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One of the words in the Scripps National Spelling Bee 2016 (Guardian liveblog) was chremslach, the plural of chremsel; your curiosity about what the word represents can be satisfied by this lively Haaretz column by Liz Steinberg (thanks, Paul!): “Admittedly not the most common of Jewish foods, chremslach are flat, fried fritters made by some Ashkenazi Jews for Passover or Hanukkah.” But what if you’re curious about where the word is from? It’s not in the OED, NOAD, or M-W Collegiate; Webster’s Third New International has it (which is why it was eligible for the spelling bee), but the etymology given there is just “Yiddish chremzel.” Well, yes, it practically screams “Yiddish,” but where is the Yiddish word from? So I did a little digging in Google Books and found this on p. 393 of Alexander Beider‘s Origins of Yiddish Dialects: “Influence of French is also quite likely in AlsY frimzl and SwY fremzl ‘noodle’/EY khremzl ‘Passover pancake.'” The relevant footnote reads:

[…] This word is related in some way to Italian vermicelli though the immediate etymon for the WY word is uncertain. Starting with Kosover (1958:63), several authors wrote about the link between the WY frimzl and the Old French word that in turn was loaned from Italian. However, no linguistic argument corroborating this hypothesis was ever suggested, while the proposed French etymon is actually anachronistic. In French, the earliest reference to a word derived from vermicelli dates from the sixteenth century only (Wexler 1992:54). Looking into the early Jewish references collected by Kosover (1958:61–5), one can observe the existence of two series: (1) with the initial gimel […], the oldest date from the twelfth century; (2) with the initial vav or double-vav […], mainly present in sources from western Germany of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, but also known in Normandy in the thirteenth century. The first series is clearly of French origin. It was in certain Romance dialects in the territory of France that Germanic (Frankish) initial /w/ gave rise to /gw/ that later turned into /g/. The last process ended in Old French during the twelfth century. […] The second series (to which WY frimzl is related) may also be of French origin. Indeed, Frankish /w/ remained unchanged in northern (Wallony, Picardy) and eastern (Lorraine) dialects. […] Both series have two idiosyncrasies in common: (a) the letter zayen /z/ for what was “c” in Italian; (b) the introduction of a vowel between /r/ and /m/, most likely as a result of the metathesis between the first vowel and the second (liquid) consonant. Such characteristics could not appear independently. Either both series had the same ancestor that already possessed these features, or one of these series influenced another. The feature (a) is typical for France only. It is regularly found in French and Occitan: compare modern French plaisir “pleasure’ < Latin placere, oiseau ‘bird’ < aucellus (Bourciez 1921:153–4). For the feature (b), a close parallel can be found in French fromage ‘cheese’ whose initial sounds underwent in Old French the change from /furm-/ to /frum-/ (Pope 1934:178).

So there you have it: chremslach is related in some way to vermicelli, though the details are frustratingly unclear. Me, I’ll stick to latkes.

I haven’t had a lot of pho, the Vietnamese noodle-and-meat soup, but what I’ve had I’ve liked. The name is a notorious problem (for English-speakers): it looks like it should be pronounced like the word “foe,” and lots of people say it that way, but the Vietnamese word phở actually has a mid-vowel that sounds like the vowel of “fun” (you can hear it said at that Wikipedia article by clicking the “listen” symbol), and those English-speakers who know that can sound a little silly trying to reproduce it in English (and, worse, can sound supercilious if they feel impelled to “correct” those who say it like “foe”). But never mind that; where is the word from, what is its etymology? The OED (entry created 2006) says “< Vietnamese phở, perhaps < French feu (in pot au feu),” and AHD says the same, but it seems odd that such a basic Vietnamese dish should have a name of foreign origin. Not absurd, mind you, or even unlikely (cf. “hamburger”), but odd. So I was interested to see an entirely different origin proposed in Andrea Nguyen’s The History of Pho; it’s well worth reading if you have any interest in the soup itself, but here I’m focusing on etymology. She says it began (around the turn of the 20th century) as a beef noodle soup called nguu nhuc phan:

