The indefatigable Trevor Joyce sent me Steven Morris’s Guardian story about laudable lexicography:
It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic. The dictionary will not be huge because relatively few words survive, but experts from Aberystwyth University say they expect they will end up with more than 1,000 words.
Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind.
He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period. The picture of the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland will be of interest not only to linguists but to historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists.” […]
He said the bulk of the material would come from the Roman period in Britain, from the first to the fourth centuries AD, and from the middle of the second century onwards in Ireland. He said: “There’s much less from Ireland from that period, because it was never part of the Roman empire.”
Another source is inscriptions on stones in places such as Cornwall and Ireland that use the Ogham alphabet, a system of straight lines designed to be carved on to stone, metal, bone or wood. “In north-west Europe, in the early period, we don’t have very much written history. If you’re in the Mediterranean, you’ve got Greeks and Phoenicians and Romans and Etruscans writing stuff all the time. Once you get to the north of France and Britain you don’t have much at all. We’ve got placenames and the personal names and you can start to try and reconstruct some sort of a narrative out of that.”
The plan is to produce online and printed versions of the dictionary.
Since there’s not a huge corpus, maybe I’ll live to see it completed. And speaking of things Celtic, also courtesy of Trevor comes Siobhán Long’s Irish Times piece on the 2025 traditional singer of the year, “Birr-born Thomas McCarthy” from a Traveller family (I love “Birr-born”):
Thomas’ most recent and widely lauded album, released in 2017, is a collaboration with Romani gypsy, Viv Legg, titled Jauling the Green Tobar, where “jauling” is a Romani word for walking and “tobar” an Irish Traveller word for the road.
“Jaul” is Romani ʒal ‘go’ (1 sg. past gelem) from Sanskrit yā́ti (PIE *yeh₂-); as for the second word, I’m guessing it’s a Traveler deformation of Irish bóthar ‘road’ (from Proto-Celtic *bow-itrom ‘cow path’) — the Irish word tobar means ‘well; spring.’
Gallia is not northern Europe.
Well, it is if you’re sitting in Rome.
Exactly.
Looking up tobar led me to OED and Green’s entries saying that it’s thought to be the source of (old, mostly British) slang toby, ‘the highway as the resort of robbers’, ‘highway robbery’. Green has plenty of citations, almost all from the 1800s with the last in 1958.
Plus the whole Mediterranean-coast part of what’s to us southern France was the province of Gallia Transalpina (known by various other names as well), which had already been Roman-controlled since before Caesar was born.
Caesar does give an account of his initial incursion and a year later his brief invasion of Britain. Your northward mileage may vary on whether southern Britain is far enough.
Re tobar, here is a collection of some Shelta vocabulary (missing this word, unfortunately):
https://alivebeing.com/resources/pdf/Shelta.pdf
—
lākīn ‘a girl’… Irish cailīn.
nʹāka ‘a bucket’, ‘can’ (nāga)…. Irish canna, from English.
nīdʹa ‘a person’, ‘a fellow’ …Irish duine.
nūspōg ‘a spoon’ (G). Irish spūnōg.
rodus ‘a door’ (rudhus: rodus G)…. Irish doras.
ruspān ‘a purse’. Irish sparān.
They also have
lʹišgad ‘a skillet’ (lishgadh).
[PP: from scilléad, idem?]
rīspūn ‘a prison’, ‘gaol’ …. Irish prīosūn,
from English. [PP: not quite the same replacement pattern]
It’s hardly a “complete dictionary of Ancient Celtic.” It’s a compendium of materials for the ancient Celtic languages (plural, not singular) of Britain and Ireland in Roman times and for a few preceding centuries. The reporter may very well be completely unaware that Celtic languages were spoken over a rather wider area at one time … (I’m sure Dr Rodway could put him right on that.)
Morris seems to have remarkably little understanding of the subject he’s writing about, even by the low standards of journalism about linguistics:
Elements, eh? Did he not take notes?
