Another language quiz, this time thanks to Norbert Wierzbicki, who posts Guess The Language Challenge videos to YouTube; this one is twenty minutes long and features Raphael Turrigiano, an American studying linguistics in Scotland. Raphael was great, guessing all six (twice with the help of clues) and winning the large Cup of Satisfaction. Me, I got four of the six (thus winning the small Cup of Satisfaction) — 1 and 4 instantly, 6 by the end of the sample, and 3 with the help of the “fact” (which is how Raphael got it as well); for 5 I was close but no cigar, and with 2 I hadn’t a clue (which was kind of embarrassing once I heard the answer; I would have gotten it in written form, but clearly I’ve never heard it spoken). It’s a great quiz, in that the languages are all fair game (no obscure little languages) and the samples are long enough to give you a fighting chance; if this is the kind of thing you like, you will definitely like it. A tip of the Language Hat to villanousbead, who posted it at Wordorigins.org.

Morten Høi Jensen’s NYRB review of a biography of Ibsen (Ivo de Figueiredo’s Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson) opens with a couple of good anecdotes:

[…] As many critics have noted, there’s more than a little of Ibsen in Rubek [from When We Dead Awaken]. In 1891 he too returned to Norway, having spent nearly three decades living abroad. And like Rubek, he was by then world famous; his plays sold hundreds of thousands of copies and were performed in theaters all over Europe and the United States, provoking scandal and acclaim in equal measure. Yet unlike Rubek, Ibsen was no recluse. He settled in the middle of Kristiania (now Oslo), appearing twice a day at the same café, a habit he’d picked up when he lived in Munich. There he was, his stately head resting on its august pedestal of beard, his lapel affixed with the blinding number of orders and medals showered on him by various monarchs and heads of state. Tourists, many of them young women, would clamor to catch a glimpse of the famous writer, prompting the Norwegian novelist Arne Garborg to quip “To be in Munich and not see Ibsen is like being in Rome and not seeing the pope.”

Yet rather than simply repose in his literary fame, Ibsen remained restlessly prolific. Between 1877 and 1899, he averaged a new play every two years, each one more controversial than the last. In the final years of his life, despite having suffered a heart attack and three strokes that left him paralyzed on the right side of his body, he thought of writing more. “I do not see how I will be able to stay away from those old battlefields for long,” he wrote in 1900. The year before his death in 1906, he cried out in his sleep, “I’m writing! It’s going really well!”

But what I’m bringing it to LH for is this passage from near the end:

At the height of his international fame in the 1890s, he was attacked by a new generation of writers for his psychological rigidity and moral preachiness. Chief among the dissenters was his fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun, who once delivered a scathing lecture, in Ibsen’s presence, in which he ridiculed the playwright for his “indefensibly coarse and artificial psychology”—a criticism the inscrutable protagonist of Hamsun’s novel Mysteries repeats. Ibsen’s writing, he says, “is simply mechanical routine.”

I find it hard to disagree. Unlike Hamsun and Strindberg, Ibsen never really questioned the stability and coherence of the self (except for Peer Gynt, that odd outlier in Ibsen’s oeuvre), and perhaps for this reason he doesn’t strike us as modern in the way they do. For all that he scandalized polite society, he remained the very emblem of bourgeois respectability, as the younger generation never ceased to remind him. In this and many other respects, perhaps Ibsen’s stature most closely resembles Ivan Turgenev’s—particularly the Turgenev whose “finely discriminating, slightly ironical vision” Isaiah Berlin once contrasted with the obsessive genius of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

That could explain why I’ve never been as excited about Ibsen as I somehow feel I should be. (And I don’t feel the need to reread Turgenev as pressingly as I do Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.)