So how did nguu nhuc phan become pho? It is likely that as the dish caught on, the street hawkers became more competitive and abbreviated their distinctive calls as a means to attract customers. “Nguu nhuc phan day” (“beef and rice noodles here”) was shortened to “nguu phan a,” then “phan a,” or “phon o,” and finally settled into one word, pho. In a Vietnamese dictionary published around 1930, the entry for pho defined it as a dish of thinly sliced noodles and beef, its name having been derived from phan, the Cantonese word for flat rice noodle. It’s been suggested that pho arose because when phan is mispronounced or misheard, it can mean “excrement.”

The term pho is not French in origin, despite claims that the pronunciation bears resemblance to feu (fire in French, as in pot au feu).

Intriguing, but Nguyen is a food writer, not an etymologist, and I don’t know enough about Vietnamese to have an informed opinion. As always, I welcome all thoughts from the Varied Reader.

Ryan Ruby has a 3 Quarks Daily piece called The Prescriptivist’s Progress that begins as follows:

This month, two minor controversies revived the specter of the “language wars” and reintroduced the literary internet to the distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism. One began when Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker Prize and readers took to their search engines en masse to look up the word “Kafkaesque,” which had been used by the book’s publishers and reviewers to describe it. Remarking upon the trend, Merriam-Webster noted sourly: “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque’ is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning.” A few weeks before, Slate‘s Laura Miller had lodged a similar complaint about the abuse of the word “allegory.” “An entire literary tradition is being forgotten,” she warned, “because writers use the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.”

When it comes to semantics, prescriptivists insist that precise rules ought to govern linguistic usage. Without such rules there would be no criteria by which to judge whether a word was being used correctly or incorrectly, and thus no way to fix its meaning. Descriptivists, by contrast, argue that a quick glance at the history of any natural language will show that, whether we like it or not, words are vague and usage changes over time. The meaning of a word is whatever a community of language users understands it to mean at any given moment. In both of the above cases, Merriam-Webster and Miller were flying the flag of prescriptivism, protesting the kind of semantic drift that results from the indiscriminate, over-frequent usages of a word, a drift that has no doubt been exacerbated thanks to the internet itself, which has increased the recorded usages of words and accelerated their circulation.

Ruby goes on to set “Kafkaesque” aside (because it’s “already received ample coverage”) and chase after “allegory”; I’ll let those who care about such things follow him there and, if they like, quibble over metaphor and rhetorical modes. My concern is elsewhere, with the idiotic and near-libelous statement that “Merriam-Webster” is “flying the flag of prescriptivism” and protesting semantic drift. This is idiotic on several counts. In the first place, “Merriam-Webster” is not doing anything at all. One person, presumably an employee of M-W, who writes the Trend Watch column wrote:

Lookups for Kafkaesque spiked dramatically on May 17th after the Man Booker prize for 2016 was awarded to Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian. This work, translated from Korean into English by Debbie Smith, has been described by its British publishers (and by a number of reviewers) as Kafka-esque.

The word derives from the famed Czech novelist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whose prose became so synonymous with the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. […]

The word joined a number of other literary eponyms, including Dickensian and Byronic. However, Kafkaesque has seen quite a bit more use than most such words, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to its overuse.

In the nearly 70 years since his death, we’ve promoted Franz Kafka from a merely great writer to an all-purpose adjective, and that word – Kafkaesque – now gets tossed around with cavalier imprecision, applied to everything from an annoying encounter with a petty bureaucrat to the genocidal horrors of the Third Reich.
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 31 January 1992

That is everything the anonymous M-W employee wrote, plus the final quotation illustrating the “occasional charges that the word has been watered down.” Do you see anything there that smacks of prescriptivism? In the quotation, sure, but the Trend Watch writer is simply reporting on that prescriptivism — saying that some people complain that “the word has been watered down.” To call the Trend Watch piece prescriptivist is like saying a newspaper story reporting on a KKK rally is ipso facto racist; it is not only wrong but insulting, and shows the person who says such a thing to be at best light-minded and at worst someone with no regard for the truth. Furthermore, the quoted passage “some argue that ‘Kafkaesque’ is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning” is not Merriam-Webster noting anything, “sourly” or otherwise (seriously, does that sound sour to you?), it is an italicized caption for a picture of Kafka and is the caption-writer’s summary of one of the things the Trend Watch piece is saying (and the main point it’s making, to emphasize what should be obvious, is that a lot of people are looking up the word — that’s why it’s called “Trend Watch”).

