Via Adam’s Notes for January 30, I bring you this cacalicious quote from Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century:

Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more. The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-. But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office. Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.

Supercacafragilisticexpialidocious!

Not worth a separate post, but it has been brought to my attention that there is a word tetraplegia that is synonymous with quadriplegia and that, according to the OED (entry from 1986), has been around, if not in general use (it’s not in my print M-W or AHD), since 1911. Why?? I realize that quadri- is Latin and ‑plegia is ultimately from Greek (though we got it from Latin), but so what? Does that justify creating a pointless alternative term just to confuse people? What’s next, teleorasis for television?

Saleem Vaillancourtaz writes in LRB blog about a movie I’d definitely like to see:

‘I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,’ Matthew Rankin said at a recent screening of his movie Universal Language. I come from both countries, but it’s the furniture gag that struck home. Written by Rankin, Pirouz Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, the film is set in a version of Canada where the official languages are French and Persian. Buildings are covered with Persian signs (one says ‘Robert H. Smith School’); carts sell cooked beets, an old Iranian staple.

When I spoke with Rankin and Nemati after the screening, they said the movie is neither Iranian nor Canadian (though it’s Canada’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars). Nemati, who plays a tour guide showing visitors around Winnipeg (‘this is one of the first residential structures in the historic beige district’), recalled the praise offered by one ‘Iranian grandma’ at a Toronto screening. ‘She wasn’t a cinephile, but she said she just felt the film,’ that it connected people during a time of ‘distance’. Universal Language is not didactic, Rankin said, but ‘the experience of watching it does propose a way of looking at the world, and I think that’s what people respond to.’[…]

‘I liked that there was this strange echo on the other side of the world,’ he said, between his family’s history and Iranian cinema. I suggested that Universal Language speaks to the strand in Iranian culture that uses the particular to speak to the universal. The ‘Iranian-ness’ in the film ‘is not really Iranian-ness’, Nemati replied. He mentioned the Saadi poem at the entrance to the United Nations building in New York. ‘Persian poetry became universal because it wasn’t Iranian any more,’ he said. ‘Winnipeg, in Persian, loses itself and finds itself again.’

According to Rankin, the film inhabits ‘this new third space … at the confluence of different stories and experiences and understandings and baggage, and that’s what’s fun about the movie. It doesn’t belong in one Tupperware container that is sealed off from all other Tupperware containers.’

An Iranianized version of Canada — what a great concept for a movie!

Syntinen Laulu wrote in this Wordorigins thread, in response to a comment about Theodoric:

When I was young I was greatly puzzled by his moniker in German legend being Dietrich von Bern. What had he to do with Berne, I wondered? I don’t know how long it took me to find out that that was (still is, for all I know) the German name for Verona.

I responded:

No, they call it Verona just like us; that German Wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the “Bern” form except in a brief reference to Theodoric:

Aus dem Sagenkreis um Dietrich von Bern stammt auch der alte Name der Stadt: „Dietrichsbern“. Weiterhin war in alter Zeit die Bezeichnung „Welsch-Bern“ gebräuchlich (zimbrisch: Bearn)

[The old name of the city also comes from the legends surrounding Dietrich von Bern: “Dietrichsbern”. Furthermore, the name “Welsch-Bern” was used in ancient times (Cimbrian: Bearn).]

So I began to wonder about it, and googled up Dietrich von Bern und Karl der Große by Wim S. W. Rass, who says on p. 37:

Doch ist „Dittrichs-Bern“ eine Ortsbezeichnung für Verona, die es in dieser Form erst seit dem Spätmittelalter gibt […]. Mir ist sie noch nirgendwo sonst begegnet. Man beachte aber, dass hier nicht Dietrich nach dem Ort („von Bern“) benannt ist, sondern der Ort nach Dittrich benannt wurde (also gewissermaßen das „Bern des Dietrich“). Und es dürfte sich außerdem um eine germanische, vielleicht eine „deutsche“ Bezeichnung handeln, aber wohl kaum um eine lateinische / gotische / langobardische / italienische.

