My wife asked me where the verb dine was from; I didn’t know off the top of my head, so I looked it up (delaying lunch by a couple of minutes), and discovered what I had doubtless once known but long forgotten: to quote Merriam-Webster, it’s “Middle English, from Anglo-French disner, diner to eat, have a meal, from Vulgar Latin *disjejunare to break one’s fast, from Latin dis– + Late Latin jejunare to fast, from Latin jejunus fasting.” Which means it’s a semantic doublet of breakfast and an etymological doublet of French déjeuner ‘lunch.’ And the ultimate origin, Latin jejunus, of course gives us the adjective jejune, which is so multivalent and misunderstood that it’s no longer of much use. (Plus it sounds silly—I can still hear my younger brother going “Juhjoon! Juh-JOOOOON!!)
TOO MANY HANNIBALS.
Over a year ago I got David Abulafia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Surnames did not exist, and the Punic elite, for its own good reasons, used a remarkably narrow range of available personal names. Hanno, Hasdrubal, Hannibal, Himilco and Hamilcar are frustratingly common. Adherbal, Bomilcar, Carthalo, Gisgo, and Mago account for nearly everybody else. The Punic commander who sailed to Ostia in 279 to offer the Romans help against Pyrrhus was a Mago; so too one of the great Hannibal’s brothers. In 264 alone, the known Punic commanders were a Hannibal, a Hanno, and a Hanno son of Hannibal. During the Roman siege of Agrigentum in 262-261, this second Hanno is later found cooperating as general with a Hannibal who may (or may not) be the same Hannibal as in 264. Three or four further Hannos, two more Hannibals and two Hamilcars appear between 261 and the war’s end. These officers account for well over half the senior Carthaginians that we know of. Yet it would be rash to suppose that we are looking at a group of blood relations.
Addendum. And I just ran across this in Abulafia:
HISTORY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN RUSSIA.
Another amazing site, putting scholarship online in exemplary fashion, is History of the French Language in Russia, hosted by the University of Bristol:
A cultural and social history of language cannot be written without a broad range of primary sources. For a history of French in Russia, some documents are already available in published form, but a great number of relevant documents from Russian and some other archives are still to be published. Even documents which have been published have rarely been analysed in terms of the cultural and social history of French understood as a lingua franca, a prestige language, a medium for new cultural values and notions, a tool of cultural propaganda and so forth.
Our purpose in this documents section of our project website is therefore to provide the beginnings of a corpus on which such a history can be based. The section contains pairs of documents. In each pair there is (i) a text, or excerpts from a text, or a set of texts or excerpts (with our editorial notes) and (ii) an essay (also with notes) which introduces the text(s) in question.
That’s the documents section; the Project home has English, French, and Russian versions, and says:
The research team will explore the impact that French had not only on the use of Russian, but also on Russians’ thinking about their own language and, more broadly, on Russian social and political attitudes and on the formation of a sense of national identity. Their findings will have resonance in the fields of social, political, cultural, and intellectual history as well as sociolinguistics. The project will also contribute to a field of historical scholarship which is still in its infancy: by treating language as not merely a useful tool for historians but also a subject worthy of historians’ attention in its own right, the team will demonstrate that language is itself an aspect of culture, a social institution, a key factor in the conceptions that peoples or groups have of themselves, a political instrument, and a potent force in national life.
It’s really very nicely done, and anyone who’s wondered about all that French in War and Peace should check it out. (Hat tip to Greg Afinogenov for the link.)
HOO KAME, WHAA FIELD, AND THE SLITHERS.
I’m fond of strange and amusing place names (see, for instance, this post), and there’s a magnificent crop of them at Dull Flag and Tongue of Gangsta: The Laugh-out-loud Place-names of Shetland and Orkney, a Strange Maps post by Frank Jacobs (see here):
These two maps, both produced by Steve Goldman, show the place names in both groups of islands that he considers strange. “I’ve loved place names on Orkney and Shetland since I was a kid. They are by turns surreal, beautiful, nonsensical, rude, and bizarre… There seems to be no consistency to them at all”, says Goldman. “I’ve done some online research to try to find their derivation, but there seems to be little out there”.
Indeed, apart from Mr. Goldman’s suggestion to recycle some toponyms as band names (Whirly would be a good indie band, Brethren could be a bearded folk quartet, and Twisting Nevi a dance act, etc), there seems to be little sense to be made from Orkney/Shetland place names, except to enjoy them as mellifluous bizarrery per se.
Go thither and enjoy the mellifluous bizarrery!
ASTERIX EXPLICATUS.
Andrew Girardin’s Asterix: Latin Jokes Explained provides a genuine public service:
In the English versions of Asterix, the Latin jokes are not translated or explained. Very few Asterix fans know Latin. Some may know Veni Vidi Vici, or even Alea Iacta Est, but that’s about it. These links will take you to my blog, where I not only translate the Latin, but also try to tell you why it’s funny.
To get you started, here‘s the first book, Asterix the Gaul; I like his style: “Personally, I’d have volunteered. As a kid in Glasgae it was normal for complete strangers to give you a friendly uppercut. Just for laughs.”
WRIST-SLAPS.
Time to gripe about Things that Annoy Me in Periodicals!
