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:
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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.

I’m getting close to the end of Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf), and though it’s been a tough slog, I’ll be sorry when it’s over. I’m on the last of the four sections of poems by one of the narrators, the hunter/poet/artist Yakov, who may or may not be the son of the other narrator, the knife-sharpener/cripple/drunk Ilya, whose amatory relations (tangled) and crutch (theft thereof) form the main points of such plot as there is; the poem I’m posting about is called “Паклен,” and it’s both splendid poetry and splendidly untranslatable — what I said about Pasternak here applies equally to Sokolov: he “boils down the resources of Russian too idiosyncratically and completely; there’s not enough that can be carried over in the leaky bucket of translation.” And yet Alexander Boguslawski, who took on the almost unimaginable task of translating a novel routinely called “untranslatable,” had to give it a try. I hate to complain about the result of that labor, especially when it’s been invaluable to me, but alas, complaining is what I do, and just as I moaned about his calling a shotgun a rifle here, I’m going to gripe about his rendering of this lovely set of verses.

One problem is that he has no ear for poetry, but he can’t help that. He would have done better to just translate for sense and effect, ignoring the verse forms, but he wanted to go whole hog, so he winds up with un-English phrasings like “By the way, all go to hell” or (in another poem) “Hung like sticking-out earlobe/ Weightless crescent.” But even within those parameters, there are a couple of big problems. The poem focuses on one of the main themes of the novel, the difficulty of telling X from Y. It’s right there in the title: “between dog and wolf” translates inter canem et lupum, a Latin phrase referring to twilight, when you can’t tell one canid from the other. One of the subsidiary characters is called sometimes Fyodor, sometimes Pyotr, and sometimes Yegor. And in this poem we have a difficulty in distinguishing between two trees, a неклен [neklen] (Acer tataricum, the Tatar maple) and a клен [klyon] (the regular old maple); there are half a dozen variants of this couplet:

Неклен. А в сущности – клен.
Клен. А прищуришься – неклен.

Tatar maple. But in essence a maple.
Maple. But if you squint, a Tatar maple.

The last four lines of the poem are:

Неклен. Наклюкался – клен.
Клен. Оклемаешься – неклен.
Сумерками ослеплен,
Медленной тлею облеплен.

Tatar maple. When you get really drunk, a maple.
Maple. When you recover, a Tatar maple.
Blinded by twilight,
Swarming with slow plant lice.

This shows both Sokolov’s magical way with sounds (kl-n, kl-m, sl-pl-n, dl-n, tl, l-pl-n) and the importance of booze in the novel. Now, of course English has no equivalent of the close-but-no-cigar клен and неклен (which looks like ‘not-maple’ and is etymologically probably just that), so Boguslawski has chosen to go with apple and crab(apple):

Apple. But in essence — crab.
Crab. But look closer — apple.

I don’t think this works, not least because “crab” and “apple” don’t sound anything alike, but I can’t do any better, so I won’t give him a hard time. No, what I’m complaining about is the way he translates the title, “Spackle.” He uses the same word later to render “Рвань по фамилии Паклин?”: “The trash nicknamed Spackle?” In the first place, a фамилия is a surname, not a nickname, and there is in fact a surname Paklin, derived from пакля ‘oakum, tow (bundle of fibers).’ But never mind, if he wants to call it a nickname and render it Spackle on a phonetic basis, let him. The problem is that the title of the poem is an entirely different (though similar-looking) word, паклен, which happens to be a synonym of неклен ‘Tatar maple.’ I don’t know whether he didn’t know the word or was simply seduced by the similarity into mashing the two together, but the outcome is awful: a brilliant synthesynonym that sums up the poem is turned into a mystifying pseudo-nickname that delivers nothing to the eager reader.

And the worst of it is that паклен is a really interesting word! For some reason it’s not included in Vasmer even though it’s in Dahl, but it looks to me like it must be another example of the nominal prefix па-, so that паклен has the same relation to клен ‘maple’ as пасынок ‘stepson’ does to сын ‘son.’ Isn’t that neat? Though I speak, as always, under correction; I am merely an enthusiastic amateur, and it may be that a genuine etymologist will have good reasons for rejecting this pretty hypothesis.

Addendum. I’ve finished the novel, and instead of doing a summary post I think I’ll quote the description provided by Olga Matich in her “Саша Соколов. Три поразительных и очень разных романа” [Sasha Sokolov: Three striking and very different novels] (Новый Журнал, номер 300, 2020); the translation is mine, and you can see the original Russian at that link (beginning “Если «Школа» в каком-то отношении вытекает”):

If School [for Fools] in some respects has its source in youth prose [e.g., Vasily Aksyonov], Dog can be correlated with so-called village prose [e.g., Valentin Rasputin]. But it is alien to the moralizing of the village writers; its emotional focus is the doomed existence of its unhappy characters. As I wrote over twenty years ago, the novel brings to mind rather the modernist prose of Pilnyak in the 1920s, which described village life as filled with violence. Take his novella Mother Earth (1925), which has the howl of the wolf as a leitmotiv, as well as the woman tanner Arina, doomed to death. Sokolov also has a heroine Arina (Orina), and the wolf and dog flow together inter canem et lupum – the time of day when it is impossible to distinguish a dog from a wolf – in a single image.

