A simple AskMetaFilter question (“What does this pin say, and what does it mean?” Answer: Leningrad) inspired a woman with the username posadnitsa (“The posadniki were the medieval mayors of Novgorod. There was one posadnitsa, Marfa Boretskaia, but unlike her I have never incited Tsar Ivan III to invade my hometown…”) to comment: “My host mother in St. Petersburg made annoyed noises whenever anyone brought up Solzhenitsyn; how can anyone take him seriously, she asked, when he actually suggested renaming the beautiful city of St. Petersburg Nevograd?” Needless to say, this caught my attention; some googling turned up an article by Ekaterina Vidyakina on the history of the city’s names that said (my translation; the Russian’s in the extended entry):

The discussion was started off by a letter to the newspaper Smena [‘Change’] by the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn, who at that time [1991] enjoyed greater popularity; he announced that in his opinion the city’s name should not be changed back to “Sankt-Peterburg,” since “it was foisted on [the city] in the 18th century, contrary to the Russian language and Russian consciousness.”
Solzhenitsyn’s letter attracted many replies, in which Leningraders, as well as inhabitants of other cities, proposed their own names for the “nameless” city. Bearing in mind that Russians have never suffered from fantasy [?], one should not be surprised at the variety of names which our good fellow citizens wished to bestow on our city: Petropol, Nevograd, and the like.

So it sounds like it wasn’t Solzhenitsyn himself who proposed it, though it was in response to a letter of his. But I also turned up this sci.lang post by Andrey Frizyuk, who says:

As the name St.Petersburg isn’t particularly poetical, Russian poets (Derzhavin, Pushkin, etc) invented Greeko-Slavic names for the capital: Petropol(is), Petrograd, Nevograd, etc. When the WWI started 90 years ago, there was a discussion if the name should be changed to Petrograd or to Nevograd. The former version proved more popular in official circles, because it was first used by Pushkin in “The Bronze Horseman”. The popular nickname has always been Peter.

Anybody know anything more about this (to my ears stupid-sounding) proposed name?

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Sally Thomason at Language Log has a post in which she describes how she came to learn the synonyms stot and pronk, both of which describe the “hilarious pogo-stick bounds” of mule-deer (and antelope, gazelles, and the like). The etymology of stot is unknown, but pronk is “from an Afrikaans word meaning ‘to show off, strut, prance’, and ultimately from Dutch pronken ‘to strut’; and it was first applied to the spectacular bounds of the little South African antelope called a springbok.” I felt it my bounden duty to tell you about these wonderful words, even if few of us will have the chance to use them in the course of our daily lives.

Tom Montag, aka The Middlewesterner [which has moved here and is still going in 2023], gave a talk about Lorine Niedecker (one of my favorites) at UW-Baraboo/Sauk County in Baraboo, Wisconsin; he’s kindly posted it, and its a good, detailed, meaty examination of how the great, too-little-known poet got her effects—just keep following the “Continued here” links at the end of each page, and for ease of reference I’ll link to the Exhibits (bits of her poems that he discusses) and Notes. This is very well said:

I think Niedecker was not particularly concerned with “meaning” in the denotative sense. She was concerned with the thing, and with “something else” beyond that, but it doesn’t seem to me that she was intent on making unequivocal and definitive statements. I’ll venture that for Niedecker, poetry was closer to painting than to philosophy. The painter dabs color onto the canvas just so, but what do color and shape and line mean? What does a dab of cobalt put here mean? That’s not a question Niedecker would ask.

Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link, and I envy both Tom and Dave their visit to Montreal for a blogswarm (which I found out about via this post of Lorianne’s).

And speaking of swarms, don’t miss Dave’s amazing photographs of a swarm of bees on a tree branch.

“Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity” (pdf) is a riveting look at “the link between coercion and absurdity” by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (whom Yale has cravenly refused to rehire); though I recommend the whole thing, I cite it here for this look at the nexus between language and behavior in Madagascar:

What’s more, one result of the colonial experience was that what might be called relations of command—basically, any ongoing relationship in which one adult renders another an extension of his or her will—had become identified with slavery, and slavery, with the essential nature of the state. In the community I studied, such associations were most likely to come to the fore when people were talking about the great slave-holding families of the 19th century whose children went on to become the core of the colonial-era administration, largely (it was always remarked) by dint of their devotion to education and skill with paperwork. In other contexts, relations of command, particularly in bureaucratic contexts, were linguistically coded: they were firmly identified with French; Malagasy, in contrast, was seen as the language appropriate to deliberation, explanation, and consensus decision-making. Minor functionaries, when they wished to impose arbitrary dictates, would almost invariably switch to French. I particularly remember one occasion when an official who had had many conversations with me in Malagasy, and had no idea I even understood French, was flustered one day to discover me dropping by at exactly the moment everyone had decided to go home early. “The office is closed,” he announced, in French, “if you have any business you must return tomorrow at 8AM.” When I pretended confusion and claimed, in Malagasy, not to understand French, he proved utterly incapable of repeating the sentence in the vernacular, but just kept repeating the French over and over. Others later confirmed what I suspected: that if he had switched to Malagasy, he would at the very least have had to explain why the office had closed at such an unusual time. French is actually referred to in Malagasy as “the language of command”; it was characteristic of contexts where explanations, deliberation, ultimately, consent, was not really required, since they were ultimately premised on the threat of violence.

(Via MetaFilter.)

I keep meaning to post about a journal called Sudanic Africa cited by Eliza in a comment to this Yoruba post, and now I’ve finally gotten around to it. Only a minority of the articles are available online, but all the book reviews seem to be, and there’s a lot of interesting material about a too-little-known part of the world:

Sudanic Africa is an international academic journal devoted to the presentation and discussion of historical sources on the Sudanic belt, the area between the Sahara and the Bay of Niger, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The journal typically presents such sources in the original language and in translation, with comments.

Here (pdf), for example, is an article called “A Sudanese Missionary to the United States: Satti Majid, ‘Shaykh al-Islam in North America’, and his Encounter with Noble Drew Ali, Prophet of the Moorish Science Temple Movement”:

Sometime in the late 1920s there was an encounter, direct or indirect we do not know for certain, between two figures from two very different traditions of ‘Islam’. The present article partially documents this encounter, presenting a tantalising glimpse of African American Islam’s earliest encounter with global Sunnı Islam. On the one side is a Sudanese ‘ālim, the very model of Nile Valley Islamic orthodoxy; on the other is an African American, a generation only removed from slavery, an actor in the great northward migration that was to transform the African American worldview, as it was later to transform world music. The Sudanese ‘ālim was Sātti Mājid Muhammad al-Qādi from Dongola; the African-American was Timothy Drew, later known as Noble Drew Ali, from North Carolina. The topic also opens up new avenues for research into the missionizing activities of immigrant Sunnis, Ahmadis, and other Muslim groups, and for the history of the Moorish Science Temple, which latter movement may, in some sense, have been—even unconsciously—a link between the Islam of some African slaves in the antebellum South and the Lost and Found Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad.

Thanks, Eliza!

Update (Mar. 2023). The journal is gone from the web, so I have substituted archived links; JSTOR explains:

Sudanic Africa was an international academic journal devoted to the presentation and discussion of historical sources on the Sudanic belt, published in sixteen volumes between 1990 and 2007. It has now been succeeded by the electronic journal Islamic Africa, published by Northwestern University Press from 2010 (the first issue is available in open access).

Sudanic Africa was concerned with the area between the Sahara and the Bay of Niger, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. The journal presented historical sources relating to our field of interest in the original language and in translation, with comments.

However, Islamic Africa is now a Brill publication and appears to be quite different, so I have substituted archived links there as well.

OK, this is very nitpicky, but I’m a confirmed nitpicker, so it’s driving me crazy, and if anyone can help I’ll be most grateful. I’m reading The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović (you can apparently read it online if you’re a member of Questia), and I’m getting quite annoyed by the sloppiness on display. At the top of page 110, for instance, the authors refer to Oberstrass, where Kropotkin briefly lived in Zurich, as a “street”; it isn’t, it’s a section of the city (it was an independent municipality until 1893, when it, along with Unterstrass, Fluntern, and other nearby towns were assimilated into the city, like Brooklyn into NYC a few years later). They refer to the revolutionary Karakozov as “Karakazov” throughout. And on page 109 they say:

In Zurich he was immediately among friends. His brother’s sister-in-law, Madame Sophie Nicholaevna Lavrov [sic—should be Sofya Nikolaevna Lavrova], was studying there; she lived with another Russian, Nadeshda [sic—should be Nadezhda] Smezkaya, a wealthy woman who later financed some of the insurrectionary efforts of the Italian anarchists and who was already a disciple of Bakunin.

