Our nightly reading these days is Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which I first read three decades ago and have very much been wanting to revisit; at close to 2,000 pages, it should occupy our bedtimes well into next year. The first novel, The Jewel in the Crown (also the title of the superb television serial made from it), is online at archive.org for anyone who wants to sample it; I thought I’d post this passage for its linguistic interest:

The teacher at the Chillianwallah Bazaar school, whose pupils were all Indian, was a middle-aged, tall, thin, dark-skinned Madrassi Christian, Mr F. Narayan: the F for Francis, after St Francis of Assisi. In his spare time, of which he had a great deal, and to augment his income, of which he had little, Mr Narayan wrote what he called Topics for the local English language weekly newspaper, The Mayapore Gazette. In addition, his services were available as a letter-writer, and these were services used by both his Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He could converse fluendy in Urdu and Hindi and the local vernacular, and wrote an excellent Urdu and Hindi script, as well as his native Tamil and acquired Roman-English.

“Roman-English” doesn’t convey anything to me; I’m guessing it might mean English written in the Roman alphabet, but how else would it be written? All suggestions welcome.

Also, just because it was preying on me and I’m pleased to have solved the puzzle: I’m enjoying my new Blu-ray of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, notorious for its 439-minute running time (I’m following my brother’s advice and taking it in chunks, easy to do since it’s divided into twelve parts), and today I watched the sixth part, “A pók dolga II (Ördögcsecs, sátántangó) [The Job of the Spider II (The Devil’s Tit, Satan’s Tango)],” which takes place in a bar where everyone is getting increasingly drunk. One character, Kelemen, keeps repeating the same phrases over and over until you want to slug him, and the most frequently repeated was subtitled “I was plodding and plodding” (it’s the first thing you hear in this YouTube clip). Of course I wanted to know what the Hungarian was, and I think I’ve finally figured out it’s vágtattam (see the conjugation here), which means ‘I galloped.’ I don’t know why the translator went with “plodding,” but it seems misleading.

Update. It would appear rather to be baktattam, from baktat ‘plod, trudge, walk slowly’; see Xerîb’s comment below.

My wife and I were talking about sukiyaki (which her mother had enjoyed in a NYC Japanese restaurant sometime in the 1930s-’40s) and I wondered how far back it went in English; the OED, in a 1986 entry, takes it back to 1920 (“Another name by which this dish [sc. nabe] is usually known outside of Tokyo, is suki-yaki. This is derived from suki, which means a spade, and yaki, to cook”), but I figured that could be easily antedated using Google Books, and sure enough I quickly found a hit from 1915 1912 [thanks, ktschwarz!] (something about a “sukiyaki room” in a new Japanese social club in NYC). The most entertaining find, though, was Takeo Oha’s NY Times piece from July 6, 1919 (which you can read without the OCR errors in the Herald of Asia reprint at Google Books); it starts:

Now that the Atlantic has been crossed in the short span of sixteen hours by airplanes, the world has become a very small place indeed. Already aviators are turning their eyes to the Pacific. Soon we may expect to see the United States of America and Japan drawn much closer together by quick aerial transportation and with the shrinking of the ocean may the mutual understanding and friendship of our two nations become the greater. But New Yorkers need not wait for quick aerial transportation to visit Japan. Japan has come to New York.

The part of LH interest comes a few paragraphs later:

There are two vernacular newspapers, one weekly and the other semi-weekly. Doubtless any subscriber to any other New York newspaper could dispense with these without serious danger of backwardness in news. In consequence their readers hover in the neighborhood of the unlucrative two thousands. The parlor game, commonly christened “ta-maya” among my compatriots, has practically become one of the standard features of Coney Island and other New York Summer resorts. From a mercenary point of view the business is good and forms the best Summer side line. Really you need not be an infallible shot in order to turn a cigarette package target into your coveted prize at 50 cents or win a 5-cent doll by rolling away dollars at the Japanese ball game. Business is business, the Japanese has learned.

