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“What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?” (Front. Psychol., 23 June 2015), by Ewa Dąbrowska, Professor of Linguistics at Northumbria University, begins “Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept” and goes on to back that up in a thoroughgoing manner. As a sample, see this devastating paragraph from the Conclusion:

Is it a fruitful approach? (Or perhaps a better question might be: Was it a fruitful approach?) It was certainly fruitful in the sense that it generated a great deal of debate. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have got us any closer to answers to the fundamental questions that it raised. One could regard the existing disagreements about UG as a sign of health. After all, debate is the stuff of scientific inquiry: initial hypotheses are often erroneous; it is by reformulating and refining them that we gradually get closer to the truth. However, the kind of development we see in UG theory is very different from what we see in the natural sciences. In the latter, the successive theories are gradual approximations to the truth. Consider an example discussed by Asimov (1989). People once believed that the earth is flat. Then, ancient Greek astronomers established that it was spherical. In the seventeenth century, Newton argued that it was an oblate spheroid (i.e., slightly squashed at the poles). In the twentieth century, scientists discovered that it is not a perfect oblate spheroid: the equatorial bulge is slightly bigger in the southern hemisphere. Note that although the earlier theories were false, they clearly approximated the truth: the correction in going from “sphere” to “oblate spheroid,” or from “oblate spheroid” to “slightly irregular oblate spheroid” is much smaller than when going from “flat” to “spherical.” And while “slightly irregular oblate spheroid” may not be entirely accurate, we are extremely unlikely to discover tomorrow that the earth is conical or cube-shaped. We do not see this sort of approximation in work in the UG approach: what we see instead is wildly different ideas being constantly proposed and abandoned. After more than half a century of intensive research we are no nearer to understanding what UG is than we were when Chomsky first used the term.

Anyone interested in this influential delusion of Chomskyism should read Dąbrowska’s paper. Thanks, Stan!

Addendum. ‘New mathematical methods’ in linguistics constitute the greatest intellectual fraud in the discipline since Chomsky, by Roger Blench: “For a method or disciplinary procedure to be deemed scientific it seems it should meet some minimum criteria […] It is relatively easy to show that on present showing none of these conditions are, or possibly can be met. If this is so, then the editor of Science has presumably been bamboozled.” Response by Sean at Replicated Typo, who disagrees with Blench but admits: “Those using mathematical models may have to spend more time justifying and clarifying their work.” Thanks, Yoram!

I can’t really say anything about this two-and-a-half-minute video by Reginald Pikedevant except: it’s funny, watch it! (One of my favorite bits is the po-faced spelling pronunciation of wagon-lit.) Thanks, Paul!

I’ve finally reached January 9 as I work through the stack of old issues of the TLS, and the Freelance column by Lydia Davis (probably subscribers-only) was obvious LH material:

These days, I begin my morning happily absorbed in reading a book that would have seemed highly unlikely to me a year ago: it is in Norwegian, a language I did not know before, and was described by some irritated critics in Norway, when it appeared last year, as “tedious” and “unreadable”, though it also received much admiring praise. Dag Solstad’s “novel”, Det Uoppløselige Episke Element i Telemark i Perioden 1691–1896 (428 pages), is entirely factual. Its storyline consists for the most part of detailed accounts of the births, marriages, deaths, and property transactions of his ancestors in Telemark, with little incident, almost no real drama, much authorial speculation, and the occasional memorable character, such as the pipe-smoking widow Torhild, the spendthrift Margit, and the power-hungry Halvor Steinulvson Borgja (b. 1625). […]

Then, last spring, I was describing to [Davis’s Norwegian translator, Johanne Fronth-Nygren] my difficulties with a project of my own involving several generations of my ancestors, one that promised to be long, complex and confusing. She recommended a new book she admired by Dag Solstad (pronounced “Soolstad”), now in his early seventies and considered by many to be Norway’s pre-eminent contemporary novelist. I had already dipped into the two paperbacks of his which I had in English translation. Johanne told me this new one was unusual, and quite controversial: how could it be called a novel? She said that although I would not be able to read it, I could at least look through it and get an idea of what he was doing.

