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This is a very minor issue, but it amused me, so I’m passing it along: in chapter 4 of Gorham’s Speaking in Soviet Tongues (see this post), he is discussing the difficulty of writers (and beginning writers, in the shape of workers’ and village correspondents) in dealing with the confusing variety of forms of speech available in the early 1920s, specifically the juicy but restricted peasant speech, which had trouble with abstraction and logical sequence, and the high-flown language of Bolshevik officials and propagandists, which was full of abstraction and was basically unintelligible to the average Russian. After providing amusing examples from Zoshchenko, who derived half his material from this confusion, he says, “‘True’ authority remains outside the margins of the perverted text with the implied author,” and his footnote reads:

The Russian term iskazhenie, which I translate in this discussion as “distortion” or “perversion,” nicely reflects the degree to which the act is rooted in language or narration (as suggested by the root -SKAZ-). The term was commonly employed by contemporary critics who complained of the postrevolutionary mangling of the Russian language, Soviet ideology, or both. […]

Alas, there is no root -SKAZ- here (the root of skazat’ ‘say,’ skazka ‘tale, story,’ etc.); iskazhenie is a nominalized form of the verb iskazit’ ‘distort, pervert, twist,’ which is simply a prefixed equivalent of the semantically identical but obsolete kazit’, which as Vasmer says is either a causative of -чезать or a cognate of Lithuanian kežė́ti, kežù ‘acquire a sour taste.’ No relation to -SKAZ- whatever; that’s just a tale, or story, as it were. This should not be taken as a slap at Gorham, who is a fine scholar; anyone can make a mistake, and it’s in a footnote most people won’t even read. But it should serve as a reminder not to neglect the dusty facts of philology even when one is brewing the heady nectar of analysis.

Cara Giaimo writes in Atlas Obscura about a man I knew nothing about, as well as others in his line of work:

Long before we had viral quizzes to gather our peculiarities, there was only [Edmond] Edmont—a linguistic assistant who spent the end of the 19th century bicycling around France, speaking to locals, and cataloguing their unique words and phrases. Over four years, Edmont journeyed to over 600 towns, gathering material for what would become the Atlas Linguistique de la France: the world’s first great linguistic atlas.

A century later—after technological revolutions and scholarly schisms wholly reshaped the field—Edmont remains, in the words of one linguist, “a mythical figure in the history of dialect surveys.” Whether you’re the kind of surveyor who spends hours speaking to farmers in Georgia, or the kind who dreams up the Buzzfeed Accent Challenge, his work remains both vital and informative.

There follows a riveting history of dialect studies, including a PhD student named Georg Wenker who “drew up 42 sentences that, in his estimation, covered the most changeable aspects of the German language” (“In the wintertime dried leaves fly about in the air”; “I will slap your ears with the cooking spoon, you monkey!”) and Jules Gilliéron, with “his own set of 2,000 common words and phrases, similarly designed to cover a broad swath of French.” Edmont worked for Gilliéron, and their Atlas Linguistique inspired “dialectologists from Switzerland to Japan.” There’s much more at the link, which I urge you to click on.

Jackson Landers of the Smithsonian reports on an exciting discovery:

American history has just been slightly rewritten. Previously, experts had believed that the Native Americans of central Massachusetts spoke a single language, Loup (pronounced “Lou,” literally meaning “wolf”). But new research shows that they spoke at least five different languages.

“It’s like some European families where you can have three different languages at the dinner table,” says Ives Goddard, curator emeritus and senior linguist in the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “There was probably a lot of bilingualism. A question that is raised by there being so many languages is ‘how did that work?’ How did they manage to maintain five different languages in such a small area?”

The lost languages were re-discovered by taking another look at several manuscripts written by French missionaries who were also working as linguists in the mid 1700s. While working on her master’s thesis at the University of Manitoba, Holly Gustafson compiled lists of verb forms found in one of the manuscripts. Goddard noticed some contradictions in the compilation. […]

“This gives us a picture of the aboriginal situation in New England being fragmented into different groups,” says Goddard. “This tells us something about the social and political situation.”

Goddard believes that the situation may have been similar to that of the Sui people of the Guizhou Province of China. Women from a particular band of villages would always marry into a different band of villages in which a different language was spoken. The woman would continue to speak her original dialect, her husband would speak another, while their children would grow up understanding both but primarily speaking the father’s dialect outside of the home. Family and cultural ties are maintained between the different groups of villages while maintaining an independent sense of identity.

Goddard’s research begs the question of how many other native American languages may have been missed. The cultural diversity of pre-colonial America may have been underestimated. Rediscovering those languages can help to explain where the lines were drawn between different cultures.

Fascinating stuff — thanks, Trevor!

