Two words from very different reaches of the English wordhoard that I’ve recently encountered:

1) In Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which my wife and I will be reading at night well into 2027, I hit the word barathea, which meant nothing to me (although I had seen it before, since I’ve read Lucky Jim at least twice). The OED (entry from 1933) says:

A cloth of a fine texture composed of a silk warp and woollen weft, also of cotton and wool and entirely of wool.

1862 Cobourg, paramatta, barathea, reps, cords, cloths.
International Exhibition: Illustrated Catalogue of Industrial Department vol. II. xxi. §3958

1897 Venetian crape..has taken the place of the old baratheas, Balmorals, bombazines, &c.
Daily News 30 October 6/5

1954 His lavender barathea trousers swayed gracefully with his walk.
K. Amis, Lucky Jim: A Novel ix. 98

1963 All ranks will receive a second suit of the No. 2 khaki service dress, of 22 oz. barathea.
Guardian 15 March 1/4

The stress is on the penultimate (/barəˈθiːa/), and it’s “Of unknown origin.”

2) Doreen St. Félix’s New Yorker piece (archived) on the Swedish singer Zara Larsson (of whom I was unaware) is written throughout in an idiom that presumes knowledge I lack (“hallucinations of a type of two-thousands diva,” “the main-girl-hierarchy talk resurging in pop circles”), but where it lost me completely was with “…her dancers, in pum-pum denim shorts and tank tops like Fly Girls, introduced themselves through a shabooya roll call.” It turns out that What the hell does “shabooya roll call” mean?? has been addressed at Reddit, the answer being “Its an old African Amer chant made famous in the Spike Lee movie GET ON THE BUS.” You can see the movie clip here; it’s from 1996, which shows you how long I haven’t been with it.

Oh, and for those who might be interested, A ‘Game Show’ That’s Basically Dropout For Word Nerds Is The Funniest Thing I’ve Watched In Years. Not, alas, available here in the US. (Via MeFi.)

I was reading a Russian post on Facebook when the Latin-alphabet phrase ad acta jumped out at me. Not being familiar with it, I looked for it in my fairly comprehensive Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases (hey, I’m a book guy, what can I say), but it wasn’t there, so I went to the internet like a good 21st-century denizen and found it in Wiktionary:

ad acta

German

Alternative forms

● ad Acta

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin ad ācta.
[…]

Adverb

1. (higher register) to the files

    etwas ad acta legen ― to be done with something (literally, “to file”)

Usage notes

In modern times this almost only occurs in the phrase “etwas ad acta legen”, which means to put something to the files or, figuratively, to close the matter on a topic.

So it’s used primarily in German, which explains why it’s not in my English-language reference book… but it’s also used in Russian, doubtless due to the deep immersion in German culture it got before WWI. The Russian national corpus turns up two examples, both using the phrase without explanation:

1. С. Н. Булгаков. Дневник (1924)

Но, конечно, он — гений и свои творения складывает ad acta…

2. В. Н. Ламсдорф. Дневник (1896)

На этих бумагах, хранимых в Азиатском департаменте, имеется помета «ad acta», сделанная рукой благородного Капниста.

Is anyone out there familiar with this simple-looking but obscure phrase? (For another Latin tag used by Russians, see Feci quod potui, and for a fake-Italian phrase, see Финита ля комедия.)

From the misty depths of my youth I remember the expression parler français comme une vache espagnole (literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’), meaning to speak the language badly. It occurred to me to wonder if this is still something persons of Frenchness actually say, and (more importantly) if there are equivalents in other languages; I suspect English is unusual in not having a colorful xenophobic phrase to express the concept.

In flipping through my Russian edition of Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary, I occasionally run across words that strike me as odd or intriguing in one way or another, and I thought I’d share a few of them here.

1) уй (or вуй) ‘maternal uncle.’ This is from Proto-Slavic *ujь, which goes back to that fine old Indo-European root *h₂éwh₂os ‘maternal grandfather; maternal uncle,’ from which we get Latin avus ‘grandfather’ and avunculus ‘maternal uncle,’ Old Irish aue ‘grandson,’ Armenian հավ (hav) ‘grandfather,’ and others. You can see why it dropped out of use in Russian — it’s dangerously similar to The Worst Word in the Language.

2) страфил(ь), the “mother of all birds” (мать всех птиц) in the Dove Book (Голубиная книга). This is thought to be an alteration of Greek στρουθοκάμηλος ‘ostrich.’ It’s good to have a word for ‘mother of all birds’ should you need one.

3) исто ‘kidney,’ gen. истесе, used in the dual истесѣ to mean ‘balls.’ I’m not sure why this is even in Vasmer, since it’s not in Dahl, his usual source for weird words, and only seems to be used in Church Slavic, but I’m glad to know about it; it’s related to Old Norse eista (Synonym: bǫllr) ‘testicle,’ inter alia.

