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I spent most of June reading Кощей бессмертный [Koshchei the Immortal], an 1833 novel by Alexander Veltman (see this LH post—I translated a bit from the opening of the novel here), and once again I am stupefied that such an enjoyable and unique writer has been so utterly forgotten. I described the plot, such as it is, succinctly in the Wikipedia article I created for him, calling the book “a parody of the historical adventure novels popular at the time”: “Its hero, Iva Olelkovich Puta-Zarev, is a sort of Russian Don Quixote, his brains addled by overexposure to Russian folklore. After his marriage, he imagines that his bride has been captured by Koshchei, and after various adventures the couple are reunited.” But this does not at all represent the experience of reading the book, which after the opening scene with the brainless and brutal young Iva Olelkovich forgets about him for almost half the novel, and the title remains mysterious for even longer. In the twelfth chapter comes the first mention of Koshchei; Veltman has been describing a bit of medieval history, and suddenly he’s interrupted by his readership: “Mstislav was worthy of being called the Great… —Fine, let’s say he was worthy, but what does that have to do with us? Where is Koshchei the Immortal? Where’s Iva?” [Мстислав стоил имени Великого… — Положим, что стоил, да что нам до этого? Где Кощей бессмертный? Где Ива?] He soothingly responds “All in good time!” and continues the history lesson.

As usual, my response to a book that’s difficult to describe is to provide extensive quotes and hope to convey something of the quality. The translations are, of course, mine (none of his novels have been translated, a situation I wish some publisher would remedy); the Russian is at the end of the post. First, a selection from near the end of the first of the novel’s three parts:

Having examined all the manuscripts, plain and parchment, all the ancient legends and rusty Kernels of History [Veltman is referring to the Ядро Российской истории (Kernel of Russian History) composed by the diplomat Aleksei Mankiev around 1715 and published in 1770], I have found in them not a single word about the events which I am handing down to posterity.

This omission should lie especially heavily upon the soul of the Novgorod chronicler.

There was probably some sort of personal animus against someone from the Puta-Zarev family!

But let us leave these investigations. The reader can have no doubt concerning the truth of tradition and of my words.

* * *

“In the year 6728 [i.e., 1220],” says an unknown chronicler, “Iva Ivorovich fared forth from the land of the Slavs toward Jerusalem and nigh adjoinant the marketplace of Chernavets [? (probably this town] was caitived by the Hungarish Aidamaks and affronted and wellnigh done to death, and he made away, and made his way to the marketplace of Roman [? (probably this town)], where for ruth he was taken by an Urmen [?] merchant and carried to Dichin (Dinogetia) and further…” But in the manuscript there is nothing further…

XIX

In 1262—when all the land of Rus was tributary to the Tatars and only the daring Daniel of Galicia had not abandoned his beloved meditations on means of winning freedom from the yoke of the heathen Taurmens, Bessermens, Bakhmits—around the end of Afterlithe [July] or rather around the beginning of Lammas-month [August], in the Downstream [?] region, the lord of a village near the Dana-Stry [Dniester] had his name-day, and while awaiting his guests he was giving orders in his fine lordly estate.

* * *

To provide at least some elucidation of the foregoing, we must tell the reader that the abovementioned lord is in no way a personage extraneous to that generation that is the subject of my lengthy speech, word, song, tale, legend, story, account, fabrication, poem, kernel, novel.

He was dignified by the name of Lord Savva Ivich Puta-Zarev.

And now, from the third and fifth chapters of the second part, showing his way with historical and narrative transitions:

A new ancestor of the lordling, the hero of the tale, as the Chronicler writes, was born in a most ungrateful time for storytelling. The time of wizards, sorceresses, soothsayers, astrologers, and magicians had collapsed with the manifestation of the holy faith. And the time of bogatyrs and heroes had also passed into eternity with the appearance of the Tatars. The last were Alexander Popovich and his servant Torop, Dobrynya Ryazanych of the Golden Belt, and seventy other bogatyrs who were lost at the source of that bloody river which flooded all the land of Rus, but that will not hinder us from passing through the darkness that lay over that expanse which held the cradle of our good forefathers the Scythians.

