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I’ve gotten to the third chapter of The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (see this post), Mark Altshuller’s “The transition to the modern age: Sentimentalism and preromanticism, 1790–1820,” and I found this comparison unexpected and interesting enough to pass on:

At Zhukovsky‘s hands the individual word in Russian poetry for the first time becomes multivalent, and its shades of meaning often turn out to be more essential than its basic sense. The author seeks to describe not so much his physical environment as the world of his feelings and experiences, his subjective sensations. […] By his pioneering experiments in the field of multivalency of the Russian poetic word, Zhukovsky paved the way for Russian symbolists such as Alexander Blok and Valery Bryusov, whose poetry dissolved the reality of everyday existence and summoned readers to the ideal worlds of Plato or of Vladimir Solovyov. [pp. 124-5]
[. . .]

Zhukovsky, we recall, extended the semantic boundaries of the poetic word by endowing it with numerous supplementary shades of meaning. Batyushkov, to the contrary, made the word astoundingly precise by bestowing upon it within the poetic context the only possible objectified clear and definite meaning. Possibly it is for that reason that Batyushkov is so drawn to painterly color epithets: purple grape, yellow hops, lilac hands, leaden waves, and so forth. If Zhukovsky is a predecessor of Russian symbolism, then Batyushkov might be considered a forerunner of the acmeists, who rejected symbolism’s polysemantics and strove for the precision of the poetic word with a single meaning. It is indicative that Batyushkov was one of Osip Mandelshtam’s favorite poets: Mandelshtam spoke of the “grapeflesh” of Batyushkov’s verses. [p. 127]

Obviously one could pick holes in the comparison if one were so inclined, but I find this sort of thing very useful in getting me to see familiar names from new angles and think about them in different ways. (Here‘s Peter France’s translation of the Mandelshtam poem quoted at the end; he uses the variant readings Замостье, a place name, for замостье, a rare word meaning ‘place beyond a bridge’ and Зафну, an exotic female name borrowed by Batyushkov from Parny’s Zaphné, for Дафну ‘Daphne’ — both readings make sense but are not in the most authoritative editions, so I don’t know what to think. Batyushkov is a wonderful poet who went mad in 1821 and never wrote again.)

I’ve been following the discussion at the Log with great interest, and this long comment by Jongseong Park (all of whose contributions to the thread are well worth reading) is so informative I had to share it here:

The literary language in Korea was Classical Chinese until the end of the pre-Modern Era, continuing long after the invention of the Korean alphabet in the 15th century. The fact of having Classical Chinese as the literary language created a huge class of words in Korean taken from it, i.e. Sino-Korean. Even in the early 20th century, after Classical Chinese ceased to be the literary language, “neo-Sinitic” terms coined predominantly in Japan came into Korean via writing and were absorbed as Sino-Korean vocabulary.

Sino-Korean words refer specifically to those that can be written with Chinese characters and pronounced with the canonical readings of those characters in Korean, standardized through the long use of Classical Chinese as the literary language. So we exclude oral loanwords from Chinese languages past and present that differ from these canonical readings, like the older 붓 but “brush” from 筆 (canonical reading 필 pil) or the newer 쿵후 kunghu “kung fu” from 功夫 (canonical reading 공부 gongbu). We also exclude originally Sino-Korean words that have gone through sound changes to diverge from the canonical readings, like 성냥 seongnyang “matchstick” from 석류황 石硫黃 seongnyuhwang. On the other hand, we include “neo-Sinitic” words of non-Chinese (Japanese) origin like 전화 電話 jeonhwa “telephone”, and even faddish internet-age Korean neologisms like 역대급 歷代級 yeokdaegeup “historic level”.

Sino-Korean syllables are more phonotactically restricted than Korean vocabulary at large. For example, ㅃ, ㄸ don’t appear as onsets, ㅒ doesn’t appear as a medial, consonant codas are restricted to ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, and ㅇ. It is often easy to tell if a word is Sino-Korean or not, especially if you recognize characters the way English speakers can recognize Latin roots like trans- or super-.

All this is to say that they are felt to be very different from more recent loanwords from English, German, or even Chinese (요우커 youkeo from 遊客 yóukè to give another example). Sino-Korean words are usually not considered 외래어 oerae-eo “loanwords” in Korean, but they’re not 고유어 goyu-eo “native words” either and form a separate, third class, 한자어 hanja-eo.