I sent for the book. […] I was also frustrated: this was a book I wanted to read, and it did not exist in English. So, seeing no alternative, I tried the first sentence: “Les langsomt, ord for ord, hvis man vil forstå hva jeg sier”. With the help of German cognates (lesen and langsam), I understood the first two words right away: “Read slowly”. Although it took me a few minutes to realize that ord had nothing to do with “order” or the German Ort, but meant “word”, I then found I could decipher most of the rest: “Read slowly, word for word, hvis one will understand [G. verstehen] hva jeg sier”. I thought jeg could mean “I” (Fr. je, Dutch jij, etc). The whole turned out to be a surprisingly apt directive: “Read slowly, word for word, if you want to understand what I am saying”. I made up my mind that I would simply keep reading; even if at first I understood almost nothing, I thought, I would in time understand more and more, and perhaps actually learn to read Norwegian.

And that is what has happened. I do read slowly, though no longer always one word at a time. I often reread at least part of a sentence. I don’t use a dictionary, attempting to figure out the words from their contexts with the help of cognates, though that can lead me astray. Norwegian ferd has nothing to do with German Pferd, horse – which in Norwegian is hest; giftet seg means “got married”, though gift by itself does, like the German Gift, mean “poison”. I write down each new word I figure out. Many sentences I can now read without stumbling; more and more rarely do I find myself in a thicket of incomprehensible language. By now I am within eighty pages of the end. […]

Adding to the suspense, in my case, is of course the adventure of learning the language as I go along, seeing more and more mysterious words become familiar. In the beginning, as I made my way into this partly incomprehensible Telemark of the 1600s and 1700s, I felt, pleasantly, all the farther away from home in both time and culture for not knowing half of what I was reading. Now that the mists are clearing, each page offers another reward: not only the unfolding story, but also a linguistic revelation – not only about Norwegian, but also about the roots it shares with English. When I learn svar, I glimpse the source of our “answer”. I knew “neighbour” was related to “nigh”; now that I know the Norwegian bor means “dwell”, I see “neighbour” for what it is: one who lives nearby. The English words become strange again.

It reminded me strongly of the opening of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (see this post, and if you haven’t read it, go read it); my one cavil: I don’t believe the “I don’t use a dictionary” part. I can believe she avoids using a dictionary as much as possible, but there are words you simply can’t get from context, and it seems to me it would just be too frustrating to move on leaving some crucial word a mental blank.

Update. It turns out people do learn by reading foreign texts without using a dictionary (see comments below); once again, I’ve overgeneralized from my own experience.

Last December, John Cowan said: “I note that there’s no mention of Eva Hoffman anywhere in LH, and I’d urge any interested Hattic to read her book, which is wonderful.” I’ve just finished the book, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (thanks, Sven & Leslie!), and he was absolutely right. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say it’s about life and language, and specifically about moving from Poland to Canada to the US and navigating the many changes involved, so I’ll just quote a few passages and repeat John’s urging to read the book.

Childhood memories from Cracow:

“Bramaramaszerymery, rotumotu pulimuli,” I say in a storytelling voice, as if I were starting out a long tale, even though I know perfectly well that what I am making up are nonsense syllables. “What are you talking about,” my mother asks. “Everything,” I say, and then start again: “Bramarama, szerymery . . .” I want to tell A Story, Every Story, everything at once, not anything in particular that might be said through words I know, and I try to roll all sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables as if they might make a Möbius strip of language in which everything, everything is contained. There is a hidden rule even in this game, though — that the sounds have to resemble real syllables, that they can’t disintegrate into brüte noise, for then I wouldn’t be talking at all. I want articulation — but articulation that says the whole world at once.
[…]

Like so many children who read a lot, I begin to declare rather early that I want to be a writer. But this is the only way I have of articulating a different desire, a desire that I can’t yet understand. What I really want is to be transported into a space in which everything is as distinct, complete, and intelligible as in the stories I read. And, like most children, I’m a literalist through and through. I want reality to imitate books — and books to capture the essence of reality. I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in a heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become — and such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes, when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated. “She grimaced ironically,” someone says, and an ironic grimace is now delineated in my mind with a sharpness it never had before. I’ve now grasped a new piece of experience; it is mine.

From her first years in Canada:

Every day I learn new words, new expressions. I pick them up from school exercises, from conversations, from the books I take out of Vancouver’s well-lit, cheerful public library. There are some turns of phrase to which I develop strange allergies. “You’re welcome,” for example, strikes me as a gaucherie, and I can hardly bring myself to say it — I suppose because it implies that there’s something to be thanked for, which in Polish would be impolite. The very places where language is at its most conventional, where it should be most taken for granted, are the places where I feel the prick of artifice.

