languagehat.com

I recently rewatched La Haine for the first time since it came out almost thirty years ago, and it was just as good as I remembered. But this time I noticed something that must have zipped right past me back then: at one point Saïd says “Tes parents, ils habitent Rue Gama !” It turns out this is not an actual street but a reference to an ad campaign for Gama detergent; here’s a 1980 example. Why Gama is called that I do not know.

It reminds me of the Fry and Laurie Treaty of Westphalia skit, which culminates in the laugh line “you are really spoiling us” — to get the joke you have to be familiar with the Ferrero Rocher ad campaign.

I am familiar with the word condign pretty much exclusively in the (pompous but not obsolete) phrase “condign punishment,” and I suspect this is the case for most modern users of the language; that Wiktionary article defines it as “Fitting, appropriate, deserved, especially denoting punishment.” But when I checked the OED, whose entry dates back to 1891, I find a whole series of senses, beginning with the obsolete senses “1. † Equal in worth or dignity (to)” (c1470 “This Kyng Arthure, to whom none was condigne Through all the world,” J. Hardyng, Chronicle lxxxiv. vii), “2. † Worthy, deserving” (a1513 “She hath great honour..As most condigne to beare the principalite,” H. Bradshaw, Lyfe St. Werburge ii. xxi. sig. r.v), and “3.a. Worthily deserved, merited, fitting, appropriate; adequate” (1413 “Take him vp in to thy blysse on hye in what degree that to hym is condygne,” J. Lydgate, Pilgr. of Sowle ii. xlii. 48) before getting to the modern sense:

3.b. Since the end of 17th cent. commonly used only of appropriate punishment: a use originating in the phraseology of Tudor Acts of Parliament.
Johnson 1755 says, ‘It is always used of something deserved by crimes’. De Quincey Templars’ Dial. in Wks. IV. 188 note, ‘Capriciously..the word condign is used only in connection with the word punishment..These and other words, if unlocked from their absurd imprisonment, would become extensively useful. We should say, for instance, “condign honours”, “condign reward”, “condign treatment” (treatment appropriate to the merits).’ [Cf. 1873 at sense 3a.]

1513 The godly power..Onto tha wikkyt Sawlis..Hes send conding punytioun, and just panys.
G. Douglas, translation of Virgil, Æneid xiii. vii. 64
[…]

1849 He had been brought to condign punishment as a traitor.
T. B. Macaulay, History of England vol. I. 575

1878 To wreak condign vengeance on the common oppressor of them all.
R. B. Smith, Carthage 195

It’s from French condigne, which has the theological sense “Exactement proportionné à la faute ou à la récompense. Peine, satisfaction, mérite condigne” (apparently not restricted to negative senses as in English) but is not in even my largest printed dictionary; the ultimate source is Latin condignus ‘wholly worthy.’ I love that De Quincey quote about its “absurd imprisonment.”

Back in 2013 I posted about the New Linguistic Survey of India and its founder, Ganesh Devy; now the New Yorker has run a feature article about him and his work by Samanth Subramanian (archived), and it’s a good read. (Trigger warning: the author is not a linguist, so some statements about language may be upsetting to those of excessively scientific sensibilities.) Some excerpts:

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.

For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?” […]

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Late last month I realized that I had never read Irina Polyanskaya’s second novel, Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads], and decided to remedy the omission (see my previous post about Polyanskaya). As so often happens, I’m not sure what to say about it or even how I feel about it, and I’m posting in part to try to figure that out (and in part, of course, to provide even a brief and inadequate account of a novel by a major writer that is otherwise, as far as I can tell, unmentioned in English). It was first published in Novy Mir in Oct.-Nov. 1999, and came out as a book in 2001, but I can’t find any reviews even in Russian. I don’t think it’s an especially good novel, but it’s well written and worth reading, especially for a fan of Polyanskaya or for someone interested in early Soviet cinema.

It takes the form of a first-person narration by Tanya, a grad student who wants to write about a famous old director called Vikentii Petrovich (his last name is never given); here are the first few sentences, so you can get an idea of the style (the translation is, of course, mine):

My task was to turn him inside out and transmute this headstrong man, a natural and highly experienced hunter, into game, into food for the mind, material for an article, a dissertation, a book, etc., which at first seemed to me unlikely to be realized. I understood that a great deal, if not everything, depended on my quickness of wit, because this man was spoiled by fame, capricious, arrogant, as befits a classic. I already knew that he was not accustomed to treating the writing public with much consideration, and therefore I took certain measures to ensure that he would not immediately recognize me among his students, who were somewhat younger than I. Heightening the youthfulness of my make-up, I pulled on faded jeans and tied my hair into a ponytail with an elastic band…