Martin Haspelmath has been working on a project he’s now put online:

The Grammaticon: Linking grammatical comparative concepts to typological databases

This blogpost introduces a new resource for general-comparative linguistics: the Grammaticon, a collection of hundreds of grammatical comparative concept terms (Haspelmath & Englisch 2026). Version 1.0 has just gone online:

https://grammaticon.clld.org/

Many of these terms are linked to typological features represented in database collections such as WALS, Grambank, or APiCS. Grammatical terminology is quite variable (and often somewhat confusing), so the Grammaticon offers some guidance: Each term has a standard definition, and definitions are typically linked to other terminological resources (such as Wikipedia), and for many of the typological features, the Grammaticon explains how their technical terms relate to the definitions in the Grammaticon.

The Grammaticon was first conceived of in 2017, and the idea was presented at the ALT conference in Canberra (Haspelmath & Forkel 2017). Version 1.0 is now public, and it is hoped that it will be extended and improved greatly over the coming months and years.

Click through for the FAQs; a sample:

The Grammaticon definitions use ordinary language (no abbreviations or other notational devices) and recognize that some terms cannot be defined – they are treated as “primitives”. Is it an accident that this approach is similar to Anna Wierzbicka‘s NSM approach (Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wierzbicka 1996)?

It is not an accident – the Grammaticon has been inspired by Igor Mel‘čuk‘s approach to definitions of linguistic terms (e.g. Mel‘čuk 1982), and Mel‘čuk in turn inspired Wierzbicka in the 1960s. For the meanings of ordinary words, Wierzbicka‘s approach is compelling and almost without rivals, and it seems to me that technical terms of grammar are best treated in a similar way.

I’ve long been a fan of Gasan Guseinov (e.g., 2014, 2020), so I’m delighted he’s been showing up again in my RSS feed after a long absence. Today I read his RFI essay “Сладость и горечь языков, которых мы не знаем” [The Sweetness and Bitterness of Languages ​​We Don’t Know] (and listened to him read it in his wonderful gravelly voice), and I thought I’d bring a few paragraphs of it here and translate them; those who find them attractive can go to the link and use their favorite translation software if they don’t know Russian. He starts off talking about the pull of foreign languages, and continues:

I’m writing about this now for a particular reason: I’ve just gotten back from Parma, from a conference on the Russian language to which Maria Candida Ghidini and her colleagues gather hundreds of participants from dozens of countries where Russian speakers live. I thought I’d easily be able to make myself understood—at least in a trattoria. I somehow managed to do it, but it wasn’t easy. How can that be? I love Italian so much! I read it almost fluently, and I understand quite a bit. So why can’t I speak it as freely as I sense its sweetness?

I’m talking about languages ​​that are clearly foreign, but it can happen with native languages ​​as well. Today I want to fulfill a promise I made not long ago to tell the story of how my father and I failed to make Azerbaijani—his first native language—at least a second language for me.
[…]

I’ve touched on just one aspect—the linguistic one—of the tragic personal trajectory of the Dzhemal family, touched on it as someone who happened to witness conversations between our fathers—mine and Geydar’s—regarding their unsuccessful attempts to instill in their sons a command of their fathers’ native tongues. One complained that his son, having swallowed the bait of a foreign tongue, had contracted the virus of Islamism and rebellion. The other lamented that his son would be unable to appreciate his poems and novellas in Azerbaijani, having—as so often happens with cosmopolitans—succumbed to nostalgia for the foreign.

The original:

Пишу сейчас об этом не просто так: только что вернулся из Пармы, с конференции о русском языке, на которую Мария Кандида Гидини и ее коллеги собирают сотни участниц из десятков стран, где живут говорящие по-русски люди. Мне казалось, что я легко смогу объясниться хотя бы в траттории. Кое-как смог, но не легко. Как же так? Я ведь так люблю итальянский. Я почти свободно на нем читаю и кое-что понимаю. Почему же я не могу говорить на нем так же свободно, как я ощущаю его сладость?

Но то — языки заведомо иностранные, а ведь бывает такое и с родными языками. Сегодня я хочу исполнить данное не так давно обещание рассказать о том, как у меня самого и у моего отца не получилось сделать азербайджанский — первый родной язык моего отца — и моим хотя бы вторым языком.
[…]

А я коснулся сейчас только одного — языкового — аспекта трагической личной траектории семьи Джемалей, коснулся как человек, случайно бывший свидетелем разговоров наших с Гейдаром отцов о неудачном опыте приобщения сыновей к родному языку этих самых отцов. Один жаловался, что сын с наживкой языка проглотил вирус исламизма и бунтарства. Другой сокрушался, что сын не сможет оценить его стихов и новелл на азербайджанском языке, поскольку, как свойственно космополитам, предался ксенальгии.

