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Geoffrey O’Brien, in an NYRB review (February 8, 2024; archived) of several books on mystery novels, concludes with some thoughts on patterns in such stories that I thought were worth bringing here:

Such a book was a city held in the hand, a portable labyrinth. Every plot was also a geography, even if the action was confined to a single room or, in the end, to a single exchanged glance, as in Agatha Christie’s masterpiece Five Little Pigs (1942). The words were a diagram. To read them was to advance into different spaces, sensing a continuity of passageways from one book to another. At every turn signs could be detected, marks hovering in the air around faces, housefronts, patterns of rubble and erosion denoting a shifting border between safety and terror, free movement and confinement. It was a lot like moving through an actual city, newly conscious of such borders, recognizing their scuffed surfaces almost everywhere and finally learning to mistrust even the shiniest and most thoroughly sanitized wards.

Glimpses of space flickered in patterns that were like music. The music reverberates through Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”:

It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors, passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them…the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green, unhealthy blotches.

Or Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep:

A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor…the fire stairs hadn’t been swept in a month…crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper, matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocketbook.

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Or so says Emmanuel Oliveiro; Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz (archived):

Decades after a number of unknown alphabets were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and against all odds, Emmanuel Oliveiro of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands believes he has cracked the “impossible” one known as Cryptic B. The code had been considered to be impossible to decipher, mainly because of the sheer paucity of Cryptic B material. All we have are isolated fragments from two scrolls called 4Q362 and 4Q363, and a few spots in other scrolls where scribes briefly introduced Cryptic B in the middle of a Hebrew text, Oliveiro explains, in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in December.

Oliveiro’s process was based on analysis and intuition, similar to the methodology the scholar Józef Milik used when deciphering Cryptic A in 1955. Both began with assuming that they were dealing with a mono-alphabetic substitution system– where each of the 22 letters of Hebrew or Aramaic is consistently replaced with a specific cryptic sign (as in – say A is always be replaced by $). […]

But the key breakthrough was suddenly realizing that a sequence of five letters in a Cryptic B fragment might represent the five-letter Hebrew word Yisrael, spelled yod, sin, resh, aleph, lamed. It is true that the resh did not survive the eons intact. But looking at the high-resolution image of the age-darkened fragment – the word ישראל (Yisrael) leaps out. “Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it,” as Oliveiro tells Haaretz by Zoom.

Many more details and images, along with history of the scrolls and their other scripts, at the link; I agree with David Weman, who sent me the link, that the quote at the end is delightful:

So, without certainty, Oliveiro cracked the impenetrable. “I told my friends and wife that I am going to try this and they’re like, you could be stuck here for 40 years and never crack the code,” he says. “And what do you hope to find anyway, a secret felafel recipe? But once I saw it – I think it was quite fast.” How fast? About two months to cross the desert of Cryptic B and see Yisrael.

Thanks, David!

OK, I’m an addict — as much as I tell myself I should branch out and find new authors to explore, whenever I finish a Russian novel and am at a loss as to what to read next I always seem to find myself reaching for my complete Bunin. I’m now most of the way through his last collection, Темные аллеи, translated by Richard Hare in 1949 as Dark Avenues and in 2008 by Hugh Aplin under the same title, and I hate the thought of having no more new Bunin to read, but of course I’ll just go back and reread my favorites. Anyway, I recently finished Генрих [Genrikh] and wanted to share one of his splendid winding sentences that also happens to have a couple of interesting terms I had to look up:

Был Земмеринг и вся заграничная праздничность горного полдня, левое жаркое окно в вагоне-ресторане, букетик цветов, аполлинарис и красное вино «Феслау» на ослепительно-белом столике возле окна и ослепительно-белый полуденный блеск снеговых вершин, восстававших в своем торжественно-радостном облачении в райское индиго неба, рукой подать от поезда, извивавшегося по обрывам над узкой бездной, где холодно синела зимняя, еще утренняя тень.

Hare, who calls the story “Henry,” renders it:

Then came Zemmering and the whole festive air of a foreign mountain resort; he sat by the warm window in the restaurant car with a bunch of flowers, Apollinaris and a bottle of red wine on a dazzling white table, the dazzling white midday glitter of the snow-covered peaks standing out majestically against the indigo blue paradise of the sky, while the train wound along across narrow precipices, wrapped in bluish wintry early morning shadows.

That reads well, but he’s left out the левое (‘left’) and the «Феслау», I don’t think восстававших в can mean ‘standing out against’ but has to be ‘rising up into,’ and he’s gotten the final bit wrong — see Aplin below for a better rendering.

