Archives for February 2007

John Emerson has alerted me to the existence of Katerina Potapova, who at My Polyglot Dictionary says “During my study of the Mongolian language I’ve noticed that a lot of words in Mongolian and in my mother tongue – Yakut (a Turkic language in Eastern Siberia) – are of the same origin. And now I’ve decided to make a list of them.” Now, that’s my kind of project! There aren’t many words yet, but you can see them in Yakut (саха тыла), Classical Mongolian in its beautiful original script (UM) and in transliteration, and Khalkha Mongolian, with Russian, German, and English translations. The page has a bibliography and a set of links, and she also has an Online library with materials on Yakut (Sakha) language (Сахалыы-нууччалыы онлайн-библиотека) with links to materials in Russian and Yakut and audio for Pronunciation guide, Yakut proverbs, and Music sample. Good work, Katerina!

The American Language Reprint series reprints historical vocabularies of Native American languages; starting with “A Vocabulary of the Nanticoke Dialect” in 1996, they’ve added at least thirty more, and now they’ve put a searchable database online: you can search for words, phrases, and letter sequences; create your own linguistic atlas by plotting native terms on any of seven topographical maps, and build custom dictionaries. Thanks for the link, tellurian!

Trying to find information on a town in northern Greece, between Kilkis and Thessaloniki, called Strezovo in Slavic and apparently Argiroupolis in Greek (it’s not on my most detailed map of Greece, and there are several other towns of that name, including a fairly well known one in Crete, so it’s a frustrating thing to google), I happened on an apparent Wikipedia entry in a language I couldn’t recognize at all. I went to the home page and found no enlightenment there; I did notice, though, that it wasn’t actually part of Wikipedia (even though the layout is identical): the URL has wikigadugi.org in it. So I googled “gadugi” and found a Wikipedia entry (real this time) explaining that “Ga-du-gi is a term used in the Cherokee language which means ‘working together’ in a community sense.” Cherokee! Damn, and I’m even part Cherokee myself; I’ve really got to work on my Native American language awareness. And there’s a Cherokee Wikipedia out there, with a long article on Gjirokastër of all places! What a wonderful world!
(Needless to say, I will be grateful for any concrete information on Strezovo/Argiroupolis, especially if it helps me locate it on my map.)

I don’t know how many people out there are interested in Ugric (the part of the Finno-Ugric family more closely related to Hungarian), but The Friday Circle, a group blog focused on “Hungarian studies in London” (read about the members here), has a series of posts on it: II, III, IV. (Don’t ask me what happened to Ob-Ugric I is here—thanks, Gwen!) Even if you don’t have a special interest in the languages, you can pick up nuggets like “the word ‘Ural’ itself comes from Mansi: ur (mountain) + ala (roof)” and “Mansi for clitoris translates into Hungarian as picsanyelv, that is, c*nt-tongue.” Also, Dan Abondolo taught me how to make coffee, thirty-odd years ago in New Haven, so he deserves special respect. Check out this lively blog (named, if you’re curious, after the Sunday Circle, “a group of young philosophers, musicians and artists whose weekly meetings provided a forum to discuss questions of ethics and aesthetics, from 1915 to 1919”).

Update (Sept. 2020). Having provided archived links for the long-dead site, I’ve discovered that they kept the series going through Ob-Ugric, XI – Khanty (Tsingala); the Ob-Ugric contents page is here.

I just discovered (by looking down the long list of languages at the left of the Thessaloniki article) that there’s an Old Slavic Wikipedia (the discussion page, in Russian, sternly warns against confusing Old Slavic with “a ghastly blend of languages and personal fantasy”). From there I got to Cтарославянские памятники, a great collection of Old Slavic links; somebody will probably inform me that I already blogged it back in 2003, but I figure if I’ve forgotten it, maybe others have too.
Incidentally, I note the Russian Wikipedia article on Salonica/Thessaloniki, which Russian treats as a plural Салоники (the Greek feminine ending being reinterpreted as plural), uses the endingless genitive Салоник, whereas my 1984 Словарь ударений gives Салоников; what do my Russian-speaking readers prefer?

The site “Birchbark Literacy from Medieval Rus: Contents and Contexts” has put online all the extant birchbark documents unearthed in Novgorod; as they say, this “will constitute a qualitative leap forward in the development of the study of birchbark documents by laying a reliable foundation for the further research into the texts and rendering the material accessible to an international medievalist audience of different backgrounds.” Thanks to Paul, Claire, and John for alerting me to this!

Joel of Far Outliers, who posts excerpts from the books he reads, has an entry on a problem I hadn’t really thought about, the meaning of synonym in a situation where there are many distinct dialects. From his translation of a section in Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vinţeler:

Sever Pop (cf. 1929) used to note that, within the territory of Romania, the following terms can be found to denote the concept of ‘horse trader’: barâşnic, craşcadău, cupeţ, factor, fleşer, geambaş, gheşeftar, ghiambabău, gârgez, făznar, hendler, herghelier, hâmbluitor, liverant, mecler, năstrăpaş, negustor, peţer, pilar, potlogar, precupeţ, precupitor, semsar, sfârnar, sfârnăroiu, şmecher, ţânzar, ţigan, tuşer. No one doubts that all the terms listed denote the same concept. The question that arises is the following: can each and every one of these words be considered synonyms? According to some definitions, still in circulation, all words that express the same notion are considered synonyms. Glancing over the list of words above, we observe that only the word negustor, which is the general term, and to a certain degree the word geambaş, are more widely known and can be considered synonyms; the rest are known only in more or less restricted areas. For the great majority of Romanians, words like barâşnic, gârgez, hendler, mecler, tuşer, and so forth do not mean anything; they are just as unintelligible as any others in a foreign language. Of course, in many places negustor can be a synonym of făznar, and geambaş with herghelier [‘herder’], and so on, but this only happens in certain places and not across the whole territory where Romanian is spoken.
These examples prove once again that for two or more words to be considered synonyms it is not sufficient that they express the same notion. And in cases of regional synonymy, the notion of synonym must be localized and made concrete.

