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“Pointing Out Directions in Murrinhpatha,” by Joe Blythe, Kinngirri Carmelita Mardigan, Mawurt Ernest Perdjert, and Hywel Stoakes (Open Linguistics 2.1: 132–159), is very cool; here’s the abstract:

Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpatha make reference to locations of interest using named landmarks, demonstratives and pointing. Building on a culturally prescribed avoidance for certain placenames, this study reports on the use of demonstratives, pointing and landmarks for direction giving. Whether or not pointing will be used, and which demonstratives will be selected is determined partly by the relative epistemic incline between interlocutors and partly by whether information about a location is being sought or being provided. The reliance on pointing for the representation of spatial vectors requires a construal of language that includes the visuo-corporal modality.

And the entire paper is available free at that link — hooray for Creative Commons!

Arika Okrent presents 11 Fun Facts About the International Phonetic Alphabet; OK, most of them will not surprise anyone who knows anything about the IPA, but I for one didn’t know about the IPA typewriters (“Models publicized in a 1912 supplement to Le Maître Phonétique would cost $1600 and $3200 today”) or the fact that until 1971 articles in the journal of the International Phonetic Association were published in the alphabet — it’s quite disorienting trying to read the one shown, in French!

Larry Yudelson has some exciting lexicographical news (if you’re excited by Yiddish):

Given its physical heft, it’s no surprise that the new Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary published last month by Indiana University Press is the work of generations. Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, its editor, worked on the 856-page, 4 1/2-pound volume for some 20 years in her Teaneck basement. At its core are words collected a generation earlier by her father Mordkhe Schaechter in the family’s house in the Bronx. For many of those years, when Gitl was a teenager, she helped her father as he cataloged Yiddish words at the dining room table.

But before that, the family legend goes, there was her grandfather, Khayem-Benyomen Shekhter, and his enthusiasm for the Yiddish language. The memory of his enthusiasm is tied to a date more than a century ago: 1908, the year he made sure to attend the great Yiddish language conference in his hometown of Czernowitz, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Great hook, right? When you mention Czernowitz/Cernăuți/Czerniowce/Csernovic/Черновцы, now Chernivtsi, you awaken all my unearned Hapsburg nostalgia. The family story is amazing, not least the bit where Mordkhe married Charne share “an unusual determination to raise their children as Yiddish speakers”:

There were after-school classes five days a week in the Yiddish Sholem Aleichem School and summers at Yiddish-speaking Camp Hemshekh.

And there was “Beynbridzhifke” — what her parents called the corner of Bainbridge Avenue in the north Bronx, where they settled alongside Mordkhe’s sister Beyle, who published poems in Yiddish, and the family of Joshua Fishman, an American-born Yiddishist who became a dean at Yeshiva University, an expert in bilingualism and author of “Yiddish in America.” (He also wrote the article on YIVO’s website about the Czernowitz conference; the Yiddish world is not so large these days.) From the Yiddish perspective, it was a three-house shtetl.

Three Yiddish-speaking families may not seem like a lot — it would have been an unimaginably small galus half a century earlier — but it was enough for a satisfying Yiddish-speaking game of hide-and-seek. Gitl’s father created a children’s club that he dubbed Enga-Benga — the Yiddish equivalent of the nursery rhyme “eeny meeny miny mo.”

[. . .]

Gitl went to Barnard, majoring in Russian. Clearly growing up as a linguist’s assistant had an impact. She also studied Yiddish at the Jewish Teachers Seminary/Herzliah, an institution founded to provide teachers to secular Yiddish schools..Then she went to nursing school and became a nurse — a profession she still practices.

Her older sister, Rukhl, also studied at both Barnard and the Jewish Teachers Seminary. Rukhl went on to get a masters in education. She taught Yiddish at the Kinneret Day School in Riverdale before being recruited as a writer for the Yiddish-language Forverts newspaper. In March she became the paper’s editor — the first American-born chief of the 119-year-old publication.

As a teenager, Rukhl picketed the Forverts with her siblings, parents, and other members of Yungtruf – Youth for Yiddish, an organization her father helped start. Their beef with the Yiddish newspaper was that it was published in the traditional Yiddish spelling, rather than the modernized, systematized spelling that Mordkhe and YIVO had fought for. It took a generation, but the Forverts changed its spelling. Now, Rukhl has overseen a partial retreat from YIVO style, as she welcomes in chasidic writers without insisting on a spelling makeover.