This metropolis may boast of no less than a dozen Japanese restaurants. Your casual visit will introduce you to fresh sliced fish taken raw, seasoned bamboo shoots, and lotus root and pickled radish served on the same table with “sukiyaki,” palatable at least to the Japanese. “Sukiyaki,” a compound word still unauthorized in any standard English dictionary, is the Japanese “quick lunch,” eaten while being cooked on a small charcoal table stove. Beef, onions, cabbage, beancurd, and other vegetable additions, not forgetting Japanese soy, sugar, and a little sake, are ready to be prepared in a shallow pan á la japonaise on the fire. The rest devolves upon you and your company, ladies not honorably excluded! A great time saving it is for the proprietor, this having his guests prepare their own meals! Though a fairly comprehensive menu is obtainable, Geisha girl entertainment, the Japanese equivalent to New York’s cabarets, is still unobtainable. Rice cakes have risen to a conspicuous place lately and have usurped a position in the bill of fare of chop suey restaurants. Their taste is the same as in Tokyo, but their price is different, as any sen-beiya-san (Japan rice-cake man) in New York City can tell you.

Note the use of “the Japanese” for a single Japanese person, a phenomenon we’ve discussed somewhere, and the Orientalizing “honorably”; what interests us, however, is the mention of “sukiyaki” as not occurring in any standard English dictionary, which of course makes sense at that early date. But I’m also curious about the parlor game called here “ta-maya”; does anybody know what that might be referring to? Google has been of no help to me; I’ve only found 霊屋 tamaya ‘mausoleum; (temporary) resting place of a corpse.’

This is one of those situations where I idly wonder about where a common word — in this case, abandon — comes from, and fall down a rabbit hole. The OED has revised its entry relatively recently (2011); it says the verb is from Anglo-Norman and Middle French (h)abandoner, “apparently either < abandon abandon n.¹ or directly < the phrase a bandon (see abandon adv.),” so let’s check those out. The noun:

< Anglo-Norman abandun, abaundun abandonment, surrender (first half of the 13th cent. or earlier) and Middle French abandon power, jurisdiction, discretion (12th cent. in Old French (see phrases below); French abandon; also in sense ‘freedom from constraint’ (1607 in en abandon without constraint)) < a bandon (see abandon adv.).

OK, let’s see abandon adv:

< Anglo-Norman a bandun, a baundoun, a baundun, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French a bandon under (one’s) jurisdiction or control (c1176 in mettre a bandon: see note), freely, willingly (c1230 or earlier), in abundance (c1230 or earlier), unrestrainedly (late 12th cent. or earlier), completely (c1235 or earlier) < a at, to (see a- prefix⁵) + bandon bandon n. Compare to be at a person’s bandon at bandon n. 1.

Notes
With sense 1 [‘Under control or authority; at one’s disposal’] compare Anglo-Norman aver a bandun, to have in one’s jurisdiction, under one’s control (first half of the 14th cent. or earlier), Anglo-Norman and Middle French mettre a bandon, mettre a son bandon to put under one’s jurisdiction, leave to one’s mercy (c1176), to entrust (second half of the 12th cent. or earlier). With sense 2 [‘At one’s own will or discretion, without interference or restraint’] compare Middle French a son bandon at his pleasure. Compare also the phrases cited at abandon n.¹

The entry for bandon n. ‘Jurisdiction, authority, dominion, control’ hasn’t been revised since 1885, so let’s check Merriam-Webster’s verb etymology for the rest of the story:

Middle English abandounen, borrowed from Anglo-French abanduner, derivative of abandun “surrender, abandonment,” from the phrase a bandun “in one’s power, at one’s disposal,” from a “at, to” (going back to Latin ad “to”) + bandun “jurisdiction,” going back to a Gallo-Romance derivative of Old Low Franconian *bann- “summons, command” (with -d- probably from outcomes of Germanic *bandwō “sign”) — more at at entry 1, ban entry 1, banner entry 1

I confess I did not go down those final rabbit holes; I abandoned the quest, as you might say. But there’s plenty there to chew on.