So Ptolemy’s list of tribes along the coast (half of them with p), then nothing for at least 200 years, and then the oldest few Ogham stones?
@Plastic Paddy: What is the meaning of the abbreviations G, K, L, and N in John Bear’s list?
@M: I don’t know, but his source, The Secret Languages of Ireland, with lots of Shelta, is available at https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_sth_vertxt-1/page/n13/mode/2up
A friend of mine studied politics in Aberystwyth and this is the first time I’ve seen the university mentioned outside of that. He went on to work for the Lib-Dems.
Here is a more complete scan of The Secret Languages of Ireland: https://archive.org/details/the-secret-languages-of-ireland/page/130/mode/2up. That chapter, from a few pages before the other copy starts, explains those source abbreviations.
When I was recently looking for information on Gallic and proto-Celtic related to some thread here, I stumbled across an interesting set of conference presentation titles at Aberystwyth. But alas never found any video or recording of them. They must have a good department or at least a go-getter faculty member.
@M, jf, MMcM
The version of the “Secret Languages” linked by MMcM has on page 154 the meaning of these abbreviations (shorthand references for collections of vocab, which the author has collated). The author also goes through on p.164-171 the various deformations used to disguise Irish words.
“Gallia is not northern Europe.”
Scandinavians often want to reserve the term for their part of the world, because ‘Scandinavia’ traditionally doesn’t include Finland. I suppose it represents Swedish ‘norden’ and the like.
Europeans are often keen on moving their countries conceptually north and west. Spaniards prefer to be in Western Europe rather than Southern Europe, and a survey showed that nearly all the citizens of what we British think of as Eastern Europe prefer to be in Central Europe, leaving only Russia and the Caucasus in the East. Of course the Baltic countries identify as northern, and if you told a Finn that he or she lived in Eastern Europe it would cause indignation.
Aberystwyth has a pretty solid reputation in Celtic studies.
(Also, one of my daughter*’s MA’s is from Aberystwyth.)
I was once interrupted, while l in full expository flow, by a Hungarian saying “Thank you, thank you!”
I was mystified as to what he was thanking me for, until he told me that it was because I had described Hungary as “Central European.” (As opposed to “Eastern.” This was in the early 1990s.)
I mean, Hungary is the prototypical Central European country, amirite? They really don’t come any centraller.
* Rosa Luxemburg Eddyshaw.
Austria is the prototypical Mitteleuropa country in many Austrian minds, I suppose. But basically I think Hungarians and Austrians agree that the Habsburg Monarchy was the quintessential Central European power.
a survey showed that nearly all the citizens of what we British think of as Eastern Europe prefer to be in Central Europe, leaving only Russia and the Caucasus in the East.
Americans who know enough geography to have an opinion may be surprised by the idea that the Caucasus is in Europe.
People who grew up during the Cold War (like me) perceived anything beyond the Iron Curtain as “Eastern Europe”. Yet when I look at the map “Deutschland, Mitteleuropa und Donauraum” in my old Diercke school atlas from 1966, it covers the whole area between Paris and Kyiv.
In seventh grade, our social studies topic was geography. The semester break fell between the chapters “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.” So the definition of what constituted Eastern Europe was explicitly about political, not physical, geography. Greece was western, but Czechoslovakia was eastern.
I’m an Aberystwyth graduate, though it was then a college of the University of Wales. I have a joint degree in French and Librarianship; the College of Librarianship Wales was then a separate institution, but merged with the University in 1989.
@Graham
That’s all correct. And those terms are unnecessary and frankly a little goofy because there’s no precise way to divide the European subcontinent using cardinal directions. These are only useful for positioning a region in relation to another region as in saying ‘Denmark is north of the German border’.
Aberystwyth University is also the home of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary.
Theorists of racial matters using a now-archaic but once-popular taxonomy found the population of 19th century France to include “Nordics” AND “Alpines” AND “Mediterraneans.” Divided into three parts, you might say.