[. . .]

For Gitl’s three children, it wasn’t enough just to be fluent in Yiddish. They also had to speak Tamil with their father, Meylekh Viswanath, a native of India (and an occasional writer for this paper). Gitl and Meylekh met at a Yiddish retreat. Where else?

There are moments of high drama:

And one day Gitl discovered that the files she had labored over for years were stuck in a word processor that was no longer compatible with her new computer. “All that work could not be transferred to the new system,” she said. “I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Really, I didn’t know if I would live to see this dictionary.[…]

I could quote endlessly, but go, read it, you won’t be sorry.

I sometimes get annoyed with John McWhorter, but when he’s good he’s very good, and his Aeon essay on euphemisms is probably the best thing I’ve read on this vexed topic. The core of his point is in this paragraph:

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages. Since that is likely eternal, we must accept that we’ll change our terms just like we change our underwear, as a part of linguistic life in a civilised society.

But he discusses many concrete examples, such as these:

Crippled began as a sympathetic term. However, a sad reality of human society is that there are negative associations and even dismissal harboured against those with disabilities. Thus crippled became accreted with those overtones, so to speak, to the point that handicapped was fashioned as a replacement term free from such baggage.

However, because humans stayed human, it was impossible that handicapped would not, over time, become accreted with similar gunk. Enter disabled, which is now long-lived enough that many process it, too, as harbouring shades of abuse, which conditions a replacement such as differently abled. Notably, the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled later changed its name again to Rehabilitation, International; today, the organisation prefers to be known simply as ‘RI’, bypassing the inconvenience of actual words altogether. The story has been similar for retarded being replaced by cognitively impaired; for welfare, which today is more often referred to as cash assistance; or by the faceless initials of programmes disbursing it, such as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).

The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now — we can’t help but hear the superseded ones as sounding terrible and the new ones as clean and shiny — and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably, and the new ones will sound as bad to the next generation as the old ones do to us. It’s just one aspect of language change in action. (Thanks, Paul!)

A couple of days ago I finished The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, and I’m still trying to figure out what just happened to me. Not long before, I’d read Moby-Dick, and that of course was overwhelming as well, but I knew what to expect, having read it already (though not since college). About The Confidence-Man I knew only that it was Melville’s last novel and that it had been very poorly received (one New York review was headlined “Herman Melville Crazy”). Having put down Pierre, equally unwelcomed, after only a few chapters, I was quite prepared to do the same here; instead, I found myself gripped from the first sentence (“At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis”). Mind you, I can understand why readers had trouble with it, then and now: it has no plot and no real characters, just a procession of scenes in which one participant tries to extract money or goods from one or more others, unfailingly appealing to the need for people to have confidence (the word recurs on every page, with increasing force), and it presents the passengers on “the favorite steamer Fidèle” — and by extension all Americans, and by further extension all of humanity — as either fools or conmen, and who wants to think of themselves as either? But I gobbled it up avidly, and as I went I started making marginal lines by more and more passages. Here’s one from Chapter 21:

“And who of my sublime species may you be?” turning short round upon him, clicking his rifle-lock, with an air which would have seemed half cynic, half wild-cat, were it not for the grotesque excess of the expression, which made its sincerity appear more or less dubious.

“One who has confidence in nature, and confidence in man, with some little modest confidence in himself.”

“That’s your Confession of Faith, is it? Confidence in man, eh? Pray, which do you think are most, knaves or fools?”

“Having met with few or none of either, I hardly think I am competent to answer.”

“I will answer for you. Fools are most.”

“Why do you think so?”

“For the same reason that I think oats are numerically more than horses. Don’t knaves munch up fools just as horses do oats?”

“A droll, sir; you are a droll. I can appreciate drollery—ha, ha, ha!”

“But I’m in earnest.”