He goes on to discuss the issue at some length, but I have no idea how seriously to take him, and I wonder if “Bern” for Verona exists outside of the Dietrich story. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Trevor Joyce has a poem called “The Turlough,” part of his 1995 collection stone floods (reprinted in With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold — see this post), that starts:

It is raining elsewhere

Vertical rivers reverse
stone floods
the karst domain
each sink turns source

and ends:

There is thunder now elsewhere

Under an incandescent sky
flash floods
spread out this lake
is on no map

The end note begins:

The turloughs or winter lakes of western Ireland occur in areas of karstic limestone. Rain falling on this land drains away through swallow-holes or sinks, but precipitation anywhere within the watershed may cause the water table to rise again above the valley floor, whereupon streams issue through the crevices by which they had previously drained away.

Of course I was curious about the word, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1915), which in lieu of a definition says “(See quots.)”:
[Read more…]

Robyn Creswell, who teaches comparative literature at Brown and is poetry editor of the Paris Review, has an essay in the February 13 NYRB (archived) that is ostensibly a review of two new versions of the Qur’an but spends much of its time on a useful summary of the history of such attempts. It begins:

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph and conqueror of Jerusalem, was initially one of the prophet Muhammad’s fiercest enemies. According to early Muslim historians, ‘Umar was an exemplary pagan Arab: physically imposing, short-tempered, and somewhat sentimental, he was a lover of gambling, wine, and poetry. His conversion occurred in 616, three years after Muhammad began preaching to the polytheists of Mecca. One night, the story goes, ‘Umar was looking for drinking companions when he came across the prophet at prayer near the square shrine of the Kaaba (then a site of pagan pilgrimage). ‘Umar slipped under the great cube’s black covering and listened. Hearing the words of the Qur’an for the first time, he later reported, “My heart softened, I wept, and then Islam entered me.”

‘Umar’s experience was, it seems, typical. Early biographies of the prophet include stories of poets—the tribunes of pagan culture and Muhammad’s political rivals—who immediately renounced their art upon hearing the prophet’s revelations. Other stories recount the conversion of Abyssinian and Byzantine Christians who accepted the Qur’anic message even though they didn’t understand a word of Arabic. In the most extreme cases, hearing Qur’anic verses caused fainting, terror, ecstasy, and even death. In the eleventh century, Abu Ishaq al-Tha‘labi published a collection of such tales, The Blessed Book of Those Slain by the Noble Qur’an, Who Listened to the Qur’an and Subsequently Perished of Their Listening. Al-Tha‘labi wrote that people who died in this fashion were “the most virtuous of martyrs.”

Creswell points out that “Many Islamic authorities—and indeed many translators—believe that the Qur’an, as the word of God spoken to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, is strictly speaking untranslatable” and continues:

Leaving theology aside, the Qur’an isn’t a book Muslims have historically encountered through reading. Instead it is recited, memorized, and used in devotional practices. ‘Umar converted after hearing the prophet recite the Qur’an; al-Tha‘labi’s martyrs were listeners, not readers. And this is only the beginning of the translator’s difficulties.

He goes on to discuss Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin version, Ludovico Marracci’s 1698 translation (also Latin), George Sale’s 1734 translation (“the most popular in English for some two hundred years”), Muhammad Ali’s 1917 The Holy Qur’an: Containing the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary (adopted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam), Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s 1930 The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (still widely used), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary (1934-37), Arthur J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955), and Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’án (1999) before getting to the books under review. For many of them, he provides their versions of Surah 100, al-‘Adiyat, which is a convenient way to compare their qualities. (I wish he’d included my own go-to edition, Muhammad Asad’s The Message of The Quran with its superb commentary, but you can’t have everything.) Here’s a sample passage on M.A.R. Habib and Bruce Lawrence’s new The Qur’an: A Verse Translation:
[Read more…]

I recently ran across a reference to someone’s “battel” at Oxford, and of course went straight to the OED, where I found an entry (from 1885; not yet revised) so redolent of posh Victorian England I had to share it:

1. † A prebend. Obsolete.
[…]

