Archives for December 2018

Elie Wardini at Qifa Nabki posted back at the start of 2010 about an interesting Lebanese New Year’s greeting:

In Lebanon, and I am told that it is also the case among Christians in Jordan and Syria, we have a traditional new year’s greeting:

we say: bistraynte @layk/ @layke/ @laykon etc.

What this greeting means is that my *bistrayne* (i.e. new year’s gift) is on you, [so] you have to give me the gift.

He says Anis Frayha derives this from Latin strenae, “the gifts that Romans exchanged on January 1st,” and continues:

Frayha’s explanation seems to be acceptable, but what do we do with the initial *b* in *bistrayne*.

One possibility could be to consider *b* as the English *by God*. cp. to Lebanese (considered to be vulgar nowadays) *balla* meaning *by God* so our term becomes *b-strayne* = by Strenae => becomes lexicalized to gift. It istreated as any feminine noun: => bistraynt- in construct state.

The element *ay* may be concieved of as a deminutive. But could also be a diphthongisation of the *e* in *Strenae* (if Frayha’s explanation holds).

Commenters discuss French étrennes ‘New Year gifts,’ which of course derives from the Latin, but as Wardini says, this does not have the -s- and so cannot be the direct source. I’ll be interested in whatever thoughts people have about this, and I thank Steven for the link; in any case, I wish all my readers a happy new year in 2019!

Anatoly Liberman is an etymologist whose style I often find confusing and off-putting, and in this OUPBlog post from last year I have a hard time figuring out what he’s saying. He’s discussing the etymology of hundred, and after his usual rambling introduction he gets to the heart of it:

In the remotest past, hund– must have meant “ten” rather than “hundred”; however, the picture is confusing. In Gothic, a Germanic language recorded in the fourth century, the word hunda (a neuter plural noun) means “a hundred” (like Latin centum). Yet taihun-tehund (read the digraph ai as English short e), either “ten-ten” or “tenth-ten,” depending on how we divide this word (not inconceivably, taihunte-hund), also existed and also meant “a hundred.” In Old English, we find similar words, for instance, hund-seofontig “seventy,” and wonder how hund “ten” and –tig, another word for “ten,” coexisted in one language and in one numeral. There can be only one answer. By the time of our recorded monuments (and Gothic predates the texts in Old English by more than three centuries), at least some of those compounds must have become so opaque (“disguised”) that the tautology was no longer heard. Let us keep in mind that Engl. ten goes back to Old Engl. tēn and further to some form like Gothic taihun. Since Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k, the pair taihun ~ Latin decem is perfect. With regard to ten, whose distant origin does not interest us at this moment, we have no problems.

The natural question arises whether hund– and ten, the alleged synonyms, can be related, and why have two words for “ten”? [Excursus on ablaut omitted.] Fortified with this information, we may look at hund– ~ cent and ten. In Germanic, the zero grade was usually filled by the vowel u. And this is exactly the vowel we find in hund-. Consequently, the initial stage of hund– was hnd– in an unstressed syllable. Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k, just as t corresponds to d (taihun ~ decem). […] Hund– (from hnd-) is a good match for cent(um), except that it has the zero grade, while centum has a so-called full grade. It appears that Indo-European did have two words for “ten.” In Germanic, they were represented by some forms like hnd– and tehn-.

Gothic hunda means ‘hundred.’ Latin centum means ‘hundred.’ Hundred means ‘hundred.’ Where is he getting this “two words for ‘ten’” thing? Can anyone make sense of this?

Last year Dick & Garlick had a couple of posts about what sounds like a delightful dictionary. Dipping into Fallon’s Dictionary begins:

S W Fallon’s A New Hindustani-English Dictionary (1879) is regarded as one of the most remarkable works of Indian lexicography. With its illustrations from folklore, proverbs, songs, and literature, it is a lot more than a mere dictionary: like that other great glossary of the colonial era, Hobson-Jobson, it carves up an entire culture and serves it up in tasty, chewable bits. Fallon took up the language of north India in the late 19th century as his field of study, the common colloquial speech which was then being thrust out of sight in official use as well as literature by an artificial written language of ‘stiff pompous words, strange Arabic sounds which have no meaning for the people, and the dull cold clay of Sanskrit forms’. As Ambarish Satwik writes in his column, to open Fallon is to ‘see the invisible stream that flows all around us, full of things we have left unsaid’:

On its pages is found the sap and wit of the north Indian vernacular: the common stock of allusions that once played in the minds and memories of its speakers and disseminators. Language that is both ordinary and heightened, rank and sweet, and lingers in the mind. To borrow from Kenneth Burke, language that brings out the thisness of that or the thatness of this.

