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I’m still reading Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (see the previous post), and I want to quote some material from the start of Chapter 3, “Linguistic Ukrainization, 1923–1932.” Martin is explaining the policy of korenizatsiia, which he translates “indigenization” (it’s derived from the adjective korennoi, as used in the term korennoi narod ‘indigenous people’; I myself would prefer to transliterate it korenizatsiya, but it’s his book):

Korenizatsiia, as definitively formulated at party congresses in March 1921 and April 1923, consisted of two major tasks: the creation of national elites (Affirmative Action) and the promotion of local national languages to a dominant position in the non-Russian territories (linguistic korenizatsiia). Linguistic korenizatsiia would prove much more difficult to achieve. Between April 1923 and December 1932, central party and soviet organs issued dozens of resolutions urging the immediate implementation of linguistic korenizatsiia. Local republican and oblast authorities issued hundreds, if not thousands, of similar decrees. Nevertheless, linguistic korenizatsiia failed almost everywhere. Why?

Martin says he “initially assumed that central authorities must have been sending mixed signals, publicly trumpeting the need for immediate korenizatsiia while privately letting it be known that this public rhetoric was largely for show,” but this turned out not to be the case: not only the “soft-line bureaucracies” were urging it, but the hard-line organs “frequently rebuked local party organizations for failing to implement korenizatsiia.[…] Stalin publicly and privately defended korenizatsiia and silenced its critics. Despite this sustained central support, linguistic korenizatsiia failed. Why?”

Although the Soviet leadership did consistently and sincerely support korenizatsiia, it nevertheless also viewed its implementation as a secondary task, an auxiliary rather than a core Bolshevik project, and therefore its support was soft. Failure to implement korenizatsiia was censured, but unlike failure to meet grain requisition quotas or industrialization targets, it rarely led to demotion and never resulted in arrest or execution. Interestingly, this meant that local conditions proved decisive. If a republic’s leadership aggressively supported korenizatsiia and could overcome local resistance without soliciting punitive measures from the center, linguistic korenizatsiia could be and was achieved. If not, it would fail. The center would not tolerate an open and demonstrative repudiation of korenizatsiia, but it would likewise not intervene decisively to correct a lackluster performance.

In terms of linguistic korenizatsiia, the Soviet Union’s non-Russian territories can be divided into three categories. For the vast majority, most of the regions that the Soviets called their “culturally backward eastern national territories,” complete linguistic korenizatsiia was never seriously attempted. The national languages were promoted vigorously in the press and general education but made little progress in government, industry, and higher education. There were simply too few educated titular nationals. As a result, all efforts were devoted to the Affirmative Action component of korenizatsiia: the training and promotion of natives into positions of authority.[…]

The opposing category, where local conditions were so favorable that linguistic korenizatsiia was achieved rapidly and with little difficulty, consisted of only two republics: Georgia and Armenia. The Georgian Menshevik and Armenian Dashnaktsutiun governments had already established their respective languages as state languages prior to the Soviet conquest.[…]

Most interesting was the third category, those republics where the local forces backing and opposing linguistic korenizatsiia were in near equilibrium. This was most true of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Tatarstan. In Ukraine, there was both exceptionally strong support for and resistance to linguistic Ukrainization. Moreover, both support and resistance came from within the party.[…] Tatarstan resembled Ukraine, with a very strong national movement encountering an even stronger and more entrenched Russian presence. The large and politically influential Russian population ultimately confined linguistic Tatarization to majority Tatar regions, where it was nevertheless pursued with great vigor.

So we see that even a powerful and brutal state apparatus has to set priorities, and the lower-priority stuff has to take its chances with local conditions. (As Martin points out, this was not the case with a top-priority policy like collectivization, which was pushed through regardless of local objections and massive economic losses, not to mention loss of life.)