Anna Della Subin’s NYRB review [archived] of Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut enlightened me about a modernist movement I was only barely aware of (though of course I’d heard of Adonis):

Robyn Creswell’s City of Beginnings is the story of how Arabic made it new. Beirut has been overlooked in classic histories of modernism, yet Creswell, a professor of comparative literature at Yale, […] has remedied this with eloquence and erudition in his study of how a group of exiles, iconoclasts, and émigrés—al-Khal, Adonis, and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj foremost among them—radically transformed Arabic poetry. In addition to abandoning traditional forms, the Beiruti modernists sought to purify poetry of the politics that kept it mired in its own time and place. At a moment when intellectuals across the Middle East were divided along nationalist, Pan-Arabist, monarchist, and Marxist lines, [the avant-garde quarterly magazine] Shi‘r [‘Poetry’] was avowedly nonpartisan, and talk of politics was discouraged at the magazine’s weekly literary salons. The question of what it meant to write poetry without politics, and how one might achieve this in a fractured city on the verge of civil war, is threaded throughout Creswell’s impressive book.

This study also speaks to the asymmetries, still with us, of the midcentury modernist project and its quest to create a world literature. Encountering Europe’s literary powerbrokers in Rome, the Beiruti poets were surprised to find their ideas met with reproach. In his response to Adonis, Spender chastised him for his “complete disregard for the ancient heritage of Arabic poetry,” finding his “demolition of poetic traditions” too “extremist,” according to the Arabic transcript of the conference. Although Spender criticized British poets for provincialism in dwelling too much on their own pleasant isles, non-European poets were expected to retain “local color,” Creswell writes, if they desired to participate in the circuits of world literature. The Beiruti poets sought to escape the confinements of region. Yet their European interlocutors, fearing the kind of standardized, monolithic culture they attributed to their Soviet antagonists, demanded that nonwhite writers preserve and perform their ethnic distinctiveness, to write in culturally “authentic” modes. By refusing to conform to entrenched rules of how the poet should engage with identity, ideology, and heritage, the Shi‘r group challenged the burgeoning international literary culture.

[Read more…]

Janet Chernela, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, has a thought-provoking article “Language in an ontological register: Embodied speech in the Northwest Amazon of Colombia and Brazil” (Language & Communication 63 [Nov. 2018]: 23-32); here’s the Abstract:

Speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages in Brazil and Colombia construe linguistic differences as indices of group identity, intrinsic to a complex ontology in which language is a consubstantial, metaphysical product—a ‘substance’ in the development of the person. Through speech, speakers of the same language signal a corporality based in theories of shared ancestry and mutual belonging while speakers of different languages signal difference. For Tukanoans, then, one creates one’s self in the act of speaking. These ontological beliefs underlie speech practices, influencing language maintenance and contributing to one of the most extreme examples of multilingualism reported in the literature.

It’s short (only ten pages); I’ll quote a few bits here and let you follow the link for the rest (I delete parenthetical references throughout):

The Vaupés River and its tributaries form the center of the Eastern Tukanoan Sprachbund, site of one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. In this area of some 110,000 km² — a region larger than Denmark — about 40,000 residents speak languages from four indigenous language families: Eastern Tukanoan, Arawakanan, Tupi, and Nadahup. About a third of that number (20 or so language groups) are speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages, including Desana, Piratapuia, Tuyuca, Barasana, Baré and Kotiria, whose numbers range from 10 (Yurutí) to 6151 (Tukano).

We are concerned here with speakers of Kotiria, a northern branch of Eastern Tukanoan, whose 1400 speakers are located along the banks of the Vaupés River from Santa Cruz in Colombia to Arara in Brazil. […] Kotiria villagers throughout this region speak indigenous languages in their everyday lives, with Portuguese and Spanish being the preferred languages with itinerant merchants, missionaries, and other outsiders. […]

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From W. B. Stanford’s The Sound of Greek: Studies in the Greek Theory and Practice of Euphony (University of California Press, 1967), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

In our world of printed books we mostly study and enjoy literature in silence. We do sometimes hear the sound of poetry and of good prose in the classroom and in the theatre, and when we listen to the radio. But most of our literary experience, as adults at any rate, is silent. We sit in a library or at home; our eyes move quickly over black marks on a white page; and our mind takes in an author’s thoughts and images. When we were children at school, our teachers taught us to aim at rapid reading: the sooner we got through the elementary stage of sounding the words as we went along, the better, they said. In any educational book on the psychology of reading you will probably find a section called something like “Training to Decrease Vocalization.”¹

We take all this for granted, and undoubtedly we gain great benefits from this silent, rapid reading. So when we are studying the classical literatures of Greece and Rome we generally aim at reading them in just the same way. We use our eyes, but not our ears and our voices.² We are what has been aptly called “eye-philologists,” not “ear-philologists.”³

¹ See, e.g., John Anthony O’Brien, Silent Reading (New York, 1921).