1) Claire Messud’s enthusiastic NY Times review of a Leskov collection says of the author: “he emerges as a literary missing link, a writer who brings the metafictional playfulness of Sterne into the Russian tradition…” Leskov is a wonderful writer, but he started publishing in the 1860s, seventy years after Karamzin, the “Russian Sterne,” brought that playfulness into the Russian tradition starting in the 1790s (see this post). Karamzin was followed by a whole passel of writers influenced by him and Sterne, including Veltman (see this post), Narezhny, and Senkovsky, and doubtless others I haven’t read. It’s not fair to blame Messud for this, since she probably took it from Pevear’s introduction (and of course I’m always happy to blame Pevear and Volokhonsky for things), and the real blame goes to the distorting lens through which we all view pre-Tolstoy Russian literature.
2) This is a simpler case, but more unexpected and therefore more aggravating. In Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker piece on dementia care, “The Sense of an Ending,” we find the sentence “Residents may choose when, and if, to bathe, provided that they maintain basic hygiene, and there is no compunction among staff members to get uncoöperative residents spiffed up for visitors.” She obviously means something like “staff members feel no compulsion to…”; I don’t know how the inappropriate “compunction” got in there, but even after years of watching the magazine’s standards slip, it still somehow shocks me that their once-famed editing staff didn’t root it out.
SWEDISH IS A FAKE.
I’ve been reading Osip Senkovsky’s “The fantastic journeys of Baron Brambeus” all month (see here and here), and I have to admit that since that last enthusiastic report it’s been something of a slog. The problem is that in the second section he goes to Siberia, joins a scientific expedition to the mouth of the Lena, and winds up exploring the nearby Медвежий остров [Medvezhii ostrov], ‘Bear Island,’ which is presumably invented—it certainly has nothing to do with the Norwegian Bear Island, and probably nothing to do with the Medvezhyi Islands, which are much further east. There he and his companion find a cave with what appears to be a long hieroglyphic inscription covering all four walls; fired with enthusiasm, they spend a week laboriously translating it using the “Champollion method”: “every hieroglyph is either a letter, or a metaphorical figure, or neither a letter nor a figure but a simple flourish of the handwriting” [всякий иероглиф есть или буква, или метафорическая фигура, или ни фигура, ни буква, а простое украшение почерка]. So far, so funny, but the problem is that Senkovsky then provides the complete “translation,” a very long novella about the last days before the meteor strike that caused the Flood and ended the antediluvian civilization from which hieroglyphics were passed down to the Egyptians, featuring a tiresome account of a jealous husband and his flirtatious, society-loving wife whose arguments and reconciliations are occasionally interrupted by catastrophic events and the comic relief of the astronomer Shimshik, who keeps running in to bore everyone with disquisitions on how this comet proves that he is right and his archrival is wrong. (The account is purportedly written by the husband with his last energy as he starves to death after eating his wife; the line Я съел кокетку! “I ate the coquette!” didn’t redeem the story, but it did make me laugh.) But now that section is over, the baron has gone to Sicily to view Etna, and the book is back on track, a soufflé again rather than a fruitcake, and I’d like to share a passage in which the baron is trying to convince the lovely Giulietta, whose current boyfriend is a Swede from Finland, that she shouldn’t be so impressed with him (Russian below the cut):
“But surely at least you’ll agree,” she went on, “that the Swedish language is very nice and pleasant to listen to?”
“And do you, signora, believe,” I answered heatedly, “that there is such a thing as the Swedish language? The Swedes are exceedingly proud, and they’re afraid that Europeans will call them Finns, so they employ every means to convince other peoples that they are of a completely different origin and even have their own special language. But I, having lived a long time in Petersburg, have satisfied myself that the so-called Swedish language is nothing but a hoax. When foreigners are around, Swedes deliberately pronounce random sounds in a sing-song fashion, accompanying them with gestures, to make people think that they are conversing among themselves in their native tongue, and that their language is sweet and melodious; but after babbling a while in that way, they are forced to leave you, go over by the window, and explain in Finnish whatever they wanted to tell each other.
Giulietta is convinced that the Swedes are deceivers, and resolves never to believe a thing they say.
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF TEENAGE SOUNDS.
James Harbeck (of the word blog Sesquiotica, where you can read about such things as escovitch fish, whose name turns out to be a Jamaican variant on Spanish escabeche) has a delightful piece at The Week, A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds (e.g., “Breathy-voiced long low back unrounded vowel with advanced tongue root: This is usually spelled something like auuggghhh. It’s the classic teenage sound of utter exasperation…”), illustrated in a brief video by Harbeck himself. I don’t actually know any teenagers, so I can’t speak to its accuracy, but it’s very enjoyable.
CROWDSOURCING SEMANTICS.
Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:
Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven’t worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory — which we hope you enjoy! — but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning.
Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.
Give it a try!
Update (Dec. 2013): The results are now in; a brief summary:
See the link for further details.
THE FRIGHTENING EVERYDAY WORD.
From a letter (6 III 1909) of Innokenty Annensky (classicist, poet, and much-loved teacher) to Max Voloshin:
But do many understand what the word is among us? […] You know, recently, even among us, oh! how many there are who fuss over the word and are even prepared to speak about its cult. But they do not understand that the most frightening and powerful word — the most enigmatic — is perhaps just the everyday word.
(Russian below the cut, from here.) On December 13, 1909, Annensky died from a heart attack at the Tsarskoe Selo railway station on his way home from work; Natalia Murray writes (The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde: The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin, p. 14): “It was almost certainly triggered by discovering the non-inclusion of his poems in the first issue of one of the most fashionable journals of the time, Apollon.” You can care too much about the word.
Recent Comments