I’ve frequently had occasion to complain about translators simply skipping passages they found difficult, and I’ve run across some in my latest reading. I decided to finally try one of Mark Aldanov’s historical novels, and I chose Истоки (‘Sources’) [Russian text: I, II], which I have a hard copy of — it’s set in the period leading up to the assassination of Alexander II, in which I have an interest at the moment — and I’m enjoying it; it’s easy reading compared to many of the modernist writers I’ve struggled with, and it’s good Tolstoyan fun to have historical personages show up to interact with the fictional characters. In the section I recently finished, a restless young painter named Mamontov leaves Russia with the vague plan of visiting Bakunin in Switzerland and Marx in London, partly to try to understand their ideas and partly with the hope of painting them. He learns in Zurich that Bakunin is living at the Villa Baronata on Lago Maggiore, and when he stops for a rest in nearby Locarno he discovers the great anarchist is actually in town giving a lecture, which of course he decides to attend. He meets Bakunin afterwards and is invited up to his rented room, where they eat, drink, and talk a great deal. At some point it occurred to me to wonder how Catherine Routsky had handled some of the material in her 1948 translation Before the Deluge; as I suggested above, it did not go well.

The first instance is minor and I wasn’t surprised at its being skipped; when Bakunin sizes up our hero, bedraggled from his long travels, he offers to treat him to dinner: “I have ten francs and dinner here only costs one and a half.” The embarrassed Mamontov insists on paying, producing this exchange:

— Ради Бога!.. Напротив, я прошу вас сделать мне удовольствие и честь быть моим гостем. Для меня будет величайшим удовольствием, если вы со мной пообедаете.

— Я могу сделать вам и это удовольствие, и эту честь, — благодушно ответил Бакунин. Он произносил «чешть». — Разве вы тоже при деньгах?

Routsky renders it:

‘On the contrary, I am asking you to give me the pleasure and the honour of being my guest. It will be a great pleasure for me if you will have dinner with me.’

‘I can give you that pleasure and that honour,’ Bakunin replied good-naturedly. ‘Are you, too, in funds?’

The substitution of Ради Бога! ‘For God’s sake!’ with “On the contrary” is pathetic, but I can’t blame her for skipping “Он произносил «чешть»” ‘he pronounced [chest′ ‘honor’] chesht′,’ since I can’t think of a good equivalent. But a few pages later, when Bakunin is complaining about Marx and his fellow Germans and their delight at the victory of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, we get a whole chunk of text omitted:
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A recent Works in Progress post by Henry Oliver is far too long and repetitious (ironically, because his subject is style in English), but it has some useful thoughts and examples; if you’re good at skimming it might be worth taking a look at. (Warning: he quotes William Rees-Mogg approvingly. But then he quotes Helen de Witt approvingly, which redeems him to some extent.) This is the nub of it:

From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter. […]

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.

Nothing earthshaking, but worth thinking about. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:

It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:

My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]

I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!

I saw a mention of a Boris Vian novel called Trouble dans les andains and was troubled by the fact that I had no idea what andains were. Wikipedia gave me an idea, with illustrations, and when I went to the English article I discovered that they were windrows. Ah (said I), now I not only know what andains are but I have a clearer idea of what windrows are! The OED (entry revised 2024) defines windrow thus:

1.a. A long line into which mown grass, hay, barley, etc., is raked before being gathered into heaps or cocks (cock n.³); a row of sheaves of corn, heaps of turf or peat, etc., set up to be dried by exposure to the wind. Also in extended use: a pile of dead branches, vegetation, etc., gathered to be burnt.

?1523 On the next day turne it agayne towarde night and make it in windrowes and than in small hey cockes.
J. Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry f. xv
[…]

2. Originally and chiefly North American.

2.a. A long line or elongated pile of something, formed by the wind, resulting from other natural processes, or gathered together by human intervention; spec. (a) a row or pile of trees blown down by the wind (cf. windfall n. A.1a); (b) a long pile of leaves, dust, etc., heaped up by, or as if by, the wind.

1829 Here and there a wind-row, along which trees had been uprooted, by the furious blasts that sometimes sweep off acres of our trees in a minute.
J. F. Cooper, Wept of Wish Ton-Wish vol. I. ii. 28
[…]

2.b. A long ridge of earth, gravel, etc., displaced by a grader or similar machine; esp. (chiefly Canadian) a ridge of snow heaped along the side of a road by a snowplough.

