Archives for October 2008

In yesterday’s post I mentioned reading a story by Oleg Zaionchkovsky (whose name, incidentally, is the Polish equivalent of Russian Zaitsev, both based on cognates meaning ‘hare’); I had no problem with most of the vocabulary, but I stumbled when I got to this sentence: “В дом из них вела дверь, толсто обитая какой-то кирзой” (‘From [the entrance hall] into the house led a door thickly covered with some sort of kirza‘). When I got home, I consulted my dictionaries and discovered that кирза was “kersey.” Ah, to be sure! (thought I)—now what the hell is “kersey”? Well, according to Merriam-Webster, it’s “a: a coarse ribbed woolen cloth for hose and work clothes b: a heavy wool or wool and cotton fabric used especially for uniforms and coats.” OK, that makes sense.

But I couldn’t let it rest there; no, I had to look up кирза in Russian, and it turns out that’s not what it means. Russian Wikipedia says it’s “material made from a multilayer cloth base saturated with special substances. A kind of oilcloth. The surface of kirza is stamped to make it resemble pigskin. Among the people it has received the name ‘the devil’s hide.’ … It goes mainly toward the manufacture of army boots. It is also used to make rubberized drive belts.” The association with army boots is strong, as you can see from the Google image search; there is also Vadim Chekunov’s “Kirza: A story of army life as it is.” This is clearly not a kind of cloth, and the translation as “kersey” is a classic example of lazy lexicography: find an English word in the same semantic field that sounds similar enough to be convincing and stick it in; never mind that not many people know the English word and its meaning is completely different.

The question arises: how should кирза be translated? In this passage, where its exact nature is not especially important, I suppose you could say the door was padded with imitation leather, but if anybody has a suggestion that could replace “kersey” in a bilingual dictionary, please share it. Also, if you’re familiar with the word “kersey,” in what context do you use it?

Since we moved from Peekskill to Massachusetts almost four years ago, I haven’t managed to get back to New York—too long and expensive a journey. But I discovered that a local college to which I am tenuously connected has occasional bus trips leaving at 6:30 AM and getting back around 10:30 at night (almost eight hours on the bus and a little over eight hours in the city) at a very reasonable price, and I grabbed the chance. The bus let us off at Broadway and 53rd, having passed through Columbus Circle, which is completely different than it was when I last saw it. I walked over to MOMA, also completely different, and then to the Donnell Library; having forgotten my December post about its imminent demise, I was shocked to see it empty and abandoned. I walked down Fifth Avenue enjoying the splendid fall sunshine, detoured through Rockefeller Center (where I used to work) and Bryant Park, and had a lively lunch with my old friend the Growling Wolf (during which I don’t think we said a word about baseball, although that is usually one of our main topics; I’m not sure which crash-and-burn was more responsible, the economy’s or our teams’—he’s a Yankees fan, I a Mets fan).

Then I took the Q train to Brighton Beach (being very pleased to hear two women speaking Georgian across the car from me) and walked to my usual Russian bookstore, Санкт-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg). I had a general goal and a specific goal. The general goal was to look through the literature shelves and grab anything I’d been wanting; the specific goal was to find a copy of Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Петрович [Petrovich], the one novel Anatoly recommended when I asked him what recent Russian works were worth reading. They didn’t have any Zaionchkovsky, which disappointed me, but I found a cheap edition of Turgenev’s Записки охотника [A Sportsman’s Sketches], which Nabokov thought his best work, and—this really thrilled me—a beautiful new edition of Ivan Shmelyov‘s Солнце мертвых [‘Sun of the dead,’ his scarifying novel of the vicious Civil War in Crimea] that includes his autobiographical novel Лето Господне [‘Summer of the Lord’] and three stories. I’d been wanting to read Shmelev in full ever since I discovered him via some excerpts in an anthology. So even though I regretted not finding Zaionchkovsky, I walked back down Brighton Beach Avenue reasonably content.

