languagehat.com

Georgy Manaev reports on an admirable project:

In the mid-2000s, the Russian State Library (RSL) launched the National Electronic Library project with the aim of digitizing books published before 1831.

Many important texts have already been scanned; from the hand-written Archangel Gospel of 1092 – the fourth oldest known East Slavonic manuscript – to the Octoechos, a book of Orthodox Church psalms printed in 1491 in Krakow. It is one of the first books to use Cyrillic script and is worth several million dollars – although, of course, it belongs to the state and will not be sold. “These books only used to be released by special permission – and only then to prominent scholars,” explains Tatyana Garkushova from the library’s scanning department as she flicks between priceless ancient manuscripts on her computer screen. Now they are available to everyone at the RSL Digital Library page.

[…] “Books are digitized in order to make them accessible to all,” says Roman Kurbatov, the head of the scanning department. “Also, there are other factors to consider as well. In the 19th century, people wrote with zinc-based ink, which eventually starts ‘eating through’ the sheets of paper and coming out the other side. Over time, this makes the text incomprehensible on both sides of the paper.”

“Interestingly, the oldest and most expensive books are the best preserved,” Roman continues. “They were treated with great care from the very beginning: stored in special conditions, rarely opened. We have come across a contemporary French edition of Rabelais dating from about the 1530s. It is in no worse condition than mid-19th-century books.”

There are images and a video linked at the site. (Thanks, Paul!)

Having finished Goncharov’s first novel, Обыкновенная история (A Common Story; the “Background” section of that Wikipedia article, telling how the book was delayed for a year by Yazykov’s fecklessness, is worth reading, and the novel itself is excellent — you can see why it made Goncharov’s name), I decided to try Anastasia Marchenko’s 1847 story collection Путевые заметки (“Travel notes,” published under the pseudonym “T. Ch.”). Marchenko (1830-1880) has been thoroughly forgotten; she has no Wikipedia page and is not mentioned in either Mirsky‘s History of Russian Literature or The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. But she has a substantial entry in the invaluable Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, which introduces her as “among the first women fiction writers to portray provincial society and the first to introduce the governess as heroine” and says that Путевые заметки was “exceptionally well received by leading literary critics (Belinskii, Nekrasov, and Druzhinin),” so I thought I’d give it a try, since Google Books makes it available for download.

The first story is Тени прошлого (“Shades of the past”), and it begins by describing a man who is sad (грустный), although everybody thinks he has no right to be, and he himself finds it ridiculous — and yet he can’t stop feeling that way. The next paragraph begins “Какъ будто вокругъ него все лишнее” (‘It was as if everything around him was superfluous’) and describes the writing desk, table, gloves, and so on before concluding “и наконецъ самъ онъ, быть-можетъ, нѣчто лишнее на этомъ свѣтѣ” (‘and finally he himself, perhaps, was something superfluous in this world’). I was excited for a moment, thinking this predated Turgenev’s 1850 “Diary of a Superfluous Man,” which is said to have introduced the term лишний человек ‘superfluous man,’ but then I realized that this story was added for the 1853 expanded edition that Google digitized, so she was presumably picking up on the new meme. Still, an interesting early use.

Totally unrelated, but I have to pass on this delightful etymology I just ran across: the dialectal Russian word колдуны [kolduný] ‘small fried pirozhki with meat filling,’ which looks exactly like the plural of the word колдун ‘sorceror,’ is actually from either Polish kołdun or Middle High German kaldûne (the source of the Polish word), which in turn is from Late Latin caldūna ‘entrails, tripe,’ derived from cal(i)dus ‘hot.’

I usually prefer to get my information in written form, but the PBS documentary Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin (website) is so good I was sorry when its 57 minutes were over. The host is Stephen Fry (sporting a pleasing late-tsarist beard-and-mustache combination), and the authors discussed and interviewed include Zakhar Prilepin, Dmitry Bykov, Mariam Petrosyan, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Anna Starobinets, and Vladimir Sorokin. You’ll hear lots of Russian, and Fry reads translated passages from the works discussed (accompanied by quite well done animated illustrations). I forget who sent me the link or recommended it to me, but I thank them!

Matt at No-sword posts about a wonderful site:

The Charles Darwin University Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is “a digital archive of endangered literature in Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory”. This site is amazing; I’m sure that pretty much everyone reading this will understand the appeal of a giant headline reading “Click on the map to start looking at books.”

