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I was looking up something else in my Russian edition (Русские фамилии, Moscow: Progress, 1995) of Unbegaun’s Russian Surnames when I found myself getting lost in Boris Uspensky‘s essay “Социальная жизнь русских фамилий” [The social life of Russian family names], appended to Unbegaun’s text. I was first struck by a passage on the history of the name Zinoviev (my translation):

For example, the Russian noble family [род] of the Zinovievs goes back to the Polish-Lithuanian family of the Zenovichi [Зеновичи], of Serbian origin: the Serbian Zenovichi despots, having moved to Lithuania, started calling themselves Zenov’evichi [Зеновьевичи], and afterwards, in Great Russian territory, they were renamed Zinovievs [Зиновьевы].

On the next page, Uspensky writes:

The capacity of Russian family names for modification, adapting themselves to one or another social norm, should not surprise us, if we bear in mind that family names are a relatively new phenomenon in Russia. This is evidenced by, among other things, the foreign origin of the word фамилия [‘family name’], which was borrowed in the 17th century, originally meaning ‘clan, family’ [род, семья] (corresponding to the meaning of the Latin or Polish word familia); the sense of a designation for the family began to crystallize around the 1730s, but did not become solidly fixed until the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It is instructive that until the 18th century there was no way in Russian to adequately express the concept (such words as прозвище and прозвание could refer either to family or individual appellations).

In a footnote, he quotes this delightful passage from Vyazemsky‘s notebooks:

В каком-то губернском городе дворянство представлялось императору Александру, в одно из многочисленных путешествий его по России. Не расслышав порядочно имени одного из представлявшихся дворян, обратился он к нему: “Позвольте спросить, ваша фамилия?” — “Осталась в деревне, ваше величество, — отвечает он, — но, если прикажите, сейчас пошлю за нею”.

In a certain provincial capital, the nobility was being presented to the Emperor Alexander during one of his many journeys around Russia. Not having heard properly the name of one of the nobles being presented, he turned to him: “Your familia, if I may ask?” “They’re back in the village, Your Majesty,” he answered, “but if Your Majesty wishes, I can send for them.”

Check out the amazing maps at this HuffPo story by Lorenzo Ligato, reporting on research by Jack Grieve, a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, who published the maps on Twitter last week. The one for “fuck” is a thing of beauty: you could replace the hackneyed phrase “flyover country” by “where they don’t say ‘fuck.'” (Via Mark Liberman at the Log.)

I was recently reading Turgenev’s charming one-act comedy Где тонко, там и рвется (It breaks where it is weakest, translated in 1909 as One May Spin a Thread Too Finely), and hit a crux before a line was spoken: the stage directions, in describing the furniture of the stage (the hall of a landowner’s house), include китайский бильярд ‘Chinese billiards.’ What did that refer to in 1847 Russia? (The translation just says “a small billiard table.”) I found this piquant anecdote from Gilyarovsky’s memoir Москва и москвичи (Moscow and the Muscovites):

The billiard room kept its old character, described by L. N. Tolstoy. Even on my last visit to the club in 1912 I saw there a Chinese billiard table in memory of L. N. Tolstoy. On this billiard table in 1862 Lev Nikolaevich lost a thousand rubles to an officer passing through and experienced an unpleasant minute: he had no money to pay his debt, and the club rules were strict — he could have been blackboarded [banned from attending until the debt was paid]. There’s no knowing how it might have ended if Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the Russian Messenger and the Moscow News, hadn’t been in the club; when he learned what was going on, he rescued Tolstoy, giving him a loan of a thousand rubles to cover his loss. And in the next issue of the Russian Messenger appeared Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.

(You can read the original Russian here; scroll down to “Бильярдная хранила старый характер.”) But that doesn’t help. If anyone knows what kind of game this was, I will be glad to learn.