This particular case, of course, gets under my skin because Merriam-Webster, one of the great lexicographical firms, is anti-prescriptivist by its very nature, and in fact suffered from the attacks of foolish prescriptivists when its great Third New International Dictionary came out in 1961. Shame on you, Ryan Ruby. Learn to read more carefully, think more clearly, and write more accurately.

Iona Sharma’s “A’ghailleann”: On Language-Learning and the Decolonisation of the Mind is an essay about her attempt to learn Scottish Gaelic after failure to relearn what should in theory be her mother tongue, Hindi; it’s the kind of story I always find moving and inspiring:

Here are the things you need to know first. I am thirty years old. I am Indian. My parents arrived in Scotland as newly minted immigrants in the eighties, thinking they’d go home after I was born. Decades later, we’re still here.

My parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, their friends and their community, speak Hindi as a first or joint first language. I do not. I stopped being a fluent Hindi speaker at the age of six, perhaps earlier. The school didn’t like it. Too confusing to educate a bilingual child. If you don’t speak to her in English at home, she’ll never learn. […]

Just try! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect.

But when it’s your own language, it does matter. It matters when it’s your own people who are laughing behind their hands at you. It matters when you’re seventeen, painstakingly reading a road sign, and passing strangers sympathise with your parents. And it matters in adult language classes, when you can’t relax and laugh at your own mistakes like the other learners, because of the constant, drumbeat internal litany: you should know this. You should be better than this.

And, as ever, it matters because the personal is political. It matters because Hindi, like Gaelic, is a colonised space. It is a language complete in itself, with its own history, literature, poetry and tradition. But more than sixty-five years after Indian independence, it has been surrounded and absorbed by English, so among the Indian middle classes it is no longer a prestige language. It is the vernacular, the language one speaks at home; one does not use it to write to the tax office, nor take one’s degree.

So if it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – if it doesn’t matter if a noun is masculine or feminine; if a verb falls to be transitive in the past perfect; if you just use the English word, because who can remember the Hindi for mathematics or apartment or transubstantiation – then for all I wage my small battle, we’re losing the war. To speak our language perfectly – to choose to do so, despite decades of colonial influence – is another political act. […]

After a few days of listening and learning, I find I can order elevenses at the campus café, and understand that the sign in the bathroom is telling me not to flush tampons down the toilet. Looking out over the harbour, I suddenly grasp the meaning of the Gaelic word glas, not grey or green but in-between, the colour of the sea beneath a turbulent sky. Gaelic holds the Highland landscape in the weft of it, the sound of running water in its flow and fall. It demands time and hard work, but that denotation of beauty will become a part of me.

I’ve never been in her situation, but I’ve studied many languages under many different conditions, and what she says rings true to me.

I’ve finally started reading The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900-1930 by Gerald Janecek, which Noetica gave me a few years ago, and I’ve come across an instance of mass peevery that made me wriggle with delight. Janecek is discussing the history of orthographic reform in Russia in the period leading up to the October Revolution (the Bolsheviks implemented the reform, but it had already been passed by the Provisional Government); the basics — mainly replacing the letters ѣ (yat’), ѳ (fita), and і (dotted i) by the homophonous е, ф, and и and eliminating ъ (the hard sign) at the end of words — had been decided on by 1904, but war, revolution, and more war held up the process. In the meantime, debate was vigorous:

