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Another interesting passage from Bartlett’s endlessly interesting The Making of Europe:

In the early Middle Ages most regions of Europe had highly localized repertoires of names. It is easy, given a few personal names, to tell which region or ethnic group is being talked about. Among aristocratic Germans it is even possible to make a good guess at the family, so distinct and particular are the naming patterns. Those who moved permanently from one linguistic or cultural world to another would feel the pressure to adopt a new name, as a tactic designed to avoid outlandishness. On his arrival in Normandy in 1085, for example, the child oblate Orderic was renamed: ‘the name of Vitalis was given me in place of my English name, which sounded harsh to the Normans’. When noble ladies married into foreign royal families who spoke a different language, it was not uncommon for them to adopt a new name. The Bohemian princesses Swatawa and Markéta became, respectively, the German countess Liutgard and Dagmar, queen of Denmark. Henry I of England’s wife was ‘Matilda, who had previously been called Edith’. The tight bonding of name and ethnic or local group explains the pressure for such diplomatic renaming.

The same intense regionalism is true of saints. Their cults usually had one or two main centres, where the chief relics were situated, surrounded by a limited zone of relative cultic density where one might expect to encounter churches devoted to the saint, perhaps subsidiary relics and men named after the saint, a zone which shaded off into the zones of other adjoining local saints. If we find a town whose churches are dedicated to Saints Chad, Mary and Alcmund, we know we are in the English Midlands (the example is Shrewsbury). This regional concentration is characteristic even of the more successful cults. For example, though there were over 700 churches dedicated to St Remi, 80 per cent of them were located within 200 miles of his chief centre at Rheims. The historian Charles Higounet mapped the places named after the saints of Merovingian Aquitaine and found that they stopped abruptly at the Loire, the Rhône and the Gironde.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries this highly compartmentalized world began to change. A circulation of names and saints through the system began. Sometimes this occurred as a result of conquest. England provides a neat example of such a change. In 1066 the country was conquered by an army of French-speakers from northern France. Within a few years that army had transformed itself into a landed aristocracy — a French-speaking aristocracy ruling an English-speaking peasantry. Not only did the two groups speak different languages, they bore different names. Although Norman and Anglo-Saxon nomenclatures were both, in origin, Germanic, the two countries had developed quite different repertories of names. English Ethelreds, Alfreds and Edwards faced Norman Williams, Henrys and Roberts. In the eleventh century the distinction is fairly watertight: a name is a virtually certain indicator of ethnic origin. In the twelfth century this situation changed. Names are, of course, among the most malleable elements of linguistic culture, offering, as they do, the repeated chance of choice; and soon, it seems, the English population of England chose to adopt the names of their conquerors. The kinds of pressure at work are shown by the story of one young boy, born in the area of Whitby around 1110, whose parents initially christened him Tostig but, ‘when his youthful companions mocked the name’, changed it to the respectably Norman William. This process began among the higher clergy and townsmen. […]

Our picture must, however, be complicated by one more factor. […] Simultaneously changes were taking place in the very pattern of naming and worship of the saints throughout Latin Christendom. Everywhere the universal saints and the dominical cult were increasing in importance. The apostolic saints, especially Peter and John, the Mother of God, and God himself, as Trinity, Holy Saviour or Corpus Christi, were eclipsing the local shrines and cults of earlier medieval Europe. In the twelfth century, for example, the churches of Wales adopted universal saints, like Mary and Peter, as additional patrons, to reinforce their obscure local saints. […] And, following in the wake of their rise to prominence, European naming patterns began to homogenize as parents, kin and priests began to choose names for children from these universal saints. The highly localized name repertoires of the early Middle Ages were replaced by a more standard pattern in which the universal saints were increasingly common.

One wishes the medieval English hadn’t been quite so fond of the name Matilda; Henry I’s mother, wife, and daughter were all named Matilda, as was his nephew Stephen’s wife and one of his son Henry’s daughters. Between the Williams and Henrys and the Matildas and Eleanors, it all becomes very confusing.