1907 The cross-town trolley-cars glided along between the windrows of the snow the big plow had whirled from the tracks.
Evening Mail (Halifax, Nova Scotia) 2 November 7/4
[…]

The etymology is boring (wind + row), but to make up for that the French one (from the above-linked Wikipedia article) is unexpected:

Latin ambitanus de ambire : aller des deux côtés (mouvement de la faux) : mesure équivalente à un pas, puis surface de céréale ou de fourrage abattue d’un coup de faux.

The Russian equivalent, валок, is a straightforward derivation from вал ‘rampart, dyke, wall.’

Incidentally, you may think, as I did, that the Fenimore Cooper novel quoted in the 1829 cite has a very odd title, and Wikipedia provides confirmation: “The title puzzled the public and did not satisfy them so it was only used in the United States.” It appears to mean ‘someone who was wept over’; from the novel: “The wept of my household is again with us.” He may have been wildly popular, but a competent wielder of the English language he was not.

Joel at Far Outliers posts excerpts from Aleksandra Jagielska’s Culture.pl article on entomological etymology:

The word pszczoła [‘bee’] has Proto-Slavic origins, probably even Proto-Indo-European – if we go back that far in the language, we will discover that the Polish pszczoła and the English bee most probably come from the same Proto-Indo-European form *bhiquelā! In Proto-Slavic, the proto-word was *bьčela or *bъčela (they differ in the quality of the yer – a Proto-Slavic vowel). If we wanted to discover the etymology of Polish pszczoła (bee), we’d discover that it is an onomatopoeic word: probably the Proto-Slavic root was an onomatopoeic *bъk-, *bъč-, related to the Proto-Slavic verb *bučati, brzęczeć – to buzz (about bugs). The suffix *-ela would indicate the meaning of *bъčela as ‘that which buzzes’.

The name of this bug was initially pczoła in Poland, with the consonant š (sz) eventually inserted. Language strives for economy, also in terms of articulation, hence the consonant group pč- (pcz-) was expanded to pšč- due to the desire to avoid excessive articulatory energy input. This also explains why the spelling of the word pszczoła is an orthographic exception, since there was never any ‘r’ in this word that could become a ‘rz’.

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Two trivial but entertaining items:

1) Ian Frazier’s NYRB review (archived) of Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, an account of the American Society for Psychical Research, includes this piquant bit:

The society also set up such Borgesian-sounding entities as the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments, the Census of Hallucinations, and the Committee on Thought Transference.

Unfortunately, the archives of the ASPR turn out to be incredibly boring: “As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”

2) Our old friend Conrad sent me this Guardian link with the comment that he “felt this was one for you”; after discussing the phenomenon of the apparently near-universal opinion in the UK that “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” (commonly sung at sporting events to the tune of the riff of the White Stripes’ 2003 “Seven Nation Army,” with which I was completely unfamiliar even though not only did it receive “widespread critical acclaim” but it is “arguably… the world’s most popular sports anthem” — I have to agree that the riff is catchy as hell), Jonathan Liew provides a semantic analysis that makes it Hattic material:

Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.

Thanks, Conrad!

When I’m feeling low I like to pull a book off my poetry shelves and immerse myself in something completely different; as often as not it’s one of Trevor Joyce’s, and just now I was flipping through What’s in Store (see this post) when I was caught by his lovely version of the sorrowful old Irish ballad “Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna” (sometimes Englished as “Seán Dwyer of the Glen”). You can see the whole thing in Irish with a literal translation (and some YouTube links) here; I’ll quote the first and last stanzas of Trevor’s version:

Through the early sunshine
of this summer morning
hounds raise up their howling
   while the sweet birds sing.
The small beasts and the badger
keep covert with the woodcock,
all lie low from the echo
   and the booming of the guns.
Fox red on rock keeps lookout
on the horsemen’s hurly-burly
and the woman by the wayside
   lamenting scattered geese.
But now the woods are levelled
let us leave familiar landmarks
since, Séan, my friend, it’s over,
   the game is up and gone.

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