languagehat.com

An interesting piece by Olivier Razemon in Le Monde about the correct/local ways to pronounce various French place names (it’s Luberon avec e comme dans “beurrer,” pas comme dans “bébé,” and Wissant (Pas-de-Calais) is “Uissant”, et non “Vissant”, encore moins “Ouissant”). Thanks, Paul!

Schott’s Vocab has a post today linking to this OED entry (draft revision Mar. 2009):

pig’s whisper, n.
colloq.
Brit. /pɩgz wɩspə/, U.S. /pɩgz (h)wɩspər/ Forms: 17- pig’s whisper, 18 pigs-whisper. [< the genitive of PIG n. + WHISPER n.]
1. A very short space of time, an instant.
1780 J. O’KEEFFE Tony Lumpkin in Town I. 4 I’ll be with them in a pig’s whisper. 1837 DICKENS Pickwick Papers xxxi. 333 You’ll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig’s whisper. […] 1918 P. B. KYNE Valley of Giants xxv. 218 ‘Thanks so much for the invitation’, Ogilvy murmured gratefully. ‘I’ll be down in a pig’s whisper’. 1991 R. COOVER Pinocchio in Venice xxi. 229 ‘Back in a crack, direttore!’ ‘In a pig’s whisper, direttore!’
2. A whisper; a confidential tone of voice.
1846 Swell’s Night Guide 110/1 Pig’s Whisper.., a word ‘twixt you and me. 1866 M. BANIM Peter of Castle 5 The eulogist may.. in what they call a pig’s whisper (that is, in a confidential tone).. [relate] a few anecdotes of his prowess. 1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses II. 484 Virag (Prompts into his ear in a pig’s whisper). 2001 Hindu (Nexis) 21 Jan., I heard Ata informing Mummy, in a pig’s whisper, that plagiarism, too, was actionable.

I had not been familiar with this wonderful phrase; are you? (Thanks, Bonnie!)

I have mentioned Marat Akchurin’s wonderful Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics before, and I thought I’d quote this passage from his visit to Tajikistan in 1990, as the whole Soviet mess was in the process of falling apart; it resonates with the material I’ve been posting from Terry Martin’s book:

We tried to pay the counterman for the green tea that we had drunk, but he refused to take money, saying that he considered us to be his guests.
“If you had an opportunity to address Americans, what would you tell them?” I asked him.
“Americans?” he asked again in surprise. “Let them learn Tadzhik. It’s a very simple and beautiful language. Maybe they will make use of it one day!”
Safar and I went out and decided to go to the bookstore and then walk to my hotel.
“Is Tadzhik very different from Farsi?” I asked Safar. “Are they just dialects of one language?”
“Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters,” Safar replied. “But nothing good ever came of it. They took away the old alphabet and thus cut the Tadzhik people off from their ancient history and culture. This monstrously sly Bolshevik act did terrible damage to the national culture of the Tadzhik people. Why? Because letters are culture-producing for a Tadzhik. Can you imagine Pushkin writing in Russian but with Arabic ligatures? That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? But this nightmarish experiment was conducted in the U.S.S.R. on many peoples, Tadzhiks among them. I believe that it was a cunning policy.”

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James Somers has a good analysis of “it turns out,” beginning by saying that Paul Graham knows how to use the phrase: “He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t. That probably sounds like a compliment. But it turns out that ‘it turns out’ does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself.” He goes on to explain convincingly what he’s talking about, concluding:

In other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—as in the scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on behalf of your readers—as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say “…and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice”—readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by it. They learn to trust the writers who use the phrase, in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author’s own dispassionate surprise: “I, too, once believed X,” the author says, “but whaddya know, X turns out to be false.”
Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter—as though the situation simply unfolded that way.