Now, there is no such name as “Smezkaya”; my reference books and Google come up empty (I tried both Смезкая and Смезкий). Does someone happen to have any sources that would identify this woman so I can leave Zurich and move on to Geneva along with Prince K?

A couple of years ago I did a post about an online translation of the Hyakunin-isshu, A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, and Miriam (of Creosote.org, if it’s still a going concern [it seems to have given up the ghost in early 2006]) left a comment discussing tournaments based on a game called karuta (from Portuguese carta ‘card’) and adding, tantalizingly, that she had “found a fantastic website on the history of karuta a few months ago” but didn’t know where to find it. Now Dave Bull has added a comment suggesting that she might be referring to his own 1996 essay Karuta: Sports or Culture?; I don’t know if it’s what Miriam had in mind, but it’s so well written and interesting I had to give it its own LH post. Dave starts out in medias res, with “an elderly gentleman” chanting poetry and a group of formally dressed people suddenly exploding into action, then goes into the history of the poems, the cards, and the game. Here’s a snippet to whet your appetite, but you’re going to want to read the whole thing if you have the slightest interest in Japanese culture:

Cards were formerly made in many shapes and sizes, and not only from pasteboard. Elegant sets were fashioned in lacquered finishes, or drawn on slips of thin wood. Well-known painters down the years have turned out sets of cards, perhaps the most famous of which is the much-photographed set by Ogata Korin, backed with fine gold foil, and of which reproduction sets sell for as much as 1,100,000 yen. In the Edo era it was apparently common for sets of cards to be produced by relatively upper-class people, as they had both the time, and the elegant calligraphy skills that were required. One drawback to this, of course, was that cards produced in such a way were quite difficult to read. This was especially so when the tori fuda [the cards with the final couplets, which the players must try to grab when they recognize the poem] were written in complicated Chinese characters, as was inevitably the case back in those times. It was in the mid-Meiji era that a newspaper company had the idea of producing sets of cards written using the cursive hiragana syllabary, which could be read easily by anyone, even young children. To give an impetus to the sale of their new cards, they began to organize large-scale competitions, and it is here that we see the origin of today’s nationally organized groups and competitions. (This Meiji-era burst of popularity in karuta saw the birth of another Japanese institution — the Nintendo company, of video game fame, who started out as producers of karuta and hanafuda, which they still make. Home entertainment has come a long way in a hundred years …)

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Many years ago I was reading a book about (I think) the Crusades in which there was a footnote mentioning a medieval exclamation of contempt, tprut, that turned up in a number of languages. I recently recalled this and thought I’d investigate; it turns out it’s in the OED:

prut, int. and n.
1. An exclamation of contempt.
c1300 in Langtoft Chron. (MS. Fairfax 22, lf. 4), Tprut! Skot riveling, In unsel timing crope thu out of cage. 1303 R. BRUNNE Handl. Synne 3014 And seyþ ‘prut for þy cursyng, prest!’ a1779 D. GRAHAM Janet Clinker’s Orat. Writ. 1883 II. 150 If they had tell’d me tuts, or prute no, I laid them o’er my knee, and a com’d crack for crack o’er their hurdies. 1870 LUBBOCK Orig. Civiliz. viii. 282 From pr, or prut, indicating contempt.

And the Middle English Dictionary has an entry, with a remarkable variety of spellings: “prut, interj. Also ptrot, tprut, tprot, thprut, trupth, trut. [AL ptrut, phrut & OF trout, trut, tproupt, tropt.] An exclamation of contempt or disapproval; ~ for a fig for (sb. or sth.).” Their first cite is the same as the OED’s (with different punctuation); their next is from Harley’s “The Execution of Sir Simon Fraser” (quoted here): “Tprot, scot, for þi strif!/ hang vp þyn hachet ant þi knyf,” and there are several more. It’s a pity this savory ejaculation has fallen out of use. Anybody have other examples from medieval languages?

