languagehat.com

Once again (cf. 2016, 2019), I was looking something else up in my three-volume New Great Russian-English Dictionary when my eye was caught by an odd entry:

кагуа́н а m zool common cobego (Cynocephalus variegatus).

I had never seen the word кагуан [kaguan], and indeed it does not occur in the Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language); I had also never heard of the cobego, common or otherwise, and indeed the OED is unaware of its existence (an advanced search failed to turn it up even in the citations). But Merriam-Webster has it (etymology: “modification of Malay kubong”), defining it as ‘flying lemur’ and saying that the latter is “called also colugo” (which is “perhaps from a language of the Philippines”). Meanwhile, the Russian word is said by Wiktionary to be from Cebuano kagwang.

A Google Books search turned up plenty of hits for cobego (1901: “found that it was a female cobego”; 1905: “Thus the cobego feeds upon leaves”; 1914: “It was that curious animal, the cobego”; etc.), so it surprises me that the OED has managed to ignore it for all these years.

Tamlin Magee writes for the Financial Times (archived) about his quest to understand a German descriptor:

Soon after my friend Andreas moved to Berlin, he sent me a picture of some pine nuts on a supermarket shelf. What made them photoworthy? The descriptor milde in big letters on the label.

People have eaten pine nuts since the Paleolithic Age, with evidence of their consumption found in ancient cave dwellings. And I really, really struggled with the thought that, from 10,000BC to any single time since, anyone anywhere would have flinched at their overbearing zest. Surely, if ever there was a naturally mild food, this was it.

As Andreas continued his new life in Germany, a steady drip of other “mild” foodstuffs arrived in my inbox. First, there were carrots, labelled as crunchy and mild. Then came mild orange juice, mild wine, mild olive oil. Mild chickpeas, mild tofu, mild maple syrup, mild yoghurt, mild bread. As a recent transplant, Andreas had no idea what this was all about. “I have BEGGED Germans to explain to me how carrots are not already a ‘mild’ flavour,” he wrote. But they couldn’t, and so began a shared mystery that would sustain our friendship for more than five years. […]

[Read more…]

We discussed Elfdalian back in 2016; now Dmitry Pruss sends me Miranda Bryant’s Guardian report on it:

It is a distinct language that has survived against the odds for centuries in a tiny pocket of central Sweden, where just 2,500 people speak it today. And yet, despite bearing little resemblance to Swedish, Elfdalian is considered to be only a dialect of the country’s dominant language. Now researchers say they have uncovered groundbreaking information about the roots of Elfdalian that they hope could bolster its standing and help it acquire official recognition as a minority language.

Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries. They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.

Yair Sapir, the co-author of a new book on Elfdalian grammar, the first to be published in English, said: “There is research that compares the distance between Elfdalian vocabulary and it shows the distance is as large [between Swedish and Elfdalian] as between Swedish and Icelandic. So there is higher mutual intelligibility between speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than between Swedish and Elfdalian.”

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I’ve posted a number of times about the Persianate world (e.g., 2013, 2018, 2021); for some reason I’m endlessly fascinated by it, and I now present Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud’s interview with Samuel Hodgkin, author of the new Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism. It’s introduced as follows:

Samuel Hodgkin was studying Central Asian history when his academic plans abruptly changed. In the process of learning Persian to read sources for nomad history, Hodgkin was immersed in Persianate poetry – an experience that turned out to be transformative. “The sense of direct encounter with other minds in distant times was such an exciting shock that I ended up getting completely absorbed in the poetry,” Hodgkin said. “When I went to grad school at Chicago, it was Persian poetry that I wanted to keep reading and thinking about.”

In Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press), Hodgkin explains how Persianate poetry came to be a unifying artform for writers from Soviet Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East. The literature written under communism was profoundly influenced by classical Persianate poetics; in fact, classical Persianate poetry continued to impact non-European poets beyond the end of the Cold War. Hodgkin said that even today, Persian poetry shapes literature as well as popular culture in Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Middle East. But with a few exceptions (Hodgkin mentioned the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz), these exciting leftist poets remain outside the Western canon of world literature, read outside their own languages only by area studies scholars. In writing Persianate Verse, Hodgkin explained that he hopes to “deprovincialize these poets I cared so much about by returning them to the big wide revolutionary world for which they wrote.”

Hodgkin is asked how Persianate poetry is viewed today (“In the West, where Persian poetry was massively popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its visibility has really receded. In Western China and in India, the persecution of Muslims has been disrupting the transmission of Persianate poetic traditions. But across much of Eurasia, the story is overwhelmingly one of continuity”), then about how the Persianate literary forms keep a shared sense of cultural heritage alive:
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Hazlitt presents excerpts from Eli Burnstein’s Dictionary of Fine Distinctions; here’s “Ethics vs. Morality”:

Ethics refers to intelligible principles of right and wrong.

Code of ethics
Workplace ethics

Morality refers to right and wrong as a felt sense.

Moral compass
Moral fibre

One is rational, explicit, and defined by one’s social or professional community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god.

That’s why an immoral act sounds graver than an unethical one: One may get you fired, but the other could land you in hell.

The Fine Print

With characteristic sass, usage master H. W. Fowler notes that “The two words, once fully synonymous, & existing together only because English scholars knew both Greek & Latin [ethics being Greek in origin, morality Latin], have so far divided functions that neither is superfluous…ethics is the science of morals, & morals are the practice of ethics.”

While Fowler is here alluding to ethics as a branch of philosophy, the conceptual flavor of the word can be heard in its everyday sense as well: Whether theorized by Aristotle or spelled out in a code of conduct, ethics is morality, as it were, with glasses on.

He also discusses “Tights vs. Leggings vs. Pantyhose vs. Stockings” (“Less common today, stockings are detached undergarments that stop around the thigh”), “Maze vs. Labyrinth” (” A maze has many paths and challenges you to find the exit. A labyrinth has one path and draws you toward its centre.”), “Autocrat vs. Despot vs. Tyrant vs. Dictator” (“Tyrant, meanwhile, originally referred to usurpers but not necessarily bad ones—maybe they deposed a despot”), “First Cousin vs. Once Removed,” and “Modernity vs. Modernism” (“Modernity is a historical period. Modernism is a cultural movement.”). Sounds like a good book to start arguments with.

The Log recently featured the name of an Oregon city called Clatskanie. The Log post forbade anyone to look up the pronunciation and insisted that everyone guess, which seemed both overbearing and silly to me — the interesting thing is how it actually is pronounced, which is (per Wikipedia, and who would make up such a thing?) /ˈklætskɪnaɪ/ (i.e. KLATS-ki-nye), named after the Tlatskanai tribe. And in the comments, Julian provided this wonderful story:

Joke/urban myth:
A young Australian overseas has lost his passport. Goes to the consulate to get a replacement.
The official has to check his bona fides of course.
“Where do you come from, mate?”
“Mungindi.”
“You’re good. Only someone who comes from Mungindi would know how to say that.”

But Julian too (perhaps overawed by the presentation of the post) avoided giving the pronunciation, which (again according to Wikipedia) is /ˈmʌŋɪndaɪ/ (MUNG-in-dye), which is said to mean ‘water hole in the river’ in Gamilaraay. As I’ve said many times, I love unpredictable local pronunciations!

I enjoyed these quotes from R.G.M. Nisbet, “William Smith Watt 1913-2002,” Proceedings of the British Academy 124 (2004) 358-372 (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

In one respect Mods went beyond anything offered at Glasgow: the questions set on some of the prepared books dealt predominantly with textual criticism. Candidates were presented with short extracts or ‘gobbets’ from these authors, and invited to consider the various readings with arguments for and against; to conclude that the crux was insoluble and deserving of the obelus might be taken as a sign of precocious perspicacity. The direction of scholars’ studies depends on early influences more than one likes to admit, and all his life Watt was to be superb at doing gobbets, though as time went on he hit the nail on the head more expeditiously than was thought necessary in Mods.