In an article in Dawn, Rauf Parekh writes that Fallon knew the value of field research in lexicography. With the help of his native informants, he recorded the words and idioms used by women, and interviewed ordinary people to understand usage and pronunciation. In an aside, Parekh notes that this led Fallon to use lewd or taboo words ‘and he sort of developed a taste for such expressions’.

Fallon’s lack of prudery and his emphasis on descriptive rather than prescriptive lexicography is what sets him apart from most Hindi/Urdu lexicographers. It also makes his dictionary a great read. Satwik recommends a weekly dip into its pages, which I think is a most excellent idea. So here’s a first dubki into Fallon’s ocean of words […]

I’ll leave you to discover the delights of Ardor urinae at the link; the following week’s post was Dipping into Fallon – 2, where he cites the entry for “خايه/ khā’yā, n. m. 1. Membrum virile. […] 2. Testicles.” Lexicography can be a lot of fun.

This appears to be the season of Leonid Livak for me. I first wrote about him back in 2015 after reading his How It Was Done In Paris: Russian Emigre Literature & French Modernism, a book I still consult with profit and pleasure; last week I got A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and wrote about it here, and now Johns Hopkins University Press has sent me a copy of his In Search of Russian Modernism, which I had the good fortune of copyediting a couple of years ago. It’s rare that I reread books I’ve edited, but this is different: its argument was so original, and the discussion so dense, that I can only really appreciate it now that it’s sunk in a bit (and I’ve learned more about the period). I’ll quote some passages from the introduction so you can see what he’s up to (you can also read the JHU Press Blog newsletter post he wrote about it).

He begins by saying “the disintegration of the Soviet empire brought about the implosion of the established vision of twentieth-century Russian cultural history” and “unleashed a Copernican revolution in the study of Russian modernism,” then adds this personal anecdote:

Although this book had been long in the making, the impetus for writing came as I answered a student’s query about my reasons for excluding Leonid Andreev from a course on fin-de-siècle Russian culture. I reflexively justified the omission by the need to prioritize authors, chosen for a semester-long sprint according to their aesthetic, historical, and typological importance. On second thought, that explanation sounded hollow with respect to Andreev. I had to admit, above all to myself, that my choices had been dictated by the biases I had absorbed, in part, from the partisan canon codified by Russian modernists and later espoused by my own teachers as a counterweight to the official Soviet literary canon, and, partly, from that very Soviet canon whose aversion to the modernist sensibility of Andreev’s mature work had relegated him to the literary-historical periphery.

In general, Livak has a disarming willingness, rare in the touchy world of academics, to call attention to his own errors and biases. And I approve of his refusal to aim for totalizing explanations:

To be sure, my book will not propose a coherent revisionist picture of Russian modernist experience, since no overarching historical narrative is possible or indeed desirable, given the state of Russian modernist studies. Instead, I will interrogate the field’s methodological assumptions, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking Russian modernism. Nor do I intend to refute extant interpretations of modernist experience, for I am more interested in exposing their limitations. I will advocate for many “partial truths,” as Virgil Nemoianu puts it with reference to romantic studies, when he proposes “a framework inside which the truths of other scholars could can coexist,” provided one did not treat “romanticism” as “a fixed quantity [but rather] as a cultural process.”