I thought about translating the last word, ксенальгия, as “xenalgia,” but I think that’s even less a word in English than in Russian, so I expanded it. And the bit about speaking Italian resonated strongly with me: that’s exactly my experience with Russian. I read it so well, why can’t I speak it other than haltingly?

Nelson Goering posted on Facebook as follows (I’ve added links and italics):

Roan eats a lot of banana these days, and as is inevitable in such circumstances, we got to talking about the word “banana”. English Wiktionary claims it goes back either to Wolof banaana, or to a similar word in a related language, but goes no further. Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé says it’s probably from “le bantou de Guinée” (the Bantu of Guinea): since Guinea doesn’t, as far as I know, have any native Bantu languages, I guess this either means Equatorial Guinea, or is using “bantou” in a very broad sense to refer to the larger Atlantic-Congo family.

I’m curious if anyone I know here has any further light to shed, both whether the Wolof/Atlantic-Congo origin is regarded as likely, and if so, if there’s anything to say about the history of the word *within* Atlantic-Congo.

I responded “There are a number of Africanists at LH, so I’ll post this and see what they have to say,” and I am now so posting it. Thoughts? (Forget the OED — its entry is from 1885.)

I happened on this translation by Clare Cavanagh and Michał Rusinek of a Miron Białoszewski poem in the NYRB:

It’s Easy to Lose Faith

A horse and cart went past.
I see. I believe in them.

They grow dark.

The horse and cart went past.
But the horse had a horse.
The cart had a cart.

They led their own selves
large from shadows
along the acacias.

And now it’s hard for me to believe
in the horse and cart.

Here’s the original Polish:

Jak łatwo stracić wiarę

Przeszedł koń i fura.
Widzę. Wierzę w nich.

Ściemnia się.

Przeszedł koń i fura.
Ale koń miał konia.
Fura miała furę.
Prowadzili te swoje
wielkie z cieni
po akacjach

I już mi trudno uwierzyć
w konia i furę.

I like the poem and the translation; what I’m wondering is if Prowadzili te swoje wielkie z cieni necessarily implies they were leading “their own selves” or simply unspecified large things of theirs. I do not know Polish, I just triangulate from other Slavic. Also, doesn’t Ściemnia się mean “It’s getting dark” rather than “They grow dark”?

As for the title, the Polish literally translates to “How Easy It Is to Lose Faith”; I like that better than the abbreviated one Cavanagh and Rusinek chose, even though I realize “It’s Easy to Lose Faith” is snappier and probably more attractive to the English-language reader.

In Jé Wilson’s NYRB review (March 7, 2024; archived) of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, there is a description of Comyns’ childhood that begins “She grew up as Barbara Bayley in Warwickshire, in a manor bordering the River Avon, a few miles from Stratford. The fourth of six children, five of whom were girls, she spent much of her time running wild outside with her siblings.” Later it says “In keeping with the general neglect, the Bayley girls were left to tumble up when it came to education.” I was unfamiliar with the phrase “tumble up,” and my wife said she was too, so I did some investigating. The OED (entry from 1915) has (s.v. tumble):

II.7.b. to tumble up: to make haste, originally (Nautical) from below deck. slang.

1826 The command was repeated by the boatswain and his mates, who were piping and roaring down the hatchways—‘Tumble up, tumble up from below.’
W. N. Glascock, Naval Sketch-book 1st Series vol. I. 8

1832 Tumble up smartly, my lads.
F. Marryat, Newton Forster vol. II. iv. 48
[…]

And Green’s has it in two senses:

1. to rush, to hurry.
[…]
2. to rise from bed.

But these senses don’t appear to correspond to the use in the context of the quoted sentence, where it seems to mean something like ‘make do as best they could.’ Is anyone familiar with this sense? Is it too recent to be in the dictionaries? (Incidentally, Comyns is pronounced as if spelled Cummins; it’s historically the same Irish name as Cummings.)

Songdog was over here today and mentioned a Turkish-American friend whose given name was Ebru; intrigued, I looked it up and discovered that it means ‘ebru (marbled paper, handmade in a variety of styles by artisans using traditional techniques),’ with this surprising etymology:

From Ottoman Turkish ابرو (ebru), a clipping of Classical Persian ابر و باد (abr-u-bād, literally “cloud and wind”); earlier texts employ the simpler ابری (abri, literally “cloudy”), a term that is still in use.

I hope it’s true, because it’s very charming indeed. (You can see an example of the marbled paper at the link.)