It turns out, though, that (as pointed out by a couple of commenters) Douglas Adams expressed the same thought in The Salmon of Doubt:

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Angus Trumble has a nice post at Paris Review Daily about the ombrellai (umbrella makers) of Piedmont, who spoke a jargon called Tarùsc:

According to local folklore, il Tarùsc was a very shy, small bad-tempered gnome who lived on the slopes of Mottarone and Motta Rossa. He was surly, difficult, and misanthropic. Nevertheless from him the ombrellai learned the art of making the shapeliest, lightest, most lissome and elegant umbrellas in all the world. And in the process Tarùsc taught the ombrellai how to speak his own strange tongue. […]

That was of course the unofficial story. In fact, the language called Tarùsc was documented in the seventies by the ethnographer P. E. Manni da Massino, just in the nick of time, before the last old men who still spoke it died out. His view was that Tarùsc drew upon five distinct sources: (1) Italian, that is to say the reasonably stable dialects of Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, and the southern cantons of Switzerland, and was therefore built, in turn, upon the ancient bedrock of (2) Latin; (3) German, that form of it that seeped across the Dolomites from southern Austria, and across the Swiss Alps from Bavaria; (4) French, thanks to the traditional alliances that regularly formed and re-formed in the same period between France and Savoy, and (5) Spanish, because of Philip II’s sixteenth-century annexation of the Duchy of Milan. […]

Manni never got as far as plotting any plausible grammar of Tarùsc. He made some progress with his old men, but they were inclined to be grumpy, suspicious, and maddeningly reluctant to share any expressions that related directly to the craft of umbrella-making, because obviously their commitment to trade secrecy outweighed any desire to preserve the language they must have known was on the verge of extinction.

All we have is a few stray words, a list of numbers, some cooking terminology, and names for a handful of farm animals and plants.

The post concludes with a list of such words, and G.L. at Johnson (whence I got the story) ends his own post with:

But as someone who has learned all the supposed source languages of Tarùsc except Italian, there are many words that seem to me to come from something else altogether. A doctor is sbrugnabäcâgn. Shoes are sciärbëtul. A priest is t’zurla. Wander over, read the article, and take a look at the list. Does anyone recognise where these are from? Does Tarùsc look similar to the other dialects of the region?

Good questions, and I too would welcome answers and suggestions.

Lisa Hayden Espenschade has provided a very useful resource at her blog Lizok’s Bookshelf: a list of a couple of dozen Russian-language sources of book reviews, including both individual bloggers and institutional sites. The second one on the list, В топку.ру (“Into the fire”), provides scathingly negative reviews of books that have often been critically praised, like Alexei Ivanov’s Золото бунта and Vladimir Sorokin’s День опричника; the first was favorably reviewed by the esteemed slawkenbergius, so I suspect the топку.ру reviewer of excessive bile, but I don’t really care, since the trashing is so enjoyable to read. (Apparently that site is exclusively for pans; the normal book discussions are at ChitClub.ru.)

I recently learned of the death of the Slavist Horace Lunt, a student of Roman Jakobson who taught at Harvard; I still consult my first edition (1955) of his compact Old Church Slavonic Grammar, admirably sensible and structuralist. You can read some reminiscences here. (Thanks, Cherie!)

I am deeply grateful to the blogger at Particularly in Burma for first reposting the wonderful anecdote recounted by slawkenbergius in this contentious thread (“my uncle, who lives in Israel, sent me this great story…”) and then, in today’s post, translating it from Russian, saving me the trouble. So instead of producing and posting my own translation of a hilarious story that gave me a much-needed laugh that day, I can just send you there, adding only that getting the joke depends on awareness of the beginning of Pushkin’s Ruslan i Lyudmila: ‘By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]. If he walks to the right, he starts singing a song; if to the left, he tells a fairytale.’ These are some of the most famous lines in Russian poetry, and any Russian with more than a minimal education knows them by heart.

While I’m at it, let me highly recommend to readers who know Russian the latest post at Anatoly’s blog, in which he asked readers to describe their experiences with Soviet elections. I’ve read all three pages of the thread, and it’s a fascinating look at one aspect of Soviet life. Everyone remembers the holiday atmosphere and the spread of hard-to-find items (sausages, books, etc.) offered as inducements for voting (i.e., dropping the ballot into the urn—there was, of course, no choice of candidates); opinions differ on how widespread failure to vote was and what the consequences were (apparently none in the last years of the USSR, but older people remembered the harsher conditions of Stalin’s day). I particularly recommend this lively comment by drakosha_ru about what voting was like in a small town in 1958.

Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 has astonished me yet again. Back in 2003 I posted about Eugene Garfield’s 1975 effort to get Russians to “give up their ugly Cyrillic … for the flexible, international Roman alphabet.” Now, in Chapter 5 of Martin, I learn that there was a serious project along those lines decades earlier:

The main obstacle to NA [the new latinized alphabet]’s world mission, within the Soviet Union at least, was the Russian alphabet. There had been some talk after the Revolution of latinizing the Russian alphabet, but nothing came of it. In 1929, with a second wave of utopian internationalism rising, the subject was again broached. Lunacharskii wrote several articles in support of latinizing Russian. Like Agamali-Ogly [an Azerbaijani revolutionary who led the campaign for latinization of the Turkic languages], he claimed he had Lenin’s endorsement. Most important, Lunacharskii helped put the educational bureaucracy behind the idea. On October 19, 1929, Uchitelskaia gazeta (Teachers’ Newspaper) published a discussion article on the latinization of the Russian alphabet. A month later, Izvestiia announced plans to reform the Russian orthography. Three committees had been formed within the Scientific Department of the Education Commissariat: on orthography, spelling, and the latinization of the Russian alphabet. At the same time, another committee was formed within the Council on Defense and Labor (STO) to deal with the publishing consequences of the proposed reforms. At least one of its members also publicly advocated latinization. The Communist Academy, an early supporter of latinization, hosted an exhibition devoted to the new alphabet, which showed how under the russificatory Tsarist regime the Russian alphabet had expanded outward, and how under the new progressive Soviet regime its domain was continually contracting. This flurry of activity suggested that the latinization of Russian was being seriously considered.

The idea was quickly quashed (in “a laconic Politburo resolution of January 25 1930”), but that it was taken seriously for even a time is amazing.

By the way, as Jongseong Park said in this thread, Korean was one of the languages for which latinization was proposed, as was Chinese:

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One of the few literary critics I both respected and always enjoyed reading has died at 90: Frank Kermode, for whom John Mullan wrote a good obituary in The Guardian. A few excerpts:

This was what he did best, and with grace: unravelling the ways in which ideas worked in literature. Some of the poets to whom he was most drawn were, indeed, self-consciously difficult: John Donne, on whom he published a book in 1957; Wallace Stevens, whom he, in effect, introduced to an English readership in a study published in 1960, and whose “lucid, inescapable rhythms” often return in Kermode’s criticism.

While at Reading he also wrote his major work of the 1950s, Romantic Image (1957), which secured his intellectual reputation. It was an account of the continuities between Romanticism and Modernism, with the poetry of Yeats at its heart. With its easy erudition, but not a footnote in sight, this book seems a long way from today’s average academic output. In range it is huge, reaching into European and classical literature, aesthetic philosophy as well as poetry, verse from the Renaissance as well as the 19th and 20th centuries – yet in tone it is modest, provisional (it calls itself an essay). Learning with a certain lightness was his style. […]

He had become surer and surer that literary theory, which he had once invited into the seminar room, was strangling the understanding and love of literature. He had come to think that many university teachers and leading critics of literature, particularly in America, had no “appetite for poetry”. Earlier works from the 80s, Forms of Attention (1985) and History and Value (1988), had explored the need for a literary canon – a core of especially valuable works of the imagination to which we can keep returning. Now he believed that theory, frozen into formula, was the addiction of academic critics “who seem largely to have lost interest in literature as such”. Thus, a final irony: a man who had been one of the country’s leading literary theorists became a scathing critic – sometimes satirist – of literary theory’s self-importance.

Via Helen DeWitt’s paperpools.

Addendum. Like Helen, I had been saying ker-MODE all my life (and that is the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names), but apparently Kermode pronounced his name with stress on the first syllable, so I shall retrain myself.