As you can imagine, the existence of these three broad categories means that there are lots of doublets or even triplets of words broadly referring to the same thing. The native and Sino-Korean vocabulary base is shared between the North and South. Yes, North Korea tends to prefer native forms more than the South, but that doesn’t mean that they have eliminated or even significantly reduced Sino-Korean words from their vocabulary. North Korean speech and texts will be peppered with Sino-Korean words to a degree comparable to their Southern counterparts. The most iconic North-Korea-related words are mostly Sino-Korean, like 주체 Juche or 로동 Rodong. Leaf through a North Korean dictionary and you will find the same preponderance of Sino-Korean words as in its Southern counterpart.

The North-South vocabulary differences are often highlighted and if you focus on those, it can give an impression that the North uses far less Sino-Korean words than the South, but I highly doubt that this is the case. The proportion of Sino-Korean words is so great that the relatively small number of divergent usage makes barely a dent. Also, Sino-Korean words also face competition in the South from native words and especially (other) loanwords.

Oh, and to clear up any misunderstanding, North Korea officially eliminated the use of Chinese characters to write Sino-Korean words from the beginning, using only the Korean alphabet to write Korean. South Korea didn’t take such a drastic measure as to forbid using Chinese characters to write Sino-Korean words, but in all the textbooks only the Korean alphabet was used to write Korean. This meant that the practice of “mixed-script” disappeared gradually and naturally as generations grew up educated only in using the Korean alphabet to write Korean—even in the most conservative South Korean newspapers the use of Chinese characters virtually disappeared by the 1990s. So after a half-century, Northern and Southern policies had the same end effect, of eliminating Chinese characters from general usage. And contrary to what one might think, North Korean students still learn Chinese characters in school, just like their Southern counterparts. So today there is negligible North-South difference on this issue, which is one of orthography, not vocabulary in any case.

Incidentally, I remember how surprised and pleased I was many years ago to learn that many Sinitic words, like 電話 “telephone,” were created in Japanese (denwa) and borrowed into Chinese (diànhuà); of course it makes perfect sense when you consider the respective curves of modernization, but we tend to take for granted the reverse order, in which Japan traditionally borrowed culture and vocabulary from China.

A couple of years ago, at the end of a favorable review of Boris Gasparov’s Beyond Pure Reason, I complained bitterly about “the terrible proofreading and editing of this important scholarly book”; I am happy to see that the TLS has given over an entire page (subscriber-only, I’m afraid) to a similar complaint by the great Robert Bringhurst (who graced this LH thread with his comments) about the way the University of California Press has treated the poet Robert Duncan in its collected edition of his work:

There are, if I’ve counted correctly, just over 200 words of Greek scattered through the two volumes [The Collected Early Poems and Plays and The Collected Later Poems and Plays], and in those words alone I count 130 typographic errors. The errors are new and original, not copied from Duncan’s manuscripts or from previous editions of work. They are also persistently inventive. When a Greek word or phrase is repeated in the text or the editor’s notes, it is misspelled differently each time. The errors stand out in books that are otherwise handsomely produced (typographic errors outside the Greek are mercifully rare). This beats by a huge margin everything else in Duncan’s own error-infested publication history. Even the famously error-prone New Directions editions of Pound’s Cantos come nowhere close. The Greek passages in The Cantos average a mere twenty errors per hundred words. There are well over sixty per hundred in the Duncan.

The errors caught me especially by surprise. The volumes in question are edited by Peter Quartermain, a first-class scholar of modern American literature. When he began, Quartermain sought help from a number of specialists and from several of Duncan’s old colleagues. I was asked to check and correct all of the Greek quotations and the few bits of Chinese. I identified the sources, fixed the errant spellings and provided translations (mostly superfluous, since Duncan included English glosses for almost all his Greek phrases and Chinese glyphs). Knowing that UC Press had no classically trained compositors or editors on staff, I also set all the Greek and Chinese quotations in Unicode-compliant digital type, so that each such passage could be electronically copied and pasted into place by whatever typesetting firm was given the job. I was unaware until recently that when Quartermain presented his vast manuscript to the Press and offered them the corrected digital Greek, they turned him down, offering to handle the work themselves.