Моей задачей было вывернуть его наизнанку и превратить этого своенравного человека, прирожденного и многоопытного охотника, в дичь, в пищу для ума, в материал для статьи, диссертации, книги etc., что представлялось мне на первых порах малоосуществимым. Я понимала, что от моей расторопности зависело многое, если не все, потому что человек этот был избалован славой, капризен, спесив, как и подобает классику. Я уже знала, что он не привык церемониться с пишущей публикой, и поэтому предприняла кое-какие меры для того, чтобы он не сразу опознал меня среди своих студентов, которых я была немногим старше. Усилив свой молодежный макияж, натянула потертые джинсы, собрала волосы в хвост резинкой на затылке…

Eventually she introduces herself, he asks her out, and they begin the dance of mutual seduction so (over-)familiar in academic literature — the reader expects that the story will involve the consequences of the unequal affair for her young life. Not so: instead the novel becomes a long series of reminiscences and judgments on the part of Vikentii Petrovich, with only occasional reminders of the fictional context (“… and then we met at Pushkin Square and he began telling me about the time when…”). A great deal of ground is covered, from the pre-revolutionary period through the life and death of Stalin (who watches movies with Molotov, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, etc.), with much discussion of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko (called “Sashko”), and other directors, as well as actors, musical styles, and so on. In other words, this is a novel of ideas. Now, I am a fan of such novels, which range from Middlemarch to Norman Rush’s Mating (see this post), but what is essential is that the ideas be embedded in a convincing tissue of novelistic narration, with memorable characters who are not just vessels for the ideas. Here that is not the case — it’s like Polyanskaya had a bunch of thoughts about acting and movies she wanted to get off her chest (she herself studied acting in her youth) and decided to put them in the mouth of an invented director. It makes for good reading, but not a good novel.
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From a Johns Hopkins press release:

What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers. The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”

Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. […] “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”

Exciting if true, but I’ll await those details. Thanks, Dmitry!

Back in February I posted about Ross Perlin’s attempt to document endangered languages in and around New York City; now Ian Frazier, perhaps my favorite New Yorker writer, reviews [in the New York Review of Books] Perlin’s book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (archived). I’ll quote some bits and urge you to read the whole thing:

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. The word “bodega” itself reveals a linguistic nest. It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega. Perlin writes that “in today’s New York, boutiques and bodegas sit side by side.”

[…] Kichwa, a language descended from that of the ancient Incas, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in New York. As the Inca Empire spread across parts of South America in pre-Columbian times, it drove out other languages. Now Kichwa qualifies as endangered, although 8,000 to 10,000 New Yorkers may speak it; but in a new country, parents are rarely able to pass along much of their mother tongue to their children. (I asked my dentist, who’s from Ecuador, if he spoke Kichwa or knew any Kichwa speakers. He said that when he was growing up outside Quito, he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means “sweater.” I realized that unconsciously I had always pictured the ancient Incas wearing llama-wool sweaters. “Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.) […]

Looking at the city from a linguistic point of view reveals facts you might otherwise not have stumbled on, such as: when Andy Warhol (née Andrew Warhola) met Pope John Paul II in 1980, he spoke to him in Ruthenian, a language of southern Poland and Slovakia, the region where the Pope and Warhol’s parents came from. Sojourner Truth, the antislavery heroine, grew up speaking Dutch; she was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, when it still had a Dutch presence. Yitta Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor and member of a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community in Brooklyn, left maybe two thousand living descendants when she died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. […]

[Read more…]

Ilya Vinitsky at Facebook tells a wonderful story (in Russian) about Roman Jakobson. Apparently Omry Ronen, the great Mandelstam scholar (see this LH post), was a student of his, and used to say that Jakobson was a great teacher despite never reading any of his students’ work — if he decided a student was a genius he would recommend that student for posts and, sight unseen, for publication. As an example he adduced a student whose dissertation on Mayakovsky was published at his insistence; it turned out that the student had mentioned a poem with the strange English title “Hate.” This was, of course, his famous 1913 poem Нате! (text), whose title means “here you are!; there you are!, here! (said formally or to a group of people when giving someone something, i.e., ‘take it!’)” — it’s been translated by Maria Enzensberger (in this book) as “Take It!” The word is often used in an aggressive way (‘Take that!’), and this is how Mayakovsky uses it (“I will guffaw and spit in your face”), so it is not entirely inappropriate that the hapless dissertator mistook the all-capital version in the title, НАТЕ, for the identical-looking English word HATE!

I know what you’re thinking: nice story, but probably invented or exaggerated. That was my reaction too. But no, Vinitsky checked it out and discovered that sure enough, in Lawrence Leo Stahlberger’s The symbolic system of Majakovskij (Mouton, 1964), p. 66, we find “In his poetry of this period, Majakovskij, although expressing his hatred for the bourgeoisie in such poems as Hate (title in English) …” Embarrassing! (Interestingly, Jakobson himself in his French version of another Mayakovsky poem translated «Нате!» as “un mot de dédain” — see the FB post for details.)

