languagehat.com

As I told Kári Tulinius, who sent me the link, Gothic Wikipedia seems spectacularly pointless, but it’s intriguing, so I thought I’d pass it along. Here‘s the English-language Starter’s Guide, if you want to give it a try; I have to admit the script is very pretty. Thanks, Kári!

The Chicago Manual interviews Robert Alter about his much-praised translation of the Hebrew Bible:

CMOS: You have now translated a large portion of the Hebrew Bible into English. What motivated you to take on such an enormous, high-profile, high-stakes project?

RA: I have to say that it really sneaked up on me. That is, I was dissatisfied with the existing translations, and I thought, well, I’ll give a whirl at translating Genesis and see if I can do something about the English that would make it exhibit more of the stylistic power of the Hebrew. I was rather unsure that this was going to work, but I figured it was worth a try. And it turned out to work better than I thought it would. Not that I ever think that my translations are perfect, but it got some very good responses: a rave review in the New York Times and that kind of thing. So I thought I’d do one other book that I like, and I translated Samuel, basically the David story, and that also got a nice response, and then I was kind of talked into doing the Five Books of Moses by my editor at Norton. And then because it was perceived as a fundamental building block of the whole Bible, it got reviewed all over in places I’d never been reviewed before like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. So there I was. Up until a certain point I wasn’t thinking of doing the whole Bible, but then I looked back and said, “Hey, I’ve done about two-thirds of it, so I might as well go on and do the whole.”

CMOS: What was wrong with the translations we already had?

RA: I’m a literary person who happens to have the skill set of a Bible scholar, and as a literary person I read the Hebrew and see that much of it is fantastic, stylistically—wonderfully subtle prose, powerful, resonant poetry—and I think that the existing translations don’t do justice to it because the modern translators don’t look at the stylistic aspects of the Hebrew.

There’s a good deal more — he’s especially proud of his translation of Job and of the beginning of Genesis (I agree with him that “welter and waste” is excellent), and he talks about elements of biblical Hebrew that just don’t come across well in translation — but that will give you an idea. When asked about other translators, he says “The only English translation I honestly admire is the King James Version,” which won my heart, and he adds that modern English versions “have a very shaky sense of English style,” which is exactly right. Rhythm and style are the indispensable foundation of all literary translation (and, for that matter, of all literary writing). Thanks, Paul!

Russian Dinosaur has an intriguing interview with Cathy McAteer about her research on translator David Magarshack and the Penguin Classics series he worked for; like everybody else, I was familiar with his versions of classic Russian literature (notably Dostoevsky), but I knew nothing about him or about the background of the translations. Turns out he was born in Riga (his dates were 1899–1977, just like Nabokov’s) and emigrated to the UK at nineteen, married the Yorkshire-born and Cambridge-educated Elsie, and approached E.V. Rieu offering his services as a literary translator; I’ll let you get the rest of the story at the link (and I’m looking forward to the book, if McAteer turns her PhD research into one), but here I want to highlight the final bit, since it is based on my request to the Dinosaur for information about pronunciation:

One last quick question (by special request): how would you actually pronounce Magarshack?

CM: This is an interesting one. I only ever hear Brits referring to him as MAGarshack, but of the Russians I know who are familiar with Jewish surnames, they say MagarSHACK. Alas, I do not know how he talked about himself here in the UK, but I guess it’s the same sort of conundrum facing anyone who says NabOkov/PasterNAK/RomAnov amongst British lay listeners..

Russian Магаршак is indeed stressed on the final syllable (it’s one of those Jewish names derived from abbreviations, in this case of Morenu Ha-rab Rabbi Shelomo Kluger), and I presume that’s how the translator said it in his head, but I suppose he bowed to popular pronunciation when he talked with people; was that popular pronunciation indeed MAGarshack? Is that how people who interacted with him at Penguin said it? If you know, I’m all ears.

“No Wool, No Vikings” by Claire Eamer is an article (for Hakai magazine) about, well, wool and Vikings. It’s well worth reading (I had no idea Viking ships had woolen sails!), but this is not WoolHat, and I’m posting about it because of the following paragraph:

But first, it’s time to collect the wool. These double-coated sheep shed their wool naturally in late spring and summer, so they don’t need to be shorn. Instead, the wool is plucked, or “rooed”—a bit like pulling loosened hair from a shedding dog. Rooing is labor intensive. In Viking times and for centuries after, the whole village would join in the roundup and rooing. The captive labor force of Fosen students means rooing is still possible on Utsetøya.

