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Piotr Gąsiorowski has produced the perfect rejoinder to the Pagel nonsense—in this Language Evolution post he proves, using the same allegedly rigorous techniques the proto-Eurasiatic crew rely on, that “the Quechua people are a lost Nostratic tribe. Note that the semantic matches are impeccable and the similarity of the words is quite obvious to any open-minded observer. Indeed, the matches are much better than many of those in the LWED.” This reductio ad absurdum should convince any sensible observer that the Pagel results are garbage, and Jacob Shelton in the comment thread says “You should totally turn this into a real paper”… but I fear that the kind of people (by which I mean credulous journalists) who swallowed the serious paper would take this as further confirmation rather than refutation.
Update. See now the entertaining and educational comment thread to Mark Liberman’s Log post about Gąsiorowski’s work.

This is another in my occasional series of posts bringing to light unjustly forgotten inhabitants of the byways of history (see, for instance, Sofya Engelgardt). Reading Catriona Kelly’s excellent A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820-1992, I got to her discussion (pp. 152-3) of the disjunction a century ago between the Russian feminist movement (supported by writers in the realist tradition) and the Symbolist/Acmeist modernist crew (“not one Russian woman author of modernist prose or poetry manifested any interest in, or sympathy for, the debates around female emancipation in the feminist movement itself”); in a footnote she says “The critic and writer Zinaida Vengerova, one of those most instrumental in introducing Western modernist ideas to Russia, was another example of how the supporters of ‘new arts’ also had little interest in feminism.” I was intrigued, and did a little digging; my main source of information is the invaluable Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (thanks to Look Inside, since I can’t afford $234.60 even with FREE Shipping).

Zinaida Afanasievna Vengerova (Russian Wikipedia) was born in 1867 in Helsinki (then, of course, part of the Russian Empire). She attended the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg and studied French literature at the Sorbonne; she also took courses in Vienna, England, and Italy, and met many of the leading lights of European literature. One of her first publications was the article “Poety-simvolisty vo Frantsii” [The symbolist poets in France]; Bryusov said it was a “revelation” that sent him to the bookstore to buy Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Maeterlinck. She lived in London from 1908 to 1912, lecturing on Russian literature (and again in 1914, when her nephew, the director Alexander Tairov, stayed with her); she wrote articles in French («Lettres russes») for the Mercure de France (1897—99) and the Revue des revues and in English for the Saturday Review (1902—1903), introductions to the collected works of Schiller and Shakespeare, and a number of entries for Brockhaus and Efron (available at Lib.ru); her collected critical articles appeared in three volumes (titled Literaturnye kharakteristiki [Literary characteristics]) from 1897 to 1910, covering the pre-Raphaelites, Oscar Wilde, Ruskin, Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Emile Verhaeren, and of course the French symbolists, among others. And back in Petersburg she was an intimate part of the Gippius–Merezhkovsky circle; it was presumably around this time that she visited the Nabokov household on an occasion commemorated by VVN in the Paris Review interview:

H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad or, in fact, any of Wells’s contemporaries could produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb. There was an awful moment at dinner in our St. Petersburg house one night when Zinaïda Vengerov, his translator, informed Wells, with a toss of her head: “You know, my favorite work of yours is The Lost World.” “She means the war the Martians lost,” said my father quickly.

(Note his characteristic refusal to use the feminine ending on Russian names.) Via Gippius and Merezhkovsky she knew the terrorist/novelist Boris Savinkov, and her translation of his 1909 novel Конь бледный appeared in 1917 as The Pale Horse. I’ll let the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers take it from there:

[Read more…]

Etymological Wordnet looks promising, even if I don’t understand quite how it works; their website says:

The Etymological Wordnet project provides information about how words in different languages are etymologically related. The information is for the most part mined from Wiktionary. The semi-structured data is turned into a machine-readable etymological database that also incorporates some additional manually added etymological relationships.

A very basic interface to the data is provided at lexvo.com. A more advanced browsing interface will be available later.

But when I click on the lexvo.com link, I get “Unable to connect: Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at www.lexvo.com.” At any rate, I thought I’d toss it out there for adventurous lovers of etymology.

And speaking of etymology: “Two new antedatings of hot dog!” Fred Shapiro has taken it back to November 14, 1886, and the source (from the Nashville Tennessean) is quite striking: “‘Hot stuff,’ ‘hot pup,’ ‘hot dog,’ sings out the fiend who carries in one hand a tin cooking arrangement, and on the other arm a basket. He is the wiener wurst fiend. It is his cries that greet you as you enter the theater and regreet you as you come out. He is the creature whose rolls make the night hideous, and whose wares make dreams that poison sleep…”

Update (Aug. 2024). The first link is dead; Etymological Wordnet is now here. (Impressively, lexvo.com is still there and functioning.)

Ben Yagoda has a Lingua Franca post celebrating great sentences, which he collects “the way some people collect beach glass, small statues of turtles, or perceived insults.” He provides a nice selection, including some of everyone’s favorites (“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”—Ring Lardner) and some idiosyncratic choices (“Asked his last name, Tom said, ‘Why?'”). But what I want to quote in extenso is this:

Currently my favorite sentence is from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Horace de Vere Cole, a “practical joker” (that is the DNB‘s summary phrase) who died in 1936. My friend Wes Davis alerted me to the sentence several years ago, and I return to it whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth. Actually, there are several contenders in the Cole entry, which was written by Richard Davenport-Hynes. The final line is a classic of over-the-top understatement: “His widow married Mortimer Wheeler (1939) and shot Lord Vivian (1954).” Still, nothing can top the one Wes told me about, which describes the aging practical joker in the winter of his years:

“His advanced deafness prevented him from realizing that his carefully timed coughing was inadequate to cover his explosive breaking of wind.”