…he described the Lateinische Grammatik of Hofmann and Szantyr as an exciting book…

Few knew of his love of English as well as Latin poetry: as a young man he had learned by heart the whole of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, much of the anthology of longer poems known as The English Parnassus, and (like Macaulay) all of Paradise Lost, so that fifty years later when given a line he could continue; this was an astonishing achievement even for the days when learning poetry was thought to have more educational value than writing about it. In Latin he knew by heart all of Lucretius and Virgil and much else besides, which he could declaim with an exuberant feeling for the power of rhythm and poetic language; if delayed on a station platform on the way to one of his numerous committees he would recite silently to himself.

I envy him; I get so much pleasure out of my exiguous tatters of memorized poetry (which is indeed useful for mental recitation during boring meetings, or when sleep is fugitive) that I wish I had a great deal more. (But I don’t understand what is meant by “he hit the nail on the head more expeditiously than was thought necessary in Mods”; any ideas?) And if anyone is wondering about the word gobbet, it’s from Middle English gobet, from Old French, diminutive of gobe ‘mouthful’, which is of Celtic origin; the OED (revised 2016) says (s.v. gob):

Probably < Irish gob and Scottish Gaelic gob beak, mouth (Early Irish gop muzzle, snout, beak) < a Celtic base of uncertain, probably expressive, origin.

Notes
It has been suggested that the Celtic base is related to Old Church Slavonic ozobati to consume, to destroy, Lithuanian žėbti to gobble, to covet, but this poses phonological problems.

Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian on an interesting-sounding study:

Whether it is news headlines or WhatsApp messages, modern humans are inundated with short pieces of text. Now researchers say they have unpicked how we get their gist in a single glance. Prof Liina Pylkkanen, co-author of the study from New York University, said most theories of language processing assume words are understood one by one, in sequence, before being combined to yield the meaning of the whole sentence.

“From this perspective, at-a-glance language processing really shouldn’t work since there’s just not enough time for all the sequential processing of words and their combination into a larger representation,” she said. However, the research offers fresh insights, revealing we can detect certain sentence structures in as little as 125 milliseconds (ms) – a timeframe similar to the blink of an eye.

Pylkkanen said: “We don’t yet know exactly how this ultrafast structure detection is possible, but the general hypothesis is that when something you perceive fits really well with what you know about – in this case, we’re talking about knowledge of the grammar – this top-down knowledge can help you identify the stimulus really fast.

“So just like your own car is quickly identifiable in a parking lot, certain language structures are quickly identifiable and can then give rise to a rapid effect of syntax in the brain.”

The team say the findings suggest parallels with the way in which we perceive visual scenes, with Pylkkanen noting the results could have practical uses for the designers of digital media, as well as advertisers and designers of road signs. Writing in the journal Science Advances, Pylkkanen and colleagues report how they used a non-invasive scanning device to measure the brain activity of 36 participants.

Further details at the link; thanks, Trevor!

Man, when rarely updated sites decide to update, they do so with a vengeance and come in batches! The other day it was MMcM’s Polyglot Vegetarian, and now it’s Erik McDonald’s XIX век with Translation comparison: Fathers and Sons or Fathers and Children. OK, it’s not as long as MMcM’s five-part series (the War and Peace of blog posts), but it’s pretty damn long, and mighty appetizing for those of us who like comparing translations. It begins:

There are so many translations that I’ll start with a quick overall impression of each, then get into specifics. This is all based only on chapter 10 (I could read that 18 times, but not the whole novel).

