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1) Victor Mair at the Log posts about Kongish Daily, a Facebook page whose motto is “Hong Kong people speak Hong Kong English”; both post and comments are full of interesting material. Mair says:

I suppose that some might wish to refer to Kongish as a topolect of Chinglish. In truth, though, Kongish is more coherent and integral than Chinglish. Chinglish is more amorphous and doesn’t really have any rules. Everything in Chinglish is pretty much ad hoc and spontaneous (anything goes), whereas Kongish — because Hong Kongers have been developing it for decades and are apt to actually exchange whole sentences and even series of sentences in it — has a body of mutually agreed upon usages and a higher degree of intelligibility for its own speakers. In this sense, it resembles Singlish (Singaporean English) more than Chinglish. Perhaps we may say that Kongish and Singlish are both lects of English, and that Chinglish is a work that is forever in progress.

2) And speaking of Singlish, we’ve discussed it before, but it’s worth linking to Tessa Wong’s BBC News Magazine piece about it, which has some great examples and a quiz to see if you can decode such sentences as “Wah this durian so shiok, best lah!” (Thanks go to Trevor and Eric for the link.)

I’m only two-thirds of the way through Dostoyevsky’s first attempt at a novel (as opposed to a повесть, a short novel or long story), Неточка Незванова (Netochka Nezvanova), but I have so many reactions I can’t wait and have to post about it now. It’s actually a good time to pause, because I’ve just finished the fifth (of seven) chapters, which ends “Now a new story begins”—although, to tell the truth, just about every chapter so far could have ended that way. Dostoyevsky clearly had no idea how to structure a novel yet, but it doesn’t matter; Netochka Nezvanova is a prime exhibit in the case against the Flaubertian obsession with perfection in a literary work. The hell with perfection, say I.

After finishing Avdotya Panaeva’s Семейство Тальниковых (The Talnikov family—see this post) I had started her collaboration with Nekrasov, Три страны света (Three countries/cardinal points of the world), but I gave up on that very long novel when I reached the 10% mark: given the cardboard characters (sweet/naive girl, loving/reckless guy, mustache-twirling villain, orderly German, etc. etc.), melodramatic plot (it starts with a baby girl being dropped off at a castle in a basket), and merely serviceable prose (I took bets on whether the next tears would flow like hail or in streams), I couldn’t see devoting any more of my life to it. I read some more of the Turgenev stories that would eventually be published as Записки охотника (A Sportsman’s Sketches) and then turned to Panaeva’s Пасека (The apiary), which started out brilliantly with two college friends discovering Belka (“Squirrel”), an orphan girl living at an apiary in the middle of a forest, but after one of them rescues and marries her it somewhat deflates and turns into a fairly standard-issue “he loves her but she cannot love him back” story. Then it was Dostoyevsky’s turn.

Before I started reading, the only thing I knew about Netochka Nezvanova was that it was unfinished, and presumably a lesser (because early) work. The first chapter gripped me immediately; it was very much like one of the Sportsman’s Sketches, but told with more urgency—Turgenev holds his protagonists at a certain distance, as is natural for the “I met a fellow once who told me…” form. Efimov, a musician who for years has been playing the clarinet in a landowner’s private orchestra, starts hanging out with a drunken Frenchman; after the latter’s death, he inherits his violin, which he refuses to sell to a neighboring noble (who also has an orchestra) for thousands of rubles, and eventually runs away, slanders the landowner (who has always treated him well), is arrested, and after a tearful late-night confrontation with his former employer (who forgives him), goes off with the violin, which he has learned to play masterfully. Dostoyevsky has no interest in the social aspect of this (I had assumed Efimov must be a serf, as was common for such private orchestras, but apparently not—the landowner reminds him that he’s always been free to leave any time he wants); what he cares about is the stew of resentment and ambition that drives Efimov.

With the second chapter we are suddenly in Petersburg, in the wretched one-room attic apartment shared by little Anna (whom her mother affectionately calls “Netochka,” a Russian diminutive formed from the French equivalent Annette), her mother, and her stepfather Efimov, who had married her mother for her thousand rubles and as soon as he had run through them treated her with resentment and contempt. Efimov is basically indifferent to the girl, occasionally sweet-talking her when he wants her to do him a favor, but she is utterly devoted to him, and it is this that Dostoyevsky wants to investigate; he shows us her incomprehension of her own feelings (she understands that she is unjust to her mother, who loves her deeply, and wishes she could love her back) in a way that reminds me of Proust in its subtle psychological analysis. I can’t imagine what readers made of it in 1849; the only remotely comparable thing I’ve read in previous Russian literature is Panaeva’s Talnikov book, and that was doubtless an influence, since Dostoyevsky was part of the Panaev circle (until he left because of the cruel mockery of jerks like Turgenev) and was, I believe, infatuated for a while with Panaeva—but how much deeper he delves!