When I walked the block to the beach itself and called my wife (who loves beaches), I saw from the cell phone that I had more time left than I thought and didn’t need to dash back to Manhattan, so I figured I’d walk down to Coney Island Ave. and visit the older, smaller, and shabbier Black Sea Book Store, where I had found some good things in the past. I patiently pored over the shelves and was about to give up when down at the bottom I caught the name Олег Зайончковский (Oleg Zaionchkovsky). It was a 2007 Собрание сочинений [Collected works], and when I opened it I found it had not only Petrovich but his earlier collection Sergeev i gorodok [‘Sergeev and the town’], as well as some more recent stories. This made me very happy indeed; I went back to Manhattan, had a terrible gyro from a street vendor, and on the long ride home read stories by Zaionchkovsky and Turgenev, both involving izbas and both excellent reads.

Mara Goldwyn sent me a link to the new Babbel Blog, of which she’s co-editor. She says, “We focus on issues of language, education and technology,” and there’s some interesting stuff up; I was particularly taken with “Trying to get them to use modal verbs while they’re being chased by a bear”, an interview with Todd Bryant, who teaches German using the online game World of Warcraft:

I don’t think you can teach German entirely within World of Warcraft. But as an additional hour in the evening, whenever they would otherwise be watching a film or TV in German, I think it’s certainly better than those kinds of activities, because they have to produce language as well as just receive it; they need to speak and they need to write and if they don’t understand something, that affects their gameplay. So they really need to concentrate on the language they are exposed to.

I thought it was really good for them. They were exhausted at the end of an hour – concentrating that long in German after only six weeks of German! And they were really, really, tired, but also very motivated.

Incidentally, to whoever sent me the copy of Danske stednavne med udtaleangivelse [Danish place names with pronunciations], by Kristian Hald: thank you very much! Danish pronunciation is very hard to figure out from the spelling; I’m not surprised, for example, that Vrads Sande is /vras sanǝ/, but I wouldn’t have been able to guess it.

Victor Mair at Language Log has posted about a new dictionary that ups the ante in the East Asian contest “to see who can produce a dictionary with the most entries”:

The Koreans at Dankook University have just pulled off the amazing feat of compiling a dictionary that has outstripped anything yet generated by the Japanese or the Chinese themselves. After 30 years of labor and investing more than 31,000,000,000 KRW (equal to more than 25 million USD), the South Koreans have just published the Chinese-Korean Unabridged Dictionary in 16 volumes. This humongous lexicon contains nearly half a million entries composed of 55,000 different characters.

Which is interesting in itself, but I’m linking to the entry for Victor’s discussion of why “there will never be an end to the compilation of ever larger single character dictionaries, since the Chinese writing system is essentially open-ended” and why it’s pointless to try to accumulate as many characters as possible: “most of the characters in these mega-dictionaries can only be attested as having occurred once in history, and that often in lexicons of obscure characters!” There’s a very interesting graph of “number of characters” versus “rate of coverage” that shows that 6,600 characters cover 99.999% of what’s found in actual text, which means a massive compilation like the Zhonghua zihai 中華字海, with over 85,500 different characters, is an exercise in overkill.

We all know about “the three R’s”: readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic. I always assumed it was an old wheeze making fun of people who couldn’t spell, but it seems it was started by an English politician who actually couldn’t spell, or at least wasn’t thinking about spelling when he said it; in this Wordorigins.org thread about the expression, Dr. Techie quoted the OED as saying “The phrase is said to have originated in a toast proposed c1807 by the English banker and politician Sir William Curtis (1752-1829)” and gave this citation as evidence:

1825 Mirror of Lit. 29 Jan. 75/1 It has been very much the fashion amongst a class of persons to attribute to Sir W. C. certain bulls… He is charged with having given, at public dinners, the following toasts:—‘The British tars of Old England’. ‘A speedy peace, and soon.’.. ‘The three R’s—Reading, Writing, and Rithmetic’.

