Archives for July 2003

From Dale Keiger I have learned simultaneously of Jacobsen‘s existence and her passing. He quotes a very nice poem called “The Wind in the Sunporch”; here’s the only other work of hers I’ve been able to find online (from the Baltimore section of Poetry in Motion):

from Of Pairs

The mockingbirds, that pair, arrive,
one, and the other; glossily perch,
respond, respond, branch to branch.
One stops, and flies. The other flies.
Arrives, dips, in a blur of wings,
lights, is joined. Sings. Sings.

Actually, there are birds galore:
bowlegged blackbirds brassy as crows;
elegant ibises with inelegant cows;
hummingbirds’ stutter on air;
tilted over the sea, a man-of-war
in a long arc without a feather’s stir. […]

I’d say she deserves further investigation.

I was never a great fan of Shapiro‎’s, but today I ran across a wonderful couplet from his poem “Hospital”:

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews
And actresses whose legs were always news.

For that, I’ll forgive a substantial quantity of polemical ranting.

Incidentally, I ran across it in the epigraph to this novel; I haven’t read Epstein, but I have to like anybody who had the wit to pick up that phrase, which makes for an unforgettable title.

Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufry [July 13] comes this glossary of blogging terms in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Galician, and German; Jez solicits your suggestions for additions and improvements. On the French front, La grande rousse not only links to Lexicoblogue, she has her own extensive (and, of course, fastidiously selected) list (en français, bien entendu). And speaking of French, this Globe and Mail story suggests the French are turning to Quebec for internet terminology, which should please La rousse (to be distinguished from Larousse):

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Incoming Signals links to a BBC story hyping a medieval recipe for what is alleged to be lasagna. There are a number of interesting things about the recipe, but before we get to that, a couple of reflections on the story, a typical heavy-breathing and -handed example of silly-season journalism. Here’s the start:

Britain lays claim to lasagne

Italy may be a land of lazy lunches and sun-kissed siestas, but challenge its reputation for home-grown cuisine at your peril.

With the Battle of Parma Ham not two months over the nation is facing an even more audacious claim.
Lasagne is British.
It’s so British the court of Richard II was making it in the 14th Century and most likely serving it up to ravenous knights in oak-panelled banqueting halls.
The claim has been made by researchers studying a medieval cookbook, The Forme of Cury, in the British Museum.
A spokesman for the Berkeley Castle medieval festival, with whom the experts were working, said: “I defy anyone to disprove it because it appeared in the first cookery book ever written.”…
The recipe book does not mention meat – a staple of a good lasagne.
And such an early use of tomatoes in food would have had medieval cooks spluttering into their espressos.
But it does describe making a base of pasta and laying cheese over the top.
It calls this “loseyns”, which is apparently pronounced “lasan”, although it fails to mention whether it should be followed with a sweet tiramasu and a glass of Amaretto.

First off, it’s interesting that the Brits say (or rather write) “lasagne” where we Yanks have “lasagna”; anybody know the history behind the divergence? (Yes, I know one is singular and the other plural in Italian, but both sides of the Atlantic use the plural “spaghetti,” to take a parallel example.) And what’s the Canadian usage? Second, I think Apicius would have something to say about the absurd “first cookery book ever written” claim. And finally, the only reason to mention meat and tomatoes (not present in the recipe) is to hype the “lasagna” story (which seems to be based mainly on the chance resemblance of the word to “loseyn”).

Having disposed of the BBC, let’s get to the recipe. Incoming Signals kindly adds a link to a facsimile of the recipe itself, with which you can compare the Project Gutenberg version (the entire book; search on “loseyns” and note that the superscript p, q, r, s in the facsimile are footnotes from the 1780 printing, not medieval abbreviations):

Loseyns. XX II. IX.

Take gode broth and do in an erthen pot, take flour of payndemayn and
make therof past with water. and make therof thynne foyles as paper
with a roller, drye it harde and seeth it in broth take Chese ruayn
grated and lay it in disshes with powdour douce. and lay theron
loseyns isode as hoole as thou mizt. and above powdour and chese,
and so twyse or thryse, & serue it forth.