I’m barely fifty pages into Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it’s already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. As Raymond Pearson writes in his detailed review (which, along with Martin’s response, I urge anyone interested in the topic to read): “The Affirmative Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research. Martin’s positively Herculean labours in six historical archives in Moscow and another two in Ukraine have been rewarded with a rich and abundant harvest of hitherto-inaccessible primary documentation.” And the picture he puts together as a result is astonishing. Like everyone who’s studied the Soviet Union at all, I was aware that each official nationality was awarded its own territory in which its language would be taught and its customs maintained, but I had no idea how complex the system had been. How many such territorial units do you think there were? Fifty, a hundred, a few hundred? At its peak, tens of thousands. These ranged from the well-known union republics (e.g., Ukraine), autonomous republics (e.g., Tatarstan), and autonomous oblasts (e.g., Chechnya) down through autonomous okrugs, national districts, national village soviets, and national kolkhozes “until they merged seamlessly with the individual’s personal nationality” (as recorded in everyone’s passport). This system, established in the mid-1920s and elaborated in the 1930s, was called raionirovanie ‘regionalization, division into raions or districts.’

The rationale for the system was the need to resolve a dilemma of Marxism-Leninism: what do you do about nationalism? Theoretically, it was the product of a prior stage of history and was superseded by the rise of the proletariat and the move to socialism, but—as Lenin and the other early Bolsheviks were well aware—however retrograde nationalist feelings were, people were very attached to them, and to try to repress them would lead to massive revolt on the part of non-Russians who felt that the Revolution had only brought a new form of tsarist “Great Russian chauvinism.” So one possible solution, assimilation, was out. Another, the strategy of “extraterritorial national-cultural autonomy” championed by Austrian Marxists like Otto Bauer, called for “non-national administrative territories and for special representative bodies, elected by all members of a given nationality,” but this was rejected as well; the Bolsheviks insisted on a strictly territorial definition of nationality. The solution was “the strategy of ethno-territorial proliferation” in which the system of national units was extended “downward into smaller and smaller territories, the smallest being the size of a single village.” (In Ukraine there were thirteen Czech village soviets, three Albanian, and one Swedish; in Leningrad Oblast there were Norwegian, Jewish, and Chinese national kolkhozes.) They hoped this would put an end to nationalism (the idea being that if, say, ethnic Germans were being oppressed by other ethnic Germans in their own territory, it would sharpen class struggle rather than causing ethnic resentment); in fact, it exacerbated the problem, as could have been predicted by anyone not hampered by ideological blinders. But never mind that for the moment—I want to single out a couple of fascinating language-related bits. From pp. 49-50:

[Read more…]

MetaFilter user lapsangsouchong posted an interesting AskMetaFilter question: “Which of the thousands of neologisms coined in the Turkish language reforms of the 1920s and 30s stuck, which ones didn’t—and why?” In the course of the discussion he posted this fascinating anecdote:

The word günaydın, ‘good morning’ or ‘good day’, was coined at this time and achieved widespread currency. But it was one of a pair, with tünaydın, ‘good afternoon’. This has achieved absolutely no currency except in schools. In the morning, when the teacher comes into class, the children stand up, the teacher says “Günaydın!” to them, and they say the same thing back; and in the afternoon, when the class comes back after lunch, the same ritual is repeated but with the word “Tünaydın!” Outside this context the word is never used. The explanation my friend suggested is that while gün was and is the normal word for day, so the new coinage (which literally means something like ‘bright day!’) made sense, tün was one of the ‘new old’ coinages, an ‘authentic’ ancient Turkish word… which no-one ever used. So a new word formed from tün had less chance of sticking than a new word formed from gün, despite 65 years* of teachers saying it to their classes every day after lunch.
*According to Nişanyan it was coined by the TDK in 1945. Bizarrely, Nişanyan has tünaydın but not—except in the entry for tünaydın—günaydın.

Anybody know more about this?
By the way, “Nişanyan” is Sevan Nişanyan, who among his other books has written a Turkish etymological dictionary that is available in online form.