And from later in the chapter:

“How can he find it lonely,” returned the herb-doctor, “or how desire a companion, when here I stand by him; I, even I, in whom he has trust. For the gulling, tell me, is it humane to talk so to this poor old man? Granting that his dependence on my medicine is vain, is it kind to deprive him of what, in mere imagination, if nothing more, may help eke out, with hope, his disease? For you, if you have no confidence, and, thanks to your native health, can get along without it, so far, at least, as trusting in my medicine goes; yet, how cruel an argument to use, with this afflicted one here. Is it not for all the world as if some brawny pugilist, aglow in December, should rush in and put out a hospital-fire, because, forsooth, he feeling no need of artificial heat, the shivering patients shall have none? Put it to your conscience, sir, and you will admit, that, whatever be the nature of this afflicted one’s trust, you, in opposing it, evince either an erring head or a heart amiss. Come, own, are you not pitiless?”

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eying the old man—”yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you. You are a late sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty. Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

From the magnificent Chapter 22, “IN THE POLITE SPIRIT OF THE TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS”: “Sorry, sorry. But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way.” From Chapter 24: “‘Ah, now,’ deprecating with his pipe, ‘irony is so unjust: never could abide irony: something Satanic about irony. God defend me from Irony, and Satire, his bosom friend.'” From Chapter 29: “And I return you the pledge, Charlie, heart-warm as it came to me, and honest as this wine I drink it in” (followed immediately by “Talking of alleged spuriousness of wines…”). And the opening of Chapter 33 (“WHICH MAY PASS FOR WHATEVER IT MAY PROVE TO BE WORTH”):

But ere be given the rather grave story of Charlemont, a reply must in civility be made to a certain voice which methinks I hear, that, in view of past chapters, and more particularly the last, where certain antics appear, exclaims: How unreal all this is! Who did ever dress or act like your cosmopolitan? And who, it might be returned, did ever dress or act like harlequin?

Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to something different. Yes, it is, indeed, strange that any one should clamor for the thing he is weary of; that any one, who, for any cause, finds real life dull, should yet demand of him who is to divert his attention from it, that he should be true to that dullness.

I could go on, but you get the picture: this is not a novel that respects either conventions or the fourth wall, it is very much a novel of ideas, and the main idea is one that cannot but be repugnant to persons of good, open, honest natures and tender sensibilities. On the other hand, I cannot but wonder if there are not fewer such persons than there are cracked up to be. At any rate, if you enjoyed the excerpts above, I can pretty much guarantee you will enjoy the novel, and it’s available for free in various formats from the good folks at Project Gutenberg, in whom you may have the utmost confidence. And if you would like to read a more thoughtful analysis, I offer you — again, absolutely free! — this fine essay by our own John Emerson [Louis Proyect (ps.), “Panurge and Melville’s ‘The Confidence Man'”; it no longer seems to be available online].

Two final thoughts:

1) The novel could be taken as an extended gloss on Pushkin’s famous lines from the fourth chapter of Eugene Onegin (I give Nabokov’s translation):

Кого ж любить? Кому же верить?
Кто не изменит нам один?

Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?
Who is the only one that won’t betray us?

2) The book that kept coming to mind as I read was Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (see this post). DeWitt, like Melville, was coming off a Great American Novel of tremendous scope and complexity that didn’t do as well as it should have, and like him, she produced a follow-up that was less sprawling, more focused, superficially more approachable. Both novels could be described by the phrase I used of DeWitt’s, “a scathing but increasingly funny satire of American culture,” and both are told in a genial narrative voice that sucks you into the ever stranger goings-on being recounted. And both made me laugh heartily and often. Go thou and do likewise.

Eric at XIX век has finished translating Старик/“The Old Man” (first installment, last) and revealed the author; now he’s got questions about details of the translation. Previously he asked about repetition (a topic on which I had strong ideas); now he’s got a most interesting lexical/cultural problem: what exactly is a лиф [lif]? It’s some part of the upper garment of a mid-nineteenth-century Russian woman, but what? He gives a bunch of quotes (and throws in some images for good measure) and asks for help from people knowledgeable in these matters, and I thought I’d add my readership to the pool of possible helpers. (I confess I found the idea of posting irresistible once the title occurred to me.)

[The passage in the story where the word occurs:

Next to the portrait of the old man, in an ugly gold frame bedecked with stars, hung in all its splendor a pastel depicting a young woman with a long, curved neck and a [lif at one-and-a-half vershoks width] who had a dove on her shoulder; the whole pose betrayed pretentions to a head by Greuze.

