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I’ve finished Elena Veltman’s short novel Виктор [Viktor], which surprised me by being a huge advance on “Oksana” (which I wrote about here). It’s one of those works that makes me glad I embarked on my project of reading as much early Russian literature as I could, and frustrated at the unjust workings of literary history and canon formation. It appeared in the January and February 1853 issues of Moskvityanin and as a book in the same year, but the book appears to be an extreme rarity, and it has not been digitized by Google, which means anyone who wants to read the novel has to depend on the Google Books scan of Moskvityanin (here‘s the start)—which, alas, is missing several pages.

The novel is divided into two halves, the first giving background and the second telling the actual story. But here, as in an Alexander Veltman novel, the plot is not paramount, and the title character is not meant to be a particularly interesting or psychologically deep protagonist (a point missed by one of the very few people who seems to have actually read it since the 1850s, the author of the entry in the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers). It starts with its young hero waking up in an unbearably melancholy state, tells the reader that this is one of those fateful moments that can determine the entire future course of a person’s life, and then says that to understand it we must go back a generation or two, to Viktor’s mother, or better yet to her mother, Anna Petrovna Polyanova, and we’re off — Viktor disappears for many pages. It turns out that Anna’s husband, Prokofy Trofimovich, works for a rich woman, Avdotya Medvedeva, on the lawsuit which consumes her entire life and which everyone expects will make their fortune. After many miscarriages which seem to ordain a childless marriage, Anna has a daughter, Nastenka, who is so beautiful and charming that Avdotya takes her under her wing, giving her a proper lady’s education (French, piano, dancing) at a pension. Unfortunately, she is also a miser, and chooses the cheapest available pension (Mme Griselle’s), which means that Nastenka learns such terrible French that Avdotya says she’d better not marry anyone who actually speaks the language. Fortunately, she has just the right candidate: Andrei Lyudvinov, a lawyer who carries on her lawsuit in the higher circles of St. Petersburg. He’s an older man, and balding, but Nastasya has no choice in the matter, and she marries him (I might note that the author herself was forced by her family to marry an older man she didn’t love, for financial reasons); they have a child, Viktor, whom they adore, and they provide him with the best possible gentleman’s education. Unfortunately, just as he’s about to set out to make his way in the world, the lawsuit is decided unfavorably, and everyone is suddenly broke. He’s excited for a moment when an acquaintance shows up and offers to take him on a trip around the world, all expenses paid, but it turns out the fellow means that Viktor (who he assumes is rich) will pay the expenses while he acts as a tour guide. So, after awakening (thus we return to the start of the novel), Viktor sees nothing for it but to retreat to the village the family owns, out in the country. This is where the first part ends.

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Jalada is “a pan-African writers’ collective,” and they have produced a fantastic online magazine consisting of translations of a single story by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Gikuyu pronunciation [ᵑɡoɣe wa ðiɔŋɔ]), “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright,” into English, Amharic, Dholuo, Kikamba, Lwisukha-Lwidakho, French, Arabic, Luganda, Kiswahili, Afrikaans, Hausa, Ikinyarwanda, Meru, Lingala, IsiZulu, Igbo, Ibibio, Somali, Sayyidka, XiTsonga, Nandi, Rukiga, Bamanankan, Shona, Lugbarati, Lubukusu, Kimaragoli, Giriama, Sheng, Naija Languej, Marakwet, and Ewe. As if that weren’t enough, you can hear audio files of readings of the story in the original Kikuyu and in English and Sheng translation. If you’re wondering about Naija Languej, it’s also known as Nigerian Pidgin; this page says a 2009 conference adopted Naijá as the new name for the language, “because what hitherto was referred to as Nigerian Pidgin is no longer a pidgin because it has creolised in some parts of the country; its functions have surpassed the functions of a pidgin; and the term ‘pidgin’ has helped to encourage derogatory connotations about the language.” Both idea and execution are excellent, and I hope they do more of this sort of thing.

Over at the Log, a guest post by Nathan Hopson describes a really clever use of the Japanese language’s traditions of borrowings and abbreviations:

Reading and watching the news in Japanese, I quickly realized that the UN is something of an exception and that the media handle the alphabet soup of international organizations by giving the English acronym along with its Japanese translation the first time, and then simply using the English acronym thereafter. So the World Health Organization becomes WHO (世界保健機関), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is NATO (北大西洋条約機構). In conversation, many of these well-known bodies are simply referred to by their English acronyms; even the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers (連合国総司令部) is just called GHQ.

