Frequent commenter zaelic, whose intimate knowledge of all sorts of byways of Eastern European, Jewish, Romany, and musical lore is the envy of everyone who values such things, especially me, was kind enough to send me a kucsma (pronounced KOOCH-ma) he’d picked up at the Black Lake peasant fair in Romania from a family of Gypsies from Tirgu Mures. What is a kucsma, you ask? Zaelic defines it as a “big furry astrakhan winter hat,” adding “My favorite is the ‘oversized boy scout cap’ design favored by Ceausescu, Karzai, and half of Boro Park.” I asked him about the etymology of the word and he said:

My guess is that it may be from Old Turkish/Chuvah/Bulgar level of loan words from the 6th – 9th century, when the Magyars/Mogurs/Someday-we-will-be-Bashkirs were learning the horse culture from proto-Chuvash types south of the Kama river. The consonant cluster “chma” or “shma” gives it away.

But what I really want to talk about is the CD he included in the package, A Mazeldiker Yid, by his group Di Naye Kapelye, for which he plays violin, mandolin, koboz, cumbus, flutes, and Carpathian drum:

Di Naye Kapelye plays old time Jewish music the way we imagine it was played in eastern Europe both before and after the Holocaust. Learning from Jewish people still living in the region, and from Gypsy musicians who played for them, DNK carries on a living tradition of music.

I was blown away both by the music (my feet wouldn’t keep still) and by the learned and hilarious liner notes, which I’m happy to say you can read in their entirety here. I’m going to quote a bit (adding links) to illustrate the historical and geographical interest:

Northern Romania, in particular the regions of Maramures and the Bukovina, was once home to a large Jewish community unlike any other. Hasidic Jews first settled in the poorer mountain areas of the Habsburg Empire during the 17th and 18th centuries, in the aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres and the resultant messianic confusion. Led by disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, Hasidism’s pioneering leader, these Jews coalesced into Hasidic “courts” (hoyfn) centered around rabbinic dynasties residing in Szatmár, Vizhnitz, Munkács, Sighet, Sadagora, and Shpinka (Sapinta). Free of the official oppression and pogroms suffered by Jews in the Russian Empire, they lived in a relatively healthy social atmosphere with their neighbors – Romanians, Hungarians, Hutsul Ukrainians, Slovaks, Zipser Germans, and Roma (Gypsies). Reflecting the strongly conservative nature of the region, the Jews of Maramures rejected the “Jewish Enlightenment” offered by the 1868 reorganization of the Hungarian Jewish community, and maintained an existence apart, Yiddish speaking and deeply Hasidic in character, until the Holocaust. After the war this same stubborn independence led to the rebirth of Carpathian Hasidic communities in centers such as Brooklyn, Antwerp, and Bnei Brak, where the culture remains as vibrant and quarrelsome as it did the Romanian mountains.

Isn’t that great stuff? Do read the song annotations; among other things, you won’t want to miss the recipe for matzo balls.

Do you say “in the circumstances” or “under the circumstances”? Never mind, I wouldn’t believe you if you told me—people are notoriously bad at analyzing their own language use. Arnold Zwicky has been investigating the alternatives, and has posted his results, which are surprising and interesting:

In summary: the Google data suggest that “under” is preferred to “in”
(modestly)
with determiners “the” and “these”
(more strongly)
with determiner “which”
(very strongly)
with determiner “what”
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner “no”
but that “in” is preferred to “under”
(modestly)
with quantity determiners “all” and “some”
(strongly)
with determiner “those” in general
(strongly)
with quantity determiner “many”
(almost categorically)
when “circumstances” means ‘personal situation’
(almost categorically)
with determiner “those” plus certain following relatives
(almost categorically)
with quantity determiner “a few”

See his post for the details (I’ve rearranged the results for clarity); it makes clear both the complexity of usage and the value of the internet for sifting it.

I was reading an H. Allen Orr New Yorker piece on evolution and genetics when I hit the sentence “Similarly, a gene that affects pigmentation in birds like the chicken and the bananaquit also affects pigmentation in mammals like the jaguar and you.” The word bananaquit struck me; I couldn’t find it in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate or the American Heritage Dictionary, but it was in the New Oxford American Dictionary:

bananaquit /bəˈnanəˌkwit/ a small songbird with a curved bill, typically with a white stripe over the eye, a sooty gray back, and yellow underparts. It is common in the West Indies and Central and South America… See QUIT².