I’ve gotten a couple of review copies that I won’t have time to read for a while but that look so interesting and useful that I want to put the word out about them right away:

1) The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics, by Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin W. Lewis. The blurb says:

Over the past decade, a group of prolific and innovative evolutionary biologists has sought to reinvent historical linguistics through the use of phylogenetic and phylogeographical analysis, treating cognates like genes and conceptualizing the spread of languages in terms of the diffusion of viruses. Using these techniques, researchers claim to have located the origin of the Indo-European language family in Neolithic Anatolia, challenging the near-consensus view that it emerged in the grasslands north of the Black Sea thousands of years later. But despite its widespread celebration in the global media, this new approach fails to withstand scrutiny. As languages do not evolve like biological species and do not spread like viruses, the model produces incoherent results, contradicted by the empirical record at every turn. This book asserts that the origin and spread of languages must be examined primarily through the time-tested techniques of linguistic analysis, rather than those of evolutionary biology.

I’ve often cited Asya’s blog Languages Of The World (e.g., here), and that description is certainly singing my song (“the time-tested techniques of linguistic analysis”: hear, hear!), so I’m very much looking forward to reading the book.

2) May I Quote You on That?: A Guide to Grammar and Usage, by Stephen Spector. I generally look askance at popular usage guides, but this one looks very well done; it starts off pointing out that “We all use language in different styles, depending on the situation,” it’s written in a lively manner, it uses well-chosen quotes to make its points (and leads each section with them, rather than with a rule), and above all, it actually mentions the history behind the rules rather than presenting them as graven in stone — under “It’s or its,” for example, Spector says “The distinction that we use today didn’t become standard until the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.” For twelve bucks (or seven for the Kindle edition), you could do a lot worse.

Many thanks to Steve Lubman for sending me links to Forty-three translations of Hadrian’s “Animula, Vagula, Blandula” (at coldewey.cc) and Lev Oborin’s LJ post collecting a few Russian versions. Of the English translations, my favorites are the first two:

Minion soul, poor wanton thing,
The body’s guest, my dearest darling,
To what places art thou going?
Naked, miserable, trembling,
Reaving me of all the joy
Which by thee I did enjoy.
—Molle (1625)

My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The ghest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor Jests wilt thou afford me more.
—Henry Vaughan (1652)

I don’t know if “Molle” is the John Molle, or Mole, who died in January 1639 in an Inquisition prison in Rome where he had been kept for decades, but if so, he certainly had sufficient personal experience to underlie his excellent version; the only flaw for me is the final rhyme, but I presume it was perfectly OK in his day to rhyme “joy” and “enjoy.” The nineteenth-century versions are pretty much uniformly awful (again, from my point of view); I would single out as an exception this one:

Wandering, gentle little sprite,
Guest of my body and its friend,
    Whither now
    Goest thou?
Pale, and stiff, and naked quite,
All thy jests are at an end.
—W. A. S. Benson

It would be nice if someone were to collect later versions (the ones at the coldewey.cc post appear to be from this 1876 book, which has translations into other languages as well, including Ancient Greek) — I imagine the twentieth century did a better job. The Russian ones are certainly superior to most of the English ones; I particularly liked Olga Sedakova‘s:

Душенька, беженка, неженка,
дружок и гостья бренности,
куда теперь отправишься,
голодная, сирая, босая?
утехи твои кончились!

A nice Atlas Obscura piece by Sarah Laskow on the history and psychology of American English, with discussions of Mencken and others:

English in America has always been different than the English spoken in the British metropole. In his 1992 book, A History of American English, the late linguist J.L. Dillard, who specialized in African American Vernacular English, demonstrates that the most originally American form of English was a pidgin, originating with sailor’s language. Early explorers of North America, he argues, would have used nautical pidgins and passed those on to native people. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, there were people here—most famously the men the new arrivals called Samoset and Squanto—who already spoke a version of English that Puritans could understand.

But the English spoken by American settlers of European origin, too, quickly split off from the English spoken in Britain. At the beginning of the colonial period, America was a backwater. Not only was it distant from the cultural centers of Europe, it was far from the most happening place on this side of the Atlantic. So trends that surged in the language of London took longer to reach here, if they ever did.