On one side stood most of the teachers and linguists, and on the other stood the traditionalists, some of whom claimed that the orthographic reforms would drive a wedge between the people and their heritage. Among the opponents of the reform stood some major literary figures, such as the Symbolists Vyacheslav Ivanov, Bryusov, and Blok. Their objections are particularly relevant to our study as they focus on the look of words. The opinion of Vyacheslav Ivanov (1905): “The danger that threatens on this path is graphic amorphousness or formlessness which not only, as a consequence of the weakening of the hieroglyphic [emphasis added] element, is aesthetically unpleasant and psychologically unnatural, but also can facilitate general apathy toward language” (Eskova 1966, 87). Bryusov: “However, both ѣ and ъ play one important role that is ordinarily forgotten about: an aesthetic role. By means of some sort of ‘natural selection’ Russian words have acquired in their shapes the most beautiful of attainable forms. The word весть printed with a simple е (instead of вѣсть) loses its beauty of shape, as will be the case with words printed without ъ” (Eskova 1966, 87). This despite the fact that the letters ѣ and е were no longer distinguished phonetically, and ъ, indicating the hardness of the preceding consonant, was in most cases entirely superfluous.

[…] Yet it is striking that three of the leading Symbolists—Russia’s first group of avant-garde Modernists—should oppose modernization of the orthography; it is even more striking that they, as sonically oriented writers, should do so because it would change nothing but the way a word looks. Among them only Bely had shown any Interest in the graphic side of literature beyond a certain aestheticism, and he was among the first to accept the orthographic reforms when they were finally implemented. John Malmstad notes: “Unlike Blok, who remained loyal to the old orthography to the end of his life, Bely showed no preference for the old. He began almost immediately to publish his verse in the new orthography and in his own personal writing after the changes employed the new orthography” […].

Lev Tolstoy was against the reform because, although it might simplify writing, it would “lengthen the process of reading: after all we only write by letters, but we read . . . by the general look of words. We take in a word all at once with a glance, not breaking it into syllables; . . . every word had its special physiognomy . . .” […]

Other voices in opposition were more extreme. Apollo, the Acmeist journal, published an article by Valerian Chudovsky, “In Favor of the Letter ѣ,” in which the author made the threatened letter a “symbol of mortally wounded philological tradition, of linguistic heritage.” The reform, a product of “rotten politics,” threatened to undermine Russian culture and children’s faith in their elders: “Language is a religion: orthography is its sacred liturgy. Like the heavens above the earth, there must be given to children in their education a feeling of spiritual expanses not created by us.” He went so far as to say that “there is no path to Pushkin without ѣ, for he lives on the Olympus of the accumulation through the ages, of the unbrokenness of heritage whose symbol and key is the letter ѣ” (Chudovsky 1917, v-viii).

(Dmitrii Bykov’s novel Orfografiya features this reform; I wrote about it here, here, and here.)

Addendum. I can’t resist adding this delicious paragraph:

Another upshot of the reforms was somewhat amusing. Evidently some overly zealous revolutionary sailors went into various printing offices and destroyed the supplies of the now obsolete letters, including all the ъs, not having noticed that they were still needed in some words as separators […]. As a result, for more than a decade until the ъs could be resupplied, many printers were obliged to substitute apostrophes for them […]. When the ъs were reintroduced, there was a brief outcry of “counterrevolution” because that letter had become a symbol of the old regime.

I was thinking about using this Log post by Victor Mair for LH because of the video with its wonderful rapid-fire exchange in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Wuhan topolect, and Dongbei (Northeastern) topolect and the explication of the various varieties used, but one of the insults involved (gè bānmǎ ‘this zebra’) prompted a second post which is even better, explaining exactly why and how “zebra” became a term of abuse. I will quote the conclusion and urge you to go read the whole thing:

The denizens of Wuhan have a reputation for being rude and foul-mouthed. I’m sure that there must be plenty of polite, elegant, well-spoken individuals in Wuhan, but people from other parts of China — even where swearing is prevalent — are often stunned by the ubiquitousness and creativity of Wuhan profanity.