Everything will be renewed!

* * *

On the left side of the river Dana-Stry, near Studenitsa, on the riverbank’s slope, there is a hill, and on that hill Stano, on her knees, lay her head on the pile of fresh earth and showered it with her tears.

Over her stood [her husband] Lavr, like an enfeebled elder, head and hands hanging.

It seemed as if Stano and Lavr had turned to stone in their positions.

On the right bank of the river Dana-Pry, near Volny-Prag, on the slope, there is a high tomb. On this tomb stood a cross carved from rough stone; leaning on that cross stood Lavr, alone, somber, pale; his heart was filled with tears, his eyes were dry.

It was the year 1320. In Galicia Prince Andrei Yurevich sat on the throne, in Vladimir his brother Lev. […]

Having redeemed his princedom by virtual enslavement to Gediminas, Lev died in 1324, leaving as his heir his son, the wise Georgii, under whose rule came the Princedom of Galicia, after his uncle Prince Andrei Yurevich, and the region of Kiev. He was the last scion of the power of Rus over South Russia. With him ended the tale of its glory as well.

The aged Lavr, as a reward for his service, was granted by Georgii a rich demesne on the banks of the Dnieper. The settlement of Oblazna [Old Russian ‘error, delusion’] with its villages took the place of his inherited demesne on the Dniester. […]

After this weighty acquisition, Lavr passed away, and to Olel Lavrovich was born three years later a son Iva Olelkovich, named Iva in memory of his great-grandfather Iva, who spent forty years walking to Jerusalem.

This Iva Olelkovich is that very lordling of whom we are speaking; he himself is that hero of Rus and mighty and powerful bogatyr whose exploits have until now perished in obscurity.

And thus by a commodius vicus of recirculation we return to the opening of the novel.

Veltman’s love of obscure words and documents, his joyous playing around with form, his refusal to let the reader sink comfortably into a story and forget that it is an artificial creation—all this would have brought joy to the hearts of the Formalists of the 1920s if they had ever read him. Shklovsky would have been thrilled by his use of defamiliarization and his constant baring of the form. But by then he’d been forgotten for two generations.

But Veltman knew how to tell a story as well as play with form. That quiet juxtaposition of the grieving couple on the left bank of the Dana-Stry and the grieving man on the right bank of the Dana-Pry moves me whenever I think of it.

The original Russian for the first selection:

Рассмотрев все летописи, простые и харатейные, все древние сказания и ржавые Ядра Истории, я не нашел в них ни слова о событии, которое предаю потомству.
Это упущение особенно должно лежать на душе Новгородского летописца.
Верно, какая-нибудь личность с кем-нибудь из рода Пута-Заревых!
Но оставим изыскания. Читатель не может сомневаться в справедливости преданий и слов моих.
* * *
“В лето 6728-е, говорит неизвестный летописец, Ива Иворович иде Славенскою землею во Иерусалим и негде у торга Чернавца пленен бысть Айдамаками Угорскими и обьщьствован и вмале не убиен, и убежа, и вбежа в торг Роман, идеже, жалости ради, взят бысть Урменским купцом и везен в Дичин (вер. Диногетия, Галиц) и далее…” А далее в летописи ничего нет..,
XIX
В 1262 году — когда уже Русская земля была данницею Татар и только смелый Даниил Галицкий не оставлял любимой думы о средствах избавиться от ига поганых Таурменов, Бессерменов, Бахмитов — около исхода Червеня [= Июля] или вернее около начала Зарева [= Августа] в Понизовской области, Боярин одного села при реке Дана-Стры был имянинник и в ожидании гостей распоряжался в своем красном Боярском дворе.
* * *
Чтоб пояснить хоть несколько все предыдущее, мы должны сказать читателям, что вышеписанный Боярин, нисколько не постороннее лицо тому поколению, об котором идет моя длинная речь, слово, песнь, повесть, сказание, история, быль, вымысел, поэма, ядро, роман.
Его величали: Боярин Савва Ивич Пута-Зарев.