² Cf. A.W. Verrall, The Bacchants of Euripides and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1910) 246: “The habit of silent reading has made us slow to catch the sound of what is written. And moreover, used to language and poetry constructed on principles not merely different from the Greek, but diametrically opposed, our attention, even if given to the sound, brings us no natural and instinctive report. To logic, rhetoric, pathos we are alive; and upon these heads the tragic poets are criticised; but as to noise we will not notice it, not even if we are bidden and bidden again.”

³ I take the terms “eye-philologists” and “ear-philologists” from [Otto] Jespersen [Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin] 23 f. How little the ear counts among modern rhetoricians is exemplified in the neglect of all matters of verbal sound except rhythm in so full a manual as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric (New York, 1949).

This continues to astonish me, though it’s not the first time it’s been brought to my attention. Subvocalizing is so ingrained in me it’s hard to imagine reading without it, and impossible to imagine someone thinking they could appreciate poetry (of all things) without on some level hearing the sound of it (for which it exists, or existed until modern experimental verse). It took me years of concentrated effort to develop the ability to hear the meters of Greek and Latin verse, but once I did I could instantly tell how a line of verse worked and detect if it was off. I pity people who deal professionally with it and yet have to laboriously count the morae or whatever it is they do instead of using the senses they were born with and that poets depend on. “Training to Decrease Vocalization” forsooth!

Colin Burrow has a magnificent review essay [archived] on William Empson in the latest LRB that I can’t resist quoting chunks of; I only wish AJP (who just last year said “Colin Burrow is God”) were still here to enjoy it:

Empson was famously chucked out of Magdalene College, Cambridge, when condoms were found in his room. He spent the early part of his academic career teaching in Japan and China. He was a staggering drinker and a wild eccentric in his social manner, as well as in his disorderly mandarin-style beard (Geoffrey Hill was apparently reminded of Empson when he saw a prize-winning Yorkshire terrier). At Richards’s funeral he read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The organiser of the event, Richard Luckett, described him as speaking ‘inaudibly and inexactly against his own brilliantly simulated atmospherics of squeaks and high-pitched whistles modulated through a slightly damp moustache’. Empson later explained that in order to be sure he was audible he had removed his teeth before reading.

That rudimentary error about how best to get people to attend to what you are saying was not untypical of Empson. But he was – bear with me here – very good at metaphorically taking out his false teeth in order to make himself understood. His critical writing combines forensic analysis of alternative senses (in which his critical teeth grind a text into fine particles) with deliberately wide and vague gestures to the beyond (teeth out, evocative mumbling through a slightly damp moustache). Empson would quite often (and ‘quite’ is one of the function words about which he writes particularly well) grind through a list of alternative interpretations, set out with pseudo-mathematical precision, and then gesture off into the void of the unknowable with a ‘sort of’ to suggest that none of his carefully listed alternative interpretations could quite capture the overall effect of a given phrase. He does this in the passage which poor Madge had to read out to her blind professor when he interrupts his list of all the things Donne might mean in order to talk of ‘a different sort of feeling’. As he said in Some Versions of Pastoral, ‘probably a half-magical idea is the quickest way to the truth.’ […]

It’s hard to say that there is a typical Empson essay, since he wrote about so many things. His posthumous publications include books on images of the Buddha and on the role of the censor in shaping Marlowe’s Dr Faustus – a wildly entertaining account ruined by Empson’s conviction that the haphazard processes of Elizabethan censorship resembled those of 20th-century totalitarianism, which they did not. He also wrote about Alice in Wonderland, Marvell’s relationship with his housekeeper, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, and made parenthetical references to more or less everything else. Reading an Empson essay is like being taken for a drive by an eccentric uncle in a terrifyingly powerful old banger. There are disturbing stains on the upholstery and an alarming whiff of whisky in the air, but when he takes another swig from his hipflask and guns the accelerator, your head gets thrown back so far that you just have to make yourself enjoy the ride – even if you’re not quite sure you’re going where you want to go.