Of course I looked it up in OED, and fortunately the entry has been updated (in November 2010); it’s a word local to Orkney and Shetland meaning “To strip (a sheep) of wool by hand, instead of by shearing; to pluck (wool) in this manner,” and the etymology is quite interesting:

A borrowing from Norn.
< the unattested Norn cognate of Icelandic rúa, Norwegian regional rua, both in sense ‘to pluck (wool) from a sheep’, probably representing a later denominative formation (compare Icelandic rú old or dirty sheep’s wool (16th cent.), Norwegian (Nynorsk) ru, (regional) ruv sheep’s wool which is shorn off at the end of the winter) < the same Scandinavian base as (with i-mutation) Old Icelandic rýja to pluck (wool) from a sheep < the same Indo-European base as classical Latin ruere to churn or plough up, dig out, Old Church Slavonic ryti, Old Russian ryti (Russian ryt′) to dig, Old Russian r′′vati (Russian rvat′) to tear, tug, pluck (compare Old Church Slavonic runo fleece, probably < the same base), Lithuanian rauti to pull, tear, root out, and probably also (with different ablaut grade) rag n.2

I’m curious as to whether my Scandinavian readers are familiar with the various ru(a) words.

Addendum. Nothing to do with rooing, but I wanted to pass on the sad news that Jeff Del Col, who usually posted here as j. del col, commenting on everything from brassicas to R. Crumb to Elias Canetti, “died very unexpectedly today at the age of 68,” as his daughter Laura wrote me; she added that “He loved reading and talking about language and literature (he was an English professor himself)” and that LH gave him a great deal of enjoyment. [Obit.] My condolences to his family; he’ll definitely be missed around these parts.

Update to Addendum (Sept. 2025). The Del Col obit has disappeared from the website and was not captured by Internet Archive, so it is lost to history. I wish I had quoted it.

Elon Gilad in Haaretz has a piece called “Why Hebrew Has So Many Words for ‘Penis’” (if that link takes you to a paywall, google the title and use the cached version) that provides some fine, and salacious, language history:

Euphemism creep didn’t start yesterday. The Bible is replete with circumlocutions for penis, to the extent that it isn’t clear what the actual word for penis was in ancient Israel.

Biblical allusions include basar (“flesh”, Exodus 28:42), erva (“nakedness”, Leviticus 18:6), mevoshim (“private parts”, Deuteronomy 25:11), regel (“leg”, 2 Kings 18:27), shofkha (“spout”, Deuteronomy 23:1), yad (“Hand”, Isaiah 57:8), and me’or (“Nakedness”, Habakkuk 2:15).

Later, during the times of the Mishnah and the Talmud (the first six centuries of the Common Era), the rabbis added some more euphemisms to those of eld: panim shel mata (“lower face”, Shabbat 41a), ama (“middle finger”, Shabbat 108b), etzba (“finger”, Pesachim 112b), shamash (“helper”, Nidah 60b), gevia (“corpse”, Negaim 6:7), parmashtaq (probably a Persian word for “penis”, Mo’ed Katan 18a), and evar (“organ”, Bava Mezia 84a).

In the Middle Ages, even though Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language, rabbis kept up the pace. New names of the era included: brit (“covenant” – referring to circumcision), gevura (“manliness”), geed (“tendon”), zakhrut (“maleness”), zanav (“tail”) and kama (“ripe sheaf”).

With such an abundance of suggestions at their disposal, and these lists are not exhaustive, you would think that when Hebrew was reborn as a spoken language starting in the late 19th century, the new Hebrew speakers – preoccupied with finding words for the modern world – would settle for the rich pickings from previous generations of Jews over millennia. Not so. New words had to be found.

An early “modern” word for penis, zereg, was first noticed among giggling children at Tel Aviv’s Gymnasia Herzliya school in the early 20th century. It may have been a corruption of gezer (“carrot”) or zerek (“hose” – defunct).

Another word springing from the classrooms of early Tel-Aviv is zayin, which is by far the most common used word for penis in contemporary Hebrew, though – you stand warned – it is considered vulgar.

There is discussion of various proposed etymologies for zayin and the Yiddishisms shmock and shtrungool (the latter apparently a Hebrew corruption of strunckel ‘little (tree) trunk’); then we get this delightful passage:

The polite, “official” word for penis is peen, and it comes from an ancient typographical error.

The Mishnah, a treatise on Jewish law written in roughly 200 CE, has a passage that reads “A key of metal with pins of wood is pure” (Kelim 13:6). The word for pins here is khapeen. But sometime over the generations, a scribe made a mistake, replacing the first letter, khet (ח), with the nearly identical looking hei (ה). From “khapeen” – pins, plural, the word was mistakenly rendered as “hapeen,” the pin.

In modern Hebrew too, pin came to be peen. And when Hebrew revivers were looking for a word for penis, they decided peen would do for that too. It was reminiscent of penis and pins sort of look like tiny penises.

This actually caught on. But in the 1950s, the Hebrew Language Academy chose not peen but evar (“organ”) as the official word for penis, or evar meen – “sex organ”.