He also deprecates the tendency of academics to treat past artists condescendingly, as if they could not see what is so obvious to us, pointing out that “the modernist artist was, more often than not, aware of the hyperbole and abstraction inherent in her concept of modernity.” He goes on:

It seems more productive to focus our inquiry on the varied uses, rather than the empirical veracity, of claims to the uniqueness of the historical circumstances informing the sensibility of a modernist cultural community, in Russia or elsewhere. Such a pragmatic approach to modernist self-modeling is justified by the fact that we are dealing here with symbolic behavior – “an intervention in the field of the politics of time” – as Peter Osborne calls modernist self-stylization […]. Debunking the rhetoric or specific tropes of modernist identity – be it disruption, impermanence, chaos, degeneration, or eschatological anxiety – as mythical, because unoriginal from a longue durée historical perspective, is a tautological exercise. This is because such critical deflation has been performed repeatedly by our own modernist research objects, who, nonetheless, imbibed the “hypertrophied historicism” of their culture as a mode of cognition. In contrast, exploring the uses and evolution of the imaginative language informing modernist self-fashioning, one ultimately arrives at a pragmatically functional methodology that offers a descriptive alternative to the definition-centered approach hitherto dominant in Russian modernist studies and grounded in the literal reading of self-legitimating practices among the carriers of the modernist sensibility.

I enjoy his casual swipes at leftist pieties: “In the culture of Russian Marxism – the intelligentsia’s fin-de-siècle offshoot that replaced the fetish of narod with the equally mythical figure of ‘the proletariat’…” And as a lover of maps, I approve of his use of cartography as the book’s “controlling metaphor”:

I cannot but agree, then, with Gabriel Josipovici that there is no “true story of modernism” but rather a multiplicity of stories, none of which can be told as a linear succession of significant events. This is because the significance of an event depends on the thematic filter through which we examine a national modernist culture. No story can do justice to life’s complexity. The description of cultural processes is no exception to this truism. Like cartography, which tells white lies about reality in order to produce usable maps, students of Russian modernism must rely on selection, simplification, enhancement, and other mapping tools in order to tell many complementary, and often contradictory, stories about their object of investigation. Each story, or map, would differ in accordance with the thematic filter generating it, making visible some actors, practices, and events, while obfuscating others, even though all such filters are applied to the same material circumscribed in concrete historical time and geographic space.

This is what I propose to do in my book. After a critical revision, in the first three chapters, of the extant terminology and mental cartography of Russian modernism, I will apply to its newly named and outlined “misty lands” two of the many possible thematic filters – those which appeal the most to my own intellectual curiosity thanks to their potential to yield maps that help us see more clearly in Russian modernist culture.

His main point is that in his framework, the “modernist” marker “does not refer to immutable qualities characterizing authors, ideas, practices, and artifacts”:

Calling an author, a text, a practice, or an idea modernist, I signal its place in Russian and transnational modernist culture at a given historical moment – a place that is most often fleeting, because no idea or practice is exclusive to modernism, and few individuals and artifacts retain their central position in a national modernist community throughout its existence.

He has a brief discussion of Bunin, “whose oeuvre has been read as antithetical to modernism” and who allied himself mostly with anti-modernists:

Yet his first poetic collection, Listopad (1901), was published by the modernist publishing house Skorpion, whose milieu Bunin frequented for a while, and where he was accepted, albeit grudgingly and condescendingly, as a figure from the periphery of modernist culture. And the story repeats itself after Bunin leaves Gorky’s faction, in 1906, becoming a contributor to the modernist journals Pereval, Fakely, and Zolotoe runo. Accepted in modernism’s less factionalist circles, Bunin was rejected as not “pure” enough by the militants at the culture’s core (to wit, the publishing house Sirin). It is no wonder that contemporaries struggled to define Bunin’s mercurial place, now excluding him from modernism, now listing him along with its prominent Russian and foreign representatives. The fact remains, however, that during his long artistic career Bunin experimented with a variety of styles and themes in poetry and prose, shuttling in and out of the modernist community in sync with his changing views and in pursuit of professional advantages.