The novel’s action takes place in an intermediate space along the two shores of the Itil/Wolf river [the fictional Volga] in the villages Gorodnishche, Bydogoshch, and others. The characters of Dog are hunters, grinders, beggars, cripples, and thieves; some of them transform from one to another. In terms of genre, Dog is in part an epistolary novel in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The narrative is characterized by a plaiting and replaiting of words […] Dog abounds in paronomasia and repetition of sounds, often punning, founded on coincidences in meaning and sound.

[…] The novel’s reader often gets lost in its storytelling and verbal labyrinths; on one hand, trying to understand their meaning, on the other, seeking an exit from them. Leona Toker calls the book “a spiderweb of words” […]

A few years ago we discussed the idea of abolishing foreign language requirements, but that focused on education at the high-school level; Victor Mair at the Log posts about the graduate level, taking off from a tweet by Bryan Van Norden:

My sense is that most doctoral programs in philosophy in the US have abandoned language requirements. This reflects the mistaken beliefs that the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy outside the Anglophone world are worthless.

Mair continues, “I asked my colleagues in Classical Studies what the situation was like here. Ralph Rosen responded thus:”

Well, Princeton is really just catching up to what has become the norm in most places. Penn was a pioneer in this— we crafted a no-languages-required major almost 25 years ago, and it was one of the best things we did for a variety of reasons we can discuss some time if you’re interested. I might add that ‘despite’ having a major such as this, students can still get all the training they would like in Greek and Latin if they’re interested. There are fewer of these choosing this language path than the non-language Classical Studies major, but they all interact as one community dedicated to a common interest in the pre-modern Mediterranean and its reception. One shouldn’t forget, after all, that ‘Classical Studies’ comprises a lot of quite diverse fields (archaeology, history, art history, reception studies, philosophy, in addition to Greek and Latin). Graduate study, of course, is another matter; but that article from Princeton was reporting changes only their undergraduate major, to align it better with disciplinary norms (and presumably to attract more students, who remain interested in the classical world, but for whatever reason, do not want to commit to language study).

Mair is upset:

I’m sure that every single one of my colleagues in East Asian Languages and Civilizations would find it absolutely inconceivable that we could offer a major or minor without heavy language requirements (it’s built right into the name of our department). In our department, we wrangled over whether the language requirement should be six courses or eight courses. Language study is at the heart of all that we do, and most practitioners of East Asian studies programs believe that you can’t really understand East Asian civilization and culture if you don’t know the languages.

Will EALC one day go the way of Classics at Penn and Princeton?

But of course there’s a big difference between a department that explicitly features languages and one focused on a subject matter like philosophy that can perfectly well be studied in translation (if you disagree, you have to explain where to draw the line between those philosophies that are worthy of being studied in the original and those that aren’t). There are good comments by several LH regulars; J.W. Brewer writes:

It is annoyingly hard to google up good data quickly, but my impression, bolstered with some recollections of having looked at decent data a few years ago, is that the percentage of US high school graduates that have studied some foreign language before graduation (and thus before entering college) is significantly higher these days than it was in most former times (in really former times the percentage was higher but that’s when most Americans didn’t finish high school).

And I tend to agree with Y, who says:

My natural tendency is to be sympathetic—yay, languages—but I can see their point. An archaeologist, I imagine, could be satisfied with the available translations of the works of classical antiquity, and leave the rare inscription or papyrus to the specialists. This is very unlike Chinese or Japanese studies, where most of the primary sources are untranslated, as is the vast body of secondary literature, which is still being generated.

I used to be much more reflexively in favor of language instruction, but (though obviously I still think it’s a Good Thing) I’m now more sympathetic to the idea of not requiring it for the study of things that don’t inherently involve languages. If you need German, or Chinese, for your particular branch of philosophy, you’ll learn it. If not, why bother?