Most of the errors in the books could only have been made by someone altogether innocent of Greek. Letters that can only be used at the beginnings or ends of Greek words are placed in the middle, letters with similar shapes are confused with one another, and the diacritics that abound in classical Greek are freely interchanged or replaced with diacritics borrowed from Latin or Cyrillic. The Greek letter nu (ν), corresponding to Latin n, caused particular confusion. The typesetter sometimes replaced it with upsilon (υ), the Greek form of u, but more often with izhitsa (ѵ), a Cyrillic letter formerly used in Russian but now employed only, so far as I know, in liturgical Slavonic.

He sums up by saying “Duncan’s dream of a multidimensional poetry of all poetries has been reduced to alphabet soup.” What a shame! It reminds me the mess Google Books has made of metadata (see this LH post) due to a similar we-don’t-need-your-help hubris.

To wash the bad taste out of your mouth, a nice map: Countries as Named in Their Own Languages.

Christopher Culver has a post on Romanian–Albanian parallels and the location of the Proto-Albanian Urheimat that begins with links to a couple of useful resources for anyone who might take a linguistic interest in Albanian:

Ranko Matasović has written a freely available grammatical sketch of Albanian for students of Indo-European. This is a useful resource alongside the University of Texas Indo-Europeanists’ Albanian lessons, and it’s nice that what has always been an obscure language is now easier to make an acquaintance with.

I have to admit that, barring a few curses Dan Abondolo taught me forty years ago, I’ve never looked into Albanian, but it’s nice to have the links should I choose to do so.

I watch very little TV and it’s unlikely I would have watched Homeland anyway (I still have to catch up with the second season of The Americans), but this sharp critique by Fatima Shakeel, a Pakistani who would like to like the show, makes it even more unlikely. Most of it is not LH material, but this section assuredly is:

Nobody speaks the bizarre, nonsensical language of the “local” characters on Homeland.
Imagine a show about New York City in which the “native New Yorkers” spoke English like the characters on Downton Abbey, spending wildly inaccurate amounts of money to go to nonexistent places. That’s what it feels like to watch Homeland if you speak Urdu.

Homeland consistently botches the most fundamental aspects of Urdu conversation, in ways that are both painful and hilarious to anyone who actually speaks it. If someone inquires about the whereabouts of their family members, and you have to tell them that they died in a drone strike, you don’t say “mujhe maaf kijiye,” as the strange, veiled woman in Homeland‘s premiere does. Saying that does not mean “I’m sorry for your loss”; it means “forgive me,” implying that she personally murdered the inquirer’s family members.

The English accents are just as inauthentic. In real life, Pakistani English sounds nothing like the oft-caricatured Indian English accent. On Homeland, however, Pakistani characters speaking in English sound either like Apu from The Simpsons or like the carpet merchant singing the opening song of Disney’s Aladdin.

I find it hard to believe that the show’s producers couldn’t find a single native Urdu speaker or any Pakistani actors. At the very least, why not hire a language consultant? If Game of Thrones can hire a linguist to properly construct believable, fictional languages like Valyrian and Dothraki, why can’t Homeland hire somebody to check the basics of a real-world language?

Why indeed? Like Shakeel, I don’t expect a TV series to get everything right, but this level of contempt for an actual city and its inhabitants is so repellent I refuse to pay it the tribute of watching the show.

Douglas Quenqua had an interesting piece in the Oct. 16 NY Times that I just got around to (thanks, Eric!), the burden of which is well summarized in the title: “Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds”:

Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

“It’s not just about shoving words in,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study. “It’s about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.”

There is, of course, more about this study and another one published in April (“researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2”) at the link.

I just read a nice piece by J.C. [James Campbell]​ about Glasgow grammar in the 3 September TLS and wanted to share it; naturally I was pleased to see that Scott Lahti had quoted it at his blog, saving me the trouble of figuring out how to do so. It begins:

As the referendum on Scottish independence approaches, our thoughts turn to ways in which Scotland will remain separate from the rest of the United Kingdom, no matter what happens on September 18. The church, the legal, banking and educational systems, will retain their distinctive features. There is, however, another unique area, seldom mentioned: grammar.

