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My wife and I were admiring an image of the strange-looking bird called the nightjar when she asked me, naturally enough, what the “jar” in its name meant. I, naturally enough, turned to the OED, whose entry was revised in 2003:

1.a. A nocturnal, insectivorous, migratory bird, Caprimulgus europaeus (family Caprimulgidae), of Europe and eastern and central Asia, which has grey-brown cryptic plumage and a distinctive churring call. Also called fern-owl, goatsucker.

1630 Ill boding Owles, Night-iarrs, and Rauens with wide-stretched throats.
T. May, Continuation Lucan vii. sig. K4
[…]
1991 Suddenly another sound begins, completely evoking the spirit of the ancient heath—the hypnotic ‘churr’ of the nocturnal nightjar.
Bird Watching June 75/3

It has this interesting etymology:

The second element in the name reflects the bird’s distinctive call; compare other (chiefly regional) names for the bird, as churn-owl n., churr owl n., eve-churr n. 2, eve-jar n., jar-owl n., nightchurr n. Many similar imitative formations for the name of this bird are found in other languages.

(It would be nice if they’d mentioned some of those imitative formations.) If we turn to the synonym goatsucker (entry revised 2016) we find an equally interesting etymology:

< goat n. + sucker n.,

after classical Latin caprimulgus (Pliny; < capra she-goat (see capriole n.) + mulgēre to milk: see milk v.),

itself after ancient Greek αἰγοθήλας (< αἰγο-, αἴξ goat (see Aegipan n.) + θηλάζειν to suck).

Compare goat-milker n.

Whence also the Russian козодой ‘goat-milker.’

You can hear “the bird’s distinctive call” here.

I’ve never read the Ionesco play, but I always found the title intriguing, and Wikipedia provides a very satisfying explanation:

The idea for the play came to Ionesco while he was trying to learn English with the Assimil method. Impressed by the contents of the dialogues, often very sober and strange, he decided to write an absurd play named L’anglais sans peine (“English without toil”). Other possible titles which were considered included Il pleut des chiens et des chats, (“It’s raining cats and dogs”, translated in French literally); “L’heure anglaise” and “Big Ben Follies”.

Its actual title was the result of an error in rehearsal by actor Henri-Jacques Huet: the fire chief’s monologue initially included a mention of “l’institutrice blonde” (“the blonde schoolteacher”), but Huet said “la cantatrice chauve”, and Ionesco, who was present, decided to re-use the phrase.

Now, that’s what I call Theatre of the Absurd. I got there via Mark Liberman’s Log post, where you will find further absurdities, including James Thurber’s quotes from Collins’ Pocket Interpreters: France, such as:

There are no towels here.
The sheets on this bed are damp.
I have seen a mouse in the room.
These shoes are not mine.
The radiator doesn’t work.
This is not clean, bring me another.
I can’t eat this. Take it away!
The water is too hot, you are scalding me!

Thurber described it as a “melancholy narrative poem” and “a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind.”

I’ve started reading a novel by my man Veltman that I had somehow missed when I was reading my way through the nineteenth century, his 1837 «Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию» [Virginie, or A Journey to Russia]; the protagonist, Гектор д’Альм [Hector d’Alm], is a Parisian who has had to move to Besançon because he bought property there and is terminally bored by provincial life. He goes to a solar festival, “праздникѣ солнца (Sauleou),” that involves families bringing fried eggs, and Veltman remarks:

Однакожъ этотъ праздникъ не казался
ни сколько замѣчателенъ Гектору, онъ
не видѣлъ въ немъ безотчетнаго уже
обряда одной изъ древнѣйшихъ религій;
онъ смѣялся бы, еслибъ ему сказали, что
яичница есть символъ jao, того перво-
бытнаго яйца, которое, по мнѣнію древ-
нихъ, носилось въ Хаосѣ, и изъ котора-
го произошла Вселенная.

But this festival didn’t seem in the least remarkable to Hector, who did not see in it the inexplicable rite of one of the most ancient religions; he would have laughed if someone had told him that the fried egg is the jao, the symbol of that primordial egg which, according to the ancients, floated in Chaos and from which the Universe arose.

Does anybody have any idea what this “jao” might be? The j could represent any number of sounds — Veltman could have taken it from Sanskrit, Chinese, a Germanic language, or who knows what else.