For dividing Europe more deictically, I am reminded of the amusing fact that “Ultramontane,” i.e. “beyond the mountains” (with the Alps being understood as the mountains meant), reflects in more recent centuries the non-Italian perspective, i.e. meaning someone in France or Germany or England who was excessively enthusiastic about the authority of some fellow on the other side of the Alps in Rome. But the word had originated with an Italian perspective, where “ultramontani” meant the foreign students at medieval Italian universities who had crossed the Alps in order to matriculate. (And apparently in pre-Avignon days a Roman Pontiff of non-Italian background was called a “papa ultramontano,” likewise reflecting the Italian POV, although I guess the current fellow from Chicago might be more ultramarino?)
I suspect that most of us are, so far as everyday language goes. Many many years ago I went to a lecture by someone who had been climbing Mount Elbrus. He said that Russians never called it just “Mount Elbrus”; they always said “Mount Elbrus-the-highest-mountain-in-Europe”. One in the eye for those of us who think Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe.
With our racist hats on (or more precisely with our Christianist hats on) we tend to accept that Armenians and Georgians are European, but more doubtful as to whether Azerbaijanis are.
But the word had originated with an Italian perspective, where “ultramontani” meant the foreign students at medieval Italian universities who had crossed the Alps in order to matriculate.
I hadn’t known that, thanks. And I like the idea of an Ultramarine Pope.
I just checked on a website to see if all these years after the Cold War my alma mater still allows undergraduates to major in “Russian and Eastern European Studies,” and the answer appears to be more or less yes, but it’s been rebranded as “Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies,” which “offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of a broad region: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and central Asia; Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, and other areas in east central Europe; and the Balkans.” OTOH, it’s not like there’s a “Central European Studies” program that the Hungarians and Czechs etc. are being excluded from.
ETA: Right now, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures offers on-campus instruction in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, and can help arrange remote instruction in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian or Czech, as well as (non-Slavic!) Finnish and Hungarian. A decade or two ago enrollment in Czech courses was experiencing a boom led by members of the football team, due in part to scurrilous rumors that it was an unusually-easy way to satisfy the mandatory foreign-language requirement for the bachelor’s degree, but alas that Golden Age seems to have come to an end.
“Nordics” AND “Alpines” AND “Mediterraneans”
… oh my.
Even Hilaire Belloc, who was not notably woke, found the classification eminently mockable:
Behold, my child, the Nordic man,
And be as like him, as you can;
His legs are long, his mind is slow,
His hair is lank and made of tow.
And here we have the Alpine Race:
Oh! What a broad and foolish face!
His skin is of a dirty yellow.
He is a most unpleasant fellow.
The most degraded of them all
Mediterranean we call.
His hair is crisp, and even curls,
And he is saucy with the girls.
[My copy of the Opera Omnia comes with nice illustrative pictures by BTB. The Alpine fellow’s Lederhosen are particularly striking.]
Athel C-B: Back in the old days when the right of immigrants to become naturalized U.S. citizens often depended on whether or not an applicant was a “white person” within the meaning of the Naturalization Act (subsequently amended to remove that requirement) there were court cases about the status of borderline groups.* The case that went to the Supreme Court involved a Punjabi fellow (held: not “white” from a common-sense perspective and don’t give us any scientific guff about how he’s “Aryan” or “Caucasian”) but there were lower-court cases about other disputed populations, one of which ended up ruling that Armenians were “white” after Franz Boas provided expert testimony to that effect.
*After our civil war, the laudable desire to change our official racial attitudes was reflected in an 1870 amendment to put “aliens of African nativity and … persons of African descent” on the same footing as white persons, but if you were some third thing you were out of luck. Chinese immigrants were the prototypical members of the disfavored third-thing category, but there were others …
@David: Perhaps in the context of Belloc’s time it was the pop-Darwinists who were woke and Belloc was so unwoke as to reject their progressive scientific insights due to his clinging to primitive superstitions.
