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A couple of years ago, in this LH thread, Ian recommended Frank Kuppner‘s book Second Best Moments in Chinese History, saying “Everything Kuppner writes is gorgeous. He uses an idiom of surreal wistfulness that might have distant forebears in a few other British writers, but essentially didn’t exist until he invented it”; I recently got a copy for my birthday (thanks, Songdog!), and I’m here to tell you it’s just as good as Ian said. Here‘s a brief review by Darian Leader (“How much lighter life seemed when one could at last acknowledge that ‘Life is a dinner party without a host./ And, frequently, without a dinner party either'”), and here are a few quatrains so you can see what kind of thing it is:

4
The bureaucrat sighs as he adds up another column.
Who can possibly still be riding so many horses?
He sighs again, and glances down from his low pavilion.
A royal dog is staring at him insolently.

8
It is said that the great poet often used to fall drunk here,
In this unpleasantly small walled garden.
And, furthermore, that he often used to wake up here,
In this unpleasantly small walled garden.

15
A marvellous peak – a second marvellous peak –
A foot trembling at the edge of a chasm –
A second foot trembling at the edge of a chasm –
A third foot trembling at the edge of a chasm –

16
Pensively, the Immortal begins to climb down the lacquer tree.
Hmm. The immediate danger seems to have blown over.
Somehow, he had assumed that this was an uninhabited planet.
He will really need to plan his journeys more carefully in future.

23
The palace dog is feeling a little confused this morning.
It was fed late, and fed by the wrong person.
The wrong person set it free in the wrong garden.
And still no-one has come to fetch it back.

71
The bureaucrat sighs as he adds up another column.
Who can possibly still be riding so many horses?
This is just as boring as his previous life was.
Why did he ask to be sent back to what he already knew?

It may not be your thing, but if it is, you’ll be glad to know where you can find 501 of those little gems.

This Wordorigins.org post by ᴚǝǝƶɐʍɐɈ is full of language sites I hadn’t known about, most of which I won’t use enough to put on the sidebar but which some of my readers may be glad to have on hand, so here are the links — you can read more about them at the linked post:

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, now freely accessible at ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ (see the About page).

Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität (I did add this one to the sidebar).

Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (not yet complete).

Corpus Diacrónico del Español (just citations, no definitions).

AlWaraq.net (“does for medieval Arabic what CORDE does for medieval Spanish”).

Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon.

Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie: Historische woordenboeken op internet.

Chronologisch woordenboek, which gives the date of first attestation of Dutch words, downloadable as a PDF here.

Lucy Scholes’ BBC list of “hidden literary gems” starts with Teffi’s Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, which won my heart immediately; the second entry is by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, of whom I’d never heard and of whom my immediate question was “how do you pronounce that?” Investigation suggests that the last two letters are decorative and it’s /burduks/ [as confirmed by Sashura in the comments], but I hope marie-lucie will be able to explain the odd-looking name. All the books sound interesting; I’ve read none of them and heard of very few (apart, of course, from Teffi, whom I recommend enthusiastically).

When I saw Lauren Collins’ “personal history” piece “Love in Translation” (“Learning about culture, communication, and intimacy in my husband’s native French”), I was of course intrigued, but when I started it I realized that it presumed more interest in her relationship with her husband than I could muster up, and much of the stuff about the wild and wacky adventures of learning a Foreign Language (the nouns have genders! the pronouns have formality levels!) has been hashed over by a thousand such pieces. But when I got to this passage, I suddenly perked up:

Linguists have attempted to make an objective assessment of the relative difficulty of languages by breaking them down into parts. One factor is the level of inflection, or the amount of information that a language carries on a single word. The languages of large, literate societies usually have larger vocabularies. You might think that their structures are also more elaborate, but the opposite is generally true: the simpler the society, the more baroque its morphology. In Archi, a language spoken in the village of Archib, in southern Dagestan, a single verb—taking into account prefixes and suffixes and other modifications—can occur in 1,502,839 different forms. This makes sense, if you think about it. Because large societies have frequent interaction with outsiders, their languages undergo simplification. Members of relatively homogeneous groups, on the other hand, share a base of common knowledge, enabling them to pile on declensions without confusing one another. Small languages stay spiky. But, amid waves of contact, large languages lose their sharp edges, becoming bevelled as pieces of glass.