John D. Norton (of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh) wrote an essay back in 2012 called “What is Time? Or, Just What do Philosophers of Science Do?” I figure that as an attempt to define a word it’s LH material, but it also confirms me in my belief that philosophers think they have a better grasp on language than they do. He begins:

There is a competition, the “Flame Challenge,” underway at the time I write these words for the best answer to the question “What is time?” The target audience is eleven year old children and children of this age will be the ultimate judges. […]

The challenge is introduced with a perfunctory and familiar disclaimer. First comes a celebrated quote from Augustine

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
– Saint Augustine

The sentence that follows arrives with reliability that night follows day follows night and was offered, I expect, without reflection. Doesn’t everyone know that…

It’s a deep question, and it has no simple answer.

Is that really so?

He goes on to say that “the question ‘What is time?’ as asked is not really a scientific question at all”:
[Read more…]

To appreciate this story (Anatoly is reposting from Yulya Fridman), you need to know that for Russians, the surname of Niels Bohr, Бор, is identical to the name of the element boron (Бор). With that out of the way (I translate from the Russian original):

Incidentally, [V.I. Kogan] boasted that many years ago, when a fellow student found him with Brillouin’s book Атом Бора [translation of L’atome de Bohr, i.e., The Atom of Bohr — but the Russian could also mean The Boron Atom] in his hands, V.I. managed to convince him that such books had been written on the entire periodic table […], that is, there were books The Aluminum Atom, The Copper Atom, and so on, from the Mendeleev series. He proudly said: “I convinced him with ease! I don’t really know why… Actually, there are no such books about other atoms…” From the audience someone objected that there certainly were, showing the book Атом гелия [The Helium Atom].

Anatoly adds “У физиков есть ‘Атом Бора’, а у программистов – ‘Язык Ада'” [Physicists have The Bohr/Boron Atom, and programmers have the language Ada/of Hell] — ‘hell’ in Russian is ад [ad]. If you read Russian, there are some funny comments in the thread.

I recently read two very different essays that make useful companion pieces. The first is a talk by Allison Parrish, who says “I’m a poet and computer programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program/Interactive Media Arts program.” Her prose strikes me as more professorial than poetic; here’s a sample:

The prototypical example of a transcription is a “transcript”—a written artifact that records the “content” of a stretch of language that was spoken out loud. And indeed, I’ll be talking about transcripts of this kind in more detail later. But I think the term “transcription” usefully applies to adaptations of language between any two modalities. For example, producing a typewritten copy of a handwritten manuscript is a kind of transcription. Taking notes on a lecture is a kind of transcription. Under this definition, even my verbal performance of this talk (reading from my speaker notes) is a variety of transcription.

She contrasts a “folk theory of transcription,” which is that transcription is, for the most part, a transparent process that mostly “just works,” with a more complex view that takes into account all sorts of things that get lost in the process; in her conclusion she says:

So: nothing survives transcription, in the sense that no text makes it to the far side of the transcription process with its life intact. And also, nothing does not survive transcription: the empty parts of a text, the silent parts, the parts of the text that draw attention to its own materiality, specifically operate outside transcription’s capabilities. And all of us—whether as artists, poets, or everyday conversationalists—draw on the “nothing” that forms the gap between what can be transcribed and what cannot as a productive and creative resource.

But we can also look at this from the other direction and recognize that, although no transcript can be accurate, transcriptions are an important site for linguistic intervention. Transcriptions crack open ontologies. You could say that, in a sense, the very goal of making a transcription in the first place is to make an argument about what cannot be transcribed. Nothing survives transcription, and though we may be “lost” (as Jordan Magnuson fears), at least we’re all lost together in an flowering forest of collaborative interpretation.

I found it thought-provoking but, well, academic (“Transcriptions crack open ontologies”); it leaves the reader stroking their chin and saying “Hmm.” Immediately after finishing it, I read John Lee Clark’s fiery “Against Access” (from McSweeney’s 64), which begins with a baseball “bearing personalized inscriptions by two players on the Minnesota Twins, Chuck Knoblauch and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett” that was given him by a staff writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune when he could still see well enough to enjoy baseball, and continues:
[Read more…]

Dmitry Pruss writes:

I noticed that raw herring prep before salting it can be described in Russian by two very similar words, жабренная и зябреная. They turned out to be different, one is just removing gills [жабры], the other also taking out the part behind the gills known as калтычок or калтык. The latter word sounds Turkic but wiktionary gives no etymology. Жабры is common in several Slavic languages but no proto-Slavic form or etymology are given, too.