“although I guess the current fellow from Chicago might be more ultramarino?)”
“And I like the idea of an Ultramarine Pope.”
Pope Leo XIV is the successor to Pope Francis, another Ultramarine Pope. Technically, there were a number of other Ultramarine Popes before them if the Mediterranean counts. There were Popes from Greece, Syria, Africa, and a couple from Dalmatia. The first Pope, of course, was from across the Mediterranean, from Galilee.
Belloc was so unwoke as to reject their progressive scientific insights
It may well be so. One forgets too easily that “progressives” were well into eugenics at that time.
Immigrants from Azerbaijan are few and far between in the U.S. so I suspect most Americans simply have had no occasion to think about what taxonomic box to put them in. That said, I see from the internet that Azerbaijan has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest every year since 2008, which seems a confirmation of their Europeanness from the highest cultural authority Europe currently possesses.
Would Charlize Theron and the charming Mr Musk be classified as “persons of African descent,” or would their whiteness be accepted without question?
In the latter case, the salient question would be whether he possesses human DNA (and if so, how and where he obtained it.)
I was going to say that I had never met anyone from Azerbaijan, but on thinking more I realize that that would be wrong. There was a research student in the laboratory 30 years ago that may have been from Azerbaijan. She had trouble with the idea of grammatical gender, and said of calmodulin, the protein that she was working on “il est très petite, mais il est très importante, comme M. XXX” M. XXX was the head of the group, a very small man.
I’ve met one Georgian that I know of, the widow of a distinguished German scientist who learned how to speak Georgian — not an easy task, I imagine, unless you’re the sort of person who thinks that European Portuguese has too many vowels.
As for Armenians, I’ve known lots, both Armenians from Armenia, and second-generation Armenians in France.
I am confident that “African” in the 1870 amendment would have been understood in a not-entirely-geographical sense having a specific reference to phenotype. I don’t think there was much of an Afrikaner-American immigrant population in the old days, but I’m confident that that a Huguenot-descended lady like Miss Theron would have been deemed a “white person.” Someone from Natal who looked like one-time Durban resident Mohandas Gandhi would have been in the ineligible “some third thing” category.
The runner up in our 2004 presidential election was Senator John Kerry, whose wife Teresa started life as Miss Maria Teresa Simões-Ferreira, born and raised in colonial Mozambique before attending university in South Africa. There were jocularly-intended remarks at the time about the possibility that she would become the first “African-American” First Lady, with the jocularity based on the fact that “African-American” either has a non-compositional meaning or a meaning that is compositional only for one specific and racial sense of “African.”
There is now a Georgian-immigrant community (with US-born kids) in the NYC area that is maybe not all that numerous in absolute terms but not tiny, and I have met a number of them, although probably substantially more than the average New Yorker due to the circles in which I travel.
The way we officially do racial taxonomy in the current U.S., “white” immigrants are not only those who come (directly or indirectly via remoter ancestry) from Europe but also those from so-called MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa) all the way from Morocco to Afghanistan. Various activist groups quibble about this, and I understand that they do it otherwise in Canada. The fine details of the current system did not fully evolve until some time after the “white person” language in the Naturalization Act was gone, so it serves other functions.
Of course, as I am fond of joking/not joking, everyone is of African descent.
In the Cold War, Japan was part of the West, which makes sense if the Prime Meridian is at Washington rather than Greenwich. Nowadays, instead of the West we have the Global North, which includes Australia (as indeed does the Eurovision Song Contest — which also includes Israel, which has recently controversial, although not for geographical purism).
Irish people will inform anyone who looks polite enough to pretend to care that Northern Ireland does not include the northernmost part of Ireland. South Africa is not Southern Africa. The American South is in North America. Of the 12 provinces of the Kingdom of Prussia, 10 lay to the west of West Prussia.