In the third chapter we see Efimov let go of his remaining shreds of sanity, utterly devoured by his jealousy of a visiting violin virtuoso and his fear that his grandiose self-image won’t survive the experience of a recital by the great German (“S-ts”). He cajoles and bullies his stepdaughter into stealing her mother’s carefully hoarded stash of savings so he can buy a ticket; the agonies of all three of them are explored before the inevitable catastrophe. The fourth chapter takes us into the luxurious mansion of the prince who rescues the girl, and we watch her painfully slow recovery from the horrible experiences she has undergone. We meet the prince’s daughter Katya, who is loving and enthusiastic by nature but can’t understand why the new arrival is so sad and unable to play games and begins to reject her; again, the psychological analysis is brilliant and convincing. When the two finally become close, the description of their kisses and caresses is so intense it must surely have raised eyebrows at the time; the narrator says “I was in love with my Katya. Yes, it was love, real love, love with tears and joys, passionate love” [я была влюблена в мою Катю. Да, это была любовь, настоящая любовь, любовь со слезами и радостями, любовь страстная]. How did a nineteenth-century man understand that girls could have such feelings?

I have absolutely no idea where it’s going from here; for all I know, one of them could burn the house down to prove her love (like in that Scott Spencer book), or they could run off to America together and establish a Boston marriage, or Anna/Netochka could become a man and have manly adventures as in Veltman, Woolf, or Munro. I don’t know and I don’t care; Dostoyevsky can take me wherever he wants, and I’ll follow as abjectly and happily as his heroine follows her Katya. And just to prove that it’s not all “Oh the humanity!” melodrama, I’ll end by directing your attention to the passage about the bulldog Falstaff that starts “She opened the door and called Falstaff” in the Garnett translation (“Она приотворила дверь и звала Фальстафа” in the Russian). That dog is a more memorable character than many a human in other novels; who could resist this dénoument?

Katya’s summons seemed to him so impossible that for some time he resolutely refused to believe his ears. He was as sly as a cat, and not to show that he noticed the heedless opening of the door, went up to the window, laid his powerful paws on the window-sill and began gazing at the building opposite — behaved, in fact, like a man quite uninterested who has gone out for a walk and stopped for a minute to admire the fine architecture of a neighbouring building. Meanwhile his heart was throbbing and swooning in voluptuous expectation. What was his amazement, his joy, his frantic joy, when the door was flung wide open before him, and not only that, but he was called, invited, besought to go upstairs and wreak his just vengeance. Whining with delight, he showed his teeth, and terrible, triumphant, darted upstairs like an arrow.

Update (August 10). I had planned to write a follow-up post when I finished the book, but it turns out I don’t have the heart, and there’s not really much to write. Suffice it to say that in the third section (chapters 6 and 7) it degenerates into a farrago of ridiculous melodrama and adolescent emotionality, complete with incessant repetition, vague accusations, fervent defenses, and enough tears to flood Petersburg yet again. I’m disappointed but not that surprised: he was, after all, still young and finding his way, and it was his first attempt at a long novel; I’m just sorry he never revised and completed it, because he was intending to present a full-length portrait of a powerful, self-aware, and independent woman (like the George Sand heroines he so admired), and goodness knows Russian literature could have used that. Oh, and also, I was waiting eagerly to find out why she was given the surname Nezvanov (‘unsummoned’), but I was left in the dark — that name is never mentioned once in the book as we have it.

The name is odd, but the description is enticing: “Linguistic DNA seeks to understand the evolution of early modern thought by modelling the semantic and conceptual changes which occurred in English printed discourse between c.1500 and c.1800.” The About page has more:

For the early part of our period, we are working with the ca. 58,000 texts digitised as part of the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership collaboration (EEBO-TCP). From 1700, our major source is Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). These resources allow an unprecedented level of comprehensiveness in the analysis of language, semantics, and conceptual history in the Early Modern period. The project applies computational tools to these resources to analyse details of Early Modern English vocabulary and semantics, including instances of social and cultural keywords and their shifting frequencies, meanings, and uses in various contexts over time. The result will be a rigorous, systematic, and scientific account of Early Modern conceptual history via its linguistic data.