Рядом с портретом старика, в безобразной золотой рамке, усыпанной звездочками, красовался пастель, изображающий молодую женщину, с выгнутой шеей, с лифом в полтора вершка ширины, и голубем на плече; вся поза обличала претензию на Грёзовскую головку.

Erik wrote, “I decided that this was shorthand for 1 arshin + 1 1/2 vershoks (30 5/8″) and that this kind of measurement was assumed to always be 1 arshin + X vershoks, in the way adult height was assumed to be 2 arshins + X vershoks.”]

Unrelated, but I’ll pass on the sad news (via Lizok) that Fazil Iskander died last night at 87 (NDTV obit).

Update. “The Old Man” is now available as a free e-book in mobi or epub format or as a pdf.

Rachel Cooke writes (for The Observer) about the importance of the right translation; she begins:

Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd.

Some days later, in bed, I began reading it. The shock was tremendous, disorienting. “This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’,” went the first sentence, which sounded to my ears a little as though a robot had written it. For a while I pressed on, telling myself it was stupid to cling to only one version, as if it were a sacred thing, and that perhaps I would soon fall in love with this no doubt very clever and more accurate new translation. Pretty soon, though, I gave up. However syntactically correct it might be, the prose had for me lost all of its magic. It was as if I’d gone out to buy a silk party dress and come home with a set of nylon overalls.

Last week, I mentioned this experience to Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. She laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said, down the line from New York. “My feeling about Proust is that he’s Scott-Moncrieff [C K Scott-Moncrieff, who published his English translation of A La recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past in the 1920s]. I haven’t read the newer translations – but I don’t want to. I’m very attached to his, even though people always say ‘he did this’ or ‘he did that’.”

I feel the same way about Scott Moncrieff (n.b. and tsk: no hyphen), and I enjoyed both Cooke’s essay and the reminiscences by translators that follow it: Deborah Smith (translator of the Korean writer Han Kang), Ann Goldstein, Edith Grossman (translator of works by Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, Cervantes, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others), George Szirtes (translator of Hungarian writers including Imre Madách, Sándor Márai, and László Krasznahorkai), Don Bartlett (translator of Danish and Norwegian authors including Jo Nesbø, Lars Saabye Christensen, Roy Jacobsen, and Karl Ove Knausgaard), and Melanie Mauthner (best known for translating the works of Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga). I liked them all, but perhaps especially Mauthner, who has this fetching description:

When I was translating Our Lady of the Nile there were many unfamiliar terms I needed to find out about, for example, “un wax africain”. Walking through the alleys of Brixton market, I stepped into a fabric shop, where I discovered what the term means: the process of tie-dyeing cloth with wax, cloth that is then used to fashion women’s dresses and men’s robes. As I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction at the time, I realised that the best translation would be “wrapper”.

Here is how I translate: I read the whole book first, as well as other books by the author so that I have the sound and feel of their prose in my head. The challenge is to find a similar voice in English. Would Scholastique Mukasonga sound like Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison or Bernardine Evaristo? Walking around Brixton was helpful. It was in Brixton library that I first stumbled on this Rwandan author’s short stories. In south London you can hear so many “Englishes”: African, African Caribbean and Latin American. Mukasonga writes in a classical, lyrical French. Think Chinua Achebe or Nadine Gordimer. I needed to find a warm, tender, lively and smooth neutral English. I knew I would keep all the Kinyarwanda words that describe plants, fabric, food and spiritual rituals.

Thanks, Eric!

Rachel Premack’s Washington Post story on Rocky, an 11-year-old orangutan who has learned to control the pitch and volume of his vocalizations, is admirably restrained for a newspaper story on language, carefully stating:

Shumaker noted that this shouldn’t be equated with the words and communication of humans. Rocky’s grunts have no deeper meaning — other than that, Shumaker believes, Rocky originally learned these sounds to get human attention.

But what was shown is still fairly significant:

The learning aspect of Rocky’s grunts are another crucial component [of more complex communication]. It’s something he likely learned from humans, rather than an organic sound that all orangutans make. Researchers determined this by comparing his sounds with what they call “the largest database ever assembled of orangutan calls,” which comprises more than 12,000 hours of observing 120 orangutans both wild and captive. Rocky’s sounds were confirmed to have an entirely different frequency range.