This phenomenon, which is a great example of the flexibility of the Japanese language, has recently been taken to an extreme by the Japanese musician and personality known as DAIGO, who is incidentally also the grandson of former Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru. His unique take on abbreviation is called “DAI語.” The pronunciation of this coinage is the same as his name; the last character means “language.” […]

In the first still, DAIGO is saying, “MM,” which has been helpfully glossed as マジムリ (maji muri). ムリ (or 無 理 in kanji) means something like, “No way!” and the マ ジ is an intensifier meaning “seriously.” In the second picture, he goes one step further: “SNSN” is glossed as shinsen (新 鮮; “fresh”). Below, “DGDG” is read as “Daigo no dai gosan” (DAIGOの 大誤算), or “DAIGO’s big miscalculation.”

There are more examples and background at the link; I’m sure there is no shortage of people decrying this as a mortal threat to the language (or to all that is decent and good), but I think it’s great. Have fun with language, that’s what it’s for! (Well, that and ordering breakfast.)

Susan Bernofsky, Jonathan Cohen, and Edith Grossman produced these thoughts for reviewers of literary translations, which are cogent enough I thought I’d pass them along:

• Always include the translator’s name in your initial mention of the book and in any bibliographic sidebar.

• If the translation stands out because of its elegance, panache, or daring word choices, by all means say so. If it drags and stumbles, this too is worthy of note, particularly if your conclusions are backed up by examples.

• If the translator has included a note describing his or her approach to the translation, it is useful to summarize the principles mentioned in the statement and to indicate whether the translator’s aims have been achieved.

• When previous translations of a work exist, compare parallel passages so you can indicate the contributions made by the new one.

• If the work of the original author is celebrated for particular literary qualities, it is valuable for the reader to know whether they appear in the translation.

• Most interesting of all for you to consider is this: does the translated work contribute to the literary life of the English language, to our speech, art, and sensibility? In other words, regardless of whether the work is poetry or prose, does the translation expand the boundaries of literary practice in English, introducing new narrative techniques, poetic forms, or modes of telling a story?

Here are two examples of reviews we think are particularly successful at integrating a discussion of the translation into an evaluation of the book under review: Michael Dirda’s review of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, translated from the German by Breon Mitchell (here); and James Woods’ review of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (here).

I share their impatience with reviews that include only “a passing comment like ‘ably translated,'” and I hope their suggestions are listened to. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve just come across a very interesting edge case in the perennial issue “What is an English word?” I almost hate to post about it, because by doing so I’m ruining the pristine Google results, which at present consist of three hits: Politics in the Rural Society, by P. M. Jones (“Pockets of preciputary practice existed in the North, notably in Picardy and Flanders”); A History of the Family, Vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity, ed. Andre Burguiere, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, and Francois Zonabend (“It is also clear that the preciputary system which dominated in southern France was related to the stem family”); and “From mother to daughter: The transmission of fertility” by Agnès Fine, Véronique Moulinié, and Jean-Claude Sangoï (“However, in the Haut-Comminges, when inheritance is preciputary, it lends no systematic advantage to the eldest son”). From those quotes it sounds like an ordinary word, perhaps a little specialized (I’m pretty sure no one reading this will know what it means) but a member in good standing of the English word-hoard. And yet it is not in any English dictionary, not even in the remote reaches of the OED (an advanced search turns up no results), and three Google hits is essentially zero as far as frequency of use is concerned.

What does it mean, you ask? Well, it’s an anglicized form of French préciputaire (an adjective based on the noun préciput, from Latin praecipuum), so let’s turn to The Council of Europe French-English Legal Dictionary; on p. 89 we find “donation préciputaire – money, chattels or land which the surviving spouse is entitled to take from the community property before partition,” and on p. 226 “part préciputaire – gift to an heir out of an estate in addition to his share.” Apparently there is no other single-word English equivalent, using the French adjective would be awkward, and using a long periphrasis every time you want to deal with the concept would be even more so. So even though by all normal measures there is no English word “preciputary,” I am leaving it in the text I’m editing, and encouraging others to use it so its foothold will be less precarious (or précaire, as they say in France).

I got this welcome news in the Slavica Newsletter:

In honor of Slavica’s 50th anniversary (1966-2016), we present the first in a series of reprints of notable titles published by Slavica but now long out of print. We are restoring these titles to print and making them available free of charge in .pdf format on our website, slavica.indiana.edu. Enjoy these books, tell your friends, and feel free to share them with colleagues and students.

Here, we offer Charles E. Gribble’s definitive Medieval Slavic Texts, Volume 1, a collection of medieval texts reprinted for students of Slavic philology and representing a wide range of genres, language variants, and orthographic systems. Our sincere thanks to Gribble, co-founder and long-time owner of Slavica, for granting permission for this reprint.

Medieval Slavic Texts, Volume 1, Charles E. Gribble, ed. 320 p., 1973 (978-0-89357-010-0).