My wife asked me if jerboa and gerbil were related; I looked them up, and sure enough, they’re both from Arabic يربوع (yarbūʿ), the latter via French gerbille (the first OED cite is as late as 1849: Sketches Nat. Hist.: Mammalia IV. 47 The Indian gerbille is common in Hindustan, and seems to be gregarious). What particularly struck me was the Arabic etymology:

From Proto-Semitic *ʿakbar- (“mouse”) mingled with عُرْقُوب‎ (ʿurqūb, “hamstring, Achilles tendon”) from *ʿarqūb- (“hamstring, Achilles tendon”) in specialization to the fauna of the Arabian desert where the jerboa is marked by its jumping muscles. Compare Classical Syriac ܥܽܘܩܒܪܳܐ‎ (ʿuqbarā, “mouse”), Hebrew עַכְבָּר‎ (ʿaḵbār, “mouse”).

Anybody know how reliable all that is? [Not very! See Xerîb’s comment below.]

Another interesting etymology I recently ran across in Vasmer:

обдо “сокровищница”, только русск.-цслав. обьдо, ст.-слав. обьдо θησαυρός (Супр.). От *обь- (см. о II) и к. *dhē- “ставить” (см. де́ять, деть); ср. Мейе, Ét. 234. Образование аналогично суд, просто́й.

In other words, the archaic Russian word обдо ‘treasury’ is a prefixed form of the PIE root dʰeh₁- ‘to do, put, place,’ the familiar descendant of which in Russian is деть ‘to put, place.’ I wouldn’t have guessed.

Recently I lamented the confusing wording of OED updates, and ktschwarz commented:

Could be anything from minor formatting changes, to correcting errors in quotation dates and sources, to restoring spelling and punctuation as they appeared in the original editions, to adding or dropping quotations (potato, for example), to adding and updating etymologies ahead of full revision (see December 2020 blog post), maybe even changes to the definition.

The Life of Words is annoyed too: “The impression is of a very up-to-date dictionary, which at least half of OED.com is very much not.” […] This is not as bad as making all these changes without indicating them at all, which is what they did up until this year (see Examining the OED for some blatant examples), but it’s not as good as it should be.

As I said then, I love the OED and they do great work, but they need to do better in this regard. Here’s the first paragraph of that OED December blog post, so you can see their explanation of what they’re up to:

Over the past eighteen months we have begun a new initiative as part of the ongoing revision of the OED: revising the etymology and variant forms section in entries that have yet to be revised in full. We are doing this in order to remedy deficiencies in entries that hitherto lacked an etymology, or where we have been aware that the etymology and variant forms sections already offered could be significantly improved, ahead of revision of the full OED entry. We have done this by making use of spare moments in our schedules, where members of the etymology team had completed their work on OED revision ranges slightly ahead of expectations. By working in this way, we have now managed to publish over 1500 revised etymologies and variant forms sections in this new stream of work. For each of these entries, a note appears in the “Entry history” window, “Etymology and variant forms provisionally revised”, together with the date when these revisions were published.

But I recommend reading all the links if you’re interested in this stuff.

Less than a week into the existence of this blog, I posted about the workings of coincidence (see also Apophenia, from 2005); now I’ve got another splendid example. For over a month now I’ve been hacking away at Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (see this post) with the invaluable help of (inter alia) Boguslawski’s valiant translation Between Dog and Wolf; I quote the following from his introduction (p. xxi):

The best example of a recurrent visual image is the ekphrastic description of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, which provides a detailed portrayal of the setting of the novel in chapter 2 and is skillfully repeated in Note XVII. It becomes a source of many reappearing images in the novel (birds, boats, skaters, a frozen river and ponds, hunters and hunting dogs, a tavern) and, in addition, provides a connection to the theme of the seasons, since Bruegel created the famous painting as a part of the series called Months and depicted in it activities common in December and January.

Well, Barnes & Noble is having a 50% off sale on all Criterion Blu-rays and DVDs through August 1, and being an aficionado of Criterion’s superb editions I put together an order that included one of my favorite movies, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Зеркало (Mirror), and the last movie by another of my favorite directors, Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. I knew nothing about the latter, but Criterion describes it enticingly:

Setting out to reconstruct the moments immediately before and after a photograph is taken, Kiarostami selected twenty-four still images—most of them stark landscapes inhabited only by foraging birds and other wildlife—and digitally animated each one into its own subtly evolving four-and-a-half-minute vignette, creating a series of poignant studies in movement, perception, and time. A sustained meditation on the process of image making, 24 Frames is a graceful and elegiac farewell from one of the giants of world cinema.

So I was excited to get the package today, and I tore off the plastic coverings and checked out the beautifully illustrated booklets they tuck into each box. The one for Mirror reminded me of an element I’d forgotten: “Alexei’s anecdotal recollection of a snowy day during the war prompts a visual echo of the composition of Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.” Huh, I thought. Then I turned to the Kiarostami and found in Bilge Ebiri’s essay:

The first frame begins with Dutch master Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s immortal sixteenth-century painting Hunters in the Snow, a winter scene of a group of men and dogs looking over a small village beside a frozen lake. Slowly, Kiarostami’s digital embellishments emerge. Smoke rises from a chimney. A bird flits among the branches of a tree. A dog starts sniffing around. A herd of cows lumbers along in the distance. But amid all this movement, the figures of the original painting stand motionless. The hunters carry the same poses they did in 1565. Some birds may hop among the trees, but one remains frozen in the sky, captured midflight by Brueghel 450 years ago, its wings spread out forever.

