reference to political speech, for some reason.

5. Fooster (often foosther to evoke vernacular pronunciation) is a verb denoting fiddling or fidgeting, a kind of busy activity that is aimless or inefficient. You can stop foostering around now in search of an unsatisfying synonym.

This is the sort of thing I love. Thanks, David!

I’m almost halfway through what is generally considered Alexei Pisemsky’s best novel, the 1858 Тысяча душ, translated by Ivy Litvinov as One Thousand Souls, and I can’t wait any longer to post about it — it’s so good I have to let the world know. I’ve praised Pisemsky’s Brak po strasti [Marriage for passion] (here) and Pitershchik [The Petersburger] (here), and this is better than either of them, at least so far. It shows off to the full his powerful sense of character and plot, and how they can be made to interact in a convincing manner.

The novel starts off with a newspaper notice reading “Увольняется штатный смотритель эн-ского уездного училища, коллежский асессор Годнев с мундиром и пенсионом, службе присвоенными. Определяется смотрителем эн-ского училища кандидат Калинович” [The superintendent of schools of the N. district, Collegiate Assessor Godnev, is retiring with the uniform and pension appropriate to his service. The new superintendent will be kandidat Kalinovich]. Thus are two of the main characters introduced; at first it seems Godnev will be the protagonist, but eventually we realize it’s actually young Yakov Kalinovich, who is proud and bitter because after being orphaned, he made his way through school and university by dint of endless work and ruthless self-denial, but after graduation could find no work for two years until he was finally assigned to this provincial backwater (better jobs required the kind of influential friends and protectors he lacked). He makes the rounds of the town notables, but they all turn up their noses at him except for the ever-friendly former superintendent, so he winds up spending most of his leisure time at the Godnevs’. There he and the teenage daughter, Nastenka, become close, both because they share an interest in literature and because they have both been rejected by local society (Nastenka’s first ball was a disaster, because her mother was dead and her father, though loving, had no idea how she should dress or act).

I won’t go into further detail about the story, because I don’t want to spoil it; I’ll just say the usual nineteenth-century “marriage plot” is even more powerfully developed than it is in Trollope (my previous go-to example of how it should be done), because everyone is well motivated and their interactions are thoroughly convincing. Trollope clearly liked women and they are generally the most positive characters in his novels, but the protagonists tend to be a trifle too goody-goody, giving their heart to some young man for life and waiting patiently for that man to get over whatever other romance he has foolishly gotten entangled in. (In one case, when the young man is irretrievably lost, the woman resigns herself to being an old maid and continues living pleasantly with her mother in a flower-girt country cottage.) Furthermore, with the Victorian Trollope, realism can only go so far — it is unthinkable that one of his heroines would, say, commit suicide or (worse) become a prostitute. With a Russian writer, all bets are off, so I read with the kind of trepidation that enhances enjoyment. It’s possible, of course, that it will fall apart as did Dostoyevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova (see this post); I’ll report back when I finish it. In the meantime, I can only express my delight that it’s actually been translated; Ivy Litvinov was English-born and lived in the Soviet Union (as the wife of Maxim Litvinov) — she wrote novels herself and did many translations of Russian literature — so the Englishing should be competently done, and I urge any interested parties to locate a copy (and some publisher should reprint it).

Oh, I should mention that the “souls” of the title are serfs (as in Gogol’s Dead Souls), and a thousand of them represented real wealth — at one point a character tells Kalinovich he should marry a woman with “one thousand souls” in much the same tone with which in Austin Powers Dr. Evil says “One… Hundred… BILLION DOLLARS!”

I occasionally take a whack at dumb, prejudiced, or ill-informed items relating to language, but it’s a side dish at LH. To the redditors at badlinguistics, it’s the whole menu, so if you have a hankering for mockery of things like “Italian is dying because people are using loanwords and not the subjunctive” or “A questionable map of urheimats” or “Pinyin sucks because it isn’t based off the spelling systems of English, the Germanic languages, and/or the Romance languages,” head on over and enjoy. I got a kick out of the last of the decrees in the right margin: “R5: Whosever invokes the name of 𝓒𝓗𝓞𝓜𝓢𝓚𝓨𝓓𝓞𝓩 must do so in appropriately typeset form.” (𝓒𝓗𝓞𝓜𝓢𝓚𝓨𝓓𝓞𝓩 reference.)

This is one of those “I’ve been annoyed by this all my life and it’s time to do something about it” posts. I hate the word loess ‘a windblown deposit of fine-grained, calcareous silt or clay,’ because I have no idea how to pronounce it. AHD gives (lō’əs, lĕs, lŭs), M-W \ˈles, ˈləs, ˈlō-əs, ˈlərs\; to take these in the latter order, \ˈles\ sounds like less, \ˈləs\ (i.e., “luss”) sounds dumb, \ˈlō-əs\ sounds like Lois, and \ˈlərs\ (i.e., “lurce”) sounds dumber. But I’m willing to bite the bullet and adopt one of these pronunciations if I’m convinced that it’s widespread enough, and especially if it’s the one used by those who deal professionally with the stuff. So: how do you say it, and do you know how loess people say it?

Roberta Kwok reports in the New Yorker about a website where anyone can contribute transcriptions of bits of manuscripts from Shakespeare’s time:

The first-known records of many words are in Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s not always clear which he invented and which were already commonplace. The handwritten material of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is “more or less hidden,” according to Laura Wright, a historical linguist at the University of Cambridge and a Zooniverse volunteer. “Of course it looks like Shakespeare invented all this stuff, because his stuff is in print,” she said.

To tackle the problem, Zooniverse partnered with the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., and with the Oxford English Dictionary. Volunteers for Shakespeare’s World can view images of documents from the Folger’s manuscript collection, including family correspondence, household recipe books, and letters by state officials, and transcribe as little or as much of a page as they want. […]

Already, the project has yielded linguistic discoveries. Volunteers have found recipes for “Taffytie” and “Taffity” tarts, which might be variations on “taffeta,” implying a delicate texture. Combined with an existing record of a similar usage in the O.E.D., the new examples suggest that this was an established genre of dessert, like lemon-meringue pie is today, according to Philip Durkin, the dictionary’s deputy chief editor. A volunteer came across a recipe for “portugall farts”; Durkin noted that the O.E.D. already contains the phrases “Fartes of Portingale” and “ferte of Portugall,” defined as “a ball of light pastry,” but “to have ‘portugall farts’ as well is good,” he said. One letter, from 1567, about a headstrong youth uses the term “white lie,” pre-dating the O.E.D.’s earliest record of the phrase by nearly two centuries.

Another great use of the internet!