And Aplin:

There was Zemmering and all the foreign festiveness of midday in the mountains, a hot left-hand window in the restaurant car, a little bunch of flowers, Apollinaris water and the red wine Feslau on the blindingly white table beside the window, and the blindingly white midday brilliance of the snowy peaks, rising in their solemnly joyous vestments up into the heavenly indigo of the sky within touching distance of the train, which wound along precipices above a narrow abyss, where the wintry shade, still of the morning, was coldly blue.

(Both translators, oddly, get Земмеринг wrong — it’s Semmering, which shouldn’t have been that difficult.) I had never heard of Apollinaris water, but it was easy to google up (Wikipedia: “Apollinaris is a naturally sparkling mineral water from a spring in Bad Neuenahr, Germany. Discovered in 1852, it was popularised in England and on the Continent and became the leading table-water of its time until about World War II. There are many references to it in high and popular culture.”); «Феслау» gave me more trouble, but I finally figured out it was Vöslauer, an alternate name for Blauer Portugieser — it should really be Фёслау (as here), but of course Russian no longer bothers with ё.

The story itself starts as a sort of romantic comedy: our hero Glebov, leaving Moscow for foreign parts, says farewell to the teenage Nadya in his hotel room and then to the slinky Lee [or, per Hare, inexplicably, Ly] in the train itself — both are jealous of all his other women, and Lee actually tries to open the door to the next compartment to make sure he hasn’t got another woman in there — and then when she leaves, sure enough Glebov unlocks the door and there is in fact another woman in there, his true love Elena Genrikhovna, a journalist who signs her stories Genrikh. It ends tragically, like almost all the stories in the collection. But I have to point out a Russian idiom both translators missed: when Lee tries the door and finds it locked, she says “Ну, счастлив твой бог!” This is literally “Well, your god is happy/lucky,” but it means “lucky for you” or “thank your lucky stars.” Hare went with “Well, God grant you happiness!” and Aplin with “Well, your God’s a lucky one.” Note to translators: learn those idioms!

Trevor Joyce has introduced me to John Taylor (1578 – 1653), who dubbed himself the Water Poet: “He spent much of his life as a Thames waterman, a member of the guild of boatmen that ferried passengers across the River Thames in London, in the days when the London Bridge was the only passage between the banks. His occupation was his gateway into the literary society of London, as he ferried patrons, actors, and playwrights across the Thames to the Bankside theatres.” In his e-mail, Trevor quoted this impressive passage from “his 1621 work Taylor’s Motto, which included a list of then-current card games and diversions”:

The prodigall’s estate, like to a flux,
The Mercer, Draper, and the Silkman sucks:
The Tailor, Millainer, Dogs, Drabs and Dice,
Trey-trip, or Passage, or The most-at-thrice.
At Irish, Tick tack, Doublets, Draughts or Chesse,
He flings his money free with carelessnesse:
At Novum, Mainchance, Mischance (chuse ye which),
At One and thirty, or at Poor and rich,
Ruffe, slam, Trump, whisk, hole, Sant, New-cut.
Unto the keeping of foure Knaves he’le put
His whole estate, at Loadum, or at Gleeke,
At Tickle-me-quickly, he’s a merry Greeke;
At Primefisto, Post and payre, Primero,
Maw, Whip-her-ginny, he’s a lib’rall Hero;
At My-sow-pigg’d, and (reader never doubt ye)
He’s skill’d in all games, except Looke about ye.
Bowles, shove-groat, tennis, no game comes amis,
His purse a nurse for any body is;
Caroches, Coaches, and Tobacconists,
All sorts of people freely from his fists
His vaine expenses daily sucke and soake,
And he himselfe sucks only drinke and smoake.
And thus the Prodigall, himselfe alone,
Gives sucke to thousands, and himselfe sucks none.

Click through to the Wikipedia article I linked to for explanations of many of these, e.g. Primifisto: “Primo visto, Primavista, Prima-vista, Primi-vist, Primiuiste, Primofistula, or even Primefisto, is a 16th-century gambling card game fashionable c. 1530–1640. Very little is known about this game, but judging by the etymology of the words used to describe the many local variants of the game, it appears to be one of Italian origin.” As for the connotations of “suck” in his day, further affiant sayeth naught. Thanks, Trevor!

Again Anatoly Vorobey has an Avva post (in Russian) that tickles my linguistic fancy. It concerns the Hebrew word for ‘testicle,’ אשך, which according to Anatoly is pronounced a-SHAKH (אָשָׁךְ) by practically all speakers of Modern Hebrew but which all reference works claim is E-shekh (אֶשֶׁךְ), which is indeed given in my dictionaries and at Wiktionary. As he says, the origin is obvious: since the word is generally used in the plural, asha-KHIM (אֲשָׁכִים), the singular came to conform with it. He finishes his post thus:

Why there isn’t a single normal/decent Hebrew dictionary that describes the language the way people actually use it (I repeat once again – this isn’t about colloquialisms or slang! even in a “lofty” context, people only know and use the word ashakh!) remains a mystery to me. And that’s annoying.

