I recently acquired Richard Stites’ Russian popular culture: Entertainment and society since 1900 and am working my way happily through the first chapter, “In old Russia 1900-1917.” I was reading about the superstar Alexander Vertinsky, the “Russian Pierrot” (bio in Russian), when I was thunderstruck by the offhand parenthesis in this sentence: “His rendition of ‘Endless Road’ (‘Dorogoi dlinnoyu,’ known in English as ‘Those Were the Days’) is one of the classics of his repertoire.” “Those Were the Days” is a Russian song?! Turns out that indeed it is. (This page has the text in Russian and English.) It was written by the composer Boris Fomin (stress on the final syllable of each name) in collaboration with the forgotten poet Konstantin Podrevsky circa 1917, and according to this Russian page on the history of the song:

[Vertinsky’s] first benefit performance (of whose program “Endless Road” could have been a part) took place October 25, 1917. In the newspapers of those days announcements and notices of the Vertinsky benefit are cheek by jowl with reports about revolutionary bandits seizing the telephone, telegraph, and Winter Palace. But it’s not surprising that on the day of the coup it was not that song that called forth an ovation but “To, chto ya dolzhen skazat'” [What I must say] (“I don’t know why, or who needed it, who sent them to death with an untrembling hand…”). But it was around then that “Endless road” became one of the biggest “hits” in Russia (unfortunately, then as now there were no Russian hit parades, and it’s impossible to verify the fact).

So the song, which for members of my generation calls up that magical year 1968, for an earlier Russian generation brought World War One and the Revolution to mind. Nostalgia is what it used to be, but its objects keep changing.

Jonathan’s Boring But Useful Site (not boring at all!) makes this point: “Consider how much cash has been made from the 1960s hit Those were the days my friend (Mary Hopkin, 1968), and then ask yourself how much of it found its way to the family of Boris Fomin 1900-1948 who wrote the song on which it was based (called Дорогой длинною, with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii).” Jonathan also mentions a recording by Vertinsky, but the link is to a defunct webpage; anybody have a working one? I’d love to hear the voice that first made the song a hit.

A correspondent sent me a link to a fascinating story (at Ioram’s blog A pair of eyes in the Middle East, which seems to have gone silent since May). It starts:

It’s no big secret that nobody likes the newcomer. In this land one can say it has been a long-standing tradition, perfected with each turn of History. A famous sketch known to practically any Hebrew-speaking Israeli, done by the now-defunct comedy group “Lool” (“Coop”) shows how each wave of immigrants arriving since the beginning of Zionism is received with contempt by the previous immigrants, who now regard themselves as “locals”. The first Zionist pioneers, singing folk-songs in the Russian style are looked down at by the local Palestinian Arabs who express their anger and scorn by spitting the insult “Il’an babour illi jabak”, which means, literally “Curse the ship that brought you”.
The classic sketch then shows how the first Jewish settlers show their contempt at the next wave of Jewish immigrants, coming from Poland, how the Polish Jews are then quick to curse the German Jews coming in the 1930s. The German Jews (nicknamed “Yekes”, maybe for their propensity to cling to their jackets, stiff and stifling in the local heat) then curse the Yemenites who are quick to learn the drill and curse the Moroccans who then curse the Jews from the Georgia and so on. Each group curses the previous one, and the sketch is funny not only in painting the characters, accents, quirks and stereotypes, but in that they all use the same curse in Palestinian Arabic: “Curse the ship that brought you.”

It goes on to discuss the history of the Arabic word babur (from French vapeur), of steamships, and of inter-ethnic resentment, and concludes with a moving tribute to “one of the best Arab restaurants in the country,” called Al Babour, “The Steamer.” Well worth the read.

Of mother tongues and other tongues is the blog of a young man living in Finland and learning the language—and when I say “learning the language,” I mean doing it up right: he’s got nearly the complete set of the Finnish etymological dictionary (and I’m jealous). He has a post comparing Finnish and its cousin Hungarian:

There’s a sentence that gets quoted a lot showing relations between Hungarian and Finnish, as each language retains similar words. It and more such sentences can be found here, along with more of those fancy -v- words. Pretty nifty!

Hun.: Jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.
Fin.: Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.
‘In wintertime living fish swim under the ice.’