Dagestan! Now you’re talking! Fortunately, the same passage caught the eye of Ben Zimmer at the Log, and he did the spadework on Archi morphology so you and I don’t have to; he also traces her thoughts on linguistic simplicity and complexity to the work of John McWhorter. Check it out.

Back in 2007, a LH post began as follows:

I have always pronounced the preposition pace (‘with due deference to’ or ‘despite,’ from the ablative of Latin pax) in the traditional anglicized way, PAY-see, and assumed that was the universally accepted pronunciation. Now I discover […] that the Church Latin version, PAH-chay, is equally acceptable (the OED gives it second place for U.K. usage, first place for U.S.). So it’s time for another Languagehat straw poll: if you use this slightly obnoxious Latinism, how do you say it?

That was a good thread, with many interesting responses. Now I have a similar question, based on this Geoffrey Pullum post at Lingua Franca, which begins with an argument between linguists: Pullum says the word redux ‘brought back’ is pronounced “riddúx” (“stressing the second syllable, as in redúction“); his friend Mark Steedman insists it’s “réddux” (“stressing the first syllable, as in réddish“).

“You seriously think,” asks Mark, “that Updike’s second Rabbit Angstrom novel is called ‘Rabbit Reddúx’?”

“And you think it’s called ‘Rabbit Réddux’?”

It was a standoff. Trying to intimidate each other with protestations of disbelief was clearly not going to get us anywhere.

Pullum checks dictionaries and discovers that “redux is not in John Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary or in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. No help there.” I found that astonishing, and thought he must have missed the word in Webster’s Third, but when I ran to my copy, sure enough, no redux (just before where it should be is reduvius ‘the type genus of Reduviidae,’ and a few words down is red-wat [Scot.] ‘wet with blood’!) I don’t know how they missed it back in 1961, but it’s in Webster’s Collegiate, with the dual pronunciations \(ˌ)rē-ˈdəks, ˈrē-ˌ\ (i.e., reeDUX and REEdux). Pullum finds it in the OED:

The matchless Oxford English Dictionary gives two pronunciations: “Brit. /ˈriːdʌks/ , U.S. /ˈriˌdəks/” is what it says. That’s like réedux and ríddux — disagreeing with both Mark and me.

He ends his post:

Certain questions about human languages don’t have definite answers. Half a dozen plausible pronunciations of redux coexist. Select at will; no one can authoritatively refute you. But you may find it a bit unsettling that no one can authoritatively confirm your correctness either. You’re on your own. It’s a phonetic jungle out there.

Me, I’ve always (mentally) said /ˈriːdʌks/ (REEdux), doubtless from having looked it up as a wee lad — I certainly didn’t hear it around the house. So: how do you say it (if, of course, you ever say it at all)?

1) The language landscape of the Philippines in 4 maps. Does what it says on the tin; the maps are “Language diversity across the country,” “The more multilingual provinces,” “The more monolingual provinces,” and “Top languages aside from Tagalog/Bisaya in Metro Manila.” The first-sentence hook: “If you were to randomly pick two people from anywhere in the Philippines, there’s a roughly 76% to 84% chance that they grew up speaking different languages.”

2) The race to save a dying language, by Ross Perlin: “The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?” The opening:

In 2013, at a conference on endangered languages, a retired teacher named Linda Lambrecht announced the extraordinary discovery of a previously unknown language. Lambrecht – who is Chinese-Hawaiian, 71 years old, warm but no-nonsense – called it Hawaii Sign Language, or HSL. In front of a room full of linguists, she demonstrated that its core vocabulary – words such as “mother”, “pig” and “small” – was distinct from that of other sign languages.

