languagehat.com

My (excellent) local NPR radio station, during their afternoon classical program, announced Telemann’s Violin Concerto in A major, nicknamed “The Frogs”… or “Die Relinge” in the original. Huh? thought I: isn’t the German for ‘frog’ Frosch? So it is, but the Grimm dictionary has an entry describing it as a kind of toad:

reling, m. krötenart, sumpf– oder teichfrosch: eine art krotten, die man reling oder möhmlein nennet, so im frühling und sommer in den unsaubern pfützen sitzen und singen, sind goldgelb oder fast rothgelb und unten am bauch schwarz gescheckigt, gar unlustig anzusehen. Simpl. 1, 384 Kurz. es ist schreibung für röhling, und das thier hat seinen namen von dem ihm eigenen tone, vgl. bair. röheln, rüheln, grunzen, wiehern, schreien wie ein esel (s. dazu röcheln); in Nordfranken rühling sumpf- oder teichfrosch Schm.2 2, 85; hessisch roeling wasserfrosch und wassereidechse Vilmar 330.

It’s not in any of my modern dictionaries, even the Harper-Collins Unabridged. So my question is: would modern German-speakers recognize this word, or would it be taken as the homophonous Reling ‘rail (on a ship)’?

I’ve recently finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and am still stumbling about in a Neapolitan daze (in fact I’m starting on my little stack of other novels set in Naples, beginning with John Horne Burns’s The Gallery), so I’m pleased to be able to bring you a relevant link, Melinda Harvey’s interview with Ann Goldstein, her English translator. (Warning for those of you who might want to read the books: there are spoilers.) She talks about learning Italian:

Superficially, it was easy because I had studied French and Latin. I had the basic vocabulary and the basic grammatical structures, in a sense. Because I’ve never lived there I don’t have a verbal fluency that I wish I had, you know, street language. I learned my Italian in such an unconventional way, that is to say through reading. I don’t have any academic training and I don’t have “living there” training—I have book training! I often feel that I have big gaps in my ways of understanding things. I don’t speak idiomatic Italian—I have that fluency when I read but not when I walk around.

That’s the same way I know Russian. And here’s an exchange that describes a couple of obscure words:

MH: You translated the Neapolitan novels as they fell off the press, as it were. You didn’t have the full sweep of the novels at your disposal when you began your translation of them. Would you have done certain things differently in terms of the translation had you known what you do now about the series? […]

AG: The obvious example is smarginatura. It appears just once in My Brilliant Friend and then Ferrante doesn’t use the word again until The Story of the Lost Child. And there it becomes this huge, elaborate thing—I don’t think she uses the word again until then, or maybe only once or twice. Just as a one-word example, I might have translated it differently, had I known. I’m not sure. I certainly would have had a much better idea of what she meant; of what it meant to her. Also in Frantumaglia she talks a lot about the word frantumaglia. She says it’s a word that her mother used, and she talks at great length about the many meanings that it has. I’m not even sure if it’s a real Italian word… Literally, it means both “the process of shattering” and “the result of shattering.” So it’s already complicated. And then she talks about how her mother used it in different contexts and how she then adopted it.

Thanks, Trevor!

Meg Miller reports on what sounds like an interesting exhibit:

The acrylic mural of a Queens map that greets visitors to the Queens Museum, in New York, is enormous, abstract, and angular, rendering the borough in a colorful array of polygons. Inside the shapes is the word for “tongue” in each of the endangered languages still spoken in Queens, by residents the artist Mariam Ghani refers to as people with “forked tongues.” There are 59 such languages in total.

“Migrants and the multilingual are constantly speaking with forked tongues, slipping from one language to another,” Ghani writes in her description of her project The Garden of the Forked Tongues, which is part of the exhibition Nonstop Metropolis, a collaborative show based around the work of author Rebecca Solnit and geographer Josh Jelly-Schapiro. […]

Queens has been called “one of the most diverse places on Earth.” The evidence is in the languages. According to the Endangered Language Alliance, whose data Ghani used to create the mural as well as an accompanying interactive graphic, an estimated 500 languages are currently spoken in Queens. The 59 languages depicted in the map are the ones endangered, which means that Queens residents are some of the last people on Earth who know the language that they speak. Given that there are a total of 574 “critically endangered” languages worldwide, according to UNESCO, 59 is a pretty remarkable number to have just in one borough.