What a great thing to do! I’ve already downloaded the book, and I add my thanks to Gribble and to Slavica.

“Polyglossia” is an sf story by Tamara Vardomskaya, a Canadian writer currently pursuing a PhD in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago. It’s one of the most remarkable linguistics-oriented stories I’ve read, featuring a linguist who studies the endangered languages of her region and a young speaker of a dying language, navigating the capital city’s tense ethno-linguistic situation; it gets into nice detail about historical relationships between languages and is a lot of fun to read (if you enjoy sf, of course). Thanks, Vasha!

Rebecca Onion posts at Slate about a map so gorgeous and interesting I can’t resist bringing it here:

John Wesley Powell, explorer, geologist, and scientist, produced this map while he was the head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, as part of an 1890 Annual Report. According to Powell’s description of the project, the map plotted “linguistic stocks of American Indians,” as they were situated “at the time when the tribes composing them first became known to the European.”

The map was a culmination of decades of work, Powell wrote in the section of the bureau’s 1891 annual report that described its provenance. “The writer’s interest in linguistic work and the inception of a plan for a linguistic classification of Indian languages date back about 20 years, to a time when he was engaged in explorations in the West,” Powell wrote […]

In his description of the map, Powell exuded scholarly modesty: “[The map] is to be regarded as tentative, setting forth in visible form the results of investigation up to the present time, as a guide and aid to future effort.” But the project was a big deal, writes historian Donald Worster in his biography of Powell: “The classification and map were Powell’s most important achievement as bureau director … and they set the standard for linguists well into the twentieth century.”

Take a look; I’m sure a lot of it is out of date (and I hope marie-lucie will weigh in), but it’s a feast for the eyes. Thanks, Trevor!

David Zvi Kalman’s Forward article “The Strange and Violent History of the Ordinary Grogger” is extraordinarily interesting in its own right, as a history of the ratchet from the church crotalus to the policeman’s rattle (only superseded by the the pea whistle in 1884) and the Purim noisemaker. But I’m bringing it here for a couple of etymologies. The Yiddish word grager or greger, conventionally spelled grogger in American Jewish usage, is said to be from Polish grzegarz ‘rattle’; the problem is that I can find no evidence for such a Polish word. Also, the article mentions “the Triduum — the three days preceding Easter”; the word triduum, which was new to me, looks like it means “three twos,” but the OED (in an entry from 1914) says “< Latin trīduum, prop. neuter of *trīduus adjective (sc. spatium), < tri-, tri- comb. form + diēs day.” How do you get –duus from dies?

Stan Carey has a mental_floss post on the word Celtic that says just about everything that needs to be said on the subject. He explains that “The now-dominant pronunciation ‘Keltic’ is a modern innovation”:

We can see the shift by comparing Fowler’s original Dictionary of Modern English Usage with Robert Burchfield’s revised third edition. Here’s Fowler, 1926: “The spelling C-, & the pronunciation s-, are the established ones, & no useful purpose seems to be served by the substitution of k-.” Burchfield, 1996: “Except for the football club Celtic (in Glasgow), which is pronounced /’seltɪk/, both Celt and Celtic are pronounced with initial /k/ in standard English.”

Burchfield doesn’t mention the Boston Celtics, and that’s not his only oversimplification. Celtic may be pronounced either way in standard English—even if this bothers some people. A lot of antagonism over language use stems from misconceptions about correctness, such as the common belief that there can be only one correct form of a word (one meaning, spelling, pronunciation, etc.), and that variants are therefore wrong. […]

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, “the closer you get to circles substantively concerned with Celtic lore and languages, the more likely you are to hear \’kel-tik\”—though “Seltic” may be heard “at times from very well-educated speakers.” The American Heritage Dictionary elaborates:

Although many people pronounce this word with an initial (s) sound, an initial (k) sound is standard in historical, linguistic, and sociological contexts. Interestingly, the introduction of the (k) sound is a linguistic change started by scholars, contravening the historical development of the word.

English borrowed Celtic in the 17th century from French celtique, soft-c, and from Latin Celtae, also soft-c in Britain at the time (unlike Classical Latin, which used a hard c). Centuries later the pronunciation changed, because language, but it didn’t switch from “Seltic” to “Keltic”—it just added the variant, which then spread. So now we have two acceptable forms. (And two spellings: Keltic, though unusual, is a variant that recalls Greek Keltoi, “the Gauls.”)

As both a Celt and a linguist, Stan is in a good position to adjudicate the matter, and his conclusion is unimpeachable:

Claims about correctness in language can’t override the facts of usage, and the important fact here is that both pronunciations are standard and correct. […] Critics are entitled to dislike “Seltic” or “Keltic,” but they have no business saying either pronunciation is wrong. Because they’re both right.