Then there are words to which I take as equally irrational liking: for their sound, or just because I’m pleased to have deduced their meaning. Mainly they’re words I learn from books, like “enigmatic” or “insolent” — words that have only a literary value, that exist only as signs on the page.

But mostly, the problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified. The words I learn now don’t stand for things in the same unquestioned way they did in my native tongue. “River” in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. “River” in English is cold — a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze of connotation. It does not evoke.

The process, alas, works in reverse as well. When I see a river now, it is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodated it to the psyche — a word that makes a body of water a river rather than an uncontained element. The river before me remains a thing absolutely other, absolutely unbending to the grasp of my mind.

When my friend Penny tells me that she’s curious, or happy, or disappointed, I try laboriously to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling from which it springs. Already, in that moment of strain, spontaneity of response is lost. And anyway, the translation doesn’t work. I don’t know how Penny feels when she talks about envy. The word hangs in a Platonic stratosphere, a vague prototype of all envy, so large, so all-encompassing that it might crush me — as might disappointment or happiness.

I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I’m free to play with words at my wont; anyway, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, the radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances — its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.

The worst losses come at night. As I lie down in a strange bed in a strange house — my mother is a sort of housekeeper here to the aging Jewish man who has taken us in in return for her services — I wait for that spontaneous flow of inner language which used to be my nighttime talk with myself, my way of informing the ego where the id had been. Nothing comes. Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shriveled from sheer uselessness. Its words don’t apply to my new experiences; they’re not coeval with any of the objects, or faces, or the very air I breathe in the daytime. In English, words have not penetrated to those layers of my psyche from which a private conversation could proceed. This interval before sleep used to be the time when my mind became both receptive and alert — when images and words rose up to consciousness, reiterating what had happened during the day, adding the day’s experiences to those already stored there, spinning out the thread of my personal story.

Now, this picture-and-word show is gone; the thread has been snapped.[…]

From her undergraduate years at Rice, in Houston:

I’m sitting in a bracingly uncomfortable chair in the Rice University library, reading slowly, laboriously. The chestnut tree in the [last] stanza summons my private chestnut tree, and the last line moves me all on its own, because that’s what it’s like to play the piano, in those moments when I can no longer tell whether I’m playing the music or the music is playing me. But what does “bole” mean, or “blear-eyed,” or “midnight oil”? I have only the vaguest idea, and by the time I look up these words in a dictionary and accomplish the translation from the sounds to their definition, it’s hard to reinsert them into the flow of the lines, the seamless sequence of musical meaning. I concentrate intensely, too intensely, and the lines come out straight and square, though I intuit a beauty that’s only an inflection away.

After her postgraduate study at Harvard:

I’ve become obsessed with words. I gather them, put them away like a squirrel saving nuts for winter, swallow them and hunger for more. If I take in enough, then maybe I can incorporate the language, make it part of my psyche and my body. I will not leave an image unworded, will not let anything cross my mind till I find the right phrase to pin the shadow down. Each week, as I drive a route of leafy New England roads to teach a class at the University of New Hampshire, my head heats up as if the circuitry were overloaded. “Beveled, chiseled, sculpted, ribbed”, I think as a wooden lampstand I liked flashes through my mind. […]

The thought that there are parts of the language I’m missing can induce a small panic in me, as if such gaps were missing parts of the world or my mind—as if the totality of the world and mind were coeval with the totality of the language. Or rather, as if language were an enormous, fine net in which reality is contained—and if there are holes in it, then a bit of reality can escape, cease to exist. When I write, I want to use every word in the lexicon, to accumulate a thickness and weight of words so that they yield the specific gravity of things. I want to recreate, from the discrete particles of words, that wholeness of a childhood language that had no words.

I pounce on bits of colloquial idiom, those slivers of Americana in which the cultural sensibility is most vivid, as if they could give me America itself. “Hair of the dog that bit me,” I repeat to myself with relish; “pork-barreling”; “I’m from Missouri, show me”; “He swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.” When I speak, I’m awkward in using such homely familiarities; I still feel the presumption in it. But in writing, I claim territorial prerogative. Perhaps if I cast my net wide enough, it will cover the whole continent.

I’d love to keep on quoting — the section beginning “It’s as important to me to speak well as to play a piece of music without mistakes,” or how she cracks “the last barrier between myself and the language” while reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — but I’ll reluctantly let it go at that. Thanks for nudging me to move the book to the top of the pile, John!