2. In Univ. of Oxford: (a) college accounts for board and provisions supplied from the kitchen and buttery; (b) (in looser use) the whole college accounts for board and lodgings, rates, tuition, and contribution to various funds, as ‘My last term’s battels came to £40’; also attributive, as battel-bills.
The word has apparently undergone progressive extensions of application, owing partly to changes in the internal economy of the colleges. Some Oxford men of a previous generation state that it was understood by them to apply to the buttery accounts alone, or even to the provisions ordered from the buttery, as distinct from the ‘commons’ supplied from the kitchen: but this latter use is disavowed by others. See the quotations, and cf. those under battel v. and batteler n., which bear that battels applied in 17–18th centuries to provisions supplied to members of the college individually at their own order and cost, i.e. to battelers, who had no commons, but were charged their ‘battels’ only, and to commoners as extras ‘above the ordinary stint of their appointed commons’: but whether the battels were originally the provisions themselves, or the sums due on account of them, must at present be left undecided.

[1557
Ad solvendum debita seu batillos sociorum.
Reg. Exeter Coll. 41]
[…]
1706
For sometime kept a name in yᵉ Buttery Book; at wᶜʰ time Dr. Charlett was sponsor for discharge of his Battles.
T. Hearne, Remarks & Collections (1885) vol. I. 220
1792 The word battel, which..signifies to account, and battels the College accounts in general.
Gentleman’s Magazine August 716
1842 Their authority might be exerted to compel payment to tradesmen with nearly the same regularity as they exact their own battells.
T. Arnold in Life & Correspondence (1844) vol. II. x. 305
[…]
1882 Receipts..in respect of battels, room rent and tuition fees.
Spectator 18 March 352

3. Elsewhere: (see quots.).

1805 Battel—(a term used at Eton for the small portion of food which, in addition to the College allowance, the collegers receive from their Dames,).
J. H. Tooke, Επεα Πτεροεντα (ed. 2) vol. II. iv. 123
[…]
[a1883 Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money, which we called battels [This is an error of the author: the Winchester term is battlings], and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master.
A. Trollope, Autobiography (1883) vol. I. 13]

A brisk rap on the knuckles for poor Trollope! (But let’s face it, he attended Harrow as a day pupil who didn’t pay fees before haring off to Winchester; what can you expect?) And the etymology is equally chatty and supercilious:
[Read more…]

Nick Nicholas has been traveling through Greece and Albania and is now in Cyprus, and he’s been posting lots of observations (and photos) on Facebook; I thought this one was interesting enough to reproduce here (in its entirety, so those of you without FB access aren’t missing anything but a couple of menu images):

Burger, transliterated as berker in Cypriot Greek, instead of bernger. Cypriot Greek has a 3-way contrast of kk, k, ng: k is actually the closest the dialect phonology has to a g, whereas Greece Greek increasingly is dropping the n in ng, and has always used NG anyway. Same for nd vs t and mb vs p.

Yes, that is a double tt at the start of ttavas. It’s aspirated word-initially: t(h)avas. Here they make it with rice: in the Nicosia region where my aunt and uncle are from, they use onion instead, so Lefkara ttavas weirds them out. It’s unfamiliar to me, so I’m in.

Ttavas is the Cypriot for tava, the Indian through to Turkish pan that it is prepared in. (Metal in India, clay here.) Turkish t ends up in Cypriot as tt. Hence also eg Turkish kele “head” > Cypriot Greek kkele.

(I’ve added itals and links ad libitum.)

As promised in my earlier post, here are some passages from Veltman’s Virginie (all from the inserted correspondence, which constitutes at least half the text) that provide ironic takes on Russian literacy in the early 19th century; I’ll put the Russian originals after the translations (probably still with uncaught OCR errors). The first is from a social gathering:

At dinner I wound up sitting next to a young man who was submerged in a weighty jabot; I started a conversation with him, wanting to acquire some information about Russia, but imagine my surprise: he seems to have no more knowledge of Russia than I do. Here’s our conversation:
I. – What an extraordinary talent for learning languages Russians are endowed with; I have never seen a European nation that spoke French so fluently.
He.—Yes; but all those who want to be educated are forced to do so.
I don’t understand; please explain it to me.
He.—It’s quite clear; we don’t have our own language. Would you believe that in Russian it is not possible to put two decent words together in a salon, not to mention that the Russian language has absolutely no words for expressing ideas; it is impossible for an enlightened person to express his thoughts in Russian.
I. – That’s remarkable; I had imagined that the Russian language was one of the richest.
He. – You are mistaken. The Russian language exists only among the common people. It is a crude language, the very simplest.
I. – But the written language? the language of Russian literature?
He. — All Russian literature is written in the Slavic language, that is, in the Church language. This language is even worse: no one learns it except the clergy and scribes; for even our legal proceedings are in the Slavic language.
I. – But surely someone is engaged in the development of the Russian language?
He.— Absolutely nobody; all decent people speak and write French, they know English, German, Italian.
I.- But I seem to remember reading that in Russia there are the poets Lamanousoff, Dershavni….
He – Lomonosov is famous only because he was the first to write the vilest poems in Russian… And as for Minister Derzhavin. . . He is a Minister, therefore, it was not difficult for him to make himself famous . . . and what did he write? some odes; but they are also in the Slavic language, which, I confess, I do not understand, and therefore I cannot be enraptured by Russian works. In any case, I have no need of them, like any educated person who can read European works… I’d rather open the charming Delille, the sublime Racine, Corneille, Voltaire! …
Is it possible to express in Russian, for example, the verse when Assur says to Semiramis: “Madame! c’est à vous d’achever votre ouvrage”?
I asked him to translate the verse into Russian; my interlocutor thought for a long time, and finally translated it. I wrote it down, and here it is:
“Sadarina, eto vam prinadlejit kontchit vasch rabоto.”
My God, is it even possible to compose something decent in Russian? continued the Russian youth.
Judging by his words, and by the general conversation of society in French, one must assume that the Russian language will completely die out and be replaced by French.

[Read more…]

Dmitry Pruss writes me:

We have an etymology discussion under my Facebook post with ermine pictures. Vasmer says one thing about горностай, Trubachyov another, and wiktionary shies away from it but suggests a paper with discussion.
Does the learned world of the hatters know?

I’ve added links so interested parties can follow up; to summarize, Trubachov says it’s from an Old Saxon *harmenes-tagl- / *harmenes-tail- ‘ermine’s tail,’ while Vasmer calls that idea mistaken (“Ошибочно”) without further analysis, rubbishing another couple of hypotheses in the process (“unacceptable… also unacceptable… absolutely fantastic”), and says Proto-Slavic *gornostajь remains unexplained (“остается необъясненным”). All thoughts welcome!

In 2023, introducing my review of Alexander Veltman’s Предки Калимероса [The forebears of Kalimeros] (1836), I wrote “having since read more Veltman than doubtless all but a handful of Americans, I’ve finally gotten around to one of his early works I missed along the way,” and now I’ve renewed the exploit by reading his 1837 novel Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию [Virginie, or a journey to Russia]. As usual, I have no idea whether anyone else would be interested in it, and even if they were it’s unlikely they’d actually read it because 1) it’s never been translated (and doubtless will never be) and 2) even to read it in Russian you have to download a pdf of the original publication, in pre-reform spelling and often hard to make out (at least that’s the only text I could find). So I will thoroughly spoil the plot in my summary (though plot is always the least important thing in Veltman).

It starts off:

Hector d’Alm, a handsome young Parisian, was compelled as a result of a purchase of land to spend a good deal of time in Briançon and in the environs of that Alpine city.

Парижанинъ Гекторъ д’Альмъ, прекрасный собою молодой человѣкъ, принужденъ былъ по случаю покупки земли, прожить долгое время въ Бріансонѣ и въ округѣ этого Альпійскаго города.

He has no interest in the antiquities of the region (“Что мнѣ до символовъ прошедшаго, я хочу видѣть только настоящее”) and dreams of women, so in the interest of meeting some local members of the fair sex he visits a tree-planting festival. Ignoring the ancient roots of the celebration, he fixates on a beautiful girl and follows her to her home in a nearby village, where he pretends to be interested in the antiquarian researches of her father while casting smoldering glances at the girl, who is, of course, the titular Virginie. She, a virginal and naive fifteen-year-old, responds with the requisite blushes, and eventually, alone with her while her father is rummaging in his storeroom, he seizes the opportunity to give her a kiss. Unfortunately, she melts in his arms, her father dashes in, and before he knows it Hector is officially engaged to the tremulous Virginie. What to do?
[Read more…]