The latter entry says “[in combination] used in names of various small songbirds found in the Caribbean area, e.g. bananaquit, grassquit” and adds that the word is “probably imitative.”
So I looked it up in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage and found the pronuncation given as [ˈbʌna^.nʌkwɪt] and the definition “a bird about 3 ins long, dark grey in color, with a yellow breast, a white streak over the eye, and known for its love of ripe bananas and grains of sugar, and in some places also for its warbling or making a ‘cheep-cheep’ sound”—gotta give them props for explaining the “banana” part. Other local names: beany bird (Jamaica), honey-creeper (St Vincent, US Virgin Is), see-see bird (Grenada), sikyé-bird (Trinidad), sugar-bird (Barbados, USVI), and yellow-breast (Antigua, Barbados, USVI). You can see some pictures here.

King Alfred, over at The Bitter Scroll, has posted a verse translation of something I didn’t know existed: a Tolkien poem in Gothic called “Bagme Bloma” [‘The Flower of the Trees’]. There’s also a webpage called The Annotated Bagme Bloma, which King Al used in doing the translation. (I have to say, the poem sounds a lot more like Tolkien than like early Germanic poetry to me.)

Addendum (Nov. 2021). The poem and translation are short enough I don’t know why I didn’t just quote them back in 2005; to save readers the trouble of clicking, I’ll do so now:

Brunaim bairiþ bairka bogum
laubans liubans liudandei,
gilwagroni, glitmunjandei,
bagme bloma, blauandei,
fagrafahsa, liþulinþi,
fraujinondei fairguni.

Wopjand windos, wagjand lindos,
lutiþ limam laikandei;
slaihta, raihta, hweitarinda,
razda rodeiþ reirandei,
bandwa bairhta, runa goda,
þiuda meina þiuþjandei.

Andanahti milhmam neipiþ,
liuhteiþ liuhmam lauhmuni;
laubos liubai fliugand lausai,
tulgus, triggwa, standandei.
Bairka baza beidiþ blaika
fraujinondei fairguni.

Flower of the Trees

The birch bears fine leaves on shining boughs, it grows pale green and glittering, the flower of the trees in bloom, fair-haired and supple-limbed, the ruler of the mountain.

The winds call, they shake gently, she bends her boughs low in sport; smooth, straight and
white-barked, trembling she speaks a language, a bright token, a good mystery, blessing my people.

Evening grows dark with clouds, the lightning flashes, the fine leaves fly free, but firm and faithful the white birch stands bare and waits, ruling the mountain.

Forbes has a special section on “Communicating,” with pieces by Arthur C. Clarke (“Join The Planetary Conversation”), Scott Woolley (“The Next 4,000 Days”), David M. Ewalt (“How To Talk To Aliens”), and others, as well as interviews with Jane Goodall, Kurt Vonnegut, Desmond Morris, Steven Pinker, etc.; there’s even an interview with Uncle Noam. Check it out.

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I would like to join my colleague Geoff Pullum in celebrating Jan Freeman’s superb takedown of that mangiest of stuffed owls, Strunk and White’s inescapable The Elements of Style, which has just undergone its latest restuffing, this time with illustrations by Maira Kalman (it’s been taxidermized more often than Lenin’s corpse). A sample:

It was never a seamless creation, to be sure; the 1959 first edition merely sandwiched Strunk’s 1918 handbook for his Cornell students, lightly edited, between White’s introduction and his essay on prose style. But at least you knew Strunk was Strunk, vintage 1918, and White was White, circa 1958. Succeeding revisions, instead of blending the disparate parts, have left ”Elements” a hodgepodge, its now-antiquated pet peeves jostling for space with 1970s taboos and 1990s computer advice.
(The illustrated ”Elements” is essentially the 1999 edition, with a couple of small restorations from the 1918 original. Not quite a restoration, alas, in the case of Strunk’s introduction: The proofreaders overlooked one of his ”Words Often Misspelled,” so the opening sentence now promises ”to give in brief space the principle requirements of plain English style.”)
Scanning the recent editions, you sometimes wonder what could possibly have been cut, given the absurdity of what remains. Don’t use claim to mean ”assert”? Mark Twain did it in 1869, the year Strunk was born. Don’t contact anyone? It’s a ”vague and self-important” verb—or so people said in the 1920s, when it was new. Don’t use they to refer to ”a distributive subject” like everybody—unless you’re E.B. White: ”But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” says a character in ”Charlotte’s Web.”

Ouch. I know I can’t talk you Strunk-lovers out of your affection, but can you at least look on the damn book as an affectionate portrait of a crotchety former teacher and not as a guide to English, a task for which it is manifestly unsuited? Let it sit harmlessly on the mantelpiece and glare out at the unruly world with its glassy eyes.

