Archives for September 2019

A decade ago I quoted Leah Price on shorthand; now Prospect’s Sameer Rahim interviews her about her new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books:

Sameer Rahim: Towards the end of the book, you quote Marshall McLuhan writing in 1966, who listed books as an example of outdated antiques. People have been declaring the end of the book for a while, haven’t they?

Leah Price: When people talk about the death of the book, they’re often talking about two quite different things. One is the death of a particular kind of object that looks and feels and smells a certain way. And the other is a set of practices or activities, which that object has sometimes prompted. You might think of that as the difference between form and function. Personally, I’m not concerned about the survival of the object; I am very concerned about the survival of those human practices or activities.

SR: There’s this myth of an ideal reader, isn’t there?

LP: In the digital age we think of someone reading a printed book curled up in bed or sprawled under a tree, reading for pleasure, probably some classic work of imaginative literature. But for most of the history of printed books, that kind of reading has been distinctly in the minority. If you asked people in Britain or in the US a generation ago what book they had in their house, the most common answers would have been a Bible and a telephone book. So when we blame the absence of printed books for the distraction and the impatience and superficiality of the digital world, it’s unfair. We’re comparing an ideal scenario of print reading with a more realistic assessment of digital reading. We kid ourselves if we think that the presence of printed books would magically make us more attentive and more focused.
[…]

SR: With the rise of audiobooks there’s been a debate over whether listening to a book means you have really read it. Again, though, when literacy rates were much lower, it would have been quite normal for people to listen to books being read aloud.

LP: It could also be a mark of status. If you were an aristocrat whose servant stood behind the chair and read aloud to you while you were having your hair powdered, this would be a form of conspicuous consumption. Although, it could also take the form of a group of semi-literate working-class men having the newspaper read aloud to them in the pub. The resurgence of reading aloud can be explained in large part by the problem of finding time in stolen moments. Since the early 19th century, the commute has been one of the great moments of reading. The great age of the newspaper in the 19th century is also the great age of the railroad. And you can see the audiobook is filling the space occupied earlier by the newspaper on the train.

There’s lots more interesting stuff, about writing in books and the closure of libraries among other things. (I have to say I’m astonished that anyone would question whether listening to a book means you have really read it, but we live in contentious times.) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Dan Nosowitz of Atlas Obscura has been frequently featured at LH, and so has the Scots language, but now I have a chance to offer you Nosowitz’s How the English Failed to Stamp Out the Scots Language, a nice little introduction to the subject:

Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically. It was less a kingdom than an area encompassing several different kingdoms, each of which would have thought itself sovereign—the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, even some Norsemen. In the northern reaches, including the island chains of the Orkneys and the Shetlands, a version of Norwegian was spoken. In the west, it was a Gaelic language, related to Irish Gaelic. In the southwest, the people spoke a Brythonic language, in the same family as Welsh. The northeasterners spoke Pictish, which is one of the great mysterious extinct languages of Europe; nobody really knows anything about what it was.

The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland. Scotland and England always had a pretty firm border, with some forbidding hills and land separating the two parts of the island. But the Anglians came through, and as they had in England, began to spread a version of their own Germanic language throughout southern Scotland.

There was no differentiation between the language spoken in Scotland and England at the time; the Scots called their language “Inglis” for almost a thousand years. But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England. […] Norman French began to change English in England, altering spellings and pronunciations and tenses. But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. […]

Over the next few centuries, Scots, which was the language of the southern Scottish people, began to creep north while Scottish Gaelic, the language of the north, retreated. By about 1500, Scots was the lingua franca of Scotland. The king spoke Scots. Records were kept in Scots. Some other languages remained, but Scots was by far the most important. […]

At this point it’s probably worth talking about what Scots is, and not just how it got here. Scots is a Germanic language, closely related to English but not really mutually comprehensible. There are several mutually comprehensible dialects of Scots, the same way there are mutually comprehensible dialects of English. Sometimes people will identify as speaking one of those Scots dialects—Doric, Ulster, Shetlandic. Listening to Scots spoken, as a native English speaker, you almost feel like you can get it for a sentence or two, and then you’ll have no idea what’s being said for another few sentences, and then you’ll sort of understand part of it again. Written, it’s a bit easier, as the sentence structure is broadly similar and much of the vocabulary is shared, if usually altered in spelling. The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Danish.

There’s a lot more at the link, including a discussion of how Scots got (perhaps inadvertently) suppressed (“The English didn’t police the way the Scottish people spoke; they simply allowed English to be seen as the language of prestige, and offered to help anyone who wanted to better themselves learn how to speak this prestigious, superior language”). Thanks, jack!