I was particularly pleased to see that because I’ve been reading Bunin lately and marveling at how modern he seems: he’s often thought of as a follower of Chekhov (who in fact said in 1904 “Soon I will die, but as regards my place in Russian literature, I see a worthy successor in Bunin”), but his stories sound nothing like Chekhov’s and occasionally remind me of Pasternak’s prose, especially Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers], with its focus on nature and its unexpected conjunctions of words, as in Bunin’s story Туман [The fog], where he describes the fog as “тоскливой аспидной мутью, за которой в двух шагах чудился конец света, жуткая пустыня пространства” [like a melancholy slate murk, beyond which the end of the earth seemed two steps away, a terrifying desert of space]. No premodern writer could have written that.

I could go on quoting, but by now you should have a decent idea of what it’s about. If you have any interest in questions like “who was a modernist?” and “is there any real dividing line between symbolism, acmeism, and futurism?” then you’ll want to read this book. My thanks go to Livak for writing it and to Johns Hopkins UP for publishing it (and doing a bang-up job, with no typos I’ve seen and a splendid cover).

This has, technically speaking, nothing to do with language, but it has to do with books, and it’s so beautiful I can’t resist posting it: 40 Hidden Artworks Painted on the Edges of Books.

A fore-edge painting is a technique of painting on the edges of the pages of a book. The artwork can only be seen when the pages are fanned, as seen in the animation below. When the book is closed, you don’t see the image because it is hidden by the gilding (i.e., the gold leaf applied to the edges of the page). According to Encyclopedia Britannica, fore-edge paintings first arose during the European Middle Ages but came to prominence during the mid-17th century to the late 19th century. Anne C. Bromer for the Boston Public Library writes, “Most fore-edge painters working for binding firms did not sign their work, which explains why it is difficult to pinpoint and date the hidden paintings.”

Thanks to the generous gifts from Anne and David Bromer and Albert H. Wiggin, the Boston Public Library holds one of the finest collections of fore-edge paintings in the United States. Most of the collection has been put online for the world to enjoy and features more than 200 high-resolution images; complete with additional videos, articles and information. The University of Iowa and Colossal recently featured a few fore-edge paintings with animated gifs that can also be seen below.

15. The rambler, v.1 1825 by Samuel Johnson (Old Wych Street, London) and 31. Lalla Rookh, 1818 by Thomas Moore (Tyburn Turnpike, London) are particular favorites of mine — I’m a city boy, and I love street scenes.

The Languages & ‘Dialects’ of Europe: Germanic page was linked in a recent thread here at LH, but I thought it should have its own post, since it’s such fun, and educational too:

Our method for measuring the phonetic divergence between any two ‘dialects’ relies strictly on comparing words that are ‘cognate’, i.e. directly related to each other in that they are derived from the same original Germanic word. Our list of words was drawn up specifically to include as many words as possible that are found in Germanic languages and dialects, and without any impact of standardisation. This is true of about 95 of the 110 words in our list.

In the remaining cases where no truly native cognate exists in one or more dialects, we signal this in our database by a superscript ! NC  for Non-Cognate. In some cases we follow with the transcription of the non-cognate word that has the same meaning in that dialect, especially where phonetic similarities might lead users to mistake the non-cognate for a cognate. For the word mouth, for instance, many German dialects use a root that is cognate not with English mouth and German Mund, but instead with German Maul (which is also slang for mouth in standard German).

The word-list — or to be more accurate then, the cognate list — is intended to form a representative sample of the phonetics of the Germanic lexicon. This entails avoiding over-representing in our list particular sounds recurring particular positions. This can be a particular problem with grammatical suffixes, so wherever possible we have recorded the bare root form of words: e.g. imperative forms of verbs rather than infinitives (which would over-represent the sounds /ən/ in the list.

Just click on the words and hear them said by native speakers.

Update. In the comments, Matthew Scarborough points out the successor website to this, adding:

Paul Heggarty and his collaborators have been putting an enormous amount of work into expanding not only the Englishes and Germanic but now has an enormous amount of data and recordings from Romance, Slavic, Celtic, Andean languages, and other projects run by the MPI for the Science of Human History including their extensive fieldwork in Vanuatu.

Too tired to do a proper post, so here are the books I got:

Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

Andrew D. Kaufman, Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times (thanks, ktschwarz!)

Richard Tarrant, Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (thanks, bulbul!)