Philosopher Rebecca Roache at Aeon analyzes what makes swear words so offensive; she develops the concept of “offence escalation,” which I was not familiar with and which makes sense to me. She distinguishes swears from slurs and from religious taboo language, though she says up front that the lines are fuzzy, and she provides the requisite list of foreign examples (I particularly liked Mandarin 肏你祖宗十八代 ‘Fuck your ancestors to the 18th generation’ and Korean 당신의 어머니는 일본어 전함을 충족하기 위해 밖으로 수영 ‘Your mother swam out to meet the Japanese battleships’) [N.b.: Apparently this is incorrect Korean — SD]. I was tickled by seeing this exchange from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which I recently edited (I was tickled by it there too):

Demetrius Villain, what hast thou done?
Aaron That which thou canst not undo.
Chiron Thou hast undone our mother.
Aaron Villain, I have done thy mother.

And there’s a nice brief discussion of why swear words often fail to function like other words:

Steven Pinker argues that ‘fucking’ is not an adjective because, if it were, ‘Drown the fucking cat’ would be interchangeable with ‘Drown the cat which is fucking’, just as ‘Drown the lazy cat’ is interchangeable with ‘Drown the cat which is lazy’. Quang Phuc Dong – a sweary pseudonym of the late linguist James D. McCawley – thinks, for various reasons, that ‘Fuck you!’ is not an imperative (that is, a command) like ‘Wash the dishes!’ One reason is that, unlike other imperatives, ‘Fuck you!’ cannot be conjoined with other imperatives in a single sentence. We can say ‘Wash the dishes and sweep the floor!’, but not ‘Wash the dishes and fuck you!’ And Nunberg suggests that ‘fucking’ is not an adverb like ‘very’ or ‘extraordinarily’, because while you can say, ‘How brilliant was it? Very,’ and, ‘How brilliant was it? Extraordinarily,’ you can’t say, ‘How brilliant was it? Fucking.’

In short, if you’re interested in swears and swearing, click the goddamn link. (Thanks go to both Pauls.)

Via Russian History Blog, I learn of the appearance of Фронтирных исследований/Journal of Frontier Studies:

Just this week a new online journal for Russian Studies arrived, The Journal of Frontier Studies/Zhurnal frontirnykh issledovanii. It is being edited by a group of scholars at Astrakhan State University, and aspires to put Russian and Western scholars into conversation. They are planning on publishing articles in English down the line.

I haven’t had time to investigate it yet, but it certainly sounds promising.

Alexander Kim of Sarkoboros (see this LH post) has a very interesting post about an idiom I wasn’t familiar with. He starts with Chekhov’s 1894 story “At the Manor” («В усадьбе»), in which noble families are said to have been “strenuously in the course of centuries separating the white bone from the black [белую кость от чёрной],” adding that “white bone” is often rendered “blue blood” in English translations. He then writes:

White bone in opposition to black looks like a direct gloss of the famous Turko-Mongol idiom of noble and common birth, which has reflexes throughout Inner Asia and echoes in the kolp’um “bone rank” system of Silla Korea (C. S. Kim 1971, citing Ryū Imanishi, mentions also the ancient Japanese consanguinity terms kotsumei 骨名 “bone names” and shikotsu 氏骨 “clan bones”) and various Tibeto-Burman lineage and caste configurations (most notably that of the Yi, among whom the “blacks” or “black bones” are, in contrast to the Inner Asian scheme, superior in status to and rigidly averse to intermarriage with the softer-boned “whites”: Schoenhals 2003; Lu Hui 2001).

After a raft of examples, he concludes:

While some of the examples speak to social rank, others are actually cardinal-directional color assignments (the white west, the black north). Not clearly brought out is how qara “black” can also have the senses of great, powerful, terrible or large (e.g., qara mal, large domestic stock like horses and cattle) — but naturally the connotations are often intermingled or tilt from one to another (e.g., Anatolian Turkish Karadeniz ‘Black Sea’, various Kara-prefixed tribal and imperial names).

On an attempted inversion of valence (Vakar 1949:208–209):

One can read of “people of white and black bone” (L. Tolstoy), “black bone students” (Miljukov), and so on. A story prepared by the Soviet officials for use in Berlin schools, and vetoed by American authorities, related the triumph of “the blackboned proletariat over the worthless whiteboned bourgeoisie.” White bone, meaning “free status, noble origin, upper class,” is still a current idiom in Central Asia, presumably the country of its origins. Finally, the expression was given respectability by the Ušakov Dictionary, which defines it in the following terms: “(ironic.) noble, ‘lordly’ breed.”

Some questions:

Is there anything in older East Slavic texts or the rest of Balto-Slavic to injure the idea that “white bone”/”black bone” was a Golden Horde-era transmission?