You can also browse by language, author, or just title. For example, there are 69 books in Gupapuyŋu, a Dhuwal dialect of Yolŋu. […] Or there are 101 books in Kriol, such as the truly great Bigibigi Ekting Ebriweya (“Pigs Acting (Like People) Everywhere”).

I wish a hundred sites like this would bloom! But in googling to make sure I hadn’t already posted this (a feat of forgetting that grows likelier every year), I found a decade-old post about the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America, so there’s that as well.

Like most bookish New Yorkers and ex-New Yorkers, I have a love-hate relationship with the Strand; I’ve spent a tremendous amount of money there, but I’ve also done a fair amount of cursing (at lousy layout, indifferent employees, derisory offers for books I tried to sell, etc.). Thus I was glad to read Christopher Bonanos’s piece in New York magazine, “The Strand’s Stand: How It Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon.” The store has clearly changed a lot since I frequented it (in those days nobody would ever have described it as “a warmer place for readers” than Barnes & Noble), and it’s interesting to learn how it’s thrived; even if I disapprove of most of the methods (“there’s a satellite Strand built into a Club Monaco. It’s spotless, selling mostly new books plus some expensive first editions”; “In the Hamptons, a wall of white books is a popular order, cheerfully fulfilled”; “Fifteen percent of the store’s revenue now comes from merch: T-shirts, postcards, notebooks, superhero action figures…”), hey, it’s keeping the store going, and I have a friend who works there. (Thanks for the link, Aude and Paul!)

Mieke Chew interviews Helen DeWitt for BOMB:

One of the things I’m very interested in is the work of Edward Tufte. He’s this genius of information design. He’s sold over a million copies, but he self-publishes. He talks about the use of the page, which is not just about putting down words on the page. It’s also about things like small multiples. He’s talking about the rich use of the page and the complexity of information. […] Tufte hired people to work on his books. He hired a producer and designer at the top end of their fields. He’s a very smart guy, but the point is that he did not do this single-handed. He had very gifted people answering to him who made it possible. When I started these conversations with publishers in New York that’s what I was trying to get. I thought if I could talk to editors, if I could talk to agents, if I could show them the kinds of things you could do if you were making use of the page rather than just using words, then people would understand there has to be a way of approaching a book more like a film. With film, yes, you start out with a screenplay, but the director is given resources with which to realize that film. And everybody understands you can’t know from the beginning what that film is going to be in the end. You are not expected to submit an already completed film in order to get funding. But that is the way publishing works. It’s constrained by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word. You hand in your text, and then it’s handed over to the designer, but you have no contact with that person. The white space is theirs, the fonts are theirs; they just do whatever they want, and you have no discussion with them about how the presentation actually relates to what the text is about.
[. . .]

When I was in high school I was very bored all the time. I was a typical girl. You just did what you had to do to get good grades, then you could go to college and lead a life of the mind. Then it turned out college was the same. Halfway through my sophomore year, I took a leave of absence. I went away, and I was working as a chambermaid in Provincetown. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is one of the things I bought there. I’d studied French in school, so I thought: I can read Proust. I was able to do this precisely because I was not in college. There was such irony. The only way I could find time to read Proust was while working as a chambermaid. Or Pound. Or Eliot. Pound thought that if there was good poetry in a language, then you should learn enough of that language to read the poetry. Your typical language course is completely misguided. You go through all this stuff about what your hobbies are, and you are not interested in what people are doing, chatting amongst themselves about their jobs, their golf. No! You want to read the great poetry and start there. Pound was single-minded about that. And that was inspiring because surely if you want banality, you don’t have to go looking for it in another language—you have your mother tongue.

I did the entrance exams for Oxford and got in. I left Smith and life was not perfect, but it was better. It was a place language was taken seriously. The thing is that this realization had to come from a book—for me, from Pound. In school, we read books, but nobody ever said: obviously we’re reading this in English, but Greek is one of the great languages. Greek was never mentioned. You had to know for yourself. I mean, who are you going to trust, your twelfth-grade English teacher or Ezra Pound? He was nasty, but he was a genius.
[. . .]

Literary languages are something different. Natural languages have evolved. They have not normally been engineered for efficiency. They’re crazy in some ways, but they offer these possibilities of engaging with the world. It seems to me a travesty that you spend twelve years in school without one little hour in which someone introduces you to ancient Greek. But it’s a natural consequence of assuming that engaging with a literary text is the reward for a couple of years or so toiling at conversation and basic grammar. This country is so wealthy, in linguistic terms, but only French and Spanish are widely studied in school, with a scattering of others occasionally deemed worthy. Why not offer a taste, early on, of the best of not just of one or two languages, but of a very wide range? By all means offer Spanish, the language of Cervantes and Borges—but the first thing the student should do is read the “Lottery of Babylon,” which is such a wonderful piece. Why would you not start with that? Why wouldn’t you start with something that good in many languages, and then decide which you wanted to pursue? You go to Pittsburgh, and they celebrate diversity by putting Welcome to the neighborhood in different languages on the side of buses. I think we can do better.