A little glossary: do ‘put’; payn-demayn ‘good white bread’ [AF. pain demeine, med.L. panis dominicus ‘lord’s bread’]; foyles ‘leaves’ (ie, of the paste/pasta); seethe ‘boil’; chese ruayn ‘Rouen (?) cheese’ (the OED is no help on “ruayn,” but this site says “Autumn cheese, made after the cattle had fed on the second growth. This was apparently a semi-soft cheese, but not as soft as a ripe modern Brie… It appears to be the same cheese that in France today is called fromage de gaing”); i-sode ‘boiled’ (past participle of “seethe,” replaced by “sodden”); hoole ‘whole, intact’; mizt ‘mightest’ (the z is clearly a misunderstanding of the medieval yogh symbol, but the lack of the second-person ending surprises me—perhaps a superscript symbol was left out of the printed version?). You notice I’ve omitted the word “loseyns,” which is the crux of the matter. What was a loseyn? The OED has it s.v. “lozen,” under definition 1: “Cookery. ? A thin cake of pastry. Obs.” The only citations are:

?c1390 Form of Cury (1780) 21 Take obleys oþer wafrous [wafrons] in stede of lozeyns and cowche in dysshes.
c1390 Form of Cury (1780) 46, 61, 62.
c1420 Liber Cocorum (1862) 40 Lay þer in Þy loseyns abofe þe chese with wynne..Þose loysyns er harde to make in fay.

(That last sentence is remarkably modern-sounding, once you realize fay = faith: “Damn, those lozens are hard to make!”) I can’t say the definition impresses me; “thin cake of pastry” simply doesn’t match the recipe. “Layered dish of pasta and cheese” is more like it. And I don’t think it’s necessarily the same word as the later “losan, losen, lozen” meaning ‘lozenge’ with which they lump it.

So what about the book itself, The Form of Cury? No, that’s not an amazingly early “curry”: cury is an old work for ‘cooking’ or ‘cooked food’ [OF. queuerie ‘cookery, kitchen,’ f. keu, queu, coeu: L. coquus, cocus ‘cook’]. And the whole thing is online in facsimile as well as the Gutenberg transcription. Lovers of medieval cooking as well as Middle English should rejoice.

Addendum. UJG has done some excellent etymological spadework on “lasagna”:

lasagna sf. [da un lat. volg. lasania, da làsanium, marmitta] larghi nastri di pasta sfoglia: un piatto di lasagne al forno || accr. || N. fettucina, nastrino, pappardella, tagliatella, macheroni, vermicelli.

[Fernando Palazzi. 1939 [1979]. Novissimo Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, p. 742]

4917. *lasania “eine Art Nudeln” (zu lasanum “Kochgeschirr”)

It. lasagna (> südfrz. lazanho, sp. lasaña) “Krapfen”. — Ablt.: tosk. lasagnolu, comel. laðané, ðalané “Nudelholz” Merlo, MIL 23, 287. Trotz südfrz. lausan nicht zu lausia 4946 oder zu einem ohnehin nicht annehmbaren *LAVA “Stein” Nigra, AGl. 14, 287.

[W. Meyer-Lübke. 1935. Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch]

[June 2020: Added the above quotes from UJG while updating the link to the post.]

The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics. The lead article in today’s science section is “Early Voices: The Leap to Language,” by Nicholas Wade, a long, long attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language based on misunderstood scraps of interviews and floating ideas. I just can’t bring myself to go into full deconstructive mode (for that, try here and here), so I’ll just offer a supercondensed version of the article:

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The Discouraging Word carries out lexicographical investigations of those three words (surely linked here for the first time) with its usual vigor and enthusiasm; scroll down to the relevant headings. (TDW is a proudly nineteenth-century blog: impeccable style, no permalinks.) Readers with ornitho-etymological ambitions can try answering the question there posed (s.v. “owly” [Thursday, July 10, 2003]): how did owls come to be associated with grumpiness?

I myself have a question about the movie-industry use of “vigorish” exemplified in this quote:

The companies are not in any way stealing from the picture-makers. They have to have built-in vigorishes—or else they’d go broke. Who pays for the 21 million dollars lost on The Sorcerer? The Studio!

This does not seem to fit under either of the dictionary definitions, ‘percentage taken by a bookie or the house on a bet’ or ‘interest, especially excessive interest, paid to a moneylender.’ Anybody have information on the movie definition and how it developed?

(You can leave suggestions here, since TDW has no comment function either. Please don’t anybody tell them Queen Victoria has passed on, at least not without hiding the laudanum first.)