What set J.C. off was James Wood’s essay in the New Yorker on the writer James Kelman, who “is not so much a Scot as a citizen of the Republic of Glasgow, a provenance reflected in his writing on almost every page”:

Quoting generously, Mr Wood sets a new record for the use of what we will considerately call “the f–word” in a New Yorker article (that’s saying something). Sharp as he is, however, he failed to make plain to American readers Kelman’s distinctive use of “but”. Let’s recast that: Sharp as he is but, he failed to make plain . . . . On the Glaswegian tongue, “but” functions as “though” or “however” and often comes at the end of a sentence. Or it functions just as “but” – placed at the end but. Let’s eavesdrop on two friends, Big Tam and Wee Shug, at the bar of a Glasgow pub:

Tam: “Ah’m daft aboot thon New Yorker.”

Shug: “Ah like it an aw. There’s a loat a swerrin’ in it but.”

Tam: “Stoap buyin’ it well.”

Shug: “Ah’d miss James Wood but.”

Mr Wood concocted some fancy theories about Kelman’s “but”, without quite getting it right. He omitted any mention of the deployment of “well” at the end of a sentence – the place where you might expect to find “then”.

Tam: “Change owr tae the LRB well.”

Shug: “It’s no the same but.”

Tam: “Stoap greetin’ well.”

At which point, Big Tam rolls his copy of the TLS into a baton and prods Wee Shug’s arm.

He does this repeatedly. Shug says, “Gonnae no do that”, which is nothing if not another example of grammar as independence by other means. Tam intimates his intention to “Shoot the craw”, not before reminding Shug of their weekly book group meeting, at which the volume under discussion is Not not while the giro by James Kelman. Tam proudly says he read it in one sitting.

“Gaun yersel big man”, Shug says in ironic congratulation. About the book group, he has a confession to make: “Ah’ll no can go”. The Glaswegian grammatical perfection of those sentences does nothing to reduce Big Tam’s exasperation. “Yir huvin me oan. Yir the main speaker but.”

“Get anither yin well.”

A delightful way to introduce subtleties of usage that will stand me in good stead next time I read Kelman or any other of the Glasgow Pléiade.

Time for another Languagehat Poll! There are two English words cist, both ultimately from Latin cista ‘basket’; one, meaning “A wicker receptacle used in ancient Rome for carrying sacred utensils in a procession,” is directly from Latin, the other, “A stone-lined grave, especially a tomb consisting of a pit lined with stones and often having a lid of stone or wood,” comes to us via Welsh, specifically the phrase cist faen ‘stone chest’ (where the second word is the lenited form of maen ‘stone,’ which is apparently related to Old Irish mag ‘field,’ and if you’ve ever seen a field in the west of Ireland you won’t be surprised at that semantic shift). Now, in Welsh the letter c is pronounced /k/, and the second word (‘stone-lined grave’) can be pronounced /kist/ as in Welsh, but the first pronunciation given in dictionaries is the /sist/ you’d expect from the spelling in English. I’m torn as to which pronunciation to mentally adopt as I read the manuscript on archaeology I’m editing; on the one hand, /kist/ is etymologically accurate and distinguishes it from its homograph, but on the other hand it’s very unintuitive and misleading to anyone not familiar with the word (not to mention that it sounds like kissed). But if it’s the pronunciation used by actual archaeologists (and others who use the word in speech), I’m happy to go along with them. Anybody know?

From Timothy Garton Ash’s NYRB review of Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature by Robert Darnton (incidentally, I find the title odd, seeming to place censorship in an antique past — I would have gone with “Have Shaped” or “Shape”):

In British India, the censors—not formally so called—were scholars and gentlemen, either British members of the elite Indian Civil Service (the “heaven born”) or their learned Indian colleagues. Harinath De, a candidate for the post of imperial librarian in Calcutta in 1906,

had mastered Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Marathi and Guzerati, along with some Provençal, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, Danish, Anglo-Saxon, Old and Middle High German, and a smattering of Hebrew, Turkish and Chinese. He got the job.

Compare James Murray‘s failure to get a job with the British Museum Library three decades earlier.

We’re all used to the idea of the tree as a model of development through time, whether of species or languages, but rarely is it portrayed so strikingly as in Minna Sundberg’s gorgeous rendering (from the site for her webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent). The only quibble I might have is that it appears (from the connection of the root systems) to support the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, but what the heck, so did my dissertation director Warren Cowgill, so who am I to quibble? A tip of the Languagehat hat to Arika Okrent at Mental Floss.