For the second selection:

Новый предок Барича, героя повести, как говорит Летописец, родился в самое неблагодарное время для повествования. Время чародеев, ворожей, вещунов, звездочетов и кудесников рушилось с проявлением святой веры. А время богатырей и витязей также прошло в вечность с появлением Татар. Последние: Александр Попович и слуга его Тороп, Добрыня Рязаныч Златой Пояс и семьдесять других богатырей утонули в истоке кровавой реки, потопившей всю Русскую землю, но это не помешает пройти нам чрез тьму, которая лежала над тем пространством, где была колыбель наших добрых праотцев Скифов.
Все возобновится!
* * *
На левой стороне реки Дана-Стры, близ Студеницы, на скате берега, есть холм, на этом холме Ст_а_но на коленях склонила голову на насыпь свежей земли и обливала ее слезами.
Над ней стоял Лавр, как обессилевший старец, опустив руки и голову.
Казалось, что Ст_а_но и Лавр окаменели в этом положении.
На правом берегу реки Дана-Пры, близ Вольного-Прага, на скате, есть высокая могила. На этой могиле стоял иссеченный из дикого камня крест; облокотясь на этот крест, стоял Лавр, один, мрачный, бледный; сердце его было полно слез, очи сухи.
Настал 1320 год. В Галиче сидел на престоле Князь Андрей Юрьевич, во Владимире Волынском Лев, брат его. […]
Искупив Княжество свое почти порабощением Гедимину, Лев умер в 1324 году, оставив наследником сына своего, мудрого Георгия, под власть коего поступило и Княжение Галицкое, после дяди его, Князя Андрея Юрьевича, и область Киевская. Он был последнею отраслью власти Русской над Южною Россиею. С ним кончилась и повесть о славе ее.
Устарелый Лавр в награду за службу свою одарен был от Георгия богатою отчиной на берегах Днепра. Погост Облазна с деревнями заменил ему наследственную Днестровскую отчину. […]
После сего важного приобретения Лавр успокоился, а у Олеля Лавровича родился через три года сын Ива Олелькович, названный Ивою в память своего прапрадеда Ивы, совершившего в 40 лет хождение во Иерусалим.
Этот-то Ива Олелькович есть тот барич, о котором мы ведем речь; он-то тот Русский витязь и сильный могучий богатырь, которого подвиги до сего времени гибли в безвестности.

I’ve posted about Michael Erard’s Babel No More, about hyperpolyglots, a couple of times (project, book); now R.L.G. of The Economist has a wonderful interview with a 17-year-old hyperpolyglot, Timothy Doner. The interviewer is knowledgeable and asks good questions, the interviewee is charming and gives good answers, and it ends with clips of him speaking French, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian; what more could you ask for? (His spoken Russian isn’t great, but it’s perfectly understandable, and he’d be the first to agree it needs work—he’s very modest about his accomplishments.) I hope it gets seen by a lot of people, some of whom might decide studying languages looks like fun and not as hard as it’s cracked up to be!