In addition, the project also incorporates the recently completed Historical Thesaurus of English. The thesaurus serves as a taxonomy of language history as it is captured in the Oxford English Dictionary; it organises the 793,000 word senses in the OED and other sources into semantic categories, which can nest inside wider categories in a taxonomy up to twelve layers tall. As such, the architecture and database of the thesaurus are key to identifying concepts in the texts explored in this project.

Using the resources described above, it is possible to discern trends, relationships, and anomalies across an enormous amount of linguistic data to identify the often surprising complexities, continuities, and discontinuities inherent to linguistic and conceptual change.

I look forward to seeing what they come up with. Thanks, Stan!

A good obit, by Gregory Hutchinson, of a remarkable scholar:

Martin West’s achievements stagger every classicist – but he himself was not staggered. He worked on, matter-of-factly, producing endless illuminating books. […]

West’s work concentrated especially on the archaic and early-classical periods of Greek. He edited the two vast narratives of Homer, and the two characterful poems of Hesiod, which he also wrote lengthy commentaries on. Other editing work included the personal (or seemingly personal) poetry of authors like Archilochus and Theognis, and the tragedies of Aeschylus.

But his work went further, in various directions. He deployed his intimate knowledge of ancient Greek poetry in books which surveyed particular areas, such as metre or music, in all their knotty detail, and depicted their historical development. Importantly, he did not see Greek poetry as springing from nothing: it was shaped by cultures outside of itself – by Indo-European traditions, and still more by the literature of the Near East.

Although these perceptions were not new in themselves, West amassed material (deliberately not confined to the most striking cases) to link Greek literature to the East. With severe criteria, he pursued poetic and religious elements in Greek and Vedic literature and more,back to earlier cultures and languages, such as “Mature” Indo-European. A huge range of knowledge underlay these explorations; they made the home territory of ordinary classicists look small.

Two contrasting tendencies appear in West’s work: on the one hand, his ambitious reconstruction; on the other, his precise fidelity to what is known. […]

It’s that “precise fidelity to what is known” that I particularly value in a scholar, but he added to it a nice touch of humor (“The ‘mean sun’ is a notional body which moves at a uniform pace, with the real sun generally a few minutes behind or ahead of it like a dog off the lead”), and he seems to have been a genuinely good person (“When his daughter was young, he once had to leave home early on her birthday; but first he mowed ‘Happy Birthday’ into the lawn”); the whole obit is worth reading. Thanks, Trevor!

I don’t normally post about commercial websites, whether they’re promoting books or other products, but Pascal Bonenfant’s site for his book Cant: A Gentleman’s Guide slipped past my defenses with a sneaky added feature:

I have used three sources: Collection of Canting Words from Nathan Bailey’s 1737 The New Canting Dictionary and the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum based on Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and the glossary from the Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux, published in 1819. […] I have put both dictionaries into a Cant Database Search facility. This has the complete (or nearly complete) contents of both Bailey and The Lexicon but a lot of the 1811 ones will appear in the “Uncategorised” category.

It’s loads of fun. If you put in “cant,” for example, you get a dozen entries ranging from CANT OF DOBBIN ‘a roll of riband’ to RANTUM SCANTUM ‘making the beast with two backs.’ Thanks, Paul!

Looking for something else (as usual), I stumbled upon something that startled me considerably: The St. Petersburg English Review of Literature, the Arts and Science (vol. 1, 1842). I knew there was an English colony in the city and it was fashionable for the Russian upper crust to study English, but had no idea there was enough demand to support a journal, even if short-lived (it lasted a little over a year). The first issue opens with a List of Subscribers, which begins (of course) with His Majesty the Emperor and Her Majesty the Empress and continues through a bunch of Highnesses to H.E. the British Ambassador and an alphabetical list starting with Abaza, Mlle. Vera and ending with Zacharevitch, Mr. Neginn; presumably “Tolstoy, the Count” is this guy. And that turns out not to be an isolated phenomenon; checking Google Books further I learned from People, Languages and Cultures in the Third Millennium: Book of Proceedings, 2000 FEELTA International Conference (ed. L. P. Bondarenko) that “In the middle of the 19th century, some magazines in English were being published in St. Petersburg and Moscow, such as The St. Petersburg English Review of Literature: The Art and Science (1848 [sic]); The Nevsky Magazine: A Journal of Literature, Science and Art (1880); English Literary Journal of Moscow, etc.” Who knew?

