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Martin Worthington of SOAS has put online an archive of recordings of “modern Assyriologists reading ancient Babylonian and Assyrian poetry and literature aloud in the original language.” The About page explains:

It is intended to serve several purposes, some for Assyriologists, and some for the wider public. First, it aims to foster interest among students of Babylonia and Assyria in how these civilisations’ works of verbal art were read aloud in the past, and how they should be read aloud today.

Second, it provides a forum in which scholars who have theories about Babylonian and Assyrian pronunciation, metre, etc. can present a concrete example of how their theories sound in practice. […]

Third, as a record of the ways in which contemporary scholars read Babylonian and Assyrian, it will some day serve a historical function. Many great Assyriologists, including some who had influential theories of Babylonian metre and phonology, passed into history without leaving a single recording of how they read Babylonian and Assyrian. This archive will provide at least some record of how scholars read Babylonian and Assyrian in the twenty-first century.

Finally, but not least, the questions which students of ancient languages most frequently hear from laymen are: “How did they sound? And how do you know?”. This website is meant to serve as an introduction to these issues, providing the public with some idea of how modern Assyriologists think Babylonian and Assyrian were pronounced.

The recordings are here; start by clicking on the open-book symbol at the right of the recording you’re interested in, then open the “listen to the recording” link in a new tab or window, and you can hear the recording while following along in the transcription and translation. It’s a lot of fun, and the ones I’ve listened to have sounded quite convincing (in the sense that they sound like an actual language being spoken rather than the kind of stilted, exaggerated reading you often get from professors trying to read Ancient Greek or Old English aloud—of course, it is extremely unlikely that any of the readers actually sound like an ancient Babylonian). Via Languages Direct; they remark “you are struck, more than anything, by a feeling of familiarity through the similarity in sound of Babylonian to its modern offspring such as Arabic,” which doubtless has to do with the fact that the readers are familiar with Arabic but have never heard any speakers of Ancient Babylonian. Thanks for the link, Sashura!

Today Hanoi celebrates its thousandth anniversary, and when I went to Wikipedia to find out what happened in 1010, I discovered an astounding array of historical names:

During the Chinese domination of Vietnam, it was known as Tống Bình (宋平) and later Long Đỗ (龍肚; literally “dragon’s belly”). In 866, it was turned into a citadel and was named Đại La (大羅).
In 1010, Lý Thái Tổ, the first ruler of the Lý Dynasty, moved the capital of Đại Việt (大越, the Great Viet, then the name of Vietnam) to the site of the Đại La Citadel. Claiming to have seen a dragon ascending the Red River, he renamed it Thăng Long (昇龍, Ascending dragon) – a name still used poetically to this day. It remained the capital of Vietnam until 1397, when the capital was moved to Thanh Hóa, also known as Tây Đô (西都, Western Capital). Thăng Long then became Đông Đô (東都, Eastern Capital).
In 1408, Chinese Ming Dynasty attacked and occupied Vietnam, then they renamed Đông Đô as Đông Quan (東關, Eastern Gateway). In 1428, Vietnamese overthrown the Chinese under the leadership of Lê Lợi who later founded the posterior Lê Dynasty and renamed Đông Quan as Đông Kinh (東京, Eastern Capital – the name known to Europeans as Tonkin. The same characters are used for Tokyo, Japan). Right after the end of Tây Sơn Dynasty, it was named Bắc Thành (北城, Northern Citadel).
In 1802, when the Nguyễn Dynasty was established and then moved the capital down to Huế, the name of Thăng Long (昇龍, “ascending dragon”) was modified to become different Thăng Long (昇隆, to ascend and flourish). In 1831 the Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng renamed it “Hà Nội” (河内, [which] can be translated as Between Rivers or River Interior).

During my period of obsession with Vietnamese history about a quarter of a century ago, I’m sure I knew it had only been called Hanoi since 1831, but the fact came as a fresh surprise to me now.
Incidentally, check out this sentence in the NYT story about the celebration:

Like most of their countrymen, few Hanoians, absorbed in getting and spending, live their lives to the rhythms of the patriotic marching tunes that filled the air last week.

So do most of their countrymen live their lives to the rhythms of the patriotic marching tunes or not?
Update. Mark Liberman has posted about this at the Log, and an interesting if sometimes bizarre discussion has ensued (a number of people don’t seem to understand that the sentence is saying the opposite of what it means to say).

I’ll be spending the day in Amherst, at the Center for Russian Culture, where they’re having a symposium to celebrate what would have been Joseph Brodsky’s seventieth birthday. I’m particularly looking forward to the panel discussion “Joseph Brodsky: Contexts and Reception” by Catherine Ciepiela (Amherst College), Mikhail Gronas (Dartmouth), Andrew Kahn (Oxford), Maria Khotimsky (Harvard), and Yakov Klots (Yale) and the “group close reading of a poem by Brodsky” led by Polina Barskova (a fine poet herself; I discussed her here).