Having finished Veltman’s Кощей бессмертный [Koshchei the Immortal], about which I’ll be posting shortly, I’m rereading Pushkin’s great story Пиковая дама (“The Queen of Spades“). Every time I read it I find things I’d overlooked before, and this time it’s a strange international word of the day that’s been utterly forgotten. It occurs twice within a few paragraphs at the end of the first section. Tomsky is describing to his fascinated fellow gamblers how his grandmother, as a young beauty in Paris sixty years before (thus presumably around 1770), had managed to win the huge sum she needed to pay back her gambling debts; the Count of St. Germain shared a secret from his fund of occult knowledge, and she went off to Versailles to gamble: “Она выбрала три карты, поставила их одну за другою: все три выиграли ей соника, и бабушка отыгралась совершенно.” [She chose three cards and played them one after the other: all three won sonika, and my grandmother won back everything she had lost.] Later she took pity on a young wastrel named Chaplitsky and shared the secret with him: “Чаплицкий поставил на первую карту пятьдесят тысяч и выиграл соника; загнул пароли, пароли-пе, — отыгрался и остался еще в выигрыше…” [Chaplitsky staked fifty thousand rubles on the first card and won sonika; he doubled the stake, doubled it again, — he won back what he had lost and more…] The notes to my edition explained that sonika meant ‘at once,’ but of course I wanted to know more about the word. It turns out it is, or was, an English word as well; the OED has it under sonica, with just two citations, one given (incorrectly, in my view) as a noun (“In the game of basset, a card having an immediate effect on the game”: 1716 Pope Basset-table 51 The Knave won Sonica, which I had chose) and one as an adverb (“Promptly, at once”: 1748 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 3 May [modernized text] III. 1143 My prophecy, as you observe, was fulfilled sonica). Etymology: “French, of obscure origin.”

So I turned to my French dictionaries, coming up empty (not even the Académie Française had it) except for Littré:

sonica
(so-ni-ka) adv.
1 Terme de jeu de la bassette. Se dit d’une carte qui vient en gain ou en perte le plus tôt qu’elle puisse venir.
2 Fig. À point nommé, justement, précisément. “En étrennes, sonica, Votre bonté coutumière Me fait présent de moka Pour toute l’année entière”, [Chanson de Piron à Mme Geoffrin, dans GRIMM, Corresp. t. I, p. 382] “L’avis que cette résolution sera mise à exécution sonica, si l’on ne reçoit bien vite une réponse satisfaisante à la lettre….” [Rousseau, 2e dial.] “L’aventure de Merlin m’abat l’esprit, au point que je n’ai ni la force de vous répondre sonica sur les projets pour rattraper mon argent, ni celle de rien composer”, [Galiani, Corresp. 7 juill. 1770]
ÉTYMOLOGIE Origine inconnue.

In Russian, aside from the Pushkin story, it occurs only three times, according to the Corpus of the Russian Language: in Zhikharev (1806-1809), Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1835-1836), and Saltykov-Shchedrin (1857-1865). [But there are many more citations in Исторический словарь галлицизмов русского языка.] It came from who knows where, was used for a few decades in chic card-playing circles across the Continent, and then vanished again. Thank goodness for unabridged dictionaries!

Update (Apr. 2023). The OED revised the entry in June 2017, and it now reads as follows:

Etymology: < French sonica (noun) (in the game of basset) a card which has an immediate effect on the game (1681 as sonicat; rare), (adverb) promptly, at once (1706, although earlier currency is perhaps implied by the earlier use as noun), of unknown origin.
Not fully naturalized in English.

In quot. 1983 after Russian sonika (1834 in the passage translated; < French).

†A. n.

In the game of basset: a card which has an immediate effect on the game. Obsolete. rare.
1688 tr. J. de Préchac Disorders of Bassett 95 So thinking to have found out a sure Card..he sets all he has left upon it, which is fass’d, or looses the Sonica [Fr. il est facé ou perd sonica].

B. adv.

Promptly; at once. Now rare.
Used esp. in the context of a card game (chiefly basset).

1688 T. D’Urfey Fool’s Preferment Epil. 86 A Lady too, in Tears has left off Play..for losing Sonica.
1716 Lady M. W. Montagu Basset-table in Court Poems 5 The Knave won Sonica, which I had chose.
1748 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 3 May (1932) (modernized text) III. 1143 My prophecy, as you observe, was fulfilled sonica.
1763 Ld. Chesterfield Let. 14 June in Lett. to Son (1774) II. 460 You arrived sonica at the Hague, for our Embassador’s entertainment.
1983 P. Debreczeny tr. A. S. Pushkin Queen of Spades i, in Compl. Prose Fiction i. 213 She chose three cards and bet on them in sequence: all three won sonica.