[Read more…]

Joel at Far Outliers posts an excerpt from R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale UP, 2012) that shows a language-related aspect of human insanity:

In each of the expelling countries, governments, residents, and ecclesiastical authorities struggled mightily to eradicate all indications that Germans had ever been present. As Edvard Beneš urged his compatriots, “We must de-Germanize our republic … names, regions, towns, customs—everything that can possibly be de-Germanized must go.” Place names were changed overnight, often by direct translation into the new language (e.g., the substitution of “Zielona Góra” for “Grünberg”); statues and memorials demolished; and fanciful local histories composed that airbrushed into oblivion centuries of German presence. “In Wrocław the government had special teams that roved for years painting over and chiseling out German inscriptions. Derelict German cemeteries were converted into parks, and headstones were used to line ditches and sewers.” The most ambitious—and unrealistic—attempt to accomplish this objective was an order by Commandant Srević of the Banat military region in Yugoslavia that all German signs on buildings be removed within twelve hours, on pain of the immediate execution of the German occupants. Nor was this a passing phase. As late as 1989, applications for visitors’ visas to Poland from Germans born in the Recovered Territories were routinely rejected if the applicant used the former German place name when stating his or her place of birth. The de-Germanization effort extended not only to penalizing the use of the German language, but to putting pressure on residents to abandon German-sounding personal names. The success of the campaign, however, was mixed. Cultural and sometimes physical clashes ensued between settler Poles and many of the indigenes of the Recovered Territories, who had absorbed over the years a high degree of Germanization. New place names could also be rejected by the local population, who sometimes “boycotted new names and even broke road signs that identified the new name…. For them, place name changes on the lands in which they had been living were never the processes of re-Polonisation, but rather Polonisation against their will.”

Consigning evidence of German settlements to George Orwell’s “memory hole” was one thing; putting self-sustaining communities in their place entirely another.

Orderly and Humane sounds like an excellent, if deeply depressing, book.

It occurred to me that the phrase “bad enough” must be a difficult one for learners of English. It’s used in two different ways, nicely illustrated by the first two hits that came up on a LH site search:

1. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the words are Grecified Russian to start with, their current names are Byelorussian or Polish that look different again.

2. The badger definition is bad enough to be a hoax.

It’s also interesting that there’s no contrasting “good enough” in the first usage (though of course there is in the second: The badger definition is good enough it could go straight into a dictionary). I made up a sample sentence and had GT render it into Russian, German, and French:

It’s bad enough to have a cold, but to get the flu as well is even worse.

Простуда – это плохо, но еще хуже – заболеть гриппом.

Es ist schlimm genug, eine Erkältung zu haben, aber auch eine Grippe zu bekommen, ist noch schlimmer.

C’est déjà assez grave d’avoir un rhume, mais attraper aussi la grippe, c’est encore pire.

Which confirms my thought that Russian does not have an equivalent construction (which makes Boris Badenov an especially ironic name). My German Sprachgefühl is not, er, good enough to tell me if GT’s version is idiomatic or if the “genug” construction works the same way; thoughts on that or any other aspects of this issue are (as always) welcome.

D Vance Smith writes for Aeon about a little-known script:

Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of modern Berber languages – although even that’s not clear – the script is usually called Libyco-Berber. Found throughout North Africa, and as far west as the Canary Islands, the script might have been used for at least as long as 1,000 years. Yet only short passages of it survive, all of them painted or engraved on rock. Everything else written in Libyco-Berber has disappeared.