As I said in response:

Interesting: if that’s true, it didn’t originate as a conscious joke but as a “bull” (i.e., “an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker”). Just as Sir William didn’t notice that “soon” didn’t add anything to “speedy,” he didn’t notice that two of the three “Rs” didn’t actually start with the letter r.

I just discovered a very interesting etymology that has apparently been developed only recently. The OED says the origin of calypso (the name of an Afro-Caribbean style of satirical song) is unknown; Webster’s Third New International (1961) says “probably after Calypso, island nymph.” But Richard Allsopp’s superb Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (1996) has the following etymology:

[ < Efik ka isu ‘go on!’, also KID Ibibio kaa iso ‘continue, go on’, a common phrase used in urging sb on or in backing a contestant. The Efik-Ibibio being the established middlemen in the slave trade (ex at Calabar) the slaves of other ethnic groups would have brought this item (as they did BAKRA) to the CarA as part of the private vocabulary of slave life. In the context of CarA plantation-life, crowds backed creole teasing-songs against MASSA shouting ‘Ka iso!’ wh gradually lost its original meaning. Kaiso is still the regular ECar folk name, not calypso. The phonological development /ka-iso > kariso > kaliso/ is attested by KARISO (Dmca, etc), KARUSO (USVI), and KALISO (StLu) this last recognized as ‘another form ‘Calisseaux’ … in use at the same time as ‘Carisseaux’ ‘ —(Espinet & Pitts, Land of the Calypso, 1944, p. 47). The development > calypso is through corruption (through folk etym) by English writers in the 1930s, influenced by the name (Calypso) of the amorous island nymph of Greek mythology, plus an anglicized shift in pitch pattern /1’12/ > /1’21/]

Most of the abbreviations should be self-explanatory, but CarA is “Caribbean area” and KID in the first line is Elaine Kaufman’s Ibibio Dictionary (Leiden, 1985). The key to the etymology is the recognition that the original form is kaiso; I love the fact that the transmogrification to the highfalutin “calypso” is called, quite properly, folk etymology—the ignorant “folk” aren’t always poor and unlettered! And the careful discussion of how the African form would have reached the Caribbean and been preserved should be a model for such things (there are far too many silly African pseudo-etymologies floating around out there).

The entry in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate says “Trinidad English, alteration of kaiso, perhaps ultimately of Afr origin”; the caution is probably appropriate for a general-usage dictionary, but personally, I’m provisionally convinced by the Efik-Ibibio etymology.

Francis Deblauwe of Word Face-Off (“Comparing the evolution in internet-popularity of words and phrases”) has had the excellent idea of comparing the popularity of multilingual synonyms in multilingual countries in this post, “Library vs. Bibliothèque vs. Bibliotheek vs. Bibliothek in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland.” A sample finding:

In Canada, approximately 75% of the population speaks English and 25% French. When doing a Google Insights for Search test for the same word in both languages, limited geographically to internet users from Canada, one would expect to see proportional Google-popularity. For instance, we would expect to find library and bibliothèque in a 75%/25% proportion. Instead, the actual overall proportion (2004-present) was 94%/6%. Odd! However, the second test with bookstore/bookshop and librairie came out with a perfect 75%/25% split. I would guess that this inconsistency might have something to do with a too limited data set for Google searches in Canada, rather than a cultural distinction…

The graphs for Belgium and Switzerland are also interesting.