It’s more correct to say, for instance, that people living in England developed a new accent than that Americans “lost” their British way of speaking. […]

What does American sound like today? There are some hints from the corpora that Davies put together: his Corpus of Historical American English contains 400 million words, drawn from sources from 1890 through 2009; his Corpus of Contemporary American English contains 450 million words, from texts, including soap operas, created from 1990-2012. With corpora this big and carefully constructed to draw consistently from a mix of popular and academic sources, linguists can look more carefully at how grammar and usage change over time. For instance, one hundred years ago, Americans would have said: “Have you any time?” “It’s very British, very old fashioned,” says Davies. Now, we would say: “Do you have any time?” We also might say: “You’re going to end up paying way too much for that book.” You’re going to end up—that construction wasn’t around 100 years ago.

Thanks, Paul!

Also, my wife and I are regular listeners to Fresh Air; having been annoyed a couple of weeks ago by a segment in which Terry Gross interviewed a speech pathologist who happily pathologized perfectly normal speech (hey, it’s what people pay her for) without any counterpoint from someone who knew linguistics, I was thrilled that for today’s show (the link has a transcript of excerpts as well as the audio file) she brought the pathologist back but this time sharing the air with an actual linguist, Stanford linguistics professor Penny Eckert (as well as journalist Jessica Grose, who has had to deal with people criticizing her voice). I was nodding so vigorously my wife said “You really like her, don’t you?” I said “It’s such a pleasure to listen to someone who knows what she’s talking about!” The poor pathologist clearly felt ganged up on, but that’s what you get when you’ve been selling astrological charts and then have to deal with an astronomer. It’s well worth a listen.

Time for another Languagehat Reader Survey! On the radio news this morning they mentioned a sortie (‘combat mission’) and pronounced it sor-TEE (stress on the last syllable). I had been aware of that pronunciation, since it is given as the second option in dictionaries, but I have always pronounced it SOR-tee (stress on the first syllable), which felt more natural, and that seems to be the only UK pronunciation. Is this sor-TEE version an authentic straight-from-French thing, like herb with no /h/, or a post-hoc Frenchification? Is it used primarily by military folk? What’s the story? Tell me your thoughts (and of course your own usage).

The publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy of The Nearest Thing to Life, by James Wood; I always turn to Wood’s reviews eagerly (though I often find myself arguing with them) — he’s very well-read, acutely sensitive to the qualities of good writing, and (most important) an excellent writer himself — so I opened it with anticipation, and was not disappointed, even though I had read two of the four essays before, the first in the New Yorker and the last in the London Review of Books. I like Woods better when he’s mingling observations on literature, life, and his own memories, as he does here, rather than when he’s concentrating fiercely on a single book. I love reading the Chekhov stories he discusses and listening to the music he mentions, and he says things whose wording I admire or that plunge me into thought on nearly every page. Here are a couple of passages that will serve as a sampler; from the second essay, evoking his early life in Durham:

The school’s headmaster, the Reverend Canon John Grove, was probably only in his early fifties, but seemed to us a fantastically antique figure. He was a bachelor and a clergyman, and wore the uniform of his calling: a black suit, a black buttonless shirt, a thick white clerical collar. […] Except for the band of white starch round his neck, Canon Grove was entirely colourless—his ancient Oxford shoes were black, his thick spectacles were black, the pipe he smoked was black. He seemed to have been carbonized centuries ago, turned into ash, and when he lit his pipe, it seemed as if he was lighting himself. Like all children, we were fascinated by the match held over the pipe-bowl, by the flame steadily journeying along the flimsy match, entranced by the sucking noises of the smoker, and the way the flame halted its horizontal passage at these moments and then briefly disappeared vertically into the bowl. And always there was the question: how can he hold the match alight for so long, with such reptilian imperviousness?