Lameen Souag at Jabal al-Lughat has a post about a language hitherto unknown to me (and almost everyone):

A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie in central Ghana (8° 52′ N, 1° 15′ W) near the confluence of the White and Black Voltas, apart from a few emigrants in Debre. According to the author’s description, the Mpre people, once more widespread, were reduced to a single village in the course of comparatively recent wars with the Asante. Noting that their language was “different to that of the surrounding tribes”, he lists 106 words of Mpre. This short vocabulary appears to be the only existing record of the language, which is believed to be extinct. The gap is all the more unfortunate because Mpre turns out to be of some taxonomic significance. It is not closely related to any of its neighbors, and Heine and Nurse (2000) treat it as unclassified. A friend of mine’s paper dealing partly with this will be appearing sometime soonish, but I won’t spoil the surprise.
You might think, given all this, that it was impossible to retrieve any information on its grammar. However, you would be wrong! Fellow language geeks may find it an interesting exercise to try their hand at extracting grammar information from the wordlist, which Blench gives a copy of [actually he says they’re “available from the author at r.blench@odi.org.uk”], before reading on…

You can go to Lameen’s post for the details; Wikipedia has a brief article on Mpre, with citations.

A while back I asked if anyone could tell me who was responsible for “the change [in Russian punctuation] (deplorable, in my view) from an intuitive system of the kind Dostoyevsky used to the rule-based system familiar to all modern readers”; nobody answered, but I was reading about Aleksei Remizov in Georgii Adamovich’s smarmy but enlightening collection of biographical/critical essays Odinochestvo i svoboda [Solitude and freedom] when the answer leaped out at me: “…убедить, что наша школьная грамматика произвольна и неосновательно-тиранична, что мы сами себя обворовали, доверившись Гроту и другим лжезаконодателям…” Grot, that was it! (Not that far from my wild guesses: “Korff? Gets? Shtumpf?”) So I googled him and found a nice biography and a Russian Wikipedia article on punctuation, which I am memorializing here in case I want them again.

Back to the September issue of Poetry; this time I want to praise a poem by Mike Chasar called “Conches on Christmas,” which happily for all of us is online (happily for you because you can read the whole thing, for me because it makes it a lot easier to quote). I love rhyme and meter and the whole kitbag of traditional poetic technique, but I’m aware that English poetry can no longer be constrained within those bounds (it requires a tremedous effort of will and imagination to write a good sonnet these days), so I’m especially happy when a poet is able to dance comfortably to the new music in an old pattern. I read the first stanza:

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss

and relaxed into pleasurable anticipation when I realized the rhymes were unobtrusive and exact, the meter irregular but confident, and the syntax complex enough to make reading further a compelling adventure:

except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,

and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—

and at that I simultaneously cracked up at the transition from the solemn “silently, sans the heraldry of bells” to the bathetic “swiftly, sans a multitude of feet” (which instantly brought to mind “And this was odd, because, you know,/ They hadn’t any feet“) and marveled at the sonic sculpture of the line “and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived”—and I gobbled up the rest of the poem with undiminished pleasure, which I now urge you to do. When you get back, you can hit the Extended Entry for a few linguistic observations.

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While I was at the bookstore, I picked up the September issue of Poetry magazine on the strength of several poems (like “On the Metro“) by C.K. Williams, with his wonderful long lines, and a long essay about Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets, by Phyllis Rose. But at the moment I’m going to quote one of the sections of Michael Hofmann‘s “Sing Softer: A Notebook”:

I think I’ve probably always been drawn to the foreign in English. When I first came across the strange and lovely word “macaronics,” I wanted to use it for a title. There’s a kind of joyful hopscotch, a cavalierism, a dandyishness, an enrichment, about alien presences in English, which otherwise remains for me a chewed, utilitarian, mercantile language. These importations are the making of Shakespeare. They are there in Walt Whitman, that quintessentially American poet, even if Henry James (of all people!), complained about his predilection for “the other languages.” They are there in Stevens, who claimed English and French were one language, and in Pound, who wrote Chinese in English, and Provençal in English, and Latin in English. I sometimes think the only Eliot I really like are the two French poems. These importations are in Lowell, even though he’s as heavily monoglot as a linebacker; in one of his Montale versions in Imitations it says: “The scirocco gunned the dead stucco with sand”—neither Italianate noun in Montale’s original! (Imitations was a huge act of will on the part of Lowell to internationalize and modernize himself by his bootstraps.)

I don’t understand the “chewed, utilitarian, mercantile” bit (what, Beowulf? after that it’s all alien presences) or “monoglot as a linebacker,” but I like the bit about Lowell and Montale. Anybody know which Montale poem Lowell was reworking? I don’t have Imitations.