People did indeed take to saying evar meen, which was used for both male and female naughty parts, but in writing the word remained peen. Then in 2009, the academy caved in to the public and made peen the official word. But although it was the will of the people and it’s official to boot –it’s rarely used when speaking any more. It’s considered too prissy.

Thanks, Kobi!

I absolutely love this story by Julian Miglierini (BBC Rome):

A few weeks back, primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.

Matteo described a flower as “petaloso” (“full of petals”). The word doesn’t officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of “petalo” (“petal”) and the suffix “-oso” (“full of”).

The assignment got Aurora thinking – could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher’s help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca – the institution that oversees the use of the Italian language – to ask for their opinion.

To their surprise, the pair got an encouraging reply.

“The word you invented is well formed and could be used in the Italian language,” one of the Crusca’s top linguistic experts wrote. “It is beautiful and clear.”

But, the linguist added, for a word to officially be part of the Italian language, a large number of people need to use it and understand its meaning. “If you manage to spread your word among many people who start saying ‘What a petaloso flower this is!’, then petaloso will have become a word in Italian.”

Matteo’s teacher was touched by the reply – “this is worth more than a thousand Italian lessons” she wrote on her Facebook account on Monday – and shared pictures of the letter.

Inadvertently, she triggered a movement to do exactly what the Crusca had asked: make “petaloso” a widely known and used word.

Her original Facebook post has been shared more than 80,000 times. On Twitter #petaloso was used almost 40,000 times. The word quickly became the top trending topic in Italy and briefly hit the list of top worldwide trends on Wednesday. Many tweeters used the word in context – demonstrating its wide use and commonly understood meaning.

The Crusca itself – an institution created in 1583 – joined in the online effort and retweeted messages using the word. The Zanichelli publishing house – which publishes one of most widely referenced Italian dictionaries – hinted that it would include the word in its next edition. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi even chipped in to congratulate the young student.

“Petaloso” is now well on its way to becoming an official Italian word thanks to an eight-year-old’s imagination – and the power of social media.

There is, by the way, a direct equivalent in English: “petalous” has been a word since at least the early 18th century.

I’m not usually crazy about invented words, since they’re nearly always about showing off the cleverness of the inventor and there is no linguistic need or use for them (as evidenced by the fact that they are all stillborn, except for the Simpsons’ “cromulent,” which lives on as a token to show that one knows the memes of one’s time), but this is (in the words of one of the Crusca’s top linguistic experts) well formed, beautiful and clear; it fits nicely into the language and people enjoy using it, and (best of all) the Accademia della Crusca is enthusiastically on board with it! If you’ve got to have an official language academy, that’s the kind to have. And I’m also impressed that the journalist took the trouble to consult and cite the OED. (Via the Log.)

Imagine my surprise when I got to this paragraph in the NY Times obituary “Rev. Robert Palladino, Scribe Who Shaped Apple’s Fonts, Dies at 83“:

The word “calligraphy” is born of Classical Greek κάλλος (kallos, “beautiful”) and γράφω (grapho, “write”). Though he was by all accounts too courtly to have said so, it would doubtless have pained Father Palladino — whom Mr. Jobs consulted on the design of the Mac’s Greek letters — to see the flagrant unloveliness of the only Greek font at this newspaper’s disposal.

And later on, the obit (by Margalit Fox) refers to “Father Edward Catich, an eminent calligrapher and paleographer (< Greek πάλαι, palai, “long ago,” + γράφω).” I’ve often wondered why in this age of Unicode and computer fonts, more newspapers and magazines don’t print words in other alphabets (though at least some are starting to put the proper accents on foreign words in Latin script); up with this sort of thing!

I recently ran across a reference to the Dutch Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael and was completely stumped by his surname. I momentarily tried to pronounce it as if it were Polish, with wt = /ft/, but realized that was unlikely; fortunately Wikipedia had the information I needed: “Dutch pronunciation: [ˈyːtəʋaːl]; also spelled Uytewael, which reflects better the pronunciation for English speakers.” It sure does! I’m posting this as a public service, in case anyone else happens on the name and is equally puzzled, and also to ask: is that a common way to spell [yː] in early modern Dutch, or is it the eccentricity of that particular family?

A reader writes:

I recently discovered–and became addicted to–the podcast Streetwise Hebrew. A fantastic language learning vehicle, lots of examples from TV, songs, the GPS voice, etc. I’ve been scouring iTunes trying to find similarly excellent programs in other languages so far without success. And of course I thought to check the languagehat archives, but the topic seems not to have come up since 2009. I wondered if you had any recommendations, or might solicit suggestions from the blog community… For myself I’d be particularly interested in French, Russian, Spanish; but I feel like I could pick up useful bits of any language I had even a little bit of grammar for with an equivalent program.

I responded: “I’m afraid I’m not a pod person, but I will ask the LH community, some of whom I’m sure will have recommendations.” So fire away!

OED timeline challenge: can you guess when these words entered the English language? Fun!