Libyco-Berber has been recognised as an African script since the 17th century. But even after 400 years, it hasn’t been fully deciphered. There are no long texts surviving that would help, and the legacy of the written language has been one of acts of destruction, both massive and petty. That fate, of course, is not unique. It’s something that’s characteristic of modern European civilisation: it both destroys and treasures what it encounters in the rest of the world. Like Scipio Africanus weeping while he gazed at the Carthage he’d just obliterated, the destruction of the other is turned into life lessons for the destroyer, or artefacts in colonial cabinets of curiosities. The most important piece of Libyco-Berber writing was pillaged and sold to the British Museum for five pounds. It’s not currently on display.

But Libyco-Berber also reveals a more insidious kind of destruction, an epistemological violence inflicted by even the best-intentioned Europeans. There are numerous stories of badly educated, arrogant Europeans insisting that Africans not only never did, but never could, write books. Even as sensitive a philosopher as the French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who had deep personal ties to Algeria, and who supported the Berber/Amazigh cultural movement, could essentially make the same assumption. He insisted that the Kabyle people, whom he lived among and studied for years, were pre-literate, although they used (and still do) the characters of Libyco-Berber. Bourdieu’s is a cautionary tale for intellectuals who are committed to social activism. The passion – the need – to do what’s right is all too often steered by the conviction that, precisely because we’re intellectuals, we know what’s right. For Bourdieu, for example, the very ability to think, to reflect about what’s right, is tied to literacy.

He goes on to talk about Punic:
[Read more…]

Ilaria Parogni has an excellent New York Times piece (archived link) about name signs in ASL which benefits mightily from “interactive” technology — you can see the various names mentioned being signed, and there are a number of very entertaining video clips with Deaf people telling the stories of their names in ASL (with subtitles). It begins:

Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, five women joined forces with a mission: assigning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris a name sign, the equivalent of a person’s name in American Sign Language. The women, Ebony Gooden, Kavita Pipalia, Smita Kothari, Candace Jones and Arlene Ngalle-Paryani — as Black and Indian members of the “capital D Deaf community” (a term used by some deaf people to indicate that they embrace deafness as a cultural identity and communicate primarily through ASL) — felt it was important that the selection of Ms. Harris’s name sign be the result of an inclusive and democratic process. […] Ms. Ngalle-Paryani’s own submission won: a hand gesture that involves rotating your wrist externally as your thumb, index and middle finger unfurl open. The Kamala Harris name sign draws inspiration, among other things, from the sign for “lotus flower” — the direct translation of the word “Kamala” in Sanskrit — and incorporates the number 3 to underscore Ms. Harris’s trifecta of firsts. “It’s truly a badge of honor,” Ms. Ngalle-Paryani said, signing, of the selection of her submission. “I really do feel that it fits Madam Vice President.”

A couple more excerpts:

Benjamin J. Bahan, a professor in the Deaf Studies department at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the nation’s only liberal arts university devoted to deaf people, said that “name signs usually come from parents who are deaf.” If a child does not receive one growing up, perhaps because he or she was raised by hearing parents, he added, the name may be assigned at a later stage.

As people go through life, they may receive new name signs that replace earlier ones. If they have a strong connection to other countries, they may also receive name signs in other sign languages, such as Japanese Sign Language or Russian Sign Language. (Vice President Harris was recently assigned a name sign in British Sign Language.)

[…]

Dr. Supalla explains in his book that while originally, name signs were reserved for deaf people, the growing number of hearing people who use ASL and regularly interact with deaf people has meant that many non-deaf individuals today have name signs. Even so, hearing people may never assign a name sign. As Ms. Ngalle-Paryani noted, only a deaf person may do so. […] Dr. Padden said that recently, deaf people have become more engaged in the process of selecting name signs for hearing politicians and well-known individuals. It’s a way for people to acknowledge those individuals “and show alliance with them,” she said.

The whole thing is enlightening and enjoyable; hat tip to Toddles’ MeFi post, from which I got the link, and a nod to michael farris, who explained the basics at LH a decade ago.