Jonathan Morse posts about an amusing linguistic discovery:

This Yiddish-language recruiting poster for a settlement in the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Region translates in part as, “Come to us in קאָלװירט.” But what might that last word, kolvirt, mean? The other day my own Yiddish wasn’t good enough to help, and I couldn’t find the word in any Yiddish dictionary.

A machine translation rendered it as “Calvary,” but eventually he ran across the Wiktionary article, which translated it “kolkhoz (farming collective)” and explained that it’s short for “Contraction of קאָלעקטיווער ווירטשאַפט‎ (kolektiver virtshaft, ‘collective economy’).” Whoda thunkit!

A cheering Science News report:

A strong ability in languages may help reduce the risk of developing dementia, says a new University of Waterloo study. The research, led by Suzanne Tyas, a public health professor at Waterloo, examined the health outcomes of 325 Roman Catholic nuns who were members of the Sisters of Notre Dame in the United States. The data was drawn from a larger, internationally recognized study examining the Sisters, known as the Nun Study. The researchers found that six per cent of the nuns who spoke four or more languages developed dementia, compared to 31 per cent of those who only spoke one. However, knowing two or three languages did not significantly reduce the risk in this study, which differs from some previous research.

“The Nun Study is unique: It is a natural experiment, with very different lives in childhood and adolescence before entering the convent, contrasted with very similar adult lives in the convent,” said Tyas. “This gives us the ability to look at early-life factors on health later in life without worrying about all the other factors, such as socioeconomic status and genetics, which usually vary from person to person during adulthood and can weaken other studies.” Tyas added, “Language is a complex ability of the human brain, and switching between different languages takes cognitive flexibility. So it makes sense that the extra mental exercise multilinguals would get from speaking four or more languages might help their brains be in better shape than monolinguals.” […]

“This study shows that while multilingualism may be important, we should also be looking further into other examples of linguistic ability,” said Tyas. “In addition, we need to know more about multilingualism and what aspects are important — such as the age when a language is first learned, how often each language is spoken, and how similar or different these languages are. This knowledge can guide strategies to promote multilingualism and other linguistic training to reduce the risk of developing dementia.”

An apple a day and a language a year, that’s the ticket. (Thanks, Pat!)

This is one of those posts that will not be of wide interest, but having put so much time and effort into understanding a few words, I feel compelled to publish my results, and since those few words are found in The Brothers Karamazov, I figure someone might benefit. So: at the end of Part One (Book Three, Chapter 11), Alyosha offers up a prayer that includes the words “У Тебя пути: ими же веси путями спаси их.” Most of this is clear: ‘Thine are the ways (or ‘paths’); by them … by the paths save them.’ But that ellipsis represents the word vesi, which I knew only as the plural of the word весь ‘village,’ which made no sense here. And when I checked the old-spelling text, I found it was вѣси (with yat), and I was even more confused.

Eventually I figured out that it was the second-person singular form of the OCS verb вѣсти/вѣдѣти, whose present-tense forms are вѣмь, вѣси, вѣсть, вѣмы, вѣсте, вѣдѧтъ; the preceding ими же [imi zhe] is the instrumental plural form of the old relative pronoun иже, equivalent to modern которыми. So the final clause of the quoted sentence means ‘by the ways that Thou knowest, save them.’ (David Magarshack, alas, misunderstood веси as a form of весь ‘all’ and translated “All the ways are thine.”) I then discovered that the phrasing was found in a number of traditional prayers, e.g. “Единый, Ты Сам точию можеши, аще восхочеши, спасти нас ими же веси путями и судьбами,” and was used in two Leskov novels, Некуда (Nekuda: Господи! ими же веси путями спаси его [Lord! save him by the ways that Thou knowest]) and Соборяне (The Cathedral Folk: Господи, ими же веси путями спаси! [Lord, save (him) by the ways that Thou knowest!]) And now you know as much as I do. (I’m guessing native Russian speakers these days have almost as much trouble as I did with that phrase.)

Update. The Bloggers Karamazov (the official blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society) has published an expanded version of this post.

I’ve already posted a couple of excerpts of rumination on the speech of Englishpersons from Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series (in The Worst There Is and A Dog Snapping at a Gnat), and to those who may have had enough of them I apologize for posting a third and even longer one from Dawn’s Left Hand (which we’re now reading), but I know AJP likes them, so he at least will appreciate this (“Hypo” is H. G. Wells, “Alma” is his wife; the first speaker is Miriam, the autobiographical heroine, whom Hypo jocularly calls Miretta):

‘I want you to repeat something for me.’ She turned to her food as the patient waiter passed on and Alma’s eye, coming round once more, reassured, took another direction; a happy sense of security closed about her, the certainty that neither his adroitness nor Alma’s permanent readiness to create diversions would prevent the launching of her discovery upon its beneficent career.