Here‘s the project site, and if you click on the interactive graphic link you get a clickable map that will provide information on each of the languages, e.g.:

Bukhori (Tajiki: бухорӣ – buxorī, Hebrew script: בוכארי buxori), also known as Bukhari and Bukharian, is a dialect of the Tajiki language spoken in Central Asia (and in the diaspora) by Bukharian Jews.

Spoken in: Kew Gardens, Queens

alternate name(s): Bukharian
word for tongue: זבאן/zabon
language family: Indo-Iranian (West)
place(s) of origin: Uzbekistan, Turkestan, Tajikistan
worldwide speaker population: 110000

And it’s got a video of an elderly gentleman speaking the language, which is so much like Persian/Farsi I could understand chunks of it even though my studies of the latter are a couple of decades in the past — in fact, I wouldn’t have guessed it was a different language. Thanks, Trevor!

(Warning: the “interactive graphic” link didn’t work the last time I tried it; I just got a blank page. Don’t know if there’s a site problem; maybe wait a day and try again.)

Having finished Sergei Aksakov’s wonderful Семейная хроника, which I had read years ago in its English translation as The Family Chronicle, I’m now reading his follow-up, Воспоминания [Memoirs] (translated as A Russian Schoolboy), which oddly uses real family names instead of the “Bagrovs” of the earlier book — it must have been an odd experience reading them when they were published together as a book in 1856. At any rate, at the start of the book eight-year-old Sergei is taken by his parents to Kazan in the winter of 1799, and one night as he has just gotten to sleep he is dragged off to visit his parents’ friends the Knyazheviches, whose house “отличался вполне славянской надписью над воротами: ‘Добрые люди, милости просим!'” [was notable for the thoroughly Slavic inscription over the gate: “Welcome, good people!”]. A footnote explains:

Надпись по длинноте и крупноте букв не умещалась, а потому была написана следующим образом: “Д. Л. Милости просим”. Читая буквы по-старинному, то есть “Добро Люди”, получался почти тот же смысл, какой выражался бы в полной надписи.

There wasn’t room for the inscription because of its length and the large letters, so it was written as follows: “D. L. Milosti prosim”. Reading the letters the old-fashioned way, that is “Dobro [good] Lyudi [people],” the same sense was expressed as in the full inscription.

The old Russian letter names are given in a chart here, and further fun with them was had in this 2008 LH post.

Searching for something else, I happened on the complete online text (pdf) of Barry A. Popik and Gerald Leonard Cohen, Studies in Slang, VII (2006). Anyone interested in slang will want to check it out; a few article titles picked at random:

POPIK: Tin Pan Alley origin is explained in a 1903 newspaper article

COHEN: To need hair of the dog that bit you ‘need a bit more booze to get over a hangover

COHEN: Lose one’s marbles–Jonathan Lighter’s 1902 attestation refutes my suggestion of a 1920s Missouri origin of the expression

POPIK: Cakewalk–1897 New-Orleans Times-Democrat article explains it was originally a marriage ceremony among French blacks in Louisiana

POPIK: Slang applesauce (spoken dismissively) derives from a once popular but corny joke, possibly in a minstrel context

The joke involves a teacher with twelve pupils and only eleven apples, and “corny” is a good word for it.

Esther Allen writes about the Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto and his 1956 novel Zama, which she translated; both he and it sound fascinating and well worth investigating, and I recommend the whole essay, but I’ll feature a couple of bits of particular LH interest. First, an odd edition:

Perhaps Di Benedetto imagined he could leapfrog Buenos Aires, going directly from Mendoza into an international literary career. Some suggestion of this is present as early as Declinación y ángel / Decline and Angel, a curious bilingual edition published in 1958 by Mendoza’s public library. The intent behind the inclusion of English translations, as the jacket copy explains, was to make the slim paperback a missive out into the world beyond Spanish. It was a good idea, but one ahead of its time; Borges would not see the first volume of his work in English translation until 1962. And the execution was problematic. The translator—her name given simply as “Ana” on the title page—was equipped for her daunting task with a bilingual dictionary and an at best intermediate grasp of English. If Di Benedetto presented the non-Spanish speakers he met in the course of his travels with copies of this slim volume, it can’t have served him well.

After his mysterious 1976 arrest by the new military government of Argentina:

Whatever the real reason, Di Benedetto would not be silenced. He was forbidden to work as a writer while in prison but was allowed to correspond, so he devised a way of including short stories in his correspondence. He would begin, “I had a lovely dream last night; let me tell you about it,” and then write an entire story in letters so microscopic they had to be deciphered through a magnifying glass.