“We’ve demonstrated that apes are able to learn a new vocalization that is unknown in their species,” Shumaker said. “We don’t know how he learned it, but he either innovated it on his own or was able to reproduce it, then learn it. There’s no doubt now that apes are able to acquire or learn new vocalization.”

As longtime LH readers will be aware, I have no truck with breathless “Animals can talk!” pieces, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in studies like this. Give ’em a million or so years, and these apes may be writing blogs. (Thanks, Eric!)

Update. See Mark Liberman’s well-informed post at the Log.

I just finished Turgenev’s first novel, Rudin (1856: Wikipedia, Russian text, Garnett translation), and I’m glad I read it, though I almost gave up on it. For the first two chapters there was absolutely nothing of interest (to me): rote nature descriptions (“It was a quiet summer morning. The sun stood already pretty high in the clear sky but the fields were still sparkling with dew…”), a collection of briefly sketched characters (a young widow, an old woman, a guy in a droshky, a young man with a radiant face and “something Asiatic” in his features, etc.), and a country estate (“a huge stone mansion, built after designs of Rastrelli in the taste of last century”). It was all very much like one of Turgenev’s early plays, and when the wonderfully named Afrikan Semyonovich Pigasov, a loquacious cynic, showed up and everybody started having one of those country-estate-play conversations (“‘So, according to you, African Semenitch,’ continued Darya Mihailovna, turning to Pigasov, ‘all young ladies are affected?'”) I was ready to bail. But at the start of the third chapter Dmitry Rudin enters, and the contraption immediately sputters into life. He quickly wins over the ladies and most of the men, though he offends Pigasov by demolishing his shallow arguments; I’ll quote a passage in extenso (in Garnett’s translation) so you can see his attractiveness:

‘Tell us something of your student life,’ said Alexandra Pavlovna.

Rudin complied. He was not altogether successful in narrative. There was a lack of colour in his descriptions. He did not know how to be humorous. However, from relating his own adventures abroad, Rudin soon passed to general themes, the special value of education and science, universities, and university life generally. He sketched in a large and comprehensive picture in broad and striking lines. All listened to him with profound attention. His eloquence was masterly and attractive, not altogether clear, but even this want of clearness added a special charm to his words.

The exuberance of his thought hindered Rudin from expressing himself definitely and exactly. Images followed upon images; comparisons started up one after another—now startlingly bold, now strikingly true. It was not the complacent effort of the practised speaker, but the very breath of inspiration that was felt in his impatient improvising. He did not seek out his words; they came obediently and spontaneously to his lips, and each word seemed to flow straight from his soul, and was burning with all the fire of conviction. Rudin was the master of almost the greatest secret—the music of eloquence. He knew how in striking one chord of the heart to set all the others vaguely quivering and resounding. Many of his listeners, perhaps, did not understand very precisely what his eloquence was about; but their bosoms heaved, it seemed as though veils were lifted before their eyes, something radiant, glorious, seemed shimmering in the distance.

All Rudin’s thoughts seemed centred on the future; this lent him something of the impetuous dash of youth… Standing at the window, not looking at any one in special, he spoke, and inspired by the general sympathy and attention, the presence of young women, the beauty of the night, carried along by the tide of his own emotions, he rose to the height of eloquence, of poetry…. The very sound of his voice, intense and soft, increased the fascination; it seemed as though some higher power were speaking through his lips, startling even to himself…. Rudin spoke of what lends eternal significance to the fleeting life of man.

‘I remember a Scandinavian legend,’ thus he concluded, ‘a king is sitting with his warriors round the fire in a long dark barn. It was night and winter. Suddenly a little bird flew in at the open door and flew out again at the other. The king spoke and said that this bird is like man in the world; it flew in from darkness and out again into darkness, and was not long in the warmth and light…. “King,” replies the oldest of the warriors, “even in the dark the bird is not lost, but finds her nest.” Even so our life is short and worthless; but all that is great is accomplished through men. The consciousness of being the instrument of these higher powers ought to outweigh all other joys for man; even in death he finds his life, his nest.’

Rudin stopped and dropped his eyes with a smile of involuntary embarrassment.