There’s further discussion of words for ‘corn, maize’; the “standard” word porumb (which, oddly, used to mean ‘pigeon, dove’; the latter meaning is now expressed by porumbel) has several widely known equivalents, as well as (in one region) the loan word tenchi (borrowed from Hungarian tengeri, itself a synonym in Hungarian of kukorica, which is presumably from Slavic). It certainly makes sense to consider as synonyms only words that are in competition with each other in the same dialect; I can’t go along with Joel, who doesn’t “have any problem with considering terms in different languages to be synonyms”—that seems to me to stretch the sense of synonym beyond the bounds of usefulness.

1) I’ve recently started reading Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower (thanks, Mel!), and I just got to this on pp. 100-01:

In the meantime, the remedy for janissary violence was often worse than the disease. Unable to rely on the troops supposedly under their command, many pashas kept armed retinues of their own. Mostly they recruited young Albanians from impoverished mountain villages, who brought with them an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life. An Ottoman traveller among them a century earlier had warned others what they might expect in the way of Albanian greetings and salutations. His list included the following useful expressions: “Eat shit!” “I’ll fuck your mother,” “I’ll fuck your wife” and “I’ll fart in your nose.”

As you can see, the author is both learned and a delightful writer (I particularly like “an aggressively uncomplicated approach to life”); I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the history of cities.

2) Carpetblogger has a post called “Thinking About Learning Turkish” which provides the following excellent pair of anecdotes:

It’s hilarious to see the look on Turks’ faces when you tell them you lived in Azerbaijan. Sometimes, they simply cannot contain their amusement at the thought. It’s like telling an American you spent a year learning English in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Last night at a party, an actual Turk confirmed the veracity of a Turkish/Azeri language anecdote I have used as cocktail chatter for years, always prefaced with the caveat that it’s “probably apocryphal.” It’s always satisfying to find out a rumor you spread turns out to be true.

Here goes: The pilot of Turkish Airlines plane full of Azeris announces he is preparing to land the plane. The passengers panic. Why? Because the verb in Azeri for “to land” is the same as “to crash.” I crack up every time I tell this. I’m not sure if it’s funnier or not now that I know it’s true.

I can pinpoint the exact minute that Russian sapped my will to live. Vexed with some horrible twist of grammatical logic, I implored Yelena, my fifty-something, chain-smoking, university-level linguist teacher, to make it make sense to me.

“Carpetblogger,” she said, pushing her huge, round glasses down her nose. “English is for conveying information. Russian,” she said with intense Slavic pride, “is for conveying philosophy.”

(Latter link via Far Outliers.)

Looking up something else in my largest Russian-English dictionary, my eye lit on the entry пиндос [pindós] m obs colloq pindos (term of abuse used by Russians of Greeks). I love ethnic slurs in foreign languages, so of course it caught my attention, and I googled it, wondering if this obsolete term for a Greek would have any sort of online presence. Indeed it did, but only glancingly in relation to Greeks: the first hit, the Russian Wikipedia article, explained that it had originated in southern Russia as an insult for Greeks (where of course there was more opportunity to interact with them) and had been used in that sense by Chekhov, Fazil Iskander, and Konstantin Paustovsky, among others, but that with the passage of time it had lost its ethnic specificity and come to mean ‘any foreigner from the south, especially one seen as physically and morally weak.’ In this sense it passed into military and criminal jargon of the 1950s-’80s (aided by its phonetic resemblance to various Russian swear words), and by the time of the Kosovo crisis of the 1990s it was available to fill a new slot, becoming an insulting term for American soldiers serving abroad, and by now (according to Wikipedia) refers to any American. (There’s a great deal of discussion in the article about the origin of the word, but I don’t see how it makes sense to see it as derived from anything but Pindos [Πίνδος], the name of a Greek mountain range.) This is a fascinating semantic development, reminiscent of the etymology of Tajik: an Arabic term for a member of the tribe of Tayy became first a Persian term for any Arab and then a Turkish term for an Iranian Muslim, winding up as a specific term for the Iranian population of Central Asia (mainly in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). I’d be curious if Russian-speaking readers are familiar with пиндос and if so, in which of its senses?

1) The Scots Language Centre: “It’s yer ain tongue.”

The site contains lots of interesting information about Scots, the language spoken throughout Scotland from Shetland to Galloway and Aberdeen to Glasgow. You can read about the history of Scots and find out about the people that speak it today. Almost everything on the site is available in English too. Just move between the two languages if there are Scots words that you don’t understand.

Thanks, Mike!

2) Languages on Wikipedia presented as an array of circles. (I would have thought Russian would have a larger circle, but I guess that’s because I consult it so often.) This comes courtesy of John Emerson, who has a new post on The Consonantization of America, investigating the changes in American baby names since the 1880s from the point of view of initial consonants, discovering (among other things) a reversal of Grimm’s law: “Goodbye, Frank and Harold and Florence and Harriet; hello, Kevin and Peter and Karen and Pam!”

3) Lexicographer Grant Barrett (blog, word site) told me he’s become a cohost of the radio show A Way With Words, which you can listen to from the linked page. Fun stuff!