And the opening of the essay resonates with this very early LH post (I am amused by my passionate defense of my position in a long-forgotten blogwar, but I stand by that position):

On December 23rd, 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, arrested and imprisoned seven months earlier, stood in the heart of St. Petersburg with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle while an officer read out a sentence condemning them all to death by firing squad. For five minutes, the 28-year-old Dostoyevsky knew his life was about to end. The first three men were tied to stakes, guns lowered in their faces; the future author of Crime and Punishment was in the next group. Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide-de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar that commuted the group’s sentence to exile and hard labor in Siberia. Many a biographer has linked that moment to themes and passages in the subsequent works. “The memory of this false execution,” observes Henri Troyat, “remained alive in Dostoyevsky’s writing.”

Antonio Di Benedetto, a writer so influenced he would say he was “invented” by Dostoyevsky, also heard his own execution read out and knew he was about to die. For 18 months during Argentina’s Dirty War, from March 24th, 1976 to September 3rd, 1977, he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad. For the Di Benedetto biographer, however, the impact of the mock executions on the literary work requires a more complex calculation. Di Benedetto faced the firing squads two decades after writing Zama, his first novel and third book, which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through 20 years later.

Thanks, Trevor!

Helen Davidson reports for the Guardian that “while the vast number of Indigenous languages are considered endangered, there are many that have a good chance of survival if they are nurtured”:

The world of mobile apps and online research tools are making languages, their history and their context more accessible to non-Indigenous Australians who wish to better understand and interact with the oldest continuing culture in the world.

Last year Charles Darwin University launched a searchable online dictionary of Yolngu Matha – the languages spoken across much of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Its success has prompted Garde to begin work on a similar project for Bininj Kunwok. A key concern, he says, is to make sure the language is controlled by the community to ensure they retain ownership over a significant part of their culture. The same concerns are held about language programs in mainstream education, outside the control of community groups and caretakers of traditional knowledge.

In March Canberra’s Australian National University launched the Austkin database of Indigenous kinship terms and skin names, which seeks to preserve those still heard every day in communities, as well as create a database of terms in languages which are essentially extinct except for mentions in historical archives.

There’s lots more good stuff at the link (“Some of the children who learn Gumbaynggirr through the centre are ‘right into it’ but others are more focused on learning swearwords, he says, laughing”), including a nice map of “the language, social or nation groups of Aboriginal Australia”; thanks, Trevor!

I ran across a reference in a Russian passage to “Тау Кита,” and immediately recognized it as the nearby star Tau Ceti. I thought with amusement “Hey, Кита [kita] is a lot like Ceti!” and then did a classic double-take: of course it is — both the Russian and Latin words are borrowed from Greek κῆτος ‘whale’! (By the time the Slavs got around to borrowing the Greek word, eta had long since become /i/, hence кит [kit].) The Greek word is an s-stem neuter, so the Greek name of the star is Ταυ Κήτους. And when I checked the Russian etymology in Vasmer, I found this hilarious bit at the end: “Начиная с Иоанна Экзарха встречается также русск.-цслав. лежахъ κῆτος – ложная калька по созвучию ср.-греч. κῆτος с κεῖμαι ‘лежу'”: “Beginning with John the Exarch, we also find the Russian–Church Slavic лежахъ [lezhakhъ] ‘whale,’ an erroneous calque based on the similarity of Middle Greek κῆτος [kitos] with κεῖμαι [kime] ‘I lie (down).’” John the Exarch writes “кѵтьстіи животи еже сѧ рекутъ лежаси”; I don’t know where it was subsequently used, but I’m glad it didn’t survive — that’s the kind of silly mistake it’s embarrassing to have cluttering up one’s language, like English author for what should be autor.

Joel of Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Japanese Destroyer Captain, by Tameichi Hara (Naval Institute Press, 2013 reprint of a 1961 translation), and I thought this discussion of ship names was interesting enough to repost:

Names of Japanese ships must sound strange to foreign readers. Many Westerners during the Pacific War called a Japanese ship “Maru.” It must be noted, however, that warships or other government ships do not have names ending with Maru. Maru has always been and still is used only for merchant ships or fishing boats.

Maru literally means circle, round or chubby. In medieval Japan, Maru was frequently used for childhood names of boys. For example, in his childhood Hideyoshi Toyotomi, the famed warlord of the 16th century, often considered Japan’s Napoleon, was called Hiyoshi Maru, which may be translated literally as “chubby (or lucky) sunny boy”; and as a youth Yoshitsune Minamoto, the great 12th century general, was called Ushiwaka Maru, meaning “healthy and strong as a calf.”

