Archives for May 2023

I found this on Facebook and of course couldn’t resist filling it out; it helps further linguistic science and exposes me to lots of terms I didn’t know about (e.g., topinambour for ‘Jerusalem artichoke’). Warning: it takes quite a while (approximately 200 questions) and is sometimes irritating (it’s not clear why for some you have to check one answer and for others you can choose several). There are some items/actions that are unfamiliar to me (“What do you call the action of drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle?”) and some questions that are controversial, either linguistically (“How do you pronounce ‘forte’”?) or culturally (“What kind of animals does a ‘vegetarian’ eat?”). Of LH note: “samara” was one of the choices for ‘maple key.’ Of course, I’m not sure they’ll even be able to use my responses, because of this question and response:

Do you feel that there are any other features of your dialect or dialect acquisition that need mentioning? If so, write about your dialect acquisition or history here:

My father was from the Ozarks (E Oklahoma, NW Arkansas), my mother from a Norwegian-American community in E Iowa; he went into the foreign service, so I grew up abroad with friends of many nationalities. I moved to the US for college in Los Angeles, went to grad school in New Haven, moved to New York City, and currently live in Western Massachusetts.

Do I even have a dialect? Anyway, if you feel like giving it a go, click the link.

Danny L. Bate (a linguist who did his master’s on the history and development of complementizers and complement clauses in Indo-European) asks What did British Latin sound like?:

The transition from Roman Britain to Medieval Britain is a fascinating historical, archaeological and linguistic puzzle. The fifth, sixth and seventh centuries AD in Britain are like a black box, into which we put a well-integrated region of the Roman Empire, and out of which emerges a patchwork of new kingdoms, cultures and languages. Explaining the workings of this change on the basis of the available evidence is a challenge that continues to keep historians very busy, and keeps me up at night.

One opinion I, as a linguist, hold is that by the end of the official Roman administration of Britain (c. 410 AD), Latin had become a common language of the population of Britain. This is to say, at least in the south of what is now England, Latin had become the majority mother tongue of the population, just as it had on the Continent. I disagree with the alternative view that the Romans brought Latin to Britain and then took it all home with them, leaving the barbarian Britons none the wiser. Elsewhere, Latin would over time produce the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and so on). However, in Britain, popular Latin was not to endure, since the incoming Angles and Saxons would upset the linguistic lie of the land. […]

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Philologos, “the renowned Jewish-language columnist” (as the Mosaic sideline bio calls him), has featured at LH for almost two decades now (back in 2004 his column was at the Forward); his new piece The Wheels of Jewish Language in the New Netflix Show “Rough Diamonds” (archived) makes it sound like a must-see for those of a Hattic bent (though of course you would want to see the original, not the dubbed version):

After Israeli television’s Shtisel [LH] and Netflix’s Unorthodox, we now have, already rising in the rating charts, another Netflix production, Rough Diamonds […], a newly premiered, eight-part Israeli-Belgian co-production set in Antwerp, for centuries a center of diamond trading and polishing in which Jews have always played a major role […].

Rough Diamonds is about decisions, mostly bad ones, and about how, once made, they have irrevocable consequences. Yet one of the pleasures of watching it has to do with decisions that are less consequential and in a way not even decisions, since they are made continually and unconsciously on a daily basis: the choice of which of the four languages spoken by the show’s main characters—Yiddish, Flemish, French, and English—they use with whom. This linguistic interplay, which forms no small part of the show’s intricacy, is unfortunately lost to some American viewers, who, I hear, have to watch Rough Diamonds in a version dubbed in English. (I myself saw it in an Israeli version with the original voices and Hebrew subtitles.) If you are one of these viewers, this column may help you to appreciate what you have missed.

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We discussed the early medieval Avars in 2016 (lots of interesting genetic research in the thread); now I’ve discovered that there’s a nice fat book on them by Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822, a 2018 revised translation of the 2015 third edition of Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa 567 – 822 n. Chr. (Astonishingly, the translator does not appear to be named anywhere in the book; in the preface, Pohl says “Then the text was translated into English. I continued working on the basis of the translation and ended up introducing major revisions and updates.” This really will not do, and I cast a cold eye on both Pohl and Cornell University Press.) It’s a nice fat book (apparently the longest thing previously available in English was “a ninety-page article by H. H. Howorth in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society published in 1889″), and there’s a fair amount of Hattic material; I’ll share some excerpts. From chapter 1:

The historian of the Avars should not only gain a mastery over the Latin and Greek sources with all their nuances but must in addition deal in critical fashion with Iranian, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and Chinese texts, should be at home with Slavic, Hungarian, Turkic, and Mongolic linguistics and onomastics, be competent to interpret with caution the published and, to the greatest degree possible, unpublished findings of archaeologists, master the approaches and models of social anthropology, and, lastly, offer new insights into old problems discussed by colleagues in his own field.