It’s certainly an advantage to have a system based on objective criteria, like “what geographically-defined political entity were you born in?” rather than pseudoscience, though one can see that a system based on facts may not readily fulfil the purpose for which it was actually intended without some tweaking.
Irish people will inform anyone who looks polite enough to pretend to care that Northern Ireland does not include the northernmost part of Ireland.
I knew an Ulsterman from the Republic of Ireland, who with admirable stamina, would still, after many years in the UK, patiently explain to passing Brits that “Northern Ireland”, as in “Great Britain and”, is not the same thing as “Ulster.”
There is now a Georgian-immigrant community (with US-born kids) in the NYC area that is maybe not all that numerous in absolute terms but not tiny
I heard Georgian spoken on the subway a couple of decades back.
While it lacks the cachet of the Eurovision Song Contest, the United Nations is arguably more precise in its “regional groups” of member states. It’s got one carefully named “Western European and Other States,” which includes among “other” Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, plus the U.S. with an asterisk. It’s maybe using a Cold-War sense of “Western” to include Finland and Greece (plus Malta) while leaving everyone arguably European who previously suffered under Communist rule to “Eastern European States.” And Turkey is somehow with extra asterisks a joint member of that group plus the “Asia-Pacific States” group, although perhaps that’s ambiguous about whether it’s “Western European” or “Other” with respect to the former group. Cyprus for whatever reasons is only Asia-Pacific, while Armenia/Azerbaijan/Georgia are “Eastern European,” although the various X-stan former SSR’s got reclassified as Asia-Pacific.
The issue came up recently when a hacker found out that Uganda-born Mamdani had classified himself in his college application as African-American. I would guess that was probably done innocently.
The US Census category of “Black or African American” is defined as “A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.”
Likewise “Asian American” is “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.”
That solves everything, naturally.
While it lacks the cachet of the Eurovision Song Contest
Bah! How many divisions has the Eurovision Song Contest? (as the Beloved Leader memorably asked at Teheran.)
(I belated realised that I needed to specify “Teheran” rather than, say, “Washington”, to avoid confusion.)
@Y: typically US bureaucratic forms that ask for racial or quasi-racial category boxes to be checked don’t directly give full definitions because people are blithely assumed (rightly or wrongly) to know them. There seem to be a wide variety of opinions as to whether the teenage Mamdani was acting “innocently.” This may be connected to people’s views of him as an individual or their more general views as to whether or not to give the benefit of the doubt to ambitious and politically-motivated people who appear to have taken dubious positions and perhaps did so for tactical advantage. I will say that Mamdani went to a NYC high school full of very very ambitious and high-achieving immigrant (and non-immigrant kids) from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and was thus doing his college applications in a milieu where his peers would have been unusually obsessed with figuring out how to do well in the complicated and often opaque world of elite U.S. college admissions and been very aware of the perhaps-not-entirely-admirable role that sorting applicants into racial-category boxes had in the admissions practices of the time.
I will also say that I have met (not particularly recently, or at least it hasn’t come up) some U.S. immigrant teenagers from Egyptian/Coptic families who appeared genuinely confused about why the “African-American” category wasn’t thought to include them and it didn’t seem like they were being disingenuous. This just shows of course that lots of stuff that’s *obvious* conventional-wisdom in any given cultural setting may actually be kind of weird and arbitrary and not particularly intuitive if you didn’t pick it up by osmosis at an early age. And theirs was a somewhat different situation because their parents were the “regular” racial/ethnic sort of people for their “African” country of origin.
Going back to the original topic for just a moment, here’s a press release from the Aberystwyth folks about the dictionary project so you don’t have to rely on the Guardian if you’d rather not. https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/cymraeg/news/news-article/title-285203-en.html
This makes it clearer to me that Continental Celtic (whatever we do or don’t know about it) is outside the scope of the project except I guess maybe as indirect evidence of Insular Celtic lexical items. I was also intrigued by this:
‘The project will also evaluate theories about other languages spoken in Britain and Ireland in prehistory and their connection with the Celtic languages.