Turgenev said the character was based on the anarchist Bakunin; Herzen, who knew both men well, thought it was more a reflection of Turgenev himself. Be that as it may, Rudin is real and compelling in a way that none of the other characters are, barring perhaps Mikhailo Lezhnev, a college friend of Rudin’s who had become estranged from him but in the course of the novel comes to appreciate him anew. The plot is trivial and could be lifted from pretty much any random play or story of the time: Rudin enchants Darya Mikhailovna’s teenage daughter Natalya and thinks he’s in love with her, but when push comes to shove he can’t do anything about it. Discussion of the novel tends to rely heavily on the whole “superfluous man” thing, which to me is meaningless — it was a meme of the 1850s that has long since passed its sell-by date. Rudin isn’t superfluous, he’s just an intelligent fellow who can’t find a practical use for his intelligence, a phenomenon not unknown in our own day. I get the feeling that Turgenev wanted badly to bring this vivid character to life, perhaps tried making him the focus of a play but decided it should be a novel, except that he didn’t yet know how to write a novel. Never mind, it’s short and well worth reading, even if Fathers and Sons is still a long way off.

I knew the Dutch word maatschappij ‘society, company’ from a former life as a member of the editorial staff of an accounting firm, and I would have guessed that the maat part was a cognate of English mate, but the details, as presented by this entry from N. van der Sijs’s Klein uitleenwoordenboek [Little loan-word dictionary], are quite interesting (thanks for the link go to the estimable Conrad); I present Google Translate’s version, with a few obvious problems cleaned up by me, but I do not know Dutch and will welcome any corrections:

maatschappij. The origin of the word maatschappij for ‘association for carrying on trade’ is closely linked to the founding of the Dutch East India Company [Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie] in 1602. The VOC was a company whose capital was provided by a group of wealthy merchants. They also spoke of the Oostindische Maatschappij or maetschappy. The word maatschappij is a derivation of maatschap [‘partnership’], formed in the fourteenth century from maat ‘buddy, companion, helper’ and the suffix –schap for collective names; a maatschap is thus a union of two or more persons.

Because the VOC in the seventeenth century was a leading international trading company, the Dutch word maatschappij was adopted by other languages. It was borrowed into Middle Low German in the form matschoppie, in German they spoke of Maskopei – now it is obsolete and replaced by Gesellschaft.

In Danish and Norwegian the word was borrowed as maskepi, and in Swedish as maskopi. In addition, Danish also borrowed unchanged the Dutch maatschappij, at least according to a Danish dictionary of foreign words. The Danish and Norwegian maskepi and Swedish maskopi have had a pretty significant development, namely they mean ‘covert relations, intrigue.’ This may result from the influence of the Norwegian verb maskere (Swedish maskera) ‘to mask,’ but it is more likely that the shift in meaning occurred because the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes had little confidence in the traders who had united in the Dutch trading company, which after all was stiff competition for their own trading.

In Polish, maatschappij was borrowed as maszoperia ‘trading company.’ One informant stated that this word appears in Kashubia, an area on the Baltic Sea near Gdańsk, where it is used for a cooperative organization of small fishermen.

In Indonesian the Dutch word was borrowed as maskapai ‘trading,’ in Javanese as maskapé, maskepé, and in Sranantongo as maskapei.

From the examples it appears that some languages ​​have borrowed Dutch maatschappij with the second syllable in –o– in place of the Dutch –a-. The Middle Low German form was pronounced [?] matschoppie. This –o– may restore the former Dutch pronunciation: in that period a was regularly pronounced /ao/ or /oa/; for example, think of the current dialect pronunciation /woater/. The German and Swedish words can also be borrowed from Middle Low German.

The OED etymology for mate ‘associate’ (updated March 2001) reads as follows:

< Middle Low German māt comrade (German regional (Low German) Maat), by aphesis < a Middle Low German cognate of Old High German gimazzo messmate (Middle High German gemazze) < the Germanic base of y– prefix + the Germanic base of meat n. Compare early modern Dutch maat (1546), maet (1573) friend, partner (Dutch maat), and also Middle Dutch maet– (in maetscap company, partnership), probably also a borrowing < Middle Low German (compare Middle Low German mātschop).