I’m reading Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915, by Francis W. Wcislo, which is irritatingly written (e.g., frequently referring to late-nineteenth-century Russians as “Victorians”), though it presents a great deal of interesting material (e.g., the rich widow Anna Rodionovna Chernyshova, godmother to both Emperor Alexander I and Witte’s grandmother Elena Dolgorukaya-Fadeeva, allowed no men on her rural estate, so that when Dolgorukaya-Fadeeva visited in 1816 she had to leave her husband outside the gates); I just hit a sentence so tortured I thought I’d post it and see if anyone can make more sense of it than I:

[Witte’s] emergent sensibilities for the hierarchical order of a world shaped by service and patronage would have pleased both grandparents, but much else in their grandson they would have found inchoate, even incomprehensible, as, in their turn, had they their Muscovite forebears.

Does he mean the grandparents found their Muscovite forebears incomprehensible, or their Muscovite forebears would have found them incomprehensible, or what?

Leon Neyfakh reports on a new dictionary of prison slang:

Before they set about compiling a dictionary of prison slang, the inmates at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, used words like viking (meaning a prisoner with poor personal hygiene) and Cadillac (meaning a cup of coffee with cream and sugar) without thinking about it too hard. But when a group of inmates put their private language under a microscope, they realized the way they use language reflects years of institutional history and serves as a unique window onto their experiences of prison life.

The dictionary—which I first heard about thanks to St. Louis Public Radio—came about as part of a prison education program operated by Saint Louis University and was conceived by English professor Paul Lynch, who volunteers at the Bonne Terre prison, a medium-/maximum-security facility. Inmates opted into the project by signing up for a class and worked on the dictionary with Lynch during two-hour sessions once a month.

Lynch said he introduced his students to the idea of creating their own dictionary by having them read part of Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything, a book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea, Lynch told me, was to show the inmates that a dictionary is not a book of rules but a description of language as it is used in real life at a particular moment in time. “The goal was to make the students see language as something more fluid and evolving than they’re probably accustomed to,” he said.

Step one was to distribute a bunch of index cards to everyone in the class and ask them to write down any words they used on a regular basis that they thought outsiders wouldn’t understand. Lynch asked that each word be accompanied by a definition and an example of how it might be used in a sentence; at the end of the exercise they had a master list of several hundred words. In order to make their task more manageable, they whittled the list down to about 60 words by identifying the ones that were most specific to life at Bonne Terre. That meant more generic terms like shank or the hole were discarded. “Anything that you learn from watching Shawshank Redemption we threw out,” as Lynch explained.

What happened next was essentially a series of classroom debates among inmates: about proper usage, what certain words really mean, and whether some were too outdated to be included. “Guys would get really worked up about it, in a very friendly and constructive way,” Lynch said.

These impassioned discussions revealed, among other things, the generational fault lines that divided the inmate population. There were certain words, Lynch said, that older guys knew that younger ones didn’t and vice versa. […]

The completed Bonne Terre dictionary now sits in the prison library. And while Lynch declined to share a copy of it with me, he did offer some of his favorite entries, which you can read below.
[…]

boat, n.: A plastic bed that is used when the prison is overcrowded.

pumpkin, n.: A term used for new arrivals at Bonne Terre because they wear orange jumpsuits instead of the gray and tan ones that inmates get after they’ve been processed. (The area where new inmates are processed is called the pumpkin patch.)

My first thought: What a great idea! My second: It’s too bad you have to go to prison to learn to see language as something fluid and evolving. (Well, that or read Languagehat. Or, you know, take a linguistics course, but who does that?) It’s too bad the dictionary isn’t available outside the prison, but maybe the idea will catch on and eventually a Dictionary of U.S. Prison Dialects will be published. (Thanks, Paul!)

My patient crawl through nineteenth-century Russian literature has brought me another unexpected reward, Avdotya Panaeva‘s Семейство Тальниковых [The Talnikov family]. It’s an account of a girl’s very difficult childhood, apparently autobiographical, and it’s usually discussed in terms like this (I quote Susan Conner Olson’s article on Panaeva in Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky): “Her first work, Semeistvo Tal’nikovykh, followed the early intention of Sovremennik to depict the ugly realities of everyday life, a literary trend promoted by Belinsky and known as Naturalism.” Well, yes, except that it doesn’t read like someone trying to depict the ugly realities of everyday life, it reads like someone trying to tell us what it was like growing up, and it’s seen with the fresh child’s-eye view of a Satyajit Ray or Abbas Kiarostami — or, to take a comparison from Russian literature rather than movies, of Sergei Aksakov in his justly popular Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka (1858, translated as Years of Childhood).