The linguists were immediately convinced. William O’Grady, the chair of the linguistics department at the University of Hawaii, called it “the first time in 80 years that a new language has been discovered in the United States — and maybe the last time.” But the new language found 80 years ago was in remote Alaska, whereas HSL was hiding in plain sight in Honolulu, a metropolitan area of nearly a million people. It was the kind of discovery that made the world seem larger.

Over at Wordorigins.org, donkeyhotay asked about “do the needful,” saying “My understanding is that this is an archaic phrase and that South Asians use it because of the time period that English was introduced into their culture.” Dave Wilton said that was correct, adding: “Indian or South Asian English is a perfectly legitimate dialect of English. Do the needful is not archaic or obsolescent in Indian English, although it is in North American and (I think) British English.” Which made me curious: is it indeed archaic or obsolescent in British English? Do any of my UK readers use it or hear it used? (Obviously speakers of other forms of English are welcome to chime in as well.)

If you’re curious about the OED citations, I posted them in my comment at that link; they start with 1681 (“My last to you was by Mr. Clayton in which I writt you the needfull”) and end with 1992 (“I went over to the drinks cabinet to do the needful”).

A couple days ago it was J. D. Åkerblad, now it’s another of those multilingual, multifaceted travelers I occasionally encounter and can’t resist posting about: Edward White’s “Boon Companion” (at the Paris Review Daily) tells the tale of Evliya Çelebi and his Seyahatname. It begins:

According to his own recollection, Evliya Çelebi, the seventeenth-century Turkish writer and traveler, experienced a life-changing epiphany on the night of his twentieth birthday. He was visited in a dream by the Prophet Muhammad, dressed nattily in a yellow woollen shawl and yellow boots, a toothpick stuck into his twelve-band turban. Muhammad announced that Allah had a special plan, one that required Evliya to abandon his prospects at the imperial court, become “a world traveler,” and “compose a marvelous work” based on his adventures.

There are intriguing descriptions of his world:

Evliya’s Istanbul was cosmopolitan and outward-looking: its population teemed with disparate ethnicities from Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, merchants, scholars, and diplomats from even farther afield, and even a surprising number of Protestant refugees—Huguenots, Anabaptists, Quakers—fleeing war, schism and persecution in Europe.

And tidbits both fascinating and hilarious:

He told terrifying stories about massacres, battles, and shipwrecks; incredible ones about witches who turned children into chickens; and ribald ones about decrepit imams still able to perform “the greater jihad,” Evliya’s euphemism for sex. Many times in the Seyahatname he found a way of entertaining readers in the process of cataloguing information. In a chapter on the various peoples he discovered in Split, he made an analysis of the Venetian dialect, faithfully listing its words for numbers one to ten, before throwing in some unessential phrases to tease the reader about what sort of scurrilous things “Evliya the pious one” had been getting up to: “begging your pardon, let me fuck your wife”; “I’ll split your head”; “don’t move, boy!”; “eat shit!”; “you eat the shit!” On the page Evliya created for himself a Falstaffian “wise fool” persona that had no precise precedent in Ottoman culture: a camel-riding, highfalutin hobo who roamed the earth praising Allah out of one side of his mouth and telling dirty jokes out of the other.

And the survival of the book is a miracle: when he died in 1684, “the Seyahatname was thousands of pages long and years away from being finished. It had been written to be read, but it was only half a century later that a eunuch at the Ottoman Palace brought the huge, tattered manuscript back to Istanbul in order to be copied. Without that, the name Evliya Çelebi would mean nothing to anyone; the Seyahatname is practically the only evidence of its author’s existence.”

Also, I’m sure Evliya would have been as glad as you and I to learn that readers have “a survival advantage” over those who don’t ever crack open a book. (Thanks, Paul!)