It reminds me of my puzzlement as to why нарды (nardy), the normal Russian word for ‘backgammon,’ isn’t in the dictionaries.

Incidentally, the post is called “ашах! как много в этом слове” [ashakh! how much is in that word], a takeoff on a famous Pushkin passage (from Eugene Onegin) that goes “Москва… как много в этом звуке Для сердца русского слилось!” [Moscow… how much is blended in that sound for the heart of a Russian!].

A couple of recent posts from Joel at Far Outliers; both of them start “My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to several observations by Janusz R. Kowalczyk about linguistic variation within Poland.”

Kashubian vs. Polish:

There are two official languages ​​in our country: Polish and Kashubian. In addition, we have dialects: Masovian, Lesser Poland dialect, Greater Poland dialect, Silesian, mixed ones in the east of the country and new mixed dialects in the west and north. These are divided into several dozen regionalisms; some of them occur in only a few towns, so they even more so deserve tender care.

…

In the north of Poland, students learn Kashubian in school. They can take the secondary school exit exam in this language. Official signs of the region’s institutions and local information have versions in the two languages.

Why did Kashubians specifically get the privilege of having their speech recognized as a separate language? Mainly because it is much less understandable than others. Hardworking Kashubians have created a grammar of their language, published literary works as well as textbooks and dictionaries in it.

(More details and examples at link.)

Silesian Polish:

An excellent example of the Silesian dialect can be found in Stanisław Ligoń’s ‘Gowa. Łozmyślania filozoficzne’ (The Head: Philosophical Musings), included in his Bery i bojki śląskie (Silesian Jokes and Fairy Tales), published by Śląsk Publishers, Katowice, 1980.

[There follows a quote with translation and glossary.]

As any Polish speaker can see, the Silesian dialect (or, according to a growing group of researchers, the Silesian language) has many expressions that differ from Polish vocabulary. The beginning of the formation of the Silesian dialect dates back to the period of district division, which took place approximately 800 years ago.

Like any language, it has undergone transformations over time. It has split into many local varieties. Nowadays, there are four main Silesian dialects, in at least several dozen specific regionalisms. Silesian is to a large degree an Old Polish language. It contains words and phrases that were used in the past throughout Poland but are now generally forgotten.

The indefatigable Trevor Joyce sent me Steven Morris’s Guardian story about laudable lexicography:

It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic. The dictionary will not be huge because relatively few words survive, but experts from Aberystwyth University say they expect they will end up with more than 1,000 words.

Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind.

He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period. The picture of the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland will be of interest not only to linguists but to historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists.” […]

[Read more…]

A Facebook post by our old pal Slavomír Čéplö/bulbul pointed me to Ahmad Al-Jallad’s All lines lead to Proto-Arabic: a review article on Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies [2025], 1–16), in which Al-Jallad (seen here in 2018 and 2022) does a thorough demolition job on Owens’ book, which sounds like a classic case of an expert in a limited field trying to extend his expertise too widely (cf. John McWhorter). It begins (I omit the footnotes):

The past century or so has witnessed what one might call a “documentary turn” in the study of Arabic’s history. The full range of modern Arabic’s dialectal diversity came into focus as linguists began to produce descriptions of peripheral dialects, spanning from Central Asia to the Yemeni highlands and from Cypress to Chad. Sociolinguistic approaches to the dialects have advanced our understanding of language change and dialect formation in real time. The epigraphic exploration of Arabia revealed a “Jāhiliyyah” with stunning linguistic diversity, even when compared to the rich materials compiled by the Arabic Grammarians. Contrary to the commonly held belief, Arabic was not alone in Arabia, but was rather a part of a rich linguistic landscape, lost to history until recently. The discovery and study of papyri from the early Islamic period afford a unique view into the written register of Arabic before the rise of the grammatical tradition, and both pre-modern Christian and Jewish Arabic materials attest to writing traditions that existed parallel to normative Classical Arabic, and shed valuable light on the pre-modern dialectal landscape. The combination of these new sources of data and approaches have rendered the traditional view of Arabic’s past obsolete, and so the time is ripe to synthesize this material into the writing of new linguistic histories of Arabic.