While reading David Rieff’s NY Times Magazine article on Mexican politics [archived], I was struck by a couple of names in this passage: “[López Obrador’s] economic team is led by Rogelio Ramírez de la O, a Cambridge-educated economist who is well respected in international business circles. And Carlos Slim, the telecom mogul who is Mexico’s richest man and the third-richest man in the world, has let it be known, without formally endorsing AMLO, that he finds nothing alarming about his candidacy.” Now Slim, while an unusual name for a Mexican, presumably reflects English ancestry [no, it’s of Lebanese origin — see comments], but I can make nothing of de la O. It’s a common surname, but I can find nothing about its origin except a suggestion on this page that it’s from “a place in Spain if I’m not mistaken, Palencia.. the name of the Church there is named after Our Lady… as Nuestra Senora de la O,” which makes no sense to me, and one here that it’s from a French name De l’Eau, which seems unlikely. Anybody have any information?

Update. The name turns out to come from the feast of the Expectation of Our Lady, the “O” coming from the expression of longing said in the office of the Mozarabic liturgy (see comments below); Sister Maria Philomena sent me a link to her post on the subject, which reproduces a poem by James J. Galvin, “Lady of O.” Thanks, Sister Maria!

A story by Pam Belluck in today’s NY Times describes the changing fortunes of the French language in Maine:

Frederick Levesque was just a child in Old Town, Me., when teachers told him to become Fred Bishop, changing his name to its English translation to conceal that he was French-American.
Cleo Ouellette’s school in Frenchville made her write “I will not speak French” over and over if she uttered so much as a “oui” or “non” — and rewarded students with extra recess if they ratted out French-speaking classmates.
And Howard Paradis, a teacher in Madawaska forced to reprimand French-speaking students, made the painful decision not to teach French to his own children. “I wasn’t going to put my kids through that,” Mr. Paradis said. “If you wanted to get ahead you had to speak English.”
That was Maine in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the stigma of being French-American reverberated for decades afterward. But now, le Français fait une rentrée — French is making a comeback…

You can go to the article to read about the comeback; what I want to focus on is the bad old days. I can understand the reaction against the language of the enemy during wartime, against German during both world wars for example; it’s irrational and deplorable, but understandable. But why on earth were people subjecting their neighbors and their neighbors’ children to that kind of harassment in the ’50s and ’60s? It shocks me to learn that during the very years when I was happily learning French, others of my generation were being punished for using it in a supposedly free country. If anyone can explain this to me, please do. I mean, generalized “why can’t they speak English” griping is one thing; forcing people to change their name is quite another.

Incidentally, Benjamin Zimmer discusses this story in Language Log and demolishes the idea that “French-American French, derived from people who left France for Canada centuries ago, resembles the French of Louis XIV more than the modern Parisian variety.”

While I’m on the subject of the Sunday Times, I have to let William Safire have it yet again. His latest column contains the idiotic statement “Most Americans associate the phrase Fur Ball, usually capitalized, with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A.” When I read this, I thought perhaps I, having been raised abroad, was an unrepresentative sample of Americans, so I turned to my wife and said “Say, what do you associate the phrase fur ball with?” She thought for a moment and said she associated it with cats. Wanting to give Safire a fair shake, I said “Are you sure you don’t associate it with events to raise funds for the Humane Society or A.S.P.C.A.?” She looked at me as if I were crazy. Perhaps Safire should have an automatic blinders-checker that would replace the phrase “most Americans” with “the tiny group of insiders I hang out with.” While I’m at it, he calls this a “familiar saying”: “If they want me in on the crash landings, I better damn well be in on the takeoffs.” And he claims it’s bad English to say “Our discussion anchored itself on Article II” because his old pal Rear Adm. Dick West (retired) says “In the Navy we say anchored in… as in ‘anchored in 300 fathoms of water.’ To be more specific, you could say that the anchor is on rock, sand or sediment. When you want to say you’re physically attached to something, you say that you’re moored to it, like moored to the dock.” That’s nice, but it has nothing to do with usage by English speakers outside of the Navy. Come on, Bill, wouldn’t you rather be golfing? If you must write a weekly column, couldn’t you pick a subject you can write sensibly about?