Unbelievably, wood s lot is eight years old and still going as strong as ever. Back in October 2000, Mark Woods was linking a Ted Honderich article (“This new piece begins with a defence of determinism against those hopeful persons who think it has been refuted by Quantum Theory”), “A touching story from Lingua Franca’s archives: Death Of An Altruist Was The Man Who Found The Selfless Gene Too Good For This World? by James Schwartz,” “Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier says computers are too dumb to take over the world, by Damien Cave,” TheWatcher Website (“Millennium Apocalypse Updates Conspiracy & End Time Prophecy: bringing you all you could ever need to know about The New World Order, The One World Religion, Masons, British Israelites, Rosicrucians, Pokemon Mind Control, The Southern Baptist Convention and other dire portents”), stuff on Owen Barfield, Pierre Trudeau, Derrida, Haruki Murikami, internet radio, love and the brain, Orwell, and much more. Today he’s celebrating Elizabeth Bishop, linking to Greenscapes, further memorializing Hayden Carruth, focusing on the “train wreck of investment vehicles” and related politico-economic phenomenal, and much more, including the usual gorgeous selection of photographs (lately often including his own, which are excellent). I know of no one on the internet with a wider range of interests or better taste, and I with my measly one post a day stand in awe of his unceasing flow of links, quotes, and images. All I can say is: keep it up!

Anatoly, in this post, mentions facts about the history of French and Russian pronunciation I didn’t know; I’ll translate:

Ricard in “History of the French Language” [I don’t know what author or book is referred to here —LH] mentions that in the 17th century words like table, coffre were usually pronounced without the final [l] and [r], but in the 18th century, under the influence of the orthography, these sounds returned.
It’s curious that this recalls a situation in the Russian language, where in the first half of the 19th century корабль, рубль [korabl’, rubl’] still had the standard pronunciation /korap’/, /rup’/, but then under the influence of orthography (and also of declined forms, I think) soft l returned, and the old standard forms were kept only in popular speech and dialects.

He finishes by wondering if similar developments could be found in English; it seems to me I should be able to come up with some, but I’m feeling woolly-brained, so I’ll just toss the question into the waiting crowd.

Having returned to my reading of War and Peace in Russian, I was looking up a dance teacher mentioned in the text named Petr Iogel (for some reason called “Vogel” in my Dunnigan translation, and I wish I knew what kind of name Iogel was) when I stumbled upon a fascinating essay by historian E. Tsimbaeva called Historical Context in a Literary Work: (Gentry Society in War and Peace) (from that link you can get to a pdf and an html file; it’s a translation of Исторический контекст в художественном образе, from Voprosy literatury, 2004). Tsimbaeva focuses on aspects of Tolstoy’s novel that contradict what she as a historian knows of early nineteenth-century Russian life. She presumes that Tolstoy was aware of his distortions, and occasionally speculates about why he made the changes, but the mere contrast between fact and fiction is sufficient to hold my attention. [Note: Anatoly in the comments links to a thread (in Russian) with fairly devastating rebuttals by therese_phil and taki_net; I had been assuming the airily sweeping tone of Tsimbaeva’s article reflected a confident command of the facts, but apparently it’s more a matter of superficiality. I’ll add corrections in brackets as needed.]

She starts with a description of the various ways in which the opening scene, at the salon of Anna Pavlovna Scherer, a maid of honor to the Dowager Empress, is impossible: maids of honor did not hold salons [not true: see taki_net’s comment, citing Shepelev’s Титулы, мундиры, ордена в Российской империи (Наука, 1991) to the effect that many maids of honor left the court for long periods, got married, and had normal social lives]; they were never married [not true: see above], and “single men and women could not meet informally in a masterless house”; and “no high-society event such as the one that Scherer’s guests take their leave to attend could have been held in the July of any year during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The St. Petersburg season ended in June, when the court transferred to Tsarskoe Selo.” But what I want to highlight here is a section focusing on the presence of French in the novel (a phenomenon I discussed in this post). This comes up in her discussion of the various improbabilities in the Kuragin family, including their very odd names; Ippolit, or Hippolyte, “was Polish, Little Russian, or associated with the social miscellany that constituted the raznochintsy. It could be attached to a minor bureaucrat who never rose above the tenth rank due to his non-noble birth and poor education” but was impossible for a princely family. [Not true; therese_phil points out that it was unusual and had a foreign ring but was not at all unknown in noble families, citing many examples.] She continues:

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