The work under review is the latest monograph by Professor Jonathan Owens, a renowned authority on the Arabic dialects of Nigeria, Libya, and Chad, who has made significant contributions to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology at large. Owens should be congratulated for the great effort put into this work, which spans over 500 pages. In this book, he builds on the case made in Owens (2006/9) that the field of Arabic historical linguistics has been fundamentally misguided, giving undue weight to older attested stages of the language when it comes to reconstruction. Here, he attempts to build a new, “non-linear” paradigm with a focus on the history of the modern Arabic vernaculars, but draws also on other sources such as epigraphy and papyri. […]

[Read more…]

Way back in 2013 I told the world about my discovery of a lost masterpiece, Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], and last year I posted about Stephen Bruce’s forthcoming translation, originally inspired by that post. Now it has come forth and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Northwestern University Press has sent me a copy, and it is every bit as good as I hoped and expected, from the gorgeous cover (featuring Karl Bryullov’s Portrait of V. A. Perovsky on Column Capitals) to the fifty pages of detailed end notes. Reading through it, I quickly gave up comparing it with the Russian (Bruce’s translation is thoroughly reliable) and simply enjoyed the ride; the fact is, I didn’t feel any great loss, because Veltman is not a stylist like Bunin or Nabokov (though his prose is thoroughly enjoyable), he is a raconteur, and his rambling storytelling can be enjoyed in any language. As a matter of fact (and I feel bad about even saying this — sorry, Alexandr Fomich!), I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.

And reading it consecutively in my native language, without stopping to look things up or figure out a complicated Russian construction, I find myself enjoying it in a different way, and making what feels like an important discovery: the ground theme of the novel is freedom. He starts by saying that with determination and imagination “we shall be everywhere and learn everything,” and in the context of the Russian Empire, where nobody was allowed to go anywhere the autocracy didn’t want them to go (Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which came out around the same time, in the early 1830s, is about this), that was a daring idea. He says that using the flying carpet of imagination we can go anywhere we want, and no one can stop us. I suspect it’s only his jolly style and his neverending divagations into inoffensive topics like wine, women, and song that kept him out of trouble. In any event, it’s a charming and invigorating read, not like anything else in Russian literature, and I am pleased as punch that it has made its appearance in English; I devoutly hope it is just the start of a series of Veltman translations. If it is, Veltman is in good hands with Bruce and NUP, and I hope I can report on future volumes. If you want to be an early adopter and help promote the Veltmanic future, you can order it at the publisher’s page (hint: Christmas is just around the corner), and a little bird tells me that if you enter the code WANDERER at checkout you get 30% off through the end of February.

I can’t resist quoting the start of the acknowledgments:

This translation began over a decade ago as a hobby, a welcome distraction from the rigors of graduate school, rather than a project with a clear path to publication. I owe my initial discovery of Veltman and The Wanderer to Stephen Dodson, whose blog Language Hat introduced me to this fascinating work. His continued interest, along with insightful suggestions from his readers, has helped clarify some of the book’s more obscure references.

So you, the Varied Reader, have gotten your due as well!

Simon Akam in the New Yorker has one of the best essays I’ve read (archived) about the struggle to standardize a language. Here’s the start:

Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters—the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that “professor” was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid’s wife served Rüeblitorte, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi.

Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland’s least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major “idioms,” not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid’s authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: “Jeu engraziel cordialmein per Vies interess e Vossa attenziun per quest problem.” Translation: “I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem.”

Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn’t grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the “Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun,” a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion. But the depth of his expertise was formidable. By the time Cathomas knocked on his door, Schmid had already sketched a plan for standardizing Romansh: a “majority principle” in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out.

“He really already had everything,” Cathomas recalled. “He had worked it all out in his head.”

What Cathomas hadn’t reckoned with was how quickly the tidy scheme, once loosed into the valleys, would ignite quarrels that engulfed Swiss classrooms, newspapers, and eventually cantonal politics—a parable of how an attempt to secure a language’s survival can feel, to those being standardized, like an assault on what makes them distinct.

I hope that lead-in entices you to read the rest; it’s gripping, sad, and funny, with sympathy for all sides. (And specially for J.W. Brewer, I cite the band name Liricas Analas ‘Anal Lyrics.’) Here’s a bit near the end:

The Lia Rumantscha is also asking the International Organization for Standardization to classify each idiom as a separate language. Some people doubt that this hyperlocalism will pay off. One member of the Zurich team told me about a Swiss firm that sold a G.P.S. device with directions spoken in Swiss German. “No one bought it,” he noted. “People said, ‘That’s not my Swiss German.’ ” You can give the machine a voice, he suggested, but people still want it to sound like their cousin.

I might add that I am the proud owner of a Lia Rumantscha publication, the Dicziunari rumantsch ladin-tudais-ch. Thanks for the link go to my dear old friend Dave, to whom I tip all my hats.