The Russian Primary Chronicle, or Повесть временных лет (Povest’ vremennykh let, in traditional orthography Повѣсть временныхъ лѣтъ), is a remarkable document that has always been the basic source for the early history of Russia (or rather Rus, since “Russia” was a much later concept). It contains eyewitness, or at least contemporary, accounts of the late 11th and early 12th centuries and reports drawn from oral history for earlier periods. As James Billington says in The Icon and the Axe:

Chronicles were written in Church Slavonic in Kievan Russia long before any were written in Italian or French, and are at least as artistic as the equally venerable chronicles composed in Latin and German. The vivid narrative of men and events in the original “Primary Chronicle” struck the first Western student of Russian chronicles, August Schlözer, as far superior to any in the medieval West, and helped inspire him to become the first to introduce both universal history and Russian history into the curriculum of a modern university.

There are excerpts in English here, here, and here (among others [first two links are dead as of Oct. 2014]), but the full text is available in Likhachev’s modern Russian translation here, in manuscript reproductions here, and (the main reason for this post) in Donald Ostrowski’s collation of the manuscripts here. The sections are in pdf files (and, alas, there is no Google cache, which means I can quote only as much as I’m willing to painstakingly type in), but it’s worth downloading Adobe if you don’t already have it—not only for the sake of the Chronicle itself, but most especially for Ostrowski’s introduction (pdf), which is the best thing I’ve read on the history and practice of textual criticism in Russia and the West. He explains why the stemma came into use and then fell out of favor due to a logical conundrum, and describes his own solution to the latter. He discusses in detail the various proposed (or implied) stemmata for the MSS of the Chronicle, then proposes his own. There is of course much that is of interest only to fellow specialists, but the many lucid discussions of subjects of general interest (for instance, “Textual Criticism vs. Textology,” about halfway through, comparing Western and Russian approaches) make it worthwhile for anyone interested in the subject.

[Read more…]

Project Gutenberg has put online Charles G. Leland’s The English Gipsies and Their Language (2nd ed., 1874).

The book contains some remarks on that great curious centre and secret of all the nomadic and vagabond life in England, THE ROMMANY, with comments on the fact, that of the many novel or story-writers who have described the “Travellers” of the Roads, very few have penetrated the real nature of their life… There is also a chapter containing in Rommany and English a very characteristic letter from a full-blood Gipsy to a relative, which was dictated to me, and which gives a sketch of the leading incidents of Gipsy life—trading in horses, fortune-telling, and cock-shying. I have also given accounts of conversations with Gipsies, introducing in their language and in English their own remarks (noted down by me) on certain curious customs… There is a collection of a number of words now current in vulgar English which were probably derived from Gipsy, such as row, shindy, pal, trash, bosh, and niggling, and finally a number of Gudli or short stories.

(Via wood s lot.)

Trying to find something else altogether (the Spanish writer José Jiménez Lozano, on whom there’s almost nothing available in English), I happened on the entry Jindyworobak movement in my Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature; struck by the name, I did a little research and thought I’d post what I found. The movement was founded in 1938 by the poet Rex Ingamells (1913-1955), “in response to L.F. Giblin’s urging that poets in Australia should portray Australian nature and people as they are in Australia, not with the ‘European’ gaze.” It started as a literary club in Adelaide and emphasized the spirit of place and the importance of Aboriginal culture; you can read more about it here and (in the South Australian context) here.

And the name? Ingamells took it from the glossary of James Devaney‘s The Vanished Tribes (1929), where it was said to mean ‘to annex, to join’; it comes from Wuywurung or Woiwurrung, an extinct language of the Melbourne area that is not even listed in Ethnologue. (As a matter of fact, none of the “Victorian” languages mentioned in the last abstract on this page [The XVIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 2003), Section on Aboriginal languages] —Madhimadhi, Wembawemba, Wergaia, Yota-Yota, Wathawurrung, and Woiwurrung—are in Ethnologue; perhaps Claire can clear this up when she recovers from her fieldwork.)