Curzio Malaparte, The Kremlin Ball

If I’ve forgotten anything, or if a late present arrives, I’ll add it. Meanwhile, I hope everyone had a good day, whether you celebrate the holiday or not!

I don’t seem to have posted about Tocharian, which is a bit surprising because it’s always been one of the Indo-European languages I’ve found most intriguing, for its unexpected location, its equally unexpected developments, and the history of its discovery. Matthew Scarborough has continued his survey of Indo-European etymological dictionaries (overview, Anatolian) with Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries for the Perplexed: Tocharian Languages, and far from being a mere list of a few books, it’s a general introduction to the field, with examples of etymologies, images of book pages, and a nice photo of an actual text. He starts by saying “I am no specialist in Tocharian and I have never studied Tocharian formally,” but he has some strong views which he makes clear, e.g.:

One of the more notable differences in the Dictionary of Tocharian B to most other works the Indo-European side of things is that Adams continues to reconstruct a fourth a-colouring laryngeal *h₄ which left no trace in Anatolian. If you’re familiar with some of Adams’s other work like The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World this oddity of reconstruction will probably not come as a huge surprise. My own hot take on fourth-laryngealism is that if you’re reconstructing a fourth laryngeal, there are a small handful of etymologies that you desperately want to be true, but the evidence is not actually bearing it out, so you reconstruct a whole new phoneme as a last ditch effort to make them work. Needless to say, it gives me the impression of a lower bar of rigour set for the acceptance of any given etymological proposal in general, and so I would tend tread a bit more cautiously with the etymological proposals made here. That said, Adams is in every respect one of the major world authorities on the Tocharian languages and he has also published extensively on Indo-European as well, so one should not be entirely dismissive of his proposals either.

So I was glad to see his post, and I hope you’ll take a moment to investigate this minor member of the I-E family.

I was reading Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece on café culture (subscribers only, I’m afraid) when I was taken aback by a description of Charlie Chaplin’s immigrant character who “tries to put off the arrival of a check he can’t foot simply by ordering more coffee.” I’m very familiar with the expression “to foot the bill,” but for me it’s fixed — you can’t replace “bill” with “check” or anything else. Is this the case for you as well? And does anyone know how the expression originated?

Leo Livak, one of the great scholars of Russian modernism, promised me he’d have University of Wisconsin Press send me a copy of the new book he’s edited, A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg; it’s arrived, and it’s even better than I expected. Fortunately, Livak has posted a summary of the book’s contents, from which I will quote:

The first part treats Petersburg’s rapports with Russian and European intellectual life in Bely’s day. Lynn Patyk elucidates the historical circumstances informing Petersburg’s terrorist intrigue, with an eye on the range of meanings that intrigue had in Bely’s modernist circle and in contemporary Russian society at large. Maria Carlson draws attention to Bely’s fascination with Theosophy and with its offshoot—Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical doctrine, which freshly captivated the writer midway through his work on Petersburg. Bely’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconoclastic thought predated his work on the novel. The formative role in modernist philosophies of art and life of Nietzsche’s intellectual heritage all but assured that Bely would engage with it in Petersburg, as Edith Clowes illustrates. Neo-Kantianism is yet another philosophical current informing the novel. As Timothy Langen explains, it shaped Bely’s thought in the decade preceding his Petersburg project, and it is present there as one of the novel’s competing philosophies. Henri Bergson equipped Bely with polemical tools for a critical reexamination of Nietzscheanism and Neo-Kantianism, whose philosophical virtues, Hilary Fink argues, the writer no longer took for granted during his work on Petersburg. Judith Wermuth-Atkinson shows that Bely’s modernist search for alternatives to the materialist understanding of the world and the human being led the author of Petersburg to heed the new science of psychology, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud. A special place in Petersburg’s imaginative universe is occupied by racial theories, whose narrative manifestations are explored by Henrietta Mondry. Closing the book’s first part, David Bethea demonstrates the centrality of eschatology—speculation about the end of history, framed as the demise and rebirth of the world and humankind—in Petersburg’s narrative and stylistic economy.

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