   1. Overall impressions of each translation
   2. How Bazarov and Pavel Kirsanov talk
   3. Dialogue as theater
   4. Other voices
   5. The metasociolinguistic eftim passage
   6. 1860s key words
   7. The painting everyone agrees is bad
   8. Micro choices that reveal their/affect our understanding of the characters
   9. A modified idiom to end on
   10. Bibliography

The translations range from Eugene Schuyler (1867: “I think Schuyler must have worked at least partly from Russian”) to Nicholas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater (2022: “The language sounds smooth—modern and informal—and not only because it’s so recent”); here’s a sample of “How Bazarov and Pavel Kirsanov talk”:

Chapter 10 centers on a verbal confrontation between PK and Bazarov, where what they say is no more important than how they say it. PK argues the position of a liberal Anglophile patriotic reformer of the 1840s generation with long speeches, rhetorical flourishes, elaborate examples, and frequent flares of temper. The nihilist Bazarov provides the opening for the argument by stringing together two nouns, and even though his speech gets closer to PK’s debating style as he gets drawn into the argument, he tends to say one thing at a time simply, and by the end he is back to being calm and laconic.

Nearly all the translators did a good job distinguishing PK’s and Bazarov’s speaking styles, but PK was easier to get right.

As with her use of “thou,” Hapgood pushes the limits of how much you can leave unchanged, having PK say “princíples” (85) with a stress mark. Back in chapter 5 the narrator had commented on PK pronouncing the Russian word for “principles” like French, while his nephew Arkady pronounced it in a kind of hyper-Russian way, farther from French than the standard Russian version of the borrowing, and Hapgood tries to carry that into English.

I thought Isaacs captured PK’s tone pretty well with “individuality, my dear sir,—that’s the main thing; individuality must stand as firm as a rock, for it is the foundation which everything is built upon” (67), and again with “first we’re as proud as Lucifer, then we start mocking at everything” (74).

The way Edmonds translated PK’s speeches made me think she must have known people with his particular mix of class attributes: “how you can decline to recognize principles and precepts passes my comprehension” (123) and “the meanest penny-a-liner” (127, for последний пачкун) seemed pitch-perfect, stylistically marked but not over the top.

Oddly, I skipped Отцы и дети (Fathers and Sons) when I was reading my way through the 1860s (back in 2017) — I seem to remember that I decided I had too much Russian literature to get through to take the time to reread it. But it’s an important novel and I should really get back to it (and post about it).

Back in June I saw my first Chadian movie (see this post); now I’ve seen another by the same director, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, called Bye Bye Africa (available at Criterion Channel until the end of October). His first feature film, it was released in 1999 but apparently shot in 1997 (judging from a reference to its being the tenth anniversary of the death of Thomas Sankara); it’s a little rough around the edges (sound and image poorly coordinated, subtitles not ready for prime time when they show up — annoyingly long stretches of both French and Chadian Arabic go untranslated), but it’s thoughtful, vigorous, and interesting throughout, and it’s great to see so much of N’Djamena. (Also, I got to learn the French titles of some popular movies that show up on posters — Contre-attaque is First Strike and Six hommes pour sauver Harry is Let’s Get Harry — and it was satisfying to learn that the plural of Arabic فِلْم film is فْلَام ʔaflām.)

But about those subtitles…. I noticed a number of infelicities, but this one really got my goat. Much of the movie deals with the difficulty of keeping a cinema industry going in Chad, and at one point someone is explaining why it’s hard to get people to theaters: “Il y a tellement de télévisions, de magnétoscopes, de cassettes, et surtout les paraboles.” The subtitle read: “There are so many TV sets, tape recorders, cassettes, and parabolas galore.” Setting aside the misleading “tape recorders” (a magnétoscope is a VCR, which, yes, is literally a tape recorder, but that’s not how we use the phrase) and the ridiculous “galore,” I have to focus on the final item in the list. The word parabole can of course mean ‘parabola,’ but it has another meaning, ‘satellite dish,’ and I think it’s pretty clear which fits this context. I know it’s hard work subtitling movies, and doubtless especially ill-paid in cases like this, but come on, when the error is so blatant even a harried scrivener should realize something is amiss.