Ki ment mi előttünk?
Ken meni meidän edessämme?
‘Who went before us?’

Thus, I must suggest the possibilities for Northern Sámi: jieŋa vuolde dalvet ealli guolli vuodjala, and gii manai min ovddas.
The first sentence (or at least my version) is not so transparent/related. In NS, alde is probably actually related to Finnish yllä ‘under, below’; similarly vuodjalit ‘to swim (freq.)’ might well come from another root (relating to Finnish ajaa?).

Fun stuff!

Update (Oct. 2020). I tried to replace the dead links, but it turns out the Wayback Machine has only a single record of the site, from 2008; I’ve substituted it for the first link, and the others will just have to stay defunct. I guess we can be grateful it was archived that once…

At least according to an unbelievably silly BBC story from the year 2000:

An American professor has developed a theory that Germans are bad-tempered because pronouncing German sounds puts a frown on the face.
Professor David Myers believes that the facial contortions needed to pronounce vowels modified by the umlaut may be getting the Germans down in the mouth…
Saying “u” [ü?—LH] – one of German’s most recognisable sounds – causes the mouth to turn down. But the English sounds of “e” and “ah” – expressions used in smiling and laughing – have the opposite effect.
Professor Myers told the Royal Society of Edinburgh on Thursday that frequent use of the muscles which the brain associates with sadness can adversely affect a person’s mood…
“This could be a good reason why German people have got a reputation for being humourless and grumpy,” said Professor Myers, who heads Psychology at Hope College, Michigan.

The story is illustrated with photographs of Michael Schumacher (looking wry, I’d say, rather than grumpy), Gerhard Schroeder (pensive), and Helmut Kohl (definitely grumpy).

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Claire of Anggargoon is back from her planned hiatus (as I am back from my unplanned one), and her first post after the “I’m back” announcement was to this “online exhibition” of Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu. The images themselves are beautiful, and the accompanying descriptions give a sense of the variety of the libraries’ holdings. I found particularly interesting Ahmad al-Bakayi ibn Sayyid Muhammad ibn Sayyid al-Mukhtar al-Kunti’s nineteenth-century [thanks, Levana!] Jawab Ahmad al-Bakayi ala Risalat Amir al-Mu’minin Ahmad al-Masini (The Response of Ahmad al-Bakayi to the Letter of Amir Ahmad, Ruler of Massinah):

This document is a reply to the ruler of Massinah [usually spelled Macina–LH], Amir Ahmad, who ordered the arrest of a German traveler, Heinrich Bart[h], suspected of spying for the British. The author of the reply cites Islamic law as making the arrest illegal and declines to obey the amir. The scholar states that a non-Muslim entering the domain of Muslims in peace is protected and may not be arrested, have his property confiscated, or to be otherwise hindered.

Welcome back, Claire!
Addendum. I just realized I’ve already posted this. Oh well, it was almost three years ago; consider it an oldie but goodie.

Thanks to the efforts of Songdog and the excellent people at Insider Hosting, my humble blog is once more operational. I thank you all for your concerned e-mails; you may now resume your normal commentary. As for me, I have a deadline tomorrow, so I have to do some work before I post anything more substantial, but hopefully there will be no further unexplained silences.

NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” today features a conversation between Grant Barrett, Geoffrey Pullum, and Martha Barnette on “new words, new blogs and new usage”; if you’ve got a spare half-hour, it’s a real pleasure. Grant and Geoff are two of my favorite wordanistas, and it’s great to hear them provide genuinely informed discussion of topics usually gnawed endlessly by cliche-ridden ignoramuses (and it was a particular thrill to hear Geoff’s peculiar accent, the result of a remarkably checkered career: born in Irvine, Scotland; moved to West Wickham, in Kent, while still very young; moved to London; joined a rock band and worked in Germany in nightclub residencies and on American air bases; went to college in York; moved to the States…). I particularly liked the sympathetic and friendly way they dealt with a young woman who called in to complain about people who write till for until and thru for through (yes, they explained that till is the older form). Here‘s a link to the show’s webpage; click on Listen (you’ll get a choice between RealAudio and WindowsMedia) and enjoy it. (Via Wordorigins.org.)