I could keep quoting and quoting, but I’ll just send you over there to read the whole thing. DeWitt is so brilliant and has so many great ideas she can’t realize for lack of funding and support; will someone get this woman a MacArthur Fellowship already? (Via wood s lot.)

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year; my contribution is up, featuring my recommendations of Dan Todes’s superb biography of Pavlov, the books by Peter Hodgson and Gary Saul Morson I’ve discussed here as I read them, and three books about soccer.

My wife and I are continuing to read Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (see this post), and in the first chapter of the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up—, I ran across a word unfamiliar to me in this sense:

But of course that had been ten minutes ago…Before the maroons or the sirens, whichever it had been, had sounded…[…]

Intense heat possessed Valentine Wannop. She imagined indeed her eyes flashing. Was this the moment?

She didn’t even know whether what they had let off had been maroons or aircraft guns or sirens.

It occurs several more times, and clearly meant some kind of noisemaker, but it wasn’t in either Merriam-Webster or AHD; of course, the OED (entry updated 2000) has it, s.v. maroon 1 “A kind of large chestnut.” The second sense is:

2. a. A firework designed to make a single loud report like the noise of a cannon (often with a bright flash of light), used esp. as a warning or signal.
Used as an air-raid warning, etc., in the First World War (1914–18).
1749 G. Ruggieri Descr. Machine for Fireworks 13, 5000 Marrons in Battery, which continue firing to the End of the Fireworks.
1773 Rivington’s N.Y. Gazetteer 15 July 3/3 (advt.) In the Bowery-Lane, Will be exhibited a grand and curious Fire-Work… A Piece representing a Wind-Mill. Two Perpendicular Wheels with Maroons.
1818 Handbill July in Pall Mall Gaz. (1885) 5 Nov. 4/2 A battery of maroons, or imitation cannon.
1840 T. Hood Miss Kilmansegg i, in New Monthly Mag. 60 87 To have seen the maroons, And the whirling moons.
1884 St. James’s Gaz. 13 June 10/2 The display last night included signal maroons..rockets, and shells.
1918 Flying 6 Feb. 90/1 Clearly, the authorities ought to have posted notices..explaining that the maroons are warnings to take cover.
1918 Daily Mirror 12 Nov. 2/1 London went wild with delight when the great news came through yesterday… Bells burst into joyful chimes, maroons were exploded, bands paraded the streets, and London gave itself up wholeheartedly to rejoicing.
1934 E. Wharton Backward Glance xiii. 358 Four years of war had inured Parisians to every kind of noise connected with air-raids, from the boom of warning maroons to the smashing roar of the bombs.
1957 J. Kirkup Only Child xiii. 177, I would go to bed, to be awakened at midnight by bells and maroons and hooting sirens and laughter and shouting and singing in the streets.
1985 Lifeboat Winter 258/3 The deputy launching authority for Alderney lifeboat was contacted and..maroons were fired.

The etymology, after saying that the word is from Middle French marron chestnut and its etymon Italian marrone (“further etymology uncertain”), adds: “French marron is attested in sense A. 2 from 1752; Trésor de la Langue Française explains that the firework makes the noise of a chestnut bursting in the fire.” I’m curious as to whether this sense is still current outside the US (where it seems to be unknown).

Side note: the first sentence of the novel, “Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand, the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago, it had used to have — of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny,” reminds me of a sentence from Lolita: “With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god.” Nabokov, of course, is playing on deus ex machina; I don’t know if there are other examples of the supernatural/divine telephone trope.

Mark Liberman has a post at the Log quoting Tal Linzen reporting that Google Translate renders Hebrew “Please return to me” as “Please me like an alien creature”:

The first word אנא [‘ana] means ‘please’ (though only in the request sense) and the last word אלי [e’laj] means ‘to me’. The source of the mistranslation is the second word חיזרי, which can be either [xiz’ri] ‘return (imperative, singular, female)’ or [xajza’ri] ‘extraterrestrial (adjective)’.The spelling for the ‘return’ sense is typically חזרי, but it’s not that unusual to spell it with the vowel חיזרי. A more common spelling for the second form would be חייזרי, doubling the י to indicate that it’s used as the glide [j] rather than the vowel [i]. Regardless of the spelling, though, it’s surprising that ‘extraterrestrial (adjective)’ is more frequent than ‘return (imperative)’.