It is no coincidence that one of the classics of steppe research is entitled Osteuropäische und ostasiatische Streifzüge (Rambles in eastern Europe and eastern Asia). It was not least the unsystematic and often excursive form of the work that enabled the author, Josef Marquart, at the turn of the twentieth century, to draw connecting lines between disciplines that may still be fruitfully pursued today. It was precisely these interdisciplinary ramblers who provided the decisive stimulus for the exploration of the nomadic peoples. In the second half of the nineteenth century the German Wilhelm Radloff made his way through the “Wild East” in the service of the Russian tsar. He collected an immense body of ethnographical and linguistic data, excavated caves from the Ice Age and kurgans or mounds from the Iron Age, undertook metallurgical investigations, and published his material in the form of a memoir “from Siberia.” Long before “interdisciplinary” became a vogue word in the humanities, frontier crossers such as Radloff and Marquart laid the foundations for research into the medieval steppes, combining archaeology and ethnography, linguistics and history.

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The prevalence of the French language in 19th-century Russia has been a frequent theme at LH (e.g., 2008, 2013, 2014, 2019), and Alessandra Tosi’s Waiting for Pushkin: Russian Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801-1825) provides a good example — it has a whole section (III.2, p. 131ff.) on Zinaida Volkonskaya (one of the Volkonskys mentioned in the 2008 post), who wrote almost exclusively in French:

Zinaida Aleksandrovna Volkonskaia (1789-1862) is renowned as a grande dame of the Russian and European beau monde in the first half of the nineteenth century rather than for her literary exploits. Born into one of the most illustrious Russian families (her father was Prince Aleksander Mikhailovich Belozelsky-Belozersky, a leading diplomat during Catherine’s reign) Zinaida belonged to the Emperor Alexander’s entourage from an early age. After the death of her father, she was made to marry Prince Nikita Grigorevich Volkonskii, a member of the highest Russian aristocracy who was to serve as aide-de-camp of Alexander I. In 1808 the nineteen-year-old Zinaida became lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna and for a time, during the Napoleonic wars, was romantically involved with the tsar himself, to whom she remained close until his death in 1825. Around this time Volkonskaia’s salon in Moscow became an important venue for writers and musicians alike. […]

Volkonskaia’s role in nineteenth-century European and Russian culture is now generally acknowledged thanks to the numerous biographical studies devoted to the “Queen of the Muses and beauty”, as Pushkin called her. What is still missing is a comprehensive study of Volkonskaia’s literary output that – apart from a few mentions in histories and dictionaries of Russian women writers and in the biographies devoted to her – has so far been overlooked. Yet Volkonskaia’s work deserves critical attention for at least three reasons: the high literary standard of her writing, the topical issues she addresses in the novels and stories, and her position as the leading Russian francophone writer of the age.

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Having finished Vladimir Sorokin’s 2017 novel Манарага [Manaraga], I find I don’t have much to say about it except that it’s enjoyable late Sorokin, focusing on a society of chefs who illegally prepare meals for rich clients by cooking over flames fueled by first-edition books and set in a mid-21st-century world that is more or less that of Day of the Oprichnik (LH). It takes the form of a diary written by the protagonist Geza, who specializes in Russian literature and winds up being sent on a mission to Mount Manaraga in the northern Urals; it’s full of the usual Sorokin tricks, like incorporated parodies and passages of nonsense; and towards the end I got whiffs of both Olesha’s Envy (LH) and Zamyatin’s We (LH). For more, I refer you to Lizok’s excellent post (which originally inspired me to add the novel to my reading list). Here I want to focus on a single paragraph, consisting entirely of the names of books. The context is one of the “book’n’grill” meals (that phrase is always in English in the original Russian text), served by sixty-nine chefs to a large wedding party; Sorokin lists all of the “logs” they use, “mainly 20th-century detective and horror novels” [в основном детективы и хоррор XX века], and here is my version using original languages (except for the Russian ones):