I’m not saying it Means anything, but tell me that isn’t weird.

I last posted about the Sorbs in 2002 (less than half a year into the blog’s existence), so it’s time for an update; Thomas Sparrow writes for BBC Culture, opening with a passage on Andrea Bunar, “the local postwoman in Lehde, a quiet 150-person village of marshy islands connected by footbridges, nestled in the lush Unesco biosphere reserve of the Spreewald,” who delivers the mail in a gondola-like boat. He continues:

But although Bunar, who has lived near the Spreewald for most of her life, often chats in German with locals and tourists alike, she regrets that she doesn’t speak the region’s second language, which forms an important part of its unique identity. That’s because, in addition to sheltering 6,000 species of animals and plants, the Spreewald is also home to the Sorbs: the world’s smallest Slavic ethnic group and one of Germany’s four nationally recognised minorities, alongside Danes, Frisians and the German Sinti and Roma.

The Sorbs are descendants of Slavic tribes who lived north of the Carpathian Mountains in Central and Eastern Europe. Around 1,500 years ago, some of these tribes migrated to Lusatia, a historical region sometimes called Sorbia that straddled eastern Germany, western Poland and the northern tip of the Czech Republic. Over time, European empires and nations have come and gone, but the Sorbs have remained – a Slavic-speaking ethnic minority existing inside modern-day Germany.

Today there are an estimated 60,000 Sorbs in Germany. A third live in the state of Brandenburg, where the Spreewald is located, and the rest live further south, in Saxony. In addition to German, Sorbs speak their own West Slavic languages: about 20,000 people in Saxony speak Upper Sorbian (which has similarities to Czech); while Brandenburg has around 5,000 speakers of Lower Sorbian (which has more in common with Polish). Both languages are endangered, and are protected and promoted locally.

This means that as visitors slowly paddle through the Spreewald’s tranquil canals in their hired punts or kayaks, they’re likely to notice that public signs are bilingual. Lehde, for instance, is Lědy in Lower Sorbian. And if you ask locals, many will write their names and titles in both German and Sorbian.

“For many people, the language is incredibly important, it’s the main way of identifying with the Sorbs in general,” said Fabian Kaulfürst, a language expert at the Sorbian Institute, a research facility that specialises in Sorbian history and culture, located in the town of Bautzen, or Budyšin in Upper Sorbian – which is commonly known as the Sorbs’ spiritual and political heart today.

There’s more information (and gorgeous photos) at the link; it sounds like the Sorbs are doing pretty well for speakers of endangered languages. (I note, by the way, that Spreewald in Lower Sorbian is Błota, ‘the Swamps.’) Thanks, Trevor!

I’m still bushwhacking my way through Sokolov’s Между собакой и волком (Between Dog and Wolf), with help from various books, the internet, and my pal José Vergara, and when I hit the end of chapter 10 I turned to José as my only hope, e-mailing him as follows:

After the sad story of Orina’s sexual exploitation and the tales of Fyodor/Egor/Pyotr’s suicide by hanging and Kaluga/Kostroma’s suicide by belladonna, we get Karaban’s amazing account, which ends the chapter [I quote the passage starting “Отдыхал я, повествует, под ильмами,” which you can see here]. You’re carried along by the lush, swooning prose, gobsmacked by “это Вечная Жизнь” [it was Life Everlasting], thrilled by “посетила она, посетила” [she visited us, she visited], and then you hit that last sentence, with its triumphant final chord: “и не как-нибудь, а как…” [and not just any old way, but like…] what?! WTF are простипомы? It turns out a простипома is a (pretty unattractive) fish […]. Boguslawski translates it as “pristipomas,” which exists in English, but barely (I learn from googling); it’s certainly not in the dictionaries. But never mind the details, the point is that it’s an extremely obscure word that hardly any reader of Russian can be expected to recognize; what’s it doing here as the culmination of a carefully composed and highly effective lyrical passage? Is it just остранение, to throw you out of your luxurious carriage and make you scrape your skin off on the gravelly embankment of the lexical unknown?

He responded “It’s certainly very obscure to me, and to contemporary Russian readers, but this page suggests it may have been more common closer to the book’s publication,” and that page (from yesaul’s Live Journal) is so funny and enlightening I have to share it here in my translation. The title is “О простипома моя, простипома!” [O prostipoma, my prostipoma!]:
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