Meanwhile, any Helen DeWitt fans who happen to be in Manhattan today can meet her this afternoon; the venue is a block south of the old Knitting Factory, if any of my readers remember the first Knit, on Houston Street. …And now I learn that the new Knit, on Leonard Street, has closed, dammit. See my remarks on Chumley’s here.

Well, it’s not new to its speakers, obviously, but it’s new to the rest of us. Researchers for the the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages were investigating two other little-known languages, Aka and Miji, spoken in a small district of Arunachal Pradesh when they found a language called Koro, part of the Tibeto-Burman language family. You can read a National Geographic story about it (which has an interesting discussion of how “the Koro, who number between 800 and 1,200 people, … live as a subtribe of the 10,000-person Aka tribe”) and watch the embedded video to hear some of the language, and there’s an NPR interview with K. David Harrison, who was one of the researchers. And via the MeFi post about the discovery, I found this story about the discovery of thirty new languages in China. (Thanks for the heads-up, Doc Rock and komfo,amonan!)

As longtime readers know, I read novels to my wife at night, and having just finished Lucky Jim (hilarious, and perfect bedtime reading), we’ve moved on to Humboldt’s Gift. I memorialized Saul Bellow here (and I might note that I never got an answer to my question about his original Russian family name—was it Belov or Belo, and if the latter, what the hell kind of name is that?), and his prose is just as delicious as I remembered. Here’s the first paragraph; note the perfect pitch for both American vernacular and high-cultural allusion, and the effortless passage between them:

The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that. An avant-garde writer, the first of a new generation, he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty, he was learned. The guy had it all. All the papers reviewed his book. His picture appeared in Time without insult and in Newsweek with praise. I read Harlequin Ballads enthusiastically. I was a student at the University of Wisconsin and thought about nothing but literature day and night. Humboldt revealed to me new ways of doing things. I was ecstatic. I envied his luck, his talent, and his fame, and I went east in May to have a look at him—perhaps to get next to him. The Greyhound bus, taking the Scranton route, made the trip in about fifty hours. That didn’t matter. The bus windows were open. I had never seen real mountains before. Trees were budding. It was like Beethoven’s Pastorale. I felt showered by the green, within. Manhattan was fine, too. I took a room for three bucks a week and found a job selling Fuller Brushes door to door. And I was wildly excited about everything. Having written Humboldt a long fan letter, I was invited to Greenwich Village to discuss literature and ideas. He lived on Bedford Street, near Chumley’s. First he gave me black coffee, and then poured gin in the same cup. “Well, you’re a nice-looking enough fellow, Charlie,” he said to me. “Aren’t you a bit sly, maybe? I think you’re headed for early baldness. And such large emotional handsome eyes. But you certainly do love literature and that’s the main thing. You have sensibility,” he said. He was a pioneer in the use of this word. Sensibility later made it big. Humboldt was very kind. He introduced me to people in the Village and got me books to review. I always loved him.

Listen to the eighteenth-century balance of “His picture appeared in Time without insult and in Newsweek with praise.” And any past or present New Yorker will smile at the mention of Chumley’s… although I learn from that Wikipedia article that “Chumley’s has been closed since the chimney in its dining room collapsed on April 5, 2007.” So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

I am in awe of Mark Woods, who’s been putting out wood s lot for ten years now. It’s all I can do to crank out a post a day; you could say Mark puts out a post a day too, but each of his is equivalent to a dozen or two of mine. He somehow finds the time and energy to put together a collection of images, links, and quotes that make my mind and soul feel a little better stocked; of late he usually includes one or two of his own gorgeous photographs as well. (Check out the grand old oak at the top of today’s entry.) And I’ve doubtless swiped more links from him over the years than from any other source, which gives me yet another selfish reason to wish him many more years of finding and sharing the best the civilized internet has to offer. As the Greeks say to the preparer of a meal, γεια στα χέρια σου: health to your hands!

Update. Mark died February 9, 2017; see my memorial post.

Today’s post at wood s lot features, among other fine things, the great Irish writer Flann O’Brien aka Brian O’Nolan aka Myles Na Gopaleen (Myles na gCopaleen), who is still too little appreciated. Mark (the Woods of wood s lot) links to Robert Looby’s Flann O’Brien: A Postmodernist When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular and a useful site called From: The Pen of…. Myles Na Gopaleen; I’ve already quoted in its entirety O’Brien’s splendidly derailed definition of Irish cur (“…the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprachaun’s denture, a sheep biscuit…”), and I will add here a magisterial sentence from near the end of the same Irish Times column: “In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time.” And here’s a somber passage from another column (both are from the 1940s; his columns are collected in The Best of Myles):

…it is worth remembering that if Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England, and it would stop there only because it could go no lower.