‘Dr Rodway added:
‘“While it is certain that non-Celtic languages were spoken in these islands before the Celtic languages, and for some time alongside them, we have no uncontroversial direct evidence for those languages, and hypotheses about them range from the cautious to the fanciful. A full collection of the available evidence will allow us to sort the wheat from the chaff.”‘
Thanks, JWB. I was actually looking for the press release, though somewhat lackadaisically.
It’s interesting to see what Morris has mangled in his paraphrasing of the press release without actually understanding it.
A well-known hypothesis for a pre-Celtic language in Britain, where actual written sources could bear on the matter, is that whatever the Picts spoke before they adopted a p-Celtic language (assuming that they didn’t in fact always speak a Celtic language) might have been non-Indo-European. As with all subjects, we’ve discussed that here before …
Some of the strange unGoidelic names that Ptolemy places in Ireland will probably come in to it too.
Didn’t we at one stage discuss a fairly sensible scholar of Celtic-origin toponyms in England, who had tentatively thought some of them might ultimately be pre-Celtic (including Phoenician)? I’ve forgotten the details, and Google nowadays is nigh-unusable.
Toponyms might well be beyond the remit of this project, though. I’m sure all the attempts to ascribe insular-Celtic linguistic weirdness to substrates are outside it too (no great loss there.)
@mollymooly
Maybe someone knows more about this, but the first king of Prussia was not allowed to call himself King of X, where X was an imperial territory. So he was grand duke or lord protector or whatever of his Imperial possessions (the title would have been given or at least confirmed by the emperor), but he could and did call himself King of Prussia. At some point, I think, Imperial policy changed, and you got the other German kingdoms.
Yes, the King of Prussia title (originally “King in Prussia” because “of” would have implied legal complications involving Poland) was taken up by the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick the III of Brandenburg and I of Prussia.
‘Ulster’ to mean the six counties is not, I think, primarily used by Brits (if by that you mean people from Great Britain proper).
My impression is that people from Donegal tend to be described as from Donegal – I can never remember the other two counties, so I don’t know what they do.
Normandy (which I have been to) and Brittany (which I have not) do seem kind of northern, suggesting that it’s your coast which matters, and not your latitude.
An interesting question which is unfortunately presumably also outside the remit of the project is the nature of the relationship between Goidelic and Brythonic. They seem alike structurally in some ways (like the initial mutations, word order and in having conjugated prepositions) that suggest extensive contact rather than shared inheritance, but it seems difficult to fit prolonged extensive contact of that kind into the historical framework (so far as we really know anything much about that.)
We have of course discussed the “King in/of Prussia” title before. Which was of interest to me because I grew up not all that far from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Prussia_(shopping_mall), which back in the day was claimed to be the largest shopping mall east of the Mississippi or something like that. The mall is located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, which is so named because there was in colonial times a tavern named the King of Prussia, presumably to honor an ally of George II-or-III back when patrons of Pennsylvanian taverns were still loyal to the House of Hanover. (To this day you can find drinking establishments in the U.S. named the White Horse, although the old Hanoverian factional symbolism of the name is probably opaque to 99% of the patrons.)
Ultramarine Pope
yves klein?
“Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies”
eek! that’s genuinely terrifying (and probably a sign of where a lot of the u.s. academy is headed right now). the wikipedia article on Eurasianism is (predictably) more than a little patchy and incoherent, but the last paragraph of the summary isn’t far from my understanding of the state of play right now, and the specific vision of the world being invoked. but the short (if opaque) version is probably “piłsudski’s Intermarium for people who think Pan-Turanism and Pan-Slavism should merge and get more autocratic”.
for the podcast-listeners among us, The Empire Never Ended has done a number of episodes on Eurasianism (and its Pan-Turanist cousins) – for the flavor of the vernacular end, their visit to the Great Kurultáj is probably the best starting point.