At Language Crawler (“Crawling the Internet for news, books, videos & resources about languages & linguistics for linguaphiles, polyglots, and language lovers”): 25 Must-See Movies Featuring Linguists, Linguistics and Languages. “Must-See” is, of course, clickbaitese (as I dimly recall, Stargate is barely worth seeing at all), but it’s certainly an interesting list, and I highly recommend Ball of Fire, featuring Gary Cooper in an uncharacteristically lively role and the unbeatable Barbara Stanwyck as the tough dame who provides the slang he needs for his encyclopedia and teaches him to conga (I wrote briefly about it here, and we discussed language in movies back in 2013). If anybody would like to recommend any of the others, most of which I haven’t seen, I’m all ears (and of course eloquent putdowns are equally welcome).

J. D. Åkerblad was one of those multilingual, multifaceted travelers I occasionally encounter and can’t resist posting about. “Johan David Åkerblad: Orientalist, Traveller, and Manuscript Collector,” by Fredrik Thomasson, a chapter from Travelling through Time: Essays in honour of Kaj Öhrnberg, ed. Sylvia Akar, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, and Inka Nokso-Koivisto (Studia Orientalia, vol. 114, 2013), is available as a pdf online, and while its main focus is on the collecting, it’s got plenty of other material:

Åkerblad had profound knowledge of, and respect for, both Ottoman and Arab learning. He studied Arabic and Turkish at Uppsala University with Carl Aurivillius, probably the foremost Orientalist in Sweden at the time. Aurivillius had studied with Christian Benedikt Michaelis in Halle, Étienne Fourmont in Paris, and Albert Schultens in Leiden. Åkerblad was already at the age of twenty when he left Uppsala, knowledgeable about the new directions in Oriental scholarship, and he would visit several universities and libraries on his way to Turkey. At the risk of simplifying the history of Orientalism, Åkerblad was part of a growing secular strand of Oriental studies that saw the study of Oriental literature as an object that was worthy in and of itself, without being explicitly related to Christian and theological issues. The abundance of religious texts tired Åkerblad, as shown by his comment – in this case, on Coptic manuscripts – about their boring nature: “this literature offers few attractions, and … such studies require a lot of courage”.

When he arrived as jeune de langue in Constantinople in 1784, he was well prepared. And in contrast to most of his foreign colleagues – including Toderini and Sestini – he soon spoke the local languages, to the extent that he was able to travel in disguise. We have many testimonies to Åkerblad’s exceptional fluency in Arabic, Turkish, and Modern Greek.
[…]

Åkerblad’s main interest was languages. He wrote in a large number of languages and scripts. A tentative count exceeds twenty: Albanian, Aramaic, Arabic (various dialects), Coptic, Dutch, English, Ethiopic (Ge’ez and Amharic), Etruscan, French, German, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Kurdish, Persian, Phoenician, Portuguese, Spanish, Syriac, Swedish, Samaritan, Tatar, Turkish, and so on. While living in Rome in the 1810s, anyone interested in Oriental languages would visit him: “I also became acquainted with Signior Akerblad at Rome, who is another of these extraordinary linguists – his knowledge [of languages] is confined to twenty-three.” Åkerblad approached new languages with an initial period of intense studies; he wrote to a female friend about his newly found obsession with Aramaic: “since a month, goodbye Greek, antiquities, Coptic, society, amusements, I am not occupied with anything but Chaldean [Aramaic]. I well know it is a great folly, but what do you want, I have been carried away, and one does not become wise when one wants.” A year later it was Ethiopic’s turn, including both the ancient Ge’ez – still used in liturgy – and the living Amharic: “I have for the past few months plunged myself into certain barbarous investigations; an Ethiopian priest comes home to me everyday to teach me the cursed cries of his language.” He also taught several languages throughout his life and his methods appear quite modern.

Anyone wanting to know more can investigate Thomasson’s The Life of J. D. Åkerblad: Egyptian Decipherment and Orientalism in Revolutionary Times, if their local library has it or they have a spare $139-$179 to throw around. (Thanks, Bruce!)