A word attributed to Wuywurung is the Australian slang term yabber ‘talk,’ which is probably from Wuywurung yaba ‘speak’ [M-W now (2020) derives it from Wiradhuri ya– speak]; another possibility is mia-mia, a synonym for gunyah ‘a temporary shelter of the Aborigines, usu. a simple frame of branches covered with bark, leaves, or grass,’ about which you can read in exhaustive detail here:

In the Australian National Dictionary (1988) we are told that it comes from Wathawurung and Wuywurung. Wathawurung was the language spoken on the western side of Port Phillip Bay, including the present city of Geelong and the town of Bacchus Marsh, and extending inland probably as far as the city of Ballarat. Wuywurung was the language spoken in the area of present-day Melbourne, and extending as far north as Seymour, and to the north of Westernport, and from the Goulburn River across to Bendigo. However, in Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1990), a book that also emanates from the Australian National Dictionary Centre, we are told: ‘Although this word was much used in Victoria (the earliest Victorian instance is 1839) it appears to have originated as maya or maya-maya in Nyungar, the language of the Perth–Albany region’. The Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers were puzzled by this change, and sent us a friendly ‘please explain’…

You can see a simple example of such a shelter here, and a more substantial one here.

Update (May 2020). Mia-mia now has its own (very brief) Wikipedia article, which derives the word from “the Wada Wurrung language.” The OED (entry updated December 2001) says:

Etymology: < Wathawurung and Wuywurung (southern Victoria) miam miam (1836 in G. A. Robinson Jrnl. 29 Dec., in N. J. B. Plomley Weep in Silence (1987), glossed ‘house’; also in form mimi in C. J. Griffith ‘A glossary of a few native words in the language of the Port Philip Corio-Weirabbee-Barrbul tribes’ in Diary 1840–41 (Latrobe Library, Melbourne MS. 9393), glossed ‘house/shelter’). Compare maimai n.
R. M. W. Dixon et al. Austral. Aboriginal Words in Eng. (1990) 201 note: ‘Although this word was much used in Victoria..it appears to have originated as maya or maya-maya in Nyungar, the language of the Perth–Albany region,’ but give quotations only for the Nyungar unreduplicated form mya. It seems unlikely that a Western Australian word would have spread to Southern Victorian languages via English at this date, but similar forms might have existed independently in different language groups; compare N.E.D. (1906) ‘The Western Australian and Victorian name for: A hut, a rude shelter.’

In 1939 Rolfe Humphries was asked to write a poem for Poetry. He was given the title (“Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion”), the meter (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and a request that the poem contain one classical reference per line. The poem appeared in the June issue, and in August the magazine printed an outraged editorial note banning Humphries from the magazine for writing “scurrilous” material. [It’s on p. 294 here, if you have JSTOR access.] Here’s the poem; see if you can figure out what they were so upset about. The explanation’s in the extended entry.

Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again,
Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone;
Chaos in cry, Actaeon’s angry pack,
Hounds of Molussus, shaggy wolves driven

Over Ampsanctus’ vale and Pentheus’ glade,
Laelaps and Ladon, Dromas, Canace,—
As these in fury harry brake and hill
So the great dogs of evil bay the world.

Memory, Mother of Muses, be resigned
Until King Saturn comes to rule again!
Remember now no more the golden day
Remember now no more the fading gold,
Astraea fled, Proserpina in hell;
You searchers of the earth be reconciled!

Because, through all the blight of human woe,
Under Robigo’s rust, and Clotho’s shears,
The mind of man still keeps its argosies,
Lacedaemonian Helen wakes her tower,

Echo replies, and lamentation loud
Reverberates from Thrace to Delos Isle;
Itylus grieves, for whom the nightingale
Sweetly as ever tunes her Daulian strain.

And over Tenedos the flagship burns.

How shall men loiter when the great moon shines
Opaque upon the sail, and Argive seas
Rear like blue dolphins their cerulean curves?
Samos is fallen, Lesbos streams with fire,
Etna in rage, Canopus cold in hate,
Summon the Orphic bard to stranger dreams.

And so for us who raise Athene’s torch.
Sufficient to her message in this hour:
Sons of Columbia, awake, arise!

[Read more…]

Over at après moi, le déluge, silmarillion has posted a list of all the Spanish words borrowed from Arabic, using the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (both printed and online editions), the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the American Heritage Dictionary, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise, and the webpage Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana. The post and definitions are in Spanish, but if you’re interested in the subject, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. My only quibble so far (having skimmed the list) is that some of the words go back to Turkish, not Arabic:

Chaleco – quizá del it. Giulecco, y este del turco yelek
Zapato del turco zabata

But I’m certainly not going to complain about too many etymologies, and besides, for lagniappe there’s a little annex of Basque words that come from Arabic. Gracias, amigos!