I’m reading (finally—I bought it 15 years ago!) Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, and she mentions that in the 8th century the Chinese called the Arabs Ta-shih (or Dashi in pinyin). Anybody know the etymology?
While I’m at it, I’ll just complain about the absurd mix of toponyms in this passage:

This is understandable because, according to [Pegolotti’s] itinerary, it will take 25 days by ox-wagon to go from Tana to Astrakhan, another 20 days by camel to reach Organci, another 35-40 days by camel-wagon to reach Otrar, 45 days by pack-ass to Armalec, another 70 days with asses to reach Camexu on the Chinese frontier, 45 more days to the river that leads to Cassai (Kinsai or Hangchow), and then finally 30 days overland to Peking (Khanbalik).

To be consistent, the names should be Tana (Azov), Gintarchan (Astrakhan), Organci (Urgench), Oltrarre (Otrar), Armalec (?Kulja), Camexu (Ganchau), and Garnalec (Khanbalik, modern Peking). (Cassai is OK as is.) What a mess!

Everybody likes unusual words; that’s why books like They Have a Word for It sell so well (see my grumpy strictures here). I do too (as should be obvious by now), but I have the quirk of insisting that the words actually exist, which makes most such books an annoyance to me. (An exception: Erin McKean’s Weird and Wonderful Words and More Weird and Wonderful Words, whose entries are taken straight from the OED.) Now Grant Barrett, like Erin an actual lexicographer, has come out with The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English: A Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age, and I’m delighted to report that not only are the entries impeccably sourced, they’re provided with full citations. If you want to see what it’s like, you have only to visit Grant’s blog Double-Tongued Word Wrester (which I discussed here), since the presentation is the same (and I presume many of the entries in the book are from the blog). Just flipping the pages will introduce you, as it has me, to all manner of hitherto unknown lexical items; on facing pages, for instance, are vogue ‘a tire,’ and (one of my favorites) vuzvuz ‘a derogatory name for an Ashkenazic Jew… This term is usually used within the religion, especially by Sephardic Jews.’ (How my friend Allan would have loved that!)

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Avva recently linked to an old post in which he quoted at length a C.S. Lewis essay on Gawin Douglas’s great 16th-century translation of the Aeneid into Scots (Avva translates the essay into Russian, but reproduces the original as well). I like the section on “quaintness” so much, and it resonates so strongly with my own feelings about the idea of the exotic in general, that I’m going to quote it here:

Poetically, the first impression which Douglas’s version makes on a modern English reader is one of quaintness. I am glad that the question of quaintness should cross our path so early in the book; let us get it out of the way once and for all. To the boor all that is alien to his own suburb and his ‘specious present’ (of about five years) is quaint. Until that reaction has been corrected all study of old books is unprofitable. To allow for that general quaintness which mere distance bestows and thus to be able to distinguish between authors who were really quaint in their own day and authors who seem quaint to us solely by the accident of our position—this is the very pons asinorum of literary history. An easy and obvious instance would be Milton’s ‘city or suburban’ in Paradise Regained. Everyone sees that Milton could not have foretold the associations that these words now have. In the same way, when Douglas speaks of the Salii ‘hoppand and siggand wonder merely’ in their ‘toppit hattis’ it is easy to remember that ‘top hats’, in our sense, were unknown to him. But it is not so easy to see aright the real qualities of his Scots language in general. Since his time it has become a patois, redolent (for those reared in Scotland) of the nursery and the kaleyard, and (for the rest of us) recalling Burns and the dialectal parts of the Waverley novels. Hence the laughter to which some readers will be moved when Douglas calls Leucaspis a ‘skippair’, or Priam ‘the auld gray’, or Vulcan the ‘gudeman’ of Venus; when comes becomes ‘trew marrow’, and Styx, like Yarrow, has ‘braes’, when the Trojans ‘kecklit all’ (risere) at the man thrown overboard in the boat race, or, newly landed in Latium, regaled themselves with ‘scones’. For we see the language that Douglas wrote ‘through the wrong end of the long telescope of time’. We forget that in his day it was a courtly and a literary language,

    not made for village churls
But for high dames and mightly earls

Until we have trained ourselves to feel that ‘gudeman’ is no more rustic or homely than ‘husband’ we are no judges of Douglas as a translator of Virgil. If we fail in the training, then it is we and not the poet who are provincials.

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