Landon Jones’s NY Times article “On the Trail of Nabokov in the American West” is in the travel section, and it is in fact much more about travel than literature, but hey, it’s Nabokov, and I can’t resist passing it along. It’s got evocative photos and some piquant bits about Vlad and Vera:

And what would Nabokov have made of this sign: IF YOU DIE TONIGHT HEAVEN OR HELL? Followed by this one: GARY’S GUN SHOP.

As it happens, Véra Nabokov once packed a Browning .38 revolver in her purse. When she applied for her license to carry one, she explained primly that it was “for protection in traveling in isolated parts of the country in the course of entomological research.” She wasn’t kidding. Nabokov killed a large rattlesnake during their 1953 trip to Portal, Ariz.

So I pass it along for those who may enjoy it, but I would advise against taking anything it says on trust, since it makes the idiotic statement that Lolita “was first published in 1955 in England,” easily refuted by a cursory glance at Wikipedia, which explains (as I would have thought every schoolboy knew) that it was first published in France by Olympia Press, and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London only in 1959. I realize it’s only the travel section, but still, someone at the Times should have caught that.

Lorraine Boissoneault writes in Jstor Daily about the 2008 Arctic Indigenous Languages Symposium and the link between linguistic preservation and biological diversity in the Arctic; here’s the conclusion:

The Saami aren’t the only indigenous people collaborating with scientists to better document the effects of climate change. A number of hunters in Alaskan native communities along the northern Bering Sea and Chukchi Sea provided information about changing sea ice patterns and polar bear behavior. The scientists concluded: “The hunters also provided information about local abundance that is complementary to research on larger scales, but which could not have been gained in any other way.” Basically, because of their connection to the environment, the hunters saw and knew things that scientists did not.

“It’s not that things are untranslatable,” said Holton, the documentary linguist, on the topic of lost languages. He works with Alaskan native communities to record local place names and samples of their languages in hopes that they won’t die out or be forgotten. “You just lose a subtlety for how you view the world. You can’t recover that sense of intimacy, that ability to express things in a certain way that can’t be captured by other languages.”

And this might be exactly why the six permanent members of the Arctic Council chose to focus their efforts on language revitalization. In doing so, they might be able to protect their homes and ways of life–or, at the least, show resilience in the face of enormous change.

“Neither nature nor language can be permanently conserved; there would be only a record of that time. Living language and living environment will always change,” Retter said. “Our challenge now is how fast things are changing. When you don’t use things your vocabulary goes to sleep. When nature is changing, you might have vocabulary for it that goes to sleep.”

Thanks, Paul!

I’ve just gotten to Chapter 6, “Canonization of the Party-State Voice,” of Michael S. Gorham’s 2003 Speaking in Soviet Tongues (see this post), in which, after describing the competing ideals of Russian language use that appeared after 1917 (the make-everything-new revolutionary, the peasant-oriented popular, and the imitate-the-classics national), Gorham focuses on the turn to the “party-state voice” that triumphed under Stalin in the mid-1930s, which began with Gorky’s review of Fyodor Panfyorov’s novel of collectivization Bruski, of which three volumes had so far appeared to near-universal acclaim:

His comments, appearing in The Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta) in January 1934, admonished Panferov for his verbiage and carelessness, citing in particular his overuse (and misuse) of dialect and his graphic distortion of words in an attempt to capture nonstandard pronunciations. Gorky questioned the author’s apparent belief that “Dal′’s dictionary still hangs over the Russian literary language” […]