Any ideas?

From Science (20 Dec 2019, 3666.472: 1517-1522) comes “Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure, by Joshua Conrad Jackson, Joseph Watts, Teague R. Henry, et al.:

Abstract

Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

The conclusion:

Questions about the meaning of human emotions are age-old, and debate about the nature of emotion persists in scientific literature. The colexification approach that we take here provides a new method and a set of metrics to answer these questions by creating vast networks of how people use words to name experiences. Analyzing these networks sheds light on the cultural and biological evolutionary mechanisms underlying how emotions are ascribed meaning in languages around the world. Although debates about the relationship between language and conscious experience are notoriously difficult to resolve (28), our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that emotion experiences vary systematically across cultural groups. More broadly, our study shows the value of combining large comparative linguistic databases with quantitative network methods. Analyzing the diverse ways that people use language promises to yield insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale.

It seems awfully short to be yielding insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale, but what do I know? I await the decision of the jury. Thanks, Trevor!

Casting about for something to read, I glanced at my old Soviet collected works of Aleksandr Kuprin (which I have thanks to the generosity of jamessal) and realized that I’d hardly read anything by him, so I hauled down vol. 5 and decided to try his 1917 Звезда Соломона (translated, by one Maria K., as The Star of Solomon and originally published in the journal Zemlya as Каждое желание [Every desire]), which Dmitry Bykov called one of the main novellas of the period and Kuprin’s best (there’s an extended quote from him at the end of the Russian Wikipedia article).

The basic plot is easy to describe (and critics at the time thought it was simple-minded and a sign of Kuprin’s decline): petty clerk Ivan Tsvet meets a mysterious fellow who says he’s a lawyer named Mefodii Isaevich Toffel (Mef. Is. Toffel = Mephistopheles, as Tsvet eventually realizes). Toffel tells Tsvet a hitherto unknown uncle has died and left him his estate, which is in ruinous condition, but he has to hurry and claim it before potential rivals grab it, so he has to leave that very day — Toffel has already gotten Tsvet leave from his work and bought the necessary tickets. When he gets to the estate, it is deserted and, as advertised, in a state of near-collapse, but he decides to spend the night there anyway and winds up absorbed in a dusty old book of magick which contains a drawing of a star of Solomon with various letters inscribed in it. He tries various combinations (Tanorifogemas? Morfogenatasi?) before crying out in a sudden inspiration “Afro-Amestigon!” This is the secret name Toffel badly wants to know, but Tsvet forgets it for a long time, during which he becomes (thanks to Toffel’s supernatural intervention) rich and successful, his every desire fulfilled (sometimes to his dismay, as when he goes to the circus and has a momentary wish to see an acrobat fall, which immediately happens). He lives in a mansion and is invited everywhere in his provincial city, but turns out to have only the most modest desires, and when in the end Toffel reveals all (after Tsvet remembers the name and tells him), he says his modesty has saved both of them — anyone else would have gone for worldly power and been doomed. Tsvet then finds himself back in his old modest quarters, wondering if it was all a dream. Bykov sees this as an attempt to answer the great question of the 20th century: what’s better — omnipotence and genius, or an ordinary, simple human life? But that’s putting far too much weight on its shoulders; it’s more of an enjoyable picaresque based on a fantastic plot element. And that reminded me of some other writer; I eventually realized it was Alexei Slapovsky (see this post). Both men started as reporters, which doubtless gave them a knowing and cynical view of the world; their work isn’t Great Literature, but it’s enjoyable and can be thought-provoking.

My favorite element in the story is the woman he sees from a train window and falls in love with; naturally they meet up (thanks, Mef. Is. Toffel!), but they don’t wind up getting together. At the end, after he’s back in his old life, he runs into her at a racetrack and finds that she remembers him as well; they share their reminiscences (“Yes, you threw me a bouquet of lilacs, I remember!”)… but then she suddenly says “But you’re not him. That was a dream,” and bids him farewell. It’s a nice Gogolian touch that casts a melancholy light over the whole gauzy tale.

I ran across a reference to a bird called Rufous treepie and thought “What an odd name!” So I turned to the OED and found this entry, reproduced in its entirety:

tree-pie
noun

A tree-crow of the genus Dendrocitta, found in India, China, and neighbouring countries.

No citations, no pronunciation, no etymology, nothin’. It’s a 1914 entry, but I’m not sure that’s an excuse.