I am delighted to see that the Basset-table quote is now properly classified under adv. (does someone at the OED read LH?), and bemused to see that it is now attributed to Lady Montagu rather than Pope. But the word is still “of unknown origin.”

Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article about Mali is good, but it made me grind my teeth right out of the gate. It begins:

On the spine of a hogback hill overlooking Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali, is a green sliver of a park, decorated with effigies of Mali’s historic explorers. On a recent visit, I stopped one piercingly hot morning to admire a bronze bust of a turbaned, bearded man set on a plinth. The nameplate was missing, but, judging from the man’s wide brow and Arab features, it seemed likely that this was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who journeyed through the Empire of Mali and visited its capital, near the River Niger, in 1352.

When Battuta arrived, […]

“Not ‘Battuta,’ Ibn Battuta!” I hollered (in the privacy of my brain, not wanting to frighten the cats). Since I have a bully pulpit, I’m going to use it: “Ibn” is not a first name, it means ‘son’ and indicates a patronymic, or nasab as it’s called in Arabic. You can no more abbreviate Ibn Battuta as Battuta than you can abbreviate O’Malley as Malley. For more on Arabic names, consult my ancient post on the topic (or Wikipedia, if you prefer, but “This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page”—you have been warned).

Addendum.. Robert Irwin, in his devastating TLS review of Robert Twigger’s Red Nile (if you’re going to write an error-riddled book on Middle Eastern history, Irwin is the very last person you want reviewing it), makes the same point: “Referring to the famous expert on optics, Ibn al-Haytham as Haytham is a solecism comparable to referring to Macpherson as Pherson, or Robinson as Robin.”

A couple of recent stories of interest from the NY Times (thanks, Bonnie!)
“From the Mouths of Babes and Birds,” by Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist:

Researchers who focus on infant language and those who specialize in birdsong have teamed up in a new study suggesting that learning the transitions between syllables — from “da” to “do” and “do” to “da” — is the crucial bottleneck between babbling and speaking.
“We’ve discovered a previously unidentified component of vocal development,” said the lead author, Dina Lipkind, a psychology researcher at Hunter College in Manhattan. “What we’re showing is that babbling is not only to learn sounds, but also to learn transitions between sounds.”

Mark Liberman has more at the Log. (Not language-related, but if you’re as fascinated by how memory works and doesn’t work as I am, you’ll want to watch Crist’s twenty-minute Studio 360 Live talk on the subject.)
“When Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers Do the Talking,” by Rachel Donadio; nothing deep, but it’s got some good anecdotes:

Sometimes gesturing can get out of hand. Last year, Italy’s highest court ruled that a man who inadvertently struck an 80-year-old woman while gesticulating in a piazza in the southern region Puglia was liable for civil damages. “The public street isn’t a living room,” the judges ruled, saying, “The habit of accompanying a conversation with gestures, while certainly licit, becomes illicit” in some contexts.
In 2008, Umberto Bossi, the colorful founder of the conservative Northern League, raised his middle finger during the singing of Italy’s national anthem. But prosecutors in Venice determined that the gesture, while obscene and the cause of widespread outrage, was not a crime.

I know I miss out on all sorts of interesting things by not following Reddit, but life is short and my online habits are pretty well set by now. Just now, however, thanks to LH reader Ryan O’Donnell, I have discovered the linguistics subreddit, which I may have to bookmark. Ryan sent me a link to Etymology Game #2 featuring North Asia, and it’s a lot of fun: five English words matched with semantic equivalents in Turkish, Ket, Chukchi, Mongolian, and Erzya (a branch of “Mordvin”—see this LH post), and a bonus question involving Adyghe; you have to decide if the words are etymologically related. They’re hard! I got most of them right, but the one I got wrong was surprising and educational. Here‘s Game #3, whose answers aren’t up yet. Thanks, Ryan!

Maria Popova had a post a year ago (I’m always the last to know!) at Brain Pickings, “Unusual Words Rendered in Bold Graphics: A visual A-Z of the hidden treasures of language.” Her introduction is a model of brevity:

As a lover of language and words, especially obscure and endangered words, I was instantly besotted with Project Twins’ visual interpretations of unusual words, originally exhibited at the MadArt Gallery Dublin during DesignWeek 2011.