I only wish Edwin Morgan had translated this poem in Wi The Haill Voice: 25 poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Carcanet Press, Translations, [South Hinksey, Eng.], England, 1972), recommended here by Geraint Jennings and in the following comment by keith100; his Scots versions are a delight. As a sample, here’s his translation of the brief А вы могли бы? (text):

Wia jaup the darg-day map’s owre-pentit—
I jibbled colour fae a tea-gless;
ashets o jellyteen presentit
to me the great sea’s camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou—
I’ve read the cries о a new warld through’t.
But you
wi denty thrapple
can ye wheeple
nocturnes fae a rone-pipe flute?

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Bryan Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume III: Books 9-12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; rpt. 2000), pp. 6-7:

A true hapax legomenon seems to present a special problem for those who believe that the techniques of composition used in the Homeric poems are mainly those of oral poetry. The techniques of oral poetry are generic and formular, the hapax legomenon by definition is not. It may not even bear any relation of sound, sense, or form to the formular part of the diction, and it would be gratuitous and implausible to claim that more than a handful make their sole appearances by chance. On the contrary, hapax legomena, being an aspect of the vitality of the Kunstsprache, and of the willingness of ἀοιδοί to experiment with their lexicon, must be accommodated in any satisfactory account of Homeric diction.⁵ Here then the question is how hapax legomena can be deployed in a sentence otherwise made up of formular elements by a composer who relies heavily on such elements. When it is put in that way the problem posed by a hapax legomenon for the singer is not radically different from that posed by an otherwise unused grammatical form of a regular part of his lexicon. The unique grammatical form will indeed bring with it the verbal associations of the regular forms, but since the associated words and phrases would be built around the particular metrical shape of the regular forms they are likely to be as much a hindrance as a help in handling the unusual form.

The scale of the problem presented by true hapax legomena and by many uniquely occurring grammatical forms is quite serious. The printed text of the Iliad is made up of some 111,500 words, i.e. segments of text marked off by verse-ends or spaces, or about 63,000 if particles, pronouns, and prepositions are ignored. Many of these ‘words’ are repeated, but about 11,000, or more than one in six, are found once only. About 2,000 of them according to M. Pope are true hapaxes, lexical items occurring just once in the poem.⁶

⁵ See M.M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim 1984) for statistics, N.J. Richardson in Bremer, HBOP [Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry] 165-84, for argument, Edwards, vol. v 53-5. Edwards concludes his discussion of hapax legomena with these words: ‘[Homer] was also completely at ease in employing in his verse words which are not only non-formular but which must be considered (on our limited evidence) foreign to the usual epic vocabulary.’ M. Pope, CQ 35 (1985) 1-8, draws attention to new coinages in Homer.

⁶ ‘Word’ is used here as a publisher might speak of a ‘book of 80,000 words’. The composer’s vocabulary or lexicon of course is very much shorter: ἔγχος is one entry in the lexicon but supplies 205 ‘words’ to the text of the Iliad. Statistics are mine. I am indebted to the Revd A.Q. Morton, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, for making available to me computerized word-lists and indices.

An interesting issue I don’t think I had ever thought about.

I trust we’re all familiar with the phenomenon of English names for animals being good old Anglo-Saxon words (pig, cow, sheep) while the meat from them is called by names deriving from Norman French (pork, beef, mutton); John Cowan quoted the famous passage from Ivanhoe in which Wamba describes it back in 2015. Well, my friend Mapraputa asks “whether there are other languages where the word used to describe a live animal and the word used to describe the same animal when it’s dead (and being eaten) are etymologically rooted in two different underlying source languages.” I thought this was an interesting question, and I figured I’d pass it along in case the Hattery can help her answer it.

I ran across the Russian phrase оконные переплеты, which I knew I’d seen before and looked up, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it meant, so I looked it up again. The dictionary said “window-sash.” I put it down, momentarily satisfied, until it came to me that I didn’t know exactly what a window-sash was either. So I looked that up, and Wiktionary told me it was “The opening part (casement) of a window usually containing the glass panes, hinged to the jamb, or sliding up and down as in a sash window.” (There’s a nice illustration labeled “Woman and boy standing at an open sash window.”) The OED (1909 entry, not yet revised) is wordier:

A frame, usually of wood, rebated and fitted with one or more panes of glass forming a window or part of a window; esp. a sliding frame or each of the two sliding frames of a sash window n. Also (? now only U.S.) applied to a casement.
In early use denoting a glazed frame of wood as distinguished from a leaded window, but now usually applied to a sliding frame in contradistinction to a casement. French sash, a French window (see French window n.).

The etymology is interesting:

From sashes, from French châssis (“frame (of a window or door)”), taken as a plural and -s trimmed off by the late 17th century.

The sad thing is that there was a whole discussion of sash windows at LH in 2010 (starting here), but I had entirely forgotten it.

Another nice etymology I ran across while looking up sash: sassy is “A modification of saucy.” (I probably knew that once, too.)