The parents are pretty one-dimensional — the father a brute, the mother interested only in card-playing and indifferent to her children — but the kids don’t interact with them much, and the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents are depicted with an amused and surprisingly sympathetic eye, given their frequently appalling behavior. There’s not much plot — someone goes off to war, someone gets married, someone goes mad — but it’s not oriented toward plot, and even less toward social commentary; it’s true it was immediately banned and the magazine it appeared in shut down, but that’s because of its attitude to authority, which is uniformly negative: if readers are given such jaundiced images of those in charge of family and school, how are they supposed to maintain respect for authority in general? It simply wants to say “this is how it is,” and precisely because the author was inexperienced, not steeped in the naturalistic writing so trendy at the time, she tells her story in original ways, avoiding the cliches she hadn’t soaked up like everyone else. I’ll translate the first few paragraphs to give at least an idea of it; maybe one of the small publishers so busily engaged in translation will put out the whole book, which would make ideal reading for anyone interested in women’s experience in nineteenth-century Russia:

In a room lit by a candle that needed snuffing, they were washing a dead body — my six-month-old sister. Her eyes, with their dull, fixed gaze, terrified me. There was silence in the room; neither my father nor my mother cried, only the wet-nurse was crying — for the gilt kerchief and fur coat of which my sister’s early death had deprived her. If the child had waited five or six months to die, the wet-nurse’s work would have been done, and the promised reward would not have slipped through her hands.

For a minute, the death made a strong impression on me, but the complete indifference of those surrounding the body and the absence of my father and mother convinced me that death was not something important. The periodic quarrels of my mother and grandmother seemed to me much more important, because of the copious tears of my grandmother and my mother’s menacing shouts: what had she done with the money given her for expenses, and how had the provisions vanished so quickly? I was always on the side of people who cried, whether because I cried a lot myself I don’t know, but I felt sorrier for my crying grandmother than my angry mother. After a prolonged quarrel they made peace, and my grandmother cried tears of joy rather than grief, ending the scene until the next month when it was again time to buy provisions…

My memories begin when I was around six. There were many relatives in the house: two sisters of my mother and a sister of my father, as well as his mother. We were very fond of our grandmother, because she indulged us. Mother took no trouble about us, and father, busy at his job, didn’t pay the slightest attention to his children, whose number increased with regularity every year. I had two sisters, Katya and Sonya, and three brothers, Misha, Fedya, and Vanya. We felt no particular tenderness for our parents, who for their part didn’t treat us especially kindly. I remember the time mama went away for a whole summer to take the waters. On the day she was supposed to return, the whole house was waiting for her, but she didn’t come. They put us to bed, but I couldn’t sleep: I wanted very much to see mama. When everyone left the room, I quietly got out of bed, sat by the window, and started watching the street and listening to the sounds. But mama didn’t come! I was ready to cry, and my heart beat strongly at the slightest sound in the other rooms. Finally the whole house was asleep, and I slept too, worn out by the wait, and I dreamed mama was kissing me soundly and holding me in her arms — it made me very happy. Suddenly I heard that mama had arrived! I ran downstairs and immediately hurled myself at her. She seemed surprised at my joy and kissed me. I cried… People clustered around me and asked me what was wrong, why was I crying? I said I was happy to see mama. Everyone laughed, and mama, smiling, took me in her arms. I clasped her neck, pressed myself strongly to her and wept more than before. She tried to calm me down and offered me presents, but I refused them and kept crying, covering my face with my hands. My mother decided I was sick, and saying “Look how she’s shaking!” ordered that I be taken to the children’s room and put to bed. I wanted to go back to her, but wasn’t allowed to…

That last scene reminds me of the famous opening of Remembrance of Things Past, in which Proust’s narrator remembers wanting desperately to see his mother, who was downstairs with guests. Panaeva is no Proust, of course, but she’s well worth reading in her own right.