‘Say, being careful to speak slowly, “Too many irons in the fire.”’

‘Is this a parlour game? You are a dear, Miriam.’

‘It’s the time and the place and the topic, all together. Speak.’

‘There’s nothing in reason I wouldn’t do for you, Miretta, even to saying too many irons in the fire.’

‘Too fast. I wanted to beat time to the convulsions.’

[…]

‘Every one,’ she said, free to speak at ease, ‘excepting most of the people here and their like, suffer, when they say those words, seven separate, face-distorting convulsions.’

[…]

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Back in 2008 I posted about my discovery that Frank Herbert had taken the name of the Fremen language Chakobsa from Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise; it turns out someone named Khalid did an entire webpage on Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”:

In this article, I try to explain in detail where Frank Herbert got his names, concepts, and words from. This article is not meant to be a literary nor an exhaustive topical critique of the novels, which I am cannot fully do, because simply, I did not read the original novels. I have watched and enjoyed the movie and the mini-series, and read summaries of the novels. Instead, this article is a linguistic and etymological study of the major aspects of Dune as they pertain to Middle East, Arabic, and Islam.

It goes from ABA (“Loose robe worn by Fremen women: usually black. The term seems to be a direct derivation from the modern day term: ‘Abaya’ عباية, which has been the Muslim female dress for centuries. The original term عبا or عباء is how it is referred to in the classical Arabic sources”) to ZENSUNNI (“Combination of two concepts, Zen, and Sunni سني, which is the larger sect in Islam (about 90%). In Dune, followers of a schismatic sect that broke away from the teachings of Maometh (the so-called ‘Third Muhammed’) about 1381 B.G.”) and links to both sources and discussions of his article; anyone with the slightest interest in Dune should enjoy it. (See also Will Collins’s The Secret History of Dune, which focuses on links to the Lesley Blanch book.)

Kobi writes that he has known the Hebrew word plonter – פלונטר since he was born:

Morfix, which is a Hebrew – English online dictionary, says it’s (slang) entanglement, knot; (slang) imbroglio.

I find it in the Urban Dictionary but not in the OED (I have v4.0).

Google translate finds it in Russian [Google search].

It isn’t an original Hebrew word for sure. I wonder where it comes from.

Any ideas?

Back in 2011 I posted about Michael Erard’s book on hyperpolyglots, Babel No More, and briefly mentioned Cardinal Mezzofanti; now the Public Domain Review has a post, The Polyglot of Bologna, in which Erard describes his research on Mezzofanti:

Without a doubt, the most important book in English devoted to Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849), the polyglot of Bologna, is The Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti, written by an Irish priest, Charles William Russell, and published in 1858. When I first began research on hyperpolyglots, I knew I was going to have to spend considerable time with Russell’s book, which contains a wealth of information about Mezzofanti, his time, and his language abilities, not to mention other famous language learners. I had discovered the book by chance in the collection of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The only way to get the required time to hunt through its treasures was to get some sort of research funding, I thought. Soon I discovered that the book, because it is in the public domain, had been scanned and republished in hardcopy, and was also available for free online. […]

Russell begins by devoting nearly a quarter of the book to describing a menagerie of polyglot scholars, monarchs, missionaries, explorers, and warriors who knew many languages. […] Part of the chapter discusses infant prodigies and unschooled polyglots, such as the British traveler Tom Coryat (1577-1617), who walked all over Europe and Eastern Mediterranean countries, accumulating Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, and probably a dozen other languages he had no use for at home. He walked two thousand miles in the same pair of shoes, which he hung on the wall at his hometown church as an offering. […]

Over and over, he states that his goal is to assess the claims made for Mezzofanti’s language abilities and to measure, once and for all, the cardinal’s abilities. He resists the urge to recount anecdotes about him (though a few are too good to resist, such as the time that Lord Byron and Mezzofanti had a swearing match; after Byron’s stock was exhausted, Mezzofanti asked, “Is that all?”), opting instead to collate first-hand reports from native speakers who witnessed Mezzofanti using languages. It’s as if Russell wanted to singlehandedly rescue him from the cabinet of curiosities where he had been abandoned by science. (Even though Mezzofanti lived at the height of phrenology in Europe, his skull was apparently never an object of fascination, not while he was alive, anyway.) Russell scours the literature and solicits accounts from Mezzofanti’s contemporaries. Collecting them, he concludes that Mezzofanti spoke 72 languages to varying degrees.