From Gerald Murnane’s “In Praise of the Long Sentence” (Meanjin, Autumn 2016), a crotchety but interesting essay:

In 1986 I was invited, along with several other writers, to give a short talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival on the subject ‘Why I write what I write’. I was not surprised when the other writers talked about childhood experiences, subjects that inspired them, or concerns that drove them to write. I chose to talk about none of these, and my short speech must have impressed at least one member of the audience, the then editor of Meanjin, Judith Brett, who published the speech a few months later. My speech began ‘I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence…’ I made no mention of grammar in my speech. I spoke more about such matters as the shape of meaning, the sound of sense, the contour of thought. These were all expressions I had learned from other writers’ efforts to explain why some writing, to put it simply, is better than other writing. I quoted a remarkable passage by Virginia Woolf in which she claimed: ‘A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it … and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.’ I wrote my speech 30 years ago, and I’m as pleased with it today as I was then, but I acknowledge that my essay, so to call it, is no sort of compelling argument for grammatically sound sentences. Rather, it seems to suggest that I trusted for most of my life in a sort of instinct. I trusted in a sort of instinct and looked only for apt or suggestive forms of words, and yet I never needed to violate the principles of traditional grammar. […]

Several times during the writing of this piece, I may have seemed to be trying to justify my use of long sentences. Certainly, I left off writing this piece now and then and pondered on my liking for such sentences and my interest in punctuation and traditional grammar. These preferences of mine may have a simpler explanation than I sometimes try to find. During the first ten years of my life, I was closer in time to the nineteenth century than to the present century. For most of my childhood I read books written long before my birth, books by R.L. Stevenson, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, William Henry Hudson. Even our English textbooks at secondary school recommended the prose of Charles Lamb, Thomas Hardy, George Borrow. I long ago gave up reading contemporary writers, but I still look often into Hardy’s novels or Lavengro or The Romany Rye. Perhaps I learned the subtle rhythms of left-branching nineteenth-century prose in the same way that the authors of that prose learned the rhythms of their Cicero or their Livy. I would be far from disappointed to learn that this is so.

Anyone who refuses to like or understand contemporary art is self-doomed to irrelevance (which is not the same as inferiority), and anyone who claims “to know more about sentences than Thomas Pynchon or Frank Kermode” is in some sense a blithering idiot, but I like his statement “that meaning for me was connection; that a thing had meaning for me if it was connected with another thing.” Via wood s lot.

Will Firth, a translator from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian, has posted “10 Books by Women We’d Like to See Translated: Balkan Edition.” I love this sort of thing, and the books sound interesting; two that particularly struck my fancy:

CROATIA
Hodler en Mostar (Hodler in Mostar), Spomenka Štimec (Edistudio, 2006)

This historical novel is partly about the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler but rather more about his model of many years’ standing, Jeanne Charles Cerani. After the two part ways, Jeanne marries a Bosnian soldier wounded in WWI, who later joins the Yugoslav diplomatic service. A collection of Hodler’s paintings follows Jeanne and her husband on their many postings and finally ends up in Mostar. A union of two quite different worlds.

MONTENEGRO
Gospođa Black (Mrs Black), Olja Knežević (Vijesti, 2015)

Written as a first-person report, the author’s second “London novel” is about a woman from Montenegro who marries a somewhat older Englishman and grafts herself into British society. Just when she feels she has comfortably adapted, ghosts of the past catch up with her. An interesting look at the problems of women in society amplified by the jarring contrast of a wealthy, stable country and a country from the underbelly of Europe.

Here‘s a post from last year on a similar topic, and I will renew “my decade-old lament at the absence of a translation of Abdelrahman Munif’s historical novel Ard Al-Sawad.”

From the About page:

The site mlat.uzh.ch is a Latin text (meta-)repository and tool under way of development. Users should take into account that some functions do not yet work satisfactorily. This Corpus Córporum is being developed at the University of Zurich under the direction of Ph. Roelli, Institute for Greek and Latin Philology. The project uses exclusively free and open software and is non-commercial. Our main goals are:

– To provide a platform into which standardised (TEI) xml-files of Latin texts can be loaded (if you would like to share your texts, please contact us) and downloaded (unless copyrights or the texts’ providers restrict this).

– To make these texts searchable in complex manners (including proximity search and lemmatised search). Search results, wordlists and concordances can be generated for the current text level at the bottom left of the page (we use the open-source software Sphinx).

– To be able to use the platform to publish Latin texts online (cf. the Richard Rufus Project’s corpus).

– Texts may be downloaded as TEI xml or txt-files for non-commercial use (in snippets also as pdf) and can thus be reused by other researchers.

The texts are divided into corpora on a specific topic that can be searched and studied separately: the first such corpus consists of ten translations of Aristotle’s Physica into Latin. They were used to study how technical Greek language could be translated into Latin. Word frequency lists are also on the server.

The internet gets better and better. Thanks, Bruce!

This BBC story is a very interesting account of why Deborah Smith, who translated Han Kang’s prize-winning novel The Vegetarian, learned the language:

Smith, whose only language was English until she was 21, decided to become a translator on finishing her English Literature degree having noticed the lack of English-Korean translators. She said she was “certainly not a born Korean speaker” and still spoke Korean “very much like somebody who learned it from a textbook”.