A nice little piece by Elisa Gabbert for The Smart Set about paragraphs; I like it because it pushes back against the terminally boring essay style they teach you in school (“first I’ll tell you what I’m going to say, then I’ll say it, then I’ll tell you what I said”) and it has some tasty examples:

What most people follow is a variation of the rule established for “five-paragraph essays” in grade school, where each paragraph is built around a “topic sentence.” As such, if the essay is an argument, each paragraph represents a subargument, with the first and last paragraphs reserved for introductory and closing remarks. (This seems like a big waste of two-fifths of the allotted paragraphs; in school I learned to save one of my best points for the end, to avoid having to rephrase my intro all over again.) […]

In nonfiction, I’m obsessed with what I’ve come to think of as the invisible transition, where there is no clear, necessary connection between two paragraphs, and yet – something happens. The juxtaposition isn’t as jarring as a non sequitur, but it could have been otherwise. In fact I’d argue that what’s mostly “lyric” about a so-called lyric essay are these transitions, these leaps, more so than some inherently “poetic” quality of the language. Invisible transitions make a text feel more open, and inside these openings, essays gesture toward poetry. […]

I love the way inter-paragraph gaps fight against the idea of essay as argument, and make it an act of discovery. Or rather a document of discovery, like an explorer’s journal, written in pencil and gone back through – to add color more than accuracy; even at the expense of accuracy. The essay needn’t be faithful to the path of the thinking, but the form can reveal how thinking happens, like when a song gets stuck in your head and only later do you realize why you thought of it, that you had read or heard a word from the third verse. There’s magic there – the mind doesn’t always show its work. Why should prose?

It occurred to me to wonder where the name Pamela came from, so I went to my Dictionary of First Names (by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges), where I found this entry:

Pamela (f.) English: invented by the Elizabethan pastoral poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), in whose verse it is stressed on the second syllable. There is no clue to the sources that influenced Sidney in this coinage. It was later taken up by Samuel Richardson for the name of the heroine of his novel Pamela (1740). In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), which started out as a parody of Pamela, Fielding comments that the name is ‘very strange’.

So now, in addition to pronouncing Byron’s hero “Don JOO-ən,” I have to remember to say “Pa-MEE-lə” for Richardson’s. I note that the Wikipedia article on the name says “It is widely thought that Sidney intended the name to mean ‘all sweetness’ having in mind the Greek words pan (‘all’) and meli (‘honey’),” but had that been the case he would surely not have stressed it on the second syllable, because meli has a short e, and they cared about these things in the sixteenth century. The Wikipedia article also says “The name’s popularity may have been hindered by the tendency to pronounce it /pəˈmiːlə/ pə-MEE-lə which was not fully superseded by the now-standard /ˈpæmələ/ PAM-ə-lə until the start of the 20th century,” but their source for the dating is A World of Baby Names, and I’d like to see a more scholarly source.

Another interesting passage from Kotkin’s Stalin (see this post):

In 1879, the year after Jugashvili had been born, two Georgian noblemen writers, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze (b. 1837) and Prince Akaki Tsereteli (b. 1840), had founded the Society for the Spread of Literacy Among Georgians. Georgians comprised many different groups—Kakhetis, Kartlians, Imeretians, Mingrelians—with a shared language, and Chavchavadze and Tsereteli hoped to spark an integrated Georgian cultural rebirth through schools, libraries, and bookshops. Their conservative populist cultural program intended no disloyalty to the empire. But in the Russian empire, administratively, there was no “Georgia,” just the two provinces (gubernias) of Tiflis and Kutaisi, and such was the hardline stance of the imperial authorities that the censors forbade any publication of the term “Georgia” (Gruziya) in Russian. Partly because many censors did not know the Georgian language—which was written neither in Cyrillic nor Latin letters—the censors proved more lenient with Georgian publications, which opened a lot of space for Georgian periodicals. But at the Tiflis seminary, to compel Russification, Georgian language instruction had been abolished in favor of Russian in 1872. (Orthodox services in Georgia were conducted in Church Slavonic and thus were largely unintelligible to the faithful, as they were even in the predominantly ethnic Russian provinces of the empire.) From 1875, the seminary in the Georgian capital ceased teaching Georgian history. Of the seminary’s two dozen teachers, all of whom were formally appointed by the Russian viceroy, a few were Georgian but most were Russian monks, and the latter had been expressly assigned to Georgia because of their strong Russian nationalist views.

The stupidity of tsarist policy on nationalities and nationalism never ceases to amaze me. (Quibble: Mingrelian, though related to Georgian, is actually a separate language.)