The rest is all illustrations (lovely, to my eye) of obscure words (one each from A to Z); I won’t give examples, because some of you may enjoy guessing as you scroll down which word is being illustrated (I tried, but didn’t get a one), I’ll just send you over and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I’m still reading Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms (see this post), and I’ve gotten to the chapter on the Kingdom of Aragon, where my attention was grabbed by this statement: “The people of the Vall d’Aran speak a unique language that mixes Basque and neo-Latin elements (aran means ‘valley’ in Basque).” Of course I hustled to Wikipedia, where the article can’t make up its mind whether Aranese is a dialect of Occitan (as the title suggests) or a separate language (“In 2010, it was named the third official language of the whole of Catalonia”); it doesn’t mention Basque at all, and I’m wondering whether Davies got it wrong or whether that element simply didn’t make it into the Wikipedia article. (The language/dialect is so obscure it isn’t in the An Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, which has an article on the Basque-Icelandic pidgin discussed in this LH post.)

Sowjetrussische Vornamen: Ein Lexikon, by Herwig Kraus, looks like a very interesting book about “first names that were inspired by the communist ideology,” but at that price I’m not about to order a copy. I do have to pass on an amusing bit from the publisher’s page: “Often only specialists recognize that the name ‘Melor’ for example stands for the initials of Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution. And ‘Trolebuzin’ has nothing to do with the trolleybus, but originated from the first letters of Trotsky, Lenin, Bukharin and Zinov’ev.” Thanks, Paul!

I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Barcelona when a photo in the “Education” section caught my eye; it showed a large, attractive, light-filled room and was labeled “Paranymph of the UB.” I am rarely completely thrown by an English word any more; I may want to look up the etymology or the details of the sense, but I can usually figure out the general idea, especially if it’s a transparent classical formation, as this was: Greek παρα- ‘para-‘ + νύμϕη ‘bride.’ But it clearly had nothing to do with brides. My first thought was vandalism (but who would vandalize a Wikipedia article by inserting the word “Paranymph”?); as a first step, I clicked on the photo to see the file name and discovered it was “Paranimf de la Universitat de Barcelona.jpg.” This was the vital clue; I pulled down my Catalan Dictionary (a very odd book in that it has no indication of authorship) and discovered that paraninf (pronounced /pərə’nimf/) is Catalan for “main or central hall of ceremonies [university].’ That solved the practical problem (and I changed the caption to read “Main hall of the University of Barcelona”), but left the problem of why the word had such an improbable meaning. Here the online Diccionari català was indispensable (note the different spelling of the word):

PARANIMF m.: cast. paraninfo.
1. En l’antiguitat, Padrí de noces, home que anava a cercar la núvia i l’acompanyava fins al nuvi.
2. El qui feia el discurs inaugural del curs en les universitats.
3. Sala d’actes principal en algunes universitats.
Etim.: del gr. παρανύμφιος, mat. sign.

So the meaning changed from the Ancient Greek ‘friend of the bridegroom, best man’ to ‘one who makes the inaugural speech at a university course’ (?) to ‘main hall’ (in which such a speech would be given). A lovely semantic transition, and one shared with Spanish (in which paraninfo means ‘main hall, auditorium’); a quick check suggests it did not take place in any other Romance languages (paraninfo in Portuguese means “god-father, honor guest of wedding” according to my antiquated McKay’s Modern dictionary, and in Italian it apparently means ‘matchmaker’). The OED calls English paranymph “Now rare” and has the definitions “1. At a wedding: a bridesmaid or best man. Also fig.” (last citation 1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. 375 “Juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion”) and “2. An advocate; a spokesperson or orator who speaks on behalf of someone else. Now hist. and rare” (e.g., a1722 A. Pennecuik Wks. 368 “Yet for all that splendid show, you be But paranymphs of vice and luxury”).