Addendum. TDW also discusses the word “natch,” for which (in the Scots sense ‘incision, notch’) Anatoly supplies a delightful Burns quote in the comments.

Avva has linked a site with three poems by Wislawa Szymborska, the first two with the Polish original accompanied by a translation into English and several into Russian, the last only in Polish and Russian. It’s a good opportunity to at least get a sense of what the originals are like, and of course if you know Russian it’s a feast of multiple translations.

Here’s a sample—Polish (without diacritics) and English—from Avva’s entry:

Dwie malpy Bruegla

Tak wyglada moj wielki maturalny sen:
siedza w oknie dwie malpy przykute lancuchem,
za oknem fruwa niebo
i kapie sie morze.
Zdaje z historii ludzi.
Jakam sie i brne.
Malpa wpatrzona we mnie, ironicznie slucha,
druga niby to drzemie —
a kiedy po pytaniu nastaje milczenie,
podpowiada mi
cichym brzakaniem lancucha.

TWO MONKEYS BY BRUEGHEL

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing —
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.

Translation by Magnus Y. Krynski, Robert A. Maguire

I’ve finally gotten around to the June 5 issue of the LRB, and in a Paul Laity review of a biography of George Steer, a war correspondent of the 1930s, found an excellent story about Evelyn Waugh. Steer and Waugh were both in Ethiopia for the Italian invasion of 1935; Steer, like most journalists, was against the Italians, while Waugh (predictably enough) took the imperialist side. Laity says:

But then Waugh was a hopelessly unsuccessful reporter. (He did send one significant cable to the Mail, informing the editor that the Italian minister in Addis was withdrawing his staff—a sign that the invasion was imminent. To keep the story from competitive colleagues, however, he sent it in Latin, and a puzzled subeditor in London was still trying to work out what it meant when the fighting began.)

Had he been working for the Times, of course, he wouldn’t have had this problem, but Steer had beaten him out for that job.

Addendum. I should add, for curious non-Latinists, that the title of this entry is line 850 of Seneca’s Oedipus (spoken by the impatient eponymous king, who is about to learn distressing facts about his ancestry) and means ‘Why do you look for words? Truth hates delay’; the latter hemistich is used by Denis Dutton as the motto of his Arts & Letters Daily.

A fascinating MetaFilter thread (started by the ever-inquiring y2karl) on the theories of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. Lots of good links and food for thought.

Tom at digenis.org has an entry (scroll down to “The Soul of Kazakhstan”) quoting the cover story, “The Soul of Kazakhstan,” from the May/June 2003 issue of Saudi Aramco World. The article is apparently excerpted from a picture book of the same name, with essays by Alma Kunanbay and photos by Wayne Eastep (a selection of the latter can be seen at the book’s website); it includes many facets of Kazakh life, but what interests us here is the material on the Kazakh “art of the word.” To quote Tom:

Kunanbay also mentions the Kazakh belief that words can hold a special, magical power. In the Kazakh language and culture there is a concept called ‘art of the word’ which refers to ‘clever, flowery speech loaded with metaphors, proverbs, and allegory.’

The zenith of this belief is the aytis, a musical-poetic duel between two epic singers (called akin) before a large, knowledgeable audience. Kunanbay says:

The language forms in an aytis are so complex, and the nuances and associations so arcane, that a meaningful translation to another language is virtually impossible. There is a tremendous variety of aytis within Kazakh poetic culture: qiz ben zhigit aytisi, for example, is a verbal duel between a girl and a boy; din aytisi is a verbal duel about religion; zhumbaq aytisi, a verbal duel with riddles; aqindar aytisi, a verbal duel between bards; and so on.

Sounds like it would fit right into the Rothenbergs’ Symposium of the Whole, and I’d like to know more about it. [Mistaken hypothesis deleted thanks to a comment by Dctr.]

Outside of poetic duels, it appears Kazakh, like the other Central Asian languages, is not faring well in the media; see this article by Aleksandr Khamagayev; the issue of Media Insight Central Asia to which the article is an introduction can be accessed via the Cimera publications site—just click on Media Insight Central Asia under Publications at the left, then Archive MICA 2002 (English version), then MICA Nr. 27 / August 2002. If there’s a more direct way, avoiding the damn frames, I don’t know it.