The annoying Richard Lederer, who has a Ph.D. in English and Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire but whose voluminous writings about language place him rather in the amateur class, is (quite appropriately) standing in for William Safire this week at the NY Times Magazine, and his column is about bloopers, a favorite topic of his. As he says, “Word botches are music to my ears, and over the years I’ve arranged five anthologies of fluffs, flubs, goofs, gaffes, blunders, boners . . . well, you get the idea.” In the first place, although they are language-related, bloopers are about as cliched a topic as could be imagined; you would think the Times would be approximately as thrilled as they would be with a story about how it’s so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk, as our intrepid reporter demonstrates! At any rate, the column illustrates why I lost interest in the subject several decades ago, once I realized that published bloopers are as reliably authentic as the letters columns in porn magazines. Verbal goofs caught in the wild can be very funny, but that happens rarely, and it’s much easier for teachers to make them up during boring stretches. Lederer says solemnly “As a word-bethumped language guy, I adhere firmly to the blooper snooper’s code, taking only what I find and contriving nothing,” but I believe him exactly as much as I believe a teller of tall tales who swears that this really happened. His culminating example is this:

Of the thousands of specimens of inspired gibberish that I’ve captured and put on display, my favorite is this gem from a student essay: ”Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.” The statement is hysterically unhistorical, and we have no trouble believing that a student actually wrote it.

Actually, I have considerable trouble believing that. Furthermore, I’ll bet you money everything in the column is cut-and-pasted from one of his many books. It’s a lazy, useless excuse for a language column, and almost makes me long for Safire’s return from vacation.

The essay by Lu Xun on the Chinese national curse, mentioned in this post and the comments to this one, has been translated by Huichieh Loy of From a Singapore Angle; you can read it here. It begins:

Those who live in China will often have occasion to hear the swear: tamade (他妈的) and others like it. I think the geographical distribution of this phrase is probably as wide as the lands upon which the Chinese have set foot; and I’m afraid the frequency of its use may not be less than that of the polite nin hao ya (您好呀). If, as some have put it, the peony is China’s “national flower”, then this has to be considered China’s “national swear” (guoma 国骂).

It’s funny and interesting; Huichieh Loy says “The language used—earlier twentieth century (‘May Fourth’) Chinese, plus the many learned classical citations, make the piece not that easy for me to translate. I have not been literal in all instances, and suggestions for improvements are most welcome.”

The good people at Metropolitan Books sent me a copy of Guy Deutscher’s new book, The Unfolding of Language; I’m only a little over halfway through it, but I’ve accumulated enough things I want to talk about I thought I’d better start now, and leave the summing up for when I finish it. I will say that it’s a great pleasure to read a book on historical linguistics written for the layperson by an actual linguist, and I hope lots of people read it and get a better idea of how languages change, so they can understand how pointless are all the demands for preservation, warnings of doom, and nostalgic looks back at an imagined time of linguistic perfection from which we’ve supposedly degenerated. (On this subject, read the excerpt from Chapter 3 here to be convinced that “the English of today is not what it used to be, but then again, it never was.”)

To the details, then! The first thing that made me want to start blogging was a picture on page 117; it’s in black and white in the book, but you can see it in glorious color towards the end of the excerpts page. It shows a Greek moving van blazoned with the word ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΕΣ [metaforés], which is the normal Greek word for ‘moves, removals’; as Deutscher says, “meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta = ‘across’, phor = ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.” I used to see such signs in Astoria (the heavily Greek part of Queens where I used to live), and I’d point them out to whoever I was walking with and explain that “metaphor” is a basic everyday word in Greek; I’m delighted to be able to send everyone to this picture (and get a nostalgic thrill myself).

[Read more…]

I wasn’t sure if I should post The Internet Chinese Text Archive, a huge collection of texts in Chinese (which I found at Plep [scroll down to 19th July]), since anyone who can make use of it probably already knows about it, but when googling it I ran across A Brief History of Asian Studies Online (through 2003) by T. Matthew Ciolek, so I figured I’d post both and see if anyone’s interested. The “Brief History” has this under 1991:

sometime in 1991: Ulysses Li establishes “The Internet Chinese Text Archive” [now at www.ibiblio.org/ chinese-text] the first Chinese text archive on the Internet. It was formerly known to web surfers as “Xiaoyu’s Collection” or “Carp Temple.” This collection had once been served by the server of Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS) Chinese Community Information Center (CCIC).

I dialetti italiani: Language and Dialect on the Italian Peninsula (via Plep [19th July]) is a potentially useful site, with all sorts of interesting-sounding links. Unfortunately, none of the external ones work (“Last Modified: 12/27/96”), but there’s still a short essay and a map hosted on the site, so I figure it’s worth mentioning. There are functioning links on Italian dialects here and here and relevant Wikipedia pages here and here (and I vote with those who think those pages should be merged).