Russell’s biography is also important as a counterpoint to three shorter, sharper papers delivered by Thomas Watts, who was said to know 50 languages himself, before London’s Philological Society in 1852, 1854, and 1860. His 1852 paper was the first time various accounts of Mezzofanti had been collected in English, the earliest from 1806. Over the next decade or so, Russell and Watts wrote about the other’s work with alternating praise and exasperation. While Russell’s biography “is not a blind and unreasoning admiration,” Watts writes, it “may still be suspected of being drawn with too courtly a pencil.” He then proceeds to take Russell to task for over-counting Mezzofanti’s languages, which he puts at “60 or 61.” Later Russell agreed with that figure, if one subtracted languages in which Mezzofanti had only a basic knowledge of the grammar and some vocabulary. […]

One day after a meeting in the Vatican, Russell heard Mezzofanti converse, “with every appearance of fluency and ease,” in seven languages: Romaic, Greek, German, Hungarian, French, Spanish, and English. Two years later, on another trip, he witnessed Mezzofanti’s performance at the annual gathering of students from all over the world at the Propaganda of the Faith. They got up and recited poems in 42 languages, many of which had apparently been looked at by Mezzofanti. (In the Mezzofanti archives in the Archiginnasio Public Library in Bologna, I found a great number of these poems written in Mezzofanti’s hand.) But the real performance came after, when students gathered around him and engaged him in their languages. Mobbed Mezzofanti spoke this language, then that, Chinese, Peguan, Russian, and others, “hardly ever hesitating, or ever confounding a word or interchanging a construction,” in a “linguistic fusilade.” Russell added, “I cannot, at this distance of time, say what was the exact number of the group which stood around him, nor can I assert that they all spoke different languages; but making every deduction, the number of speakers cannot have been less than ten or twelve; and I do not think that he once hesitated for a sentence or even for a word!”

(I’m not sure what is meant by the distinction between “Romaic” and “Greek”; perhaps the former is the modern language and the latter the ancient?) Obviously we’ll never be able to pin down Mezzofanti’s exact accomplishments, but he was clearly a remarkable man. Thanks, Trevor!

I’ve read the first two books of The Brothers Karamazov (there are twelve, plus an epilogue), and man, is it good! I remembered having been bowled over by it in college, but that was a long time ago; it’s only gotten better with more life experience (not to mention knowledge of Russian culture and literature) under my belt. The first thing I noticed this time around is how funny Dostoevsky can be; the narrator’s preface (“To the reader”) had me laughing already, and the book’s humor ranges from dry innuendo to slapstick (people literally slap each other). The second thing is the immediate impact of Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the family (you could hardly call him a patriarch); he’s one of the great villains of world literature, and his complexity is outlined in the first paragraph (of the novel proper):

Constance Garnett:
[Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov …] was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. […] At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

David Magarshack:
…he was a strange sort of individual, yet one that is met with pretty frequently, the sort of man who is not only worthless and depraved but muddleheaded as well—one of those muddleheaded people who still handle their own little business deals quite skillfully, if nothing else. […] And at the same time he continued all his life to be one of the most muddle-headed and preposterous fellows of our district, I repeat: it was not stupidity, for most of these preposterous fellows are rather clever and cunning, but sheer muddle-headedness, and of a special national kind at that.

Original:
…это был странный тип, довольно часто, однако, встречающийся, именно тип человека не только дрянного и развратного, но вместе с тем и бестолкового, — но из таких, однако, бестолковых, которые умеют отлично обделывать свои имущественные делишки, и только, кажется, одни эти. […] И в то же время он все-таки всю жизнь свою продолжал быть одним из бестолковейших сумасбродов по всему нашему уезду. Повторю еще: тут не глупость; большинство этих сумасбродов довольно умно и хитро, — а именно бестолковость, да еще какая-то особенная, национальная.

Fyodor Pavlovich is a buffoon (one of the chapters is titled Старый шут, ‘The Old Clown’), but lest we think him nothing but a provincial ignoramus, in an early conversation with his son Alexei (Alyosha), he quotes Voltaire (“Il faudrait les inventer”) and the Perrault brothers’ parody of the Aeneid (“J’ai vu l’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse” [I have seen the shade of a coachman who was brushing the shade of a carriage with the shade of a brush]), and he quotes them in French.
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