And from the final essay, on his hard-to-define longing for what once was home:

In America, I crave the English reality that has disappeared; childhood seems breathingly close. But the sense of masquerade persists: I gorge on nostalgia, on fondnesses that might have embarrassed me when I lived in Britain. Geoff Dyer writes funnily, in Out of Sheer Rage, about how, when he was living in Italy, he developed an obsession with reading the TV listings in English papers, even though he had never watched telly when he lived in England, and didn’t like it. To hear a Geordie voice on an American news program leaves me flushed with longing: the dance of that dialect, with its seasick Scandinavian pitch. And all those fabulous words: segs (the metal plates you’d bang onto your shoe heels, to make sparks on the ground and act like a hard nut); kets (‘sweets’); neb (‘nose’); nowt (‘nothing’); stotty-cake (a kind of flat, doughy bread); claggy (‘sticky’). The way Northerners say eee, as an exclamation: ‘Eee, it’s red-hot today!’ (Any temperature over about seventy-two degrees.) Recently, I heard the old song ‘When the Boat Comes In’ on National Public Radio, and I almost wept​.

Now come here little Jacky
Now I’ve smoked me packy,
Let’s have some cracky
Till the boat comes in.

And you shall have a fishy
On a little dishy,
You shall have a fishy
When the boat comes in.

But I really disliked that song when I was a boy. I never had a very northern accent. My father was born in London. It was important to my Scottish petty-bourgeois mother that I didn’t sound like a Geordie. Friends used to say, with a bit of menace in their voices: ‘You don’t talk like a Durham lad. Where are you from?’ Sometimes it was necessary to mimic the accent, to fit in, to avoid getting beaten up. I could never say, as the man in the song ‘Coming Home Newcastle’ foolishly does: ‘And I’m proud to be a Geordie/And to live in Geordie-land.’

I’ll add, since as a copyeditor I notice these things, that the book is extraordinarily well proofread; the only error I noticed was a running head that had strayed from the essay “Why?” to “Using Everything” (p. 91). Well done, Brandeis University Press!

I like books and I like movies, so it makes sense that I would like a short movie about books in movies, and I thought maybe you would too. I herewith preset Bibliophilia – Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A video-essay by Luís Azevedo, a five-minute video accompanied by a brief essay explaining what Azevedo was going for. There are books, narrators, images, the map and the territory, and some nice music; my only disappointment was that though the essay talks about Godard, there is no Godard in the film itself. (Yes, I was Waiting for Godard.) And now I want to see more Wes Anderson movies. (Via Arthur Wyatt‘s MetaFilter post.)

David Smith has a story in the Guardian about an effort to save a dying language:

Hanna Koper and her two sisters are thought to be the last remaining speakers of the San language N|uu, rated as critically endangered by Unesco. The San, also known as “bushmen”, were the first hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

N|uu, which has 112 distinct sounds, was passed on orally down the generations but never written down. Now Koper and her siblings have worked with linguists to design alphabet charts with consonants, vowels and 45 different “clicks” that are typical of San languages, as well as rules of spelling and grammar.

Matthias Brenzinger, director of the Centre for African Language Diversity at the University of Cape Town, who is working on the project with British academic Sheena Shah, said: “It’s the most indigenous language of southern Africa.” […]

Brezinger has overseen the teaching of N|uu at a local school, where pupils learn basics such as greetings, body parts, animal names and short sentences. One teenage girl in particular is showing huge promise in the language but “at one stage there will be no fluent speaker any more”, he said.

That does not mean N|uu will necessarily be doomed to the archives, however. “With these languages, you never know,” said Brezinger. “Hawaiian was extinct basically, and then there was a movement 35 years ago and you have 2,000 mother tongue speakers of Hawaiian. […]

Koper, who lives near Upington in Northern Cape province, told South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper that when she was a girl in the days of white minority rule, she and her siblings were told their language was ugly. “We were told not to make noise and the baas [a Dutch word for supervisor] would shout at us if we spoke the language because they believed we were gossiping,” she was quoted as saying.

“This is my language. This is my bread. This is my milk. I didn’t learn it, but I ate it and this is how it is my language.”

I can’t get enough of these stories. Obviously not all languages can be saved, but when a group of speakers manages to fight the process of extinction, I consider it a small victory for humanity. (Thanks, Trevor!)