Hilarious as this is, the reason I’m posting about it here is an interesting disagreement in the comment thread. David L. Gold writes:

In non-formal latter-day Israeli Hebrew, most of the historically imperative forms are not used. Rather, future-tense forms are used. […]

For chazar, the historically imperative forms (masculine singular chazor, feminine singular chizri, and plural chizru) are not used (remember, I am speaking here about non-formal latter-day Israeli Hebrew; those three forms ARE used in formal Israeli Hebrew).

Rather, in non-formal latter-day Israeli Hebrew, the imperative forms are the future-tense forms:

masculine singular tachzor! (literally, ‘you will return!, you shall return!’)

feminine singular tachzeri (literally, ‘you will return!, you shall return!’)

plural tachzeru! (literally, ‘you will return!, you shall return!’)

Ran Ari-Gur responds:

That’s true in spoken Hebrew, but in written Hebrew imperative forms aren’t nearly so uncommon; and one would have expected Google’s bilingual corpora to bias toward the latter. (Googling “חיזרי” and looking through the first few pages, by the way, I find that almost all hits are instances of /xiz’ri/; very few are /xajza’ri/.)

I’m guessing that Yoav Goldberg has it right; if this translation came from a dictionary rather than from corpus analysis, then the lemma form /xajza’ri/ would have had an advantage over the non-lemma form /xiz’ri/ (lemma = /xa’zar/).

Both reiterate their points; Gold says:

In latter-day Israeli Hebrew, the controlling factor in the choice between (1) historically imperative forms (such as !חזור) and future-tense-forms-used-as-imperatives (such as !תחזור) is not the means (written or oral) by which the utterance is conveyed.(*)

Rather, the controlling factor is the location of the utterance (be it written or spoken) on the continuum of (in)formality.

Ari-Gur responds:

It’s true that, all else being equal, the true imperatives are more formal and the future-tense-forms-as-imperatives are more informal — and I don’t think I implied otherwise. But I stand by what I wrote. In general, true imperatives occur much frequently in writing than in speech. (In part, this is because people tend to write more formally than they speak; though I’m not sure if that’s the whole story. To some extent I think the converse may also be true, that people sometimes affect formality in speech by borrowing elements of a written style, and vice versa.)

I’m curious to know what my readers have to say about it.

I recently came across a reference to “Odradek,” which sounded vaguely West Slavic but otherwise meant nothing to me; Google told me it was from a very short story by Kafka called “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” (“The Cares of a Family Man”), which turns out to be one of the few works of literature I know that puts etymology front and center. The first of the five paragraphs, followed by my attempt at a translation:

Die einen sagen, das Wort Odradek stamme aus dem Slawischen und sie suchen auf Grund dessen die Bildung des Wortes nachzuweisen. Andere wieder meinen, es stamme aus dem Deutschen, vom Slawischen sei es nur beeinflußt. Die Unsicherheit beider Deutungen aber läßt wohl mit Recht darauf schließen, daß keine zutrifft, zumal man auch mit keiner von ihnen einen Sinn des Wortes finden kann.

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavic origin, and on the strength of that they try to demonstrate the formation of the word. Others think it is of German origin, and that Slavic has only influenced it. The uncertainty of both interpretations, however, allows us to conclude with good reason that neither is correct, especially since neither of them provides us with a meaning for the word.

You can see a translation of the whole, very creepy, story, with a creepy illustration (as well as an attempt at interpretation which I did not read much of), here; the Wikipedia article has a whole series of interpretations, one more bizarre and unlikely than the next (hey, there’s Slavoj Žižek!), as well as the suggestion that an alleged “antiquated Slavonic verb ‘odradeti’, which means ‘to counsel against’ could be the root of the word” — does anybody know what this “odradeti” might be, or be supposed to be? Me, I like Noah Willumsen’s approach:

Allegorical readers of “Die Sorge des Hausvaters” have sought to tame the text and its wild creature, Odradek, by establishing stable correspondences between text and theory, replacing Odradek, in all its unknowability, with some element of their own understanding. … I will argue that an interpretation of his works must deal only with their sensus literalis. Their truth is autonomous: independent of reference, undetermined by a conceptual framework.