Gorky’s critique set off a yearlong debate in the writing community that quickly assumed an even more politically and socially charged tone. One of Panferov’s more prominent allies, the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich, countered Gorky’s remarks by defending Bruski for its authentic depiction of everyday life in the countryside and its raw portrait of muzhik strength. Gorky responded in kind, criticizing the book again for littering the Russian language with words that did not exist and chiding the reviewer for glorifying the “strength of the muzhik.” “Permit me to remind you,” he wrote, that the strength of the muzhik is a socially unhealthy force and that the consistent cultural and political work of the party of Lenin and Stalin is aimed precisely at exterminating from the consciousness of the muzhik that ‘strength’ that you are praising.” As in earlier writings on the topic, Gorky’s critical frame directly linked style and politics — authority in language with the authority of the state. […] Invoking the antirural discourse of Marx and Lenin to complement his own vocabulary of “extermination,” Gorky went on to wonder how it could be possible “to express the heroism and romanticism of the reality created in the Union of Socialist Soviets” using an “idiotic language”? […]

With the exception of some of Panferov’s allies from the disbanded Association of Proletarian Writers, participants in the debate generally sided with Gorky, including writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov and Lidiia Seifullina, renowned for their own heavy use of dialect and vulgarisms in fiction. Seifullina justified her earlier narratives by arguing that the “primitive” state of the village at that time left no other option […].

Less out of Gorky’s culturist concerns for a basic level of literacy than in an effort to solidify the stature of the party-state, lower-level critics writing on cultural policy eagerly latched on to the patriarch’s arguments and used his rhetoric about national authority and identity. In the process, all three of the models discussed earlier — the revolutionary, the popular, and the national — underwent considerable refinement, if not total transformation.

(This development was discussed a few years ago in this post.) Gorham goes on to describe the 1935 Interpretive Dictionary of the Russian Language as “the linguist Dmitrii Ushakov’s realization of Lenin’s wish to replace Dal′’s nineteenth-century lexicon with a ‘real’ dictionary of the Russian language”:

Echoing the discourse of party-state purism inspired by Gorky and his followers, Ushakov’s introduction dismissed Dal′’s work for its focus on “bourgeois vernacular and peasant language,” praised the new lexicon’s inclusion of postrevolutionary “innovations” to Russian, and finally invoked the authority of both Lenin and Gorky in staking its claim as “a weapon in the struggle ‘for the quality of the language spoken every day by literature, the press, and millions of laborers,’ ‘for the purification of a language that is good, clean, accessible to millions, [and] truly of the people [narodnyi].”

Such interpretations defused once and for all the hopes of those who advocated that the spoken language of the people be raised to the status of a language of power, advocating instead a return to the already established Russian literary language, newly refined with ideological grounding in Bolshevik authority.

Purification! When I hear talk of purity, I release the safety catch on my Browning.

This is one of the best letter exchanges I’ve seen. Here’s the intro:

“It is not easy to write a Life of Catullus”, Helen Morales observes in the TLS of April 22. Nor, apparently, is it a straightforward matter to translate him. Professor Morales was reviewing two books, Daisy Dunn’s Catullus’ Bedspread: The life of Rome’s most erotic poet and Dunn’s accompanying edition of Catullus’ poems. The second book gave our reviewer cause for concern. Morales wrote:

The translations themselves show little sensitivity to the Latin language. For example, in Poem 32 the poet addresses his lover, the “sweet Ipsitilla”, and urges her to invite him round. Dunn translates:

Let no one bolt the door
And don’t be tempted to go out,
But stay home and make ready for us
And nine consecutive fucks.

The Latin word fututiones, which Dunn translates as “fucks”, is no ordinary one. It is a word invented by Catullus and only appears in Latin literature in Catullus and Martial. It conveys an exaggerated amount, and needs translating in way that captures the originality of the term, the excess implied, and the humour in the poet’s urgency. In their translations Jane Wilson Joyce has “Fornifuckations”, Guy Lee “fuctions”, and Peter Green “fuckfests”. Dunn’s commonplace “fucks” misses the point. She is also inconsistent in handling metre. The elegiac poems are rendered with an economy similar to the Latin, whereas the hexameters of Poem 64, the exquisite mythological poem whose description of a wedding coverlet gives Dunn’s book its title, are translated into free verse . . .

I’ll let you read the reader responses for yourselves; I particularly like Peter Green’s letter and wishes-he’d-thought-of-it-at-the-time solution. (Via Wordorigins.org.)