Vakar asserts (206) that the terms “white” and “black” in connection with present Belorussia did not appear in literature before the fourteenth century. Credible?

What work of Tolstoy was it?

Good questions, and I figure just the sort of thing the multifarious readership of LH will enjoy sinking their collective white-boned teeth into.

Those who found that this post painted too rosy a picture of medieval Europe will be heartened by this further quote from Bartlett’s The Making of Europe:

Although towns often had this character of ethnic islands [in colonized regions like Wales and Eastern Europe], they rarely attained complete racial homogeneity. Native populations lived within the walls, sometimes in the humble position of manual labourers, sometimes as artisans or even merchants. The expanding urban economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seems to have allowed both immigrant and native to prosper. The picture darkens as the recession of the later Middle Ages begins. As the meal shrank, the diners began to eye each other more suspiciously.

One consequence of the dynastic uncertainties in eastern Europe during the later Middle Ages was that the German burgess population had a far more complicated and demanding political course to steer. […] In the early fourteenth century, during the dynastic manoeuvring that culminated in the revival of the Polish kingdom under Wladyslaw Lokietek, the German burgesses of Cracow made a serious miscalculation. They backed first the Luxemburg, then a Silesian aspirant, rather than Lokietek, were abandoned by their allies, and suffered savage reprisals, which took the form of a racial persecution. […]

[…] The Krasiński Annals add the detail that ‘anyone who could not pronounce soczewic [should be soczowica — see comments] (lentil), koło (wheel), miele (grinds) and młyn (mill) was executed. The application of this shibboleth gave events a starkly ethnic-linguistic imprint. This linguistic chauvinism manifested itself in another development of the same year. On 18 November 1312 the official records of the city of Cracow, which until that time had been kept in German, began to be written in Latin. […] The exclusion of the German language clearly reflects the anti-German pogrom of that year. Its replacement by Latin rather than Polish reminds us how undeveloped this vernacular was as a written idiom. (Similarly, when Old English disappeared from documents such as wills and writs after the conquest of England by a French-speaking aristocracy in 1066, it was Latin that replaced it. Eleventh-century French, like fourteenth-century Polish, had not yet won the esteem of a language of official record.) In the century following the rising of 1311-12, Cracow was gradually Polonized. […] [By 1470] Cracow had become a Polish city with a German minority rather than a German city in Poland.

Translator Burton Pike describes what to me is probably the most essential factor in translation:

A witty translator wrote that a translation is your book with someone else’s name on it. When I was teaching translation, I would tell my students that in translating prose fiction the words were the least of their problems. First, I told them, you need to identify the book’s or the story’s rhythm, how the words flow; you do that by reading the text aloud and listening. Then you fit the English words and sentences to the underlying pacing of the German, and you would be in business. For example, in translating Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther I determined that the underlying rhythm was a waterfall of words, and I based my translation on that. The result, I think, sounds like Goethe, but in English. One result of this approach through rhythm is that all my translations of prose fiction differ from each other, because each one is based on a different rhythmic model.

He talks about translating Musil and Rilke, so if those authors interest you go ahead and click the link. Me, I want to know who that witty translator was. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Bartlett’s The Making of Europe (see this post) has an interesting chapter on “Language and Law” (pp. 197-220), which begins:

Conquest and colonization created on the frontiers of Latin Christendom societies in which different ethnic groups live side by side, and everywhere in the frontier zone of Latin Europe race relations were thus a central issue. It is worth stressing at the outset that, while the language of race—gens, natio, “blood,” “stock,” and so on—is biological, its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural. […] In contrast to descent, [custom, language and law] are malleable. They can, indeed, with varying degrees of effect, be transformed not only from one generation to the next, but even within an individual lifetime. New languages can be mastered, new legal regimes adopted, new customs learned. […] If we define, say, ‘German’ and ‘Slav’ by customs, language and law rather than by descent, the grandchildren of Slavs could be Germans, the grandchildren of Germans Slavs. When we study race relations in medieval Europe we are analysing the contact between various linguistic and cultural groups, not between breeding stocks.