Incidentally, the first issue of The St. Petersburg English Review (which consists mainly of anodyne reprints from English publications) ends with a Miscellanea section that today might be labeled News of the Weird; I quote two of the entries:

A Yankee Gourmand. — A man returned home one night very late and rather the worse for liquor; and being hungry withal, he stuck his fork in a bowl of something that his wife had left upon the table before retiring. He worked away with his mouthful very patiently for some time; at length, not being able to masticate what he considered was intended for his supper, he sung out to his wife, “I say, old woman, where did you get your cabbages from? they are so ‘nation stringy, I can’t chew them.”
   “My gracious!” cried the good lady, “if the stupid filler ain’t eating up all my caps that I put in starch over-night!”

American Artists. — A painter in New Orleans possesses such extraordinary talents, that he can paint a pine-plank, or any other piece of wood, so exactly like marble, that when thrown into the river it will instantly sink to the bottom.

Shades of Zeuxis! (In the first, “‘nation” is short for “tarnation,” a euphemism for “damnation”; I presume “filler” is intended to represent “feller” = “fellow.”)

Kobi wrote me with the following interesting question:

In Hebrew people use the word שויצר to describe a person who boasts. I found the word in Raphael’s dictionary but I have no idea if it’s a credible source.

shvits verb, participle ge…t, sweat, perspire adjectival form with -ik, adverbial complementdurkh
shvitser noun, plural in -s, gender m, braggart

I wonder where shvitzer comes from and if there is more to know about this word.

I wonder too; anybody know?

As of today, it’s thirteen years since the first LH post. Amazin’, amazin’! (as Casey Stengel used to say); I vividly remember being surprised I made it to six months, at which point I hoped “to keep everyone entertained for at least another half-year.” The fact that the ship is still afloat is entirely due to the lively commentary provided by my readership, and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for sticking around and keeping the conversation going. Me, I have no intention of stopping unless and until I hit an iceberg, at which time life jackets will be issued to all passengers. Like Jack and Stephen, we sail on!

Ben Yagoda has a Lingua Franca post on an often-discussed phenomenon, “why, in American movies and TV shows set in foreign or imagined lands, the characters almost invariably speak in British accents, especially if they’re bad guys”:

The invaluable website TV Tropes dubs the custom “the Queen’s Latin” and has this explanation for its use in historical dramas:

Britain’s long history causes British accents to seem somehow “older” — they are used to suggest a sense of antiquity. This is actually inaccurate from a linguistic perspective; the modern British accents actually represent a more evolved form of English. Older English accents were closer to modern Irish and American accents.

In any case, using the Queen’s Latin makes a series or film commercially viable in the U.S. It alleviates the need for subtitles, while maintaining the appearance of historical authenticity. It’s just foreign and exotic enough. (Many British actors already Play Great Ethnics.) It’s also no doubt inspired by productions of Shakespeare‘s plays set in Ancient Rome. Remember: Romeo might have been Italian, but he’s not realistic unless he talks like a proper British toff.

(That last link mentions “the exaggerated smack of a boxing glove” and notes: “Real-life fistfights tend to be eerily silent, which obviously wouldn’t be very dramatic or exciting.” I never knew that.) And it’s not just movies and TV; Yagoda discusses a book that “is set in France and Germany during World War II, yet the author, Anthony Doerr — an American — continually uses British terms: crisps instead of potato chips, lift instead of elevator, and biscuits.” The sun may have set on the Empire, but this silly tradition shows no sign of going away.

This MetaFilter post has a roundup of links pertaining to the arrival of Multicultural London English (MLE) and its gradual displacing of Cockney as the form of speech of working-class London youth. This brief BBC News story from 2010 refers to “a study by Paul Kerswill, Professor of Sociolinguistics at Lancaster University .. to be published in early 2011,” but it doesn’t seem to have been published, and the Wikipedia article doesn’t have any sources more recent than 2011. Anybody know more about this interesting development? (Apparently kids today are no longer dropping their aitches!)