John Tagliabue has a New York Times story about the attempt to revive Romansh:

Depending on whom you talk to in the steep, alpine enclaves of Graubünden, otherwise known as Grisons, the easternmost wedge of the country, there is either strong support or bitter resistance to Romansh, the local language. “When people talk about the death of Romansh,” said Elisabeth Maranta, who for the last 18 years has run a Romansh bookshop, Il Palantin, which sells books in Romansh and in German, “then I say that there are days when I only sell books in Romansh.”
Yet Ms. Maranta herself illustrates the fragility of Romansh. A native of Germany, she came to Chur 38 years ago with her husband, but does not speak Romansh herself, which is hardly a liability since virtually all Romansh speakers also speak German. While she is an ardent champion of Romansh, she can be bleak about its future. Asked why most of the books in Romansh she sells are poetry, she muses: “When a patient is dying, he writes only poetry.”
Romansh is the direct descendant of the Latin that was spoken in these mountain valleys at the height of the Roman empire, and shares the same Latin roots as French, Italian or Spanish. So isolated were the people who spoke it in their deep valleys that not one, but five, dialects grew up, though the differences are not substantial. …
Only a few decades ago, Romansh was looked upon as the patois of the poor country yokel; today it is experiencing a tenuous rebirth thanks to grass-roots revival programs and government support. Switzerland declared it an official language in 1996, though with limited status compared with the country’s other official languages — German, French and Italian — and now spends about $4 million a year to promote it.

The article does a good job describing the mixed reactions—basically, as you would expect, practicality vs. romanticism; I, of course, am a romantic in these matters. Incidentally, David, who sent me the story, said he’d been there and found the language “indecipherable aurally” though it wasn’t hard to read—it “sounds not at all like a Romance language.”

Via Jamie Olson’s The Flaxen Wave I learned about an excellent journal, Cardinal Points; I’ll let Jamie introduce it:

For the first time, the New York journal Cardinal Points (Стороны света) has published an issue in English. In fact, it’s a double issue, and it’s packed with great stuff. Compiled under the guest editorship of Robert Chandler, the new issue includes translations of works by Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, Varlam Shalamov, and Vasily Grossman, along with original poems by Chandler, Glyn Maxwell, and Ilya Kaminsky, among others. There is enough excellent writing here to keep you occupied for many days. Valentina Polukhina, for example, has an interview here with David Bethea about Joseph Brodsky, whom Bethea calls “the last poet in the Russian heroic tradition.” And Chandler gives us his own essay on Platonov and Shalamov to accompany their stories.

The Platonov included is Two extracts from Chevengur, which gives you a glimpse of the forthcoming translation by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson (I wrote about the novel here and here); the Grossman pieces are “A Small Life” (included in the new collection The Road) and the wonderful eleventh chapter (with a charming introduction by Chandler) of Everything Flows; and there is a fascinating discussion by Alexander Anichkin (known to LH readers as commenter Sashura) of various versions of a Bella Akhmadulina poem, including one quoted by Vassily Aksyonov that is not to be found in editions of Akhmadulina but that gives the poem “a sharp political edge without losing the wider, philosophical meaning.” There’s much more, of course, and Russophones can read the Russian edition as well.

Addendum. The Russian name of the magazine, Стороны света (Stórony sveta) ‘sides of the world,’ is a pun on the phrase страны света (Strány sveta) ‘cardinal points,’ literally ‘countries of the world’; I’m not sure what the point of the pun is in Russian, but they have (doubtless wisely) made no attempt to reproduce it in the English name.

Update to Addendum. It appears the two phrases are variants, though the one I was familiar with is more common (and thus the only one in my dictionaries). Thanks, as always, to my knowledgeable commenters for the correction!

Elif Batuman has an amazing story in last week’s New York Times Magazine on the tangled history of Franz Kafka’s diaries and other papers. I won’t even try to summarize it, I’ll just quote a paragraph in which another writer provides a hilarious sort-of-summary:

Etgar Keret, a best-selling Israeli short-story writer who considers Kafka to be his greatest influence, proposes that Brod had no idea that Hoffe would sit on the papers for so long. “Half of us are married to people who say, ‘I’m just going to buy a pack of cigarettes,’ and never return,” he told me. “I think this is the literary version of that, with this Hoffe chick.” Keret characterizes Brod as “a good judge of texts, for sure, but a very bad judge of human characters.” If Brod could see what was happening now, Keret says, he would be “horrified.” Kafka, on the other hand, might be O.K. with it: “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

Really, read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

In other literary-legacy news: Antonina Pirozhkova, Engineer and Widow of Isaac Babel, Dies at 101 (Times obit by William Grimes; thanks, Eric!) and Tolstoy’s Guiding Light: “The philosophical writings of the author of War and Peace inspired followers from Moscow to Croydon and led to the creation of a Christian anarchist reform movement. Charlotte Alston examines the activities and influence of Tolstoy’s disciples.” (Thanks, Paul!)