The Japanese people, by way of personification, came to add Maru to ship names. In the last 100 years Maru has been dropped from the names of all government ships. Japanese warships, like those of other nations, are classified so that all ships of a given type have names of the same category. Hence anyone familiar with the system can tell at once from its name whether a ship is a battleship, cruiser, destroyer, and so on.

Japanese battleships were always named after ancient provinces or mountains. Famed Yamato was christened for the province of Japan’s most ancient capital city, Nara, in Central Honshu. This word was also used in ancient times to mean the whole country of Japan. This may explain the close attachment felt by the Imperial Navy for the greatest battleship ever built. Her sister ship, Musashi, was named after the province immediately north of Tokyo. […]

Heavy cruisers were traditionally named after mountains, and light cruisers were given the names of rivers. Carriers usually bore poetic names having to do with flight. Hosho, the world’s first keel-up carrier, built in 1921, means “Soaring Phoenix.” Hiryu and Sory[u], of the Pearl Harbor attack, may be translated “Flying Dragon” and “Blue Dragon,” respectively.

There’s more at the link; I knew Maru was used for ship names, but I had no idea of the complexities.

Shayna Weiss’s “Shtisel’s Ghosts: The Politics of Yiddish in Israeli Popular Culture” (from the Mar. 6 In Geveb) is a fascinating look at the Israeli television drama Shtisel and its groundbreaking use of Yiddish, and at the place of Yiddish in Israel more generally:

Tamar Ben Baruch, an assistant director and producer for the show, spoke with me about how Yiddish made its way onto Shtisel. The show’s creators wanted to include Yiddish on the show in order to reflect the realities of Haredi life in Israel. However, the question of how much Yiddish to use was a constant point of discussion during the writing and editing process. One of the most consistent questions was when characters should speak Yiddish. In other multilingual Israeli television series, it was obvious that characters would speak their minority language (i.e. Russian or Arabic, or even Moroccan-Judeo Arabic slang) amongst their families and in their homes, while speaking Hebrew when interacting with the larger Israeli public. But the uses of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Haredi community are not as clearly delineated. WIth the exception of a very small minority of Haredim who reject modern Hebrew, Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews freely mix Yiddish and Hebrew in their everyday conversations for both work and pleasure. The show’s writers also debated whether age or gender should dictate language choice. For example, both Shulem and his brother Nochem are fluent in Hebrew, but they tend to speak Yiddish to one another, which the writers use to emphasizes both Nochem’s lack of Israeliness now that he has chosen to live abroad, as well as the brothers’ connection to Bubbe Shtisel, who is far less fluent in Hebrew than in her native Yiddish.

The show’s setting in the Geula neighborhood of Jerusalem indicates that while the characters are fully Haredi, they are more open to secular society than their neighbors in Mea Shearim, which is known for religious extremism. Geula’s moderation is reflected by the characters’ frequent use of Hebrew in daily life. As a general rule, the older the character, the more they speak Yiddish in their daily life. Yet the younger characters clearly understand Yiddish, even if they speak it less frequently, reflecting the increasing integration of Haredim into wider Jewish Israeli society.

[…] Yiddish made periodic appearances on Israeli sketch comedy skits in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently a handful of shows, most notably Merḥak negiah [A Touch Away], featured small amounts of Yiddish dialogue, but nowhere close to the level seen in Shtisel. While exact numbers are not available, Tamar estimates that up to 20 percent of some episodes take place entirely in Yiddish. Furthermore, the show incorporates a significant amount of loshn koydesh, using Hebrew and Aramaic phrases that emerge from the canon of Jewish religious texts such as the Torah or Talmud. Loshn koydesh phrases are pronounced with a Yiddish accent instead of the modified Sephardic accent of Modern Hebrew, to indicate their distinct and elevated status. Several of the characters have their own loshn koydesh catchphrases, including Shulem’s “khosdey hashem” [God’s kindness], a similar analog to borukh hashem [Thank God]. The show’s success gives hope to artists working to promote Yiddish in their own work, and offers visions of how to incorporate the language into works meant to reach beyond the Yiddish-speaking world.

There’s lots more, including the phrase “He went to sell beygelekh” [“He went to sell pretzels,” meaning the person in question has passed away]. My thanks to whoever provided me with the link!