The Godfather, Der Richter und sein Henker, And Then There Were None, Rebecca, Dead Cert, Nothing Lasts Forever (Die Hard), The Executioners (Cape Fear), Gorky Park, Misery, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Shining, Postmortem, Naked Lunch, Le Chien jaune, The Hellbound Heart (Hellraiser), Eye of the Needle, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, A Time to Kill, The Sea-Wolf, The Exorcist, The Moonstone, Children of the Corn, The Maltese Falcon, Azazel, Smiley’s People, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, “The Birds,” The Sound and the Fury, Les Trois Mousquetaires, Death Under Sail, The She-Wolf [Druon’s La Louve de France? Jerzy Gierałtowski’s Wadera?], La Reine Margot, Compartiment tueurs (The Sleeping Car Murders), Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Le mystère de la chambre jaune, Red Harvest, Camera Obscura (Laughter in the Dark), Rosemary’s Baby, The Cry of the Owl, “Zigzags of Treachery,” The Silence of the Lambs, Our Man in Havana, Airport, Fletch, The English Patient, The Case of the Terrified Typist, 金閣寺 (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), The First Circle, In the Heat of the Night, When the Sleeper Wakes, La Veuve Couderc, Crime and Punishment, Fletch, Too, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, Visages cachés, The Jackal [The Day of the Jackal?], Piège pour Cendrillon, The Vampire Chronicles, Being and Time, They Thirst, The Trial, The Doorbell Rang, An American Tragedy, The Sign of the Four, Devil in a Blue Dress, In Cold Blood, and Dead Souls.

The Russian original:
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Or so claim Tomasz Stanisz, Stanisław Drożdż, and Jarosław Kwapień, authors of “Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in major Western languages” (Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 168 [March 2023]). A Phys.org account of it attributed to The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences, “Punctuation in literature of major languages is intriguingly mathematical,” says:

To many, punctuation appears as a necessary evil, to be happily ignored whenever possible. Recent analyses of literature written in the world’s current major languages require us to alter this opinion. In fact, the same statistical features of punctuation usage patterns have been observed in several hundred works written in seven, mainly Western, languages.

Punctuation […] turns out to be a universal and indispensable complement to the mathematical perfection of every language studied. Such a remarkable conclusion about the role of mere commas, exclamation marks or full stops comes from an article by scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, published in the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. […]

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Bee Wilson, whose LRB reviews have been quoted here before (2009, 2019), had one last year (archived) of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionised Food in America by Mayukh Sen and The Philosophy of Curry by Sejal Sukhadwala. She spends the entire review talking about curry, which probably irritated Mr. Sen, but if you’re interested in the subject it’s well worth reading. Herewith some sections addressing the word and its meaning:

As a child in the early 1980s, I believed that curry was synonymous with Indian food and that Indian food was synonymous with curry […] As a teenager, I started cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s books and saw with a jolt that, for Indian cooks, hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation. Jaffrey arrived in London from Delhi in 1955 to study at Rada, and taught herself to cook using her mother’s recipes because she disliked English food (except fish and chips). In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term “chop suey” was to China’s,’ Jaffrey wrote in An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973). ‘“Curry” is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us … If “curry” is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then “curry powder” attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.’

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Hedvig Skirgård and about six million other authors have a paper in Science Advances (Vol. 9, Issue 16, Apr. 2023) with the title “Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss”; its abstract reads:

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

I can’t really understand much of the article, which is full of terms like “traditional nonweighted PCA” and “the function prcomp,” but it seems like it might be of interest, and I hope those who can make sense of it will have things to say. Thanks, BB!

I recently ran across the archaic Russian word тиун [tiun] ‘tiun’ (title of various officials in medieval Russia) and discovered from both Vasmer and Wiktionary that it was borrowed from Icelandic þjónn, itself “Ultimately from Proto-Germanic *þewaz, whence also Gothic 𐌸𐌹𐌿𐍃 (þius, “servant”) and Old English þēow.” But if you click on the þewaz link, under “Descendants” it has Proto-Norse: ᚦᛖᚹᚨᛉ (þewaʀ) > Old Norse: -þér, and the latter is “(only in name-compounds) servant, retainer.” What about þjónn? And the OED has for theow | thew ‘slave, bondman, thrall’ (entry from 1912):

Etymology: Old English ðíow, þéow, þéo, strong masculine, = Old High German deo, dio, Old Norse (Runic) þewaʀ, Gothic þius < Old Germanic *þewoᶻ; beside Old English þeow strong feminine, = Old Saxon thiu, thiwi, Old High German, Middle High German diu, Old Norse þý, Gothic þiwi < Old Germanic *þewjô. Also weak nouns þéowa (masculine), þéowe (feminine); compare Old Saxon thiwa. þéowa, -e have the weak inflection of the adjective.

Again, no þjónn. And theow | thew is not to be confused with thew ‘custom, usage; good quality or habit; (plural) physical good qualities, features, or personal endowments; bodily powers or forces of a man (Latin vires), might, strength, vigour’ (entry also from 1912), which is “Old English þéaw = Old Saxon thau usage, custom, habit, Old High German thau (dau) discipline. Not recorded outside West Germanic languages. Ulterior etymology uncertain”; this is where we get phrases like “thew and sinew.” A confusing tangle!