“I had no connection with Korean culture – I don’t think I had even met a Korean person – but I wanted to become a translator because it combined reading and writing and I wanted to learn a language.

“Korean seemed like a strangely obvious choice, because it is a language which practically nobody in this country studies or knows.”

She said she initially tried to translate the book for a publisher after only learning Korean for two years, but the translation was “awful”. However, after publisher Portobello Books asked her if she had a Korean book that would be “right for their list”, she had another go at translating a year later. […]

Deborah Smith taught herself Korean and was smart enough to spot there was a need for translators to turn the language into high-quality English – which she managed brilliantly with The Vegetarian. The prose is relaxed and idiomatic but it’s powerful. There isn’t a paragraph or turn of phrase which feels like it didn’t originate in English.

The story is deliberately mysterious but Smith said she couldn’t ever call up Han Kang to ask how a particular event or character was to be regarded. “I didn’t have any way of contacting her and, as a first-time translator, I wasn’t even sure what the etiquette was. Was I even allowed to ask questions? So I just got on with putting the book into English.”

I hope her story encourages other people to learn lesser-known languages and become translators. Thanks, Paul and Eric!

I imagine I first knew of Lydia Lopokova as the wife of John Maynard Keynes, and I probably said her name mentally as “Lo-POCK-ova.” Eventually I learned that her actual (Russian) surname was Lopukhova (la-pu-KHO-və), but I never really adjusted my mental audio file, because the two versions were too different to reconcile and I never had any reason to think about her. Now John Freedman of Russian Culture in Landmarks has posted about her, and the first paragraph both explains how the renaming came about and exacerbates my feeling that something went terribly wrong:

Most of the world knows her as Lydia Lopokova, although she was born and grew up in St. Petersburg as Lidia Lopukhova. The “pseudonym” (if you’re generous) or the abomination of her real name (if you’re honest) was visited upon us by Sergei Diaghilev. When he hired Lopukhova to join the Ballets Russes in 1910, he resolved that the world would not know what to do with the “Lopukhova” configuration… as though “Lopokova” were a great improvement. But history is what it is (just for the record, Russian folk wisdom calls it a turkey) so we have what we have: Lydia Lopokova (1892-1981), one of the stars of the Ballets Russes. She never again lived in Russia and, for many years, lived at this house at 46 Gordon Square, Kings Cross, London, with her husband John Maynard Keynes, the famed economist and member of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals.

I simply can’t imagine how Diaghilev could have come up with that; I can see simplifying the kh to k for Anglo-French consumption, but the rest… Anyway, now I want to know how English-speakers familiar with her say “Lopokova,” since she’s not in any of my biographical reference works and Wikipedia doesn’t give a pronunciation. Anybody know?

I can’t believe I’ve never reported on this massive lexicographical project before, but such appears to be the case. Happily, Byrd Pinkerton has done an NPR piece that gives me a chance to remedy the omission:

On the second floor of an old Bavarian palace in Munich, Germany, there’s a library with high ceilings, a distinctly bookish smell and one of the world’s most extensive collections of Latin texts. About 20 researchers from all over the world work in small offices around the room.

They’re laboring on a comprehensive Latin dictionary that’s been in progress since 1894. The most recently published volume contained all the words beginning with the letter P. That was back in 2010.

And they’re not as far along as that may lead you to believe. They skipped over N years ago because it has so many long words, and now they’ve had to go back to that one. They’re also working on R at the same time. That should take care of the rest of this decade.

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae was one of many big, scholarly projects taken on by the German government in the late 19th century.

Through two World Wars and German reunification, generations of Latin scholars have been chipping away at the same goal: documenting every use of every Latin word from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the 6th century BC up until around 200 AD, when it was in decline as a spoken language. Befitting the comprehensive nature of the project, the scholars will also include some words up to the 6th century AD.

That means poetry and history and speeches. But it also means every gravestone and street sign. It means architectural works, medical and legal texts, books about animals or cooking.

There’s a lot more about the history and techniques involved, as well as the people who work on it (and some great photos); I’ll just quote this one additional bit to explain a joke:

Her colleague, Nigel Holmes, a Thesaurus editor, wrote the article for nam, or “for.”

“I have sometimes joked that I still have nightmares from when I was in nam,” he admits. “But it was actually, it was easier than I thought.”

For those too young to remember, “Nam” (rhymes with “ham”) used to be a common way to refer to Vietnam (and the war America fought there), and “when I was in Nam” was a phrase you heard a lot.

Or sachet or pochon? Or perhaps cornet or nylon? The French have many words for ‘plastic shopping bag,’ and you can see the geographical distribution at Arika Okrent’s Mental Floss post, along with a link to more such maps. Now I’m wondering what the Québecois say…