The section on language contrasts the regions with “a relatively high degree of linguistic and cultural homogeneity and dominated by more or less standard languages” (English in England, Languedoil north of the Loire, Languedoc south of it, Low German in north Germany, etc.) with “the conquered and colonized peripheries, which were characterized by a ubiquitous mixture and intermingling of language and culture”:

As one travelled from Trier to Vienna or from Béarn to Provence, one would notice the shift from one local variant to another. In complete contrast, the conquered and colonized peripheries of Europe were familiar with languages of completely different language families being spoken in the same settlement or street. […] The streams, hills and settlements of the frontier zones began to show signs of a double identity: ‘the place is called woyces in Slavic and enge water in German’, explains one east Pomeranian document. […]

Bilingualism was not unusual at many social levels. Even in the tenth century Otto I of Germany had command of both German and Slav. In the Frankish Morea successful leaders would know French, Greek and perhaps even Turkish […]. In the fourteenth century the descendants of the Anglo-Norman invaders of Ireland were composing poetry in Irish. […]

The variegated linguistic patterns of the frontier regions were reflected in their naming practices. A process of mutual influence meant that by the fourteenth century Slav farmers might be called Bernard and Richard, English settlers in Ireland might have Irish names, and a descendant of Welsh upland princes might be quite unrecognizable as Sir Thomas de Avene. Simultaneous binomialism is an even sharper symptom of the linguistic and cultural pluralism of the frontier zones. In the tenth century Otto II was accompanied after the rout of Cap Colonne by ‘one of his knights, Henry, who was called Zolunta in Slavic.’ […] Przemysl Ottokar II even had two seals, one for his Czech-speaking lands, inscribed with the name Przemysl, one for his German-speaking lands, bearing the name Ottokar. Among the Mozarabs of Toledo, Romance-Arabic binomialism was widespread. ‘In the name of God,’ begins one document of 1115, ‘I, Dominico Petriz, as I am called in Romance (in latinitate) and in Arabic (in algariva) Avelfaçam Avenbaço; also I, Dominiquez, as I am called in Romance, and in Arabic Avelfacam Avencelema…’ […]

A growing strand of linguistic nationalism or politicized linguistic consciousness emerges in the later Middle Ages. A symptom of the identification of language and people is the use of the word for language in contexts where it almost certainly means ‘people’. The West Slav word jazyk denoted both ‘language’ and ‘people’ […]. The German translation […] uses zung, i.e. ‘tongue’, and this has a similar semantic complexity. Iaith, the Welsh word for ‘language’, was likewise ‘charged in contemporary parlance with a far greater range of attributes than the purely linguistic one’. […] In Latin documents lingua enshrines the same ambiguity. […] In all these instances a semantic ambiguity points to a conceptual one — ethnic and linguistic identity tended to blur into one another.

We discussed the flexibility of ethnic identities last year; it is important to keep such things in mind to counteract the simplistic, ahistorical claims of ethnic nationalists.

We’ve discussed the interesting and much-disputed subject of the origins of the Austronesian languages before: in 2009 in connection with “Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement,” by Gray, Drummond, and Greenhill, which came down on the side of Taiwanese origin, and in 2014 in connection with Roger Blench’s paper “Suppose we are wrong about the Austronesian settlement of Taiwan?,” which came to the contrary conclusion that the Formosan languages “represent a continuing flow of pre-Austronesian languages from the mainland.” Now, according to a Phys.org news story, a team of archaeogenetic researchers led by Martin Richards “proposes a solution based on what has been the most comprehensive analysis so far of DNA from the region”:

The various branches of the Austronesian language can be traced back to a Taiwanese original, and DNA analysis does show that there was some expansion from Taiwan, about 4,000 years ago. But this accounted for a minority of the whole region’s population – no more than 20 per cent. An explanation for the spread of the language was that these Taiwanese migrants came to constitute an elite group, or became associated with a new religion or philosophy, according to Professor Richards.

I’ll be interested to see what those who know more than I do about the topic have to say. (Thanks for the link, Trevor!)

A reader writes:

I’m looking for words and phrases used on the colonial American frontier circa 1772 among the working classes and Scots-Irish farmers, say in the western Pennsylvania/Ohio area. Do you have any links for this? I’m reading the Hervey Allen books (written in 1940s) about life in Bedford in 1763 but that’s about as close as I can come to finding a dialect for that time.

I don’t have any links or information about this, but I’m hoping some of my readers do.

Nothing much to say about this except it’s a fun four-minute video in which a Finnish kid teaches you a little Finnish with a lot of attitude. The sentences he doesn’t translate are transcribed and translated in this MetaFilter post, where I got the link.