A nice NY Times story by Margalit Fox [archived] on an unsung hero of historical linguistics (even though she wasn’t a linguist):

Alice Elizabeth Kober was born in Manhattan on Dec. 23, 1906, the daughter of recent immigrants from Hungary. A brilliant student, she earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Hunter College, and it was there, in a course on early Greek life, that she appears to have encountered Linear B.

Enthralled — and already confident of her own blazing intellect — she announced on her graduation that she would one day decipher the script. She came within a hair’s breadth of doing so before her own untimely death, at 43, just two years before Mr. Ventris cracked the code. […]

It was Dr. Kober who cataloged every word and every character of Linear B on homemade index cards, cut painstakingly by hand from whatever she could find. (During World War II and afterward, paper was scarce, and she scissored her ersatz cards — 180,000 of them — from old greeting cards, church circulars and checkout slips she discreetly pinched from the Brooklyn College library.)

On her cards, she noted statistics about every character of the script — its frequency at the beginnings and ends of words, and its relation to every other character — with the meticulousness of a cryptographer. Sorting the cards night after night, Dr. Kober homed in on patterns of symbols that illuminated the structure of the words on the tablets. For as she, more than any other investigator, understood, it was internal evidence — the repeated configurations of characters that lay hidden within the inscriptions themselves — that would furnish the key to decipherment.

A life well spent, if you ask me.

This is definitely, as they used to say, Best of the Web:

Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England’s most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family.
Bess’s letters bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. The letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life as she weaves a web of correspondence that stretches from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.

What really makes it LH material is the Background section, which includes The Material Features of Early Modern Letters: A Reader’s Guide (“What did it mean to be handed a letter tied up with plum-coloured silk ribbon, or sealed with black wax? If a letter was written on a very large piece of paper, or was folded up very small, was your correspondent trying to tell you something?”), The Language of Early Modern Letters: A Reader’s Guide (“How do we read a letter that has no punctuation marks? How can we tell who is being sincere when so many early modern letters sound so fawning? How do we know if a servant has phrased a letter appropriately to a countess? How do we decipher early modern spelling?”), and Tutorial: Reading Early Modern Handwriting, inter alia. And a beautifully designed website to boot.

A Wordorigins.org thread started with the simple question: “The song, Sidewalks of New York has the line Some are up in ‘G,’ meaning, apparently, successful. What might be the origin of this phrase?” An excellent question to which you’d think there would be an answer, but so far all that can be said is that it goes back to the nineteenth century and was originally “way up in G” (13 April 1889, National Police Gazette, pg. 3: “The matinee actor used to be the champion masher in New York, but just now riding master stock appears to be booming in this direction, and by all accounts it is away up in G, too”), and an 1890 quote classifies it as a musical reference: “the veterans were ‘away up in G,’ as musicians say.” As I said in the thread, “There is such a thing as ‘high G’; here, for example, you can hear 14 sopranos try to hit it. But the phrase ‘way up in G’ excludes such an explanation.” So: any ideas?

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words, in his latest newsletter, has a great entry about the phrase Earl Grey tea:

Various stories link it to the second Earl Grey, who was British prime minister between 1830 and 1834 and largely responsible for the Great Reform Act of 1832 as well as removing the monopoly of the East India Company on importing tea from China…. The etymological problem for the OED was that the first example of the term Earl Grey tea it had on record was dated 1929….

The story took a surprising twist when researchers on the Foods of England site found that Charlton and Co had advertised a tea in 1867 as the rather expensive “celebrated Grey mixture”, with no reference to any aristocratic connection, though it did boast of its “most distinguished patronage”. Might the business have added a noble association later on as a marketing ploy, one that was to be copied by others? It could well have done. Victorian advertisers weren’t renowned for their strict adherence to truth.

There’s more, including a discussion of the disreputable adulteration of tea with bergamot. As Quinion says, “at times a search for the provenance of a term turns into an intriguing detective story with an unexpected dénouement.” (Via Etymolist.)

In my salad days, when I still thought of myself as a mathematician-in-training, I would have been fascinated by this (Caroline Chen writes about Shinichi Mochizuki’s alleged proof of “a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades”; nobody has any idea whether it’s correct because it would take months or years to understand it). As things stand, I’m mildly interested, but what really grabs me is the OED’s latest appeal to the public: “A number of quotations in the OED derive from a book with the title Meanderings of Memory. However, we have been unable to trace this title in library catalogues or text databases. All these quotations have a date of 1852, and some cite the author as ‘Nightlark’. The only evidence for this book’s existence that we have yet been able to find is a single entry in a bookseller’s catalogue…” If you’ve ever seen a copy of this book, please let them know! (New Yorker, Guardian, MetaFilter)

Also: Don’t make fun of renowned Dan Brown! (Warning: May cause uncontrollable laughter.)

A couple of years ago I posted about Barrie England’s blog Real Grammar; it’s now gone, along with its host (though it’s archived), but England has started a new one, Caxton (after this guy), and imported posts from his older blogs. It’s very nicely designed, and the latest post does a good succinct job of describing something I was going to post about, so I’ll just copy his text: “In his latest post, David Crystal gives details of recordings of how a sermon by John Donne might have sounded in the original pronunciation in 1622. Transcripts available here and the recordings here.” So add it to your bookmarks or RSS feed, and may it have a long and prosperous career! (Via Sentence first.)