The Bodleian Library announces a new publication, The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699:

The first dictionary of slang, out of print for 300 years, is being published by the Bodleian Library from a rare copy unearthed in its collections.
Originally entitled A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew, its aim was to educate the polite London classes in ‘canting’ – the language of thieves and ruffians – should they be unlucky enough to wander into the ‘wrong’ parts of town.
With over 4,000 entries, the dictionary contains many words which are now part of everyday parlance, such as ‘Chitchat’ and ‘Eyesore’ as well as a great many which have become obsolete, such as the delightful ‘Dandyprat’ and ‘Fizzle’. […]
Playfully highlighting similarities and contrasts between words, B.E. [the anonymous author] includes entries ranging from rogues’ cant, through terms used by sailors, labourers, and those in domestic culture, to words and phrases used by the upper classes.

The Sample Entries include Arsworm “a little diminutive Fellow,” Buffenapper “a Dog-stealer, that Trades in Setters, Hounds, Spaniels, Lap, and all sorts of Dogs, Selling them at a round Rate, and himself or Partner Stealing them away the first opportunity,” and Grumbletonians “Malecontents, out of Humour with the Government, for want of a Place, or having lost one.” Thanks for the link, AJP!

Having finished my rereading of Platonov’s Kotlovan (see this post), I find myself more moved than ever by the ending, but I don’t really have anything more to say about the novel as a whole, so I’ll quote this section from A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, by Thomas Seifrid:

Reading Platonov is a matter of learning to set aside expected clichés and perceive what is truly there.[…] It was for this reason that the typists who had to prepare Platonov’s manuscripts for publication would request triple the normal rate of pay—not because of his handwriting, which was clear enough; but because it was impossible with his texts, as it was possible for other writers, to remember an entire phrase by looking at its first few words. Every word had to be checked painstakingly to make sure the typescript followed what Platonov had written.

If you think about it, that’s a pretty impressive tribute to a writer.

As I have noted before, I am a fan of Raymond Queneau, and I am pleased to discover that his Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Wikipedia) are cleverly generated at this site: every time you visit or refresh, you get a new combination of lines (in both French and English unless you specify a preference). The translations (and the site) are by Beverley Charles Rowe; here’s the main page of the site, and here’s Rowe’s remarkable collection of English dictionaries. And by googling a bit I discover there are a couple of other online editions, which you can read about here.

While we’re on the subject of poetry, yesterday’s wood s lot features the wonderful Louise Bogan, whom I quoted here. And while you’re there, don’t miss the interesting excerpt from “A Farewell to English,” by Michael Hartnett (“…they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from/ an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark/ unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs…”).

I wanted to quote a particularly good example of the way quotations are used in Russia from the Boyle/Gerhart book I wrote about here; I was googling for an English translation of the Pushkin poem cited when I discovered that this section happens to be included in a webpage of sample passages from the book (scroll down, it’s the second one). So I’ll let you read the poem there (the lines in italics in the Russian are ones that are particularly often quoted on their own), and I’ll just quote the jokes based on it here (the Russian is on the linked page):

“Why do you have Pushkin’s portrait on the wall in the KGB office? Why not Dzerzhinsky’s [founder of the KGB]?”
“Because he was the first to say ‘Strangle the noble impulses!’ [= ‘The soul’s noble impulses’].”

This quotation has to be pronounced with the intonation of an imperative. The punchline is based on the coincidence between the Genitive of душа (‘soul’) and the imperative of the verb душить (‘strangle, repress’), which is of course lost in translation. Another joke of the perestroika period shows people’s bewilderment and mistrust of the entire concept of glasnost:

Comrade, trust me: the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost will pass,
and the KGB will remember our names.

By the way, speaking of Russian literature, I found the interesting link Что читать? (‘What to read?’; Ищем советы, что почитать ‘We’re looking for suggestions about what to read’) in a comment at Lizok’s Bookshelf; it looks like a useful source of book descriptions.

Ben Zimmer has a wonderful takedown of the Telegraph story you may have seen: “Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered.” An excerpt:

Looking deeper into the list, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. It turns out that a healthy majority of the entries come from a single source. In 2005, Merriam-Webster asked users of its online dictionary, “What’s your favorite word that’s not in the dictionary?” It compiled a top ten list (and later, with much fanfare, announced that the top vote-getter, ginormous, would enter the next edition of the Collegiate Dictionary). Beyond the top ten, Merriam-Webster provided a list of “Previous Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary).” Of the 39 words listed by the Telegraph, a whopping 27 of them — from asphinxiation (“being sick to death of unanswerable puzzles or riddles”) to wurfing (“the act of surfing the Internet while at work”) — come from Merriam-Webster’s 2005 selection of “previous favorite words.”
Of the remaining words on the Telegraph list, some (such as freegan, griefer, and nonversation) have their own entries in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary, an ongoing compendium of user-generated suggestions. A few others have actually achieved dictionary status already. Earworm, locavore, and pharming can all be found in the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Ah, journalism! Ah, humanity!

Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist at Wayne State University who once ran also runs the site Forthright’s Phrontistery (which I wrote about here), now also has a blog Glossographia (“Anthropology, linguistics, and prehistory”), whose latest post [archived] is a very interesting examination of the history of the word chairperson. He writes:

A couple of weeks ago I started making some open notes here about a potential student project on word histories for use in my undergraduate teaching, which I am tentatively calling the Lexiculture Project. My desired learning outcomes for this course include a) getting students to discover or awaken whatever love of language; b) to get essentially untrained (budding?) linguists to be able to ask and answer interesting questions about language and culture in topics of interest to them. While my students (mainly anthropology majors with a smattering of linguists and others) aren’t mostly ready to undertake original research in most areas, they can certainly be taught the research skills needed to investigate word histories.

Sounds like a great course! At any rate, he decided to use chairperson as a research topic, hoping to antedate the OED’s first citation from 1971 (Israel Shenker, New York Times, Aug 29, 58 “Instead of turning up as chairman or chairlady, each will have been transmuted into a sexually obscure ‘chairperson'”).

I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”
“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

1899 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Dec 1899, 10(1), pg. A32
NOTICE – Members of the East Aurora Don’t Worry Club are notified that there will be no more meetings until Mrs. Grubbins, the Chairperson, returns from the Sanatorium.

1902 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Sep 1902, 15(4), pg. 126
The answer is, I think, that a passion for the Chairperson is hardly possible when any moment you may be ruled out of order, and ordered to take your seat.

1910 Puck Aug 3, p. 68
“Madame Chairperson,” she shouted, “this measure is maternalism, plain and simple!”

All four of these quotations are clearly linked to first-wave feminism, the movement (to oversimplify grossly) for political rights such as the vote led by feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course (it almost goes without saying), all four instances are used to describe women – no man is described as a ‘chairperson’ until the 1970s. The first (WaPo) quotation actually is a quotation taken from the (sadly, undigitized) Detroit Journal – my Wayne State students were thrilled to find that chairperson first occurred in a Detroit publication! But the article is no feminist tract, but rather a jocular commentary on first-wave feminists, entitled ‘Indignant Womanhood’.

He goes on to say that the most interesting thing is that “I can find literally no further attestations of the word for over half a century”:

After 1910, we have no further ‘chairperson’ until 1970, when once again (as in 1899) it appeared in the Washington Post, this time associated with Betty Friedan, who used the term to describe herself. After that point, ‘chairperson’ occurs regularly up to the present, although the Corpus of Historical American English data suggest that it is being replaced by ‘chair’ as the gender-neutral form.

We live in a great age of lexicography, and I look forward to many more such discoveries.

Checking my referrer log, I just discovered a blog I wish I’d known about earlier, dormir debout. On the about page, the author (who goes by “kato” in the comment threads) says:

dormir debout – a French expression meaning, literally, ‘to sleep standing.’ Usually used in the expression ‘une histoire à dormir debout,’ meaning “a story at which to sleep standing,” in other words, a really boring story. So boring, in fact, that despite the act of standing usually discouraging sleeping, one passes right out….

Currently working on my MA in Zoroastrian Studies/Old Iranian languages at SOAS.

There’s much discussion of Arabic language and literature, including occasional quotation of Arabic poetry with translation and commentary; I noted with interest a post on 17th-century Egyptian curses. Unfortunately, there have been no updates since December. I hope it’s just on hiatus rather than defunct.

Update (Aug. 2022). The blog has been defunct for some years; the latest post seems to have been 19th Century Libyan Wolves (4 April 2011).