“Eurasian” is at this point a codeword for “restoring the Soviet empire as it was post-WWII”. Dugin started it, and Putin picked it up. Dugin also had contemporaries like Limonov, with slight ideological differences.
“piłsudski’s Intermarium for people who think Pan-Turanism and Pan-Slavism should merge and get more autocratic”. — quite accurate.
@rozele: I think the more likely answer is the simple bureaucratic one that post-USSR they feel like they can’t sweep e.g. the scholarly study of Uzbekistan into the scope of “Russian” but neither the “East Asian Studies” people nor the “South Asian Studies” people nor yet the “Middle East Studies” people want to take it. So it’s just Cold-War-era “Soviet-dominated-areas Studies” with an updated label.
The real Neo-Pan-Turanists in the US academy are probably hiding out at Indiana University-Bloomington’s famed Department of Central Eurasian Studies,* affiliated with inter alia the Inner Asian & Uralic National Resource Center. I doubt they think of the Pan-Slavists as allies rather than having a more Golden-Horde-Revivalist view of them.
*Per wikipedia, “The following geographical areas, both political and cultural, are considered to fall within the scope of the department: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Buryatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Tatarstan, Tibet Autonomous Region of China, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China.” Note the exclusion of Armenia and Georgia … And to be fair they haven’t yet gotten Japan the way hardcore Pan-Turanists would desire.
Yes, Mitteleuropa was principally k. u. k. nostalgia.
The coat of arms (and thereby the flag) of Lower Saxony features a white horse.
My mom was taught the boundary between Europe and Asia in great detail; it ran through the lowest points between the Caspian and the Black Sea well north of the Caucasus.
By the time I was taught it, the crest of the Caucasus had become the boundary, presumably making the Elbrus the highest half mountain in Europe just as the Zugspitze is the highest half mountain in Germany…
Didn’t we at one stage discuss a fairly sensible scholar of Celtic-origin toponyms in England, who had tentatively thought some of them might ultimately be pre-Celtic (including Phoenician)?
Is this it? If that’s what you’re thinking of, the fairly sensible scholar was Richard Coates; Caitlin Green cited Coates and (commenters thought) greatly exaggerated the certainty of his tentative thoughts.
Yes, that was him. Thanks!
There’s a long held contest about which mountain is the highest on the Balkans, between Bulgaria and Greece. It’s in Bulgaria. By a couple of meters. It was not established until laser measuring came along. Olympus is two meters shorter. The funniest dick-measuring contest in history.
@JWB: it’s the adoption of the terminology that scares me, more than anything about the likeliest motivations (which i don’t disagree with you about). not on a slippery-slope basis (though if there’s a fan of the 1920s Eurasianists – the guys dugin’s updating – in the mix, i’m sure they’re lubing things up and trying to tilt them), but because it defines a specific intellectual space for future students and faculty to understand themselves as part of, and so sets up a certain shape for the department’s development*. kinda the reverse move of changing from an Oriental Languages program to South Asian Languages & Linguistics. the normalization of the framing, here as with “multipolarity” (same thing at heart, but deployed in different fields), is the worrying thing to me.
.
* i’m optimistically hoping that they won’t get axed as insufficiently Serious, like a lot of language and area studies departments and programs.
rozelle “it’s the adoption of the terminology that scares me” I agree.
I understand rozele’s concern and might have suggested “Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies” had they consulted me, which they did not. (Those Fools! [cue mad-scientist laughter]) But I would say that polysemy is ubiquitous and everyone is free to, and should be encouraged to, fight for their own best and perhaps benign reading of “Eurasian” rather than concede the lexeme to a sense promoted by the Duginistas.
What might be even better, if difficult to coordinate, is what you might call bureaucratic-taxonomy pluralism through the American academy as a whole. Granted that most campuses are not going to be able to support a free-standing “Formerly Soviet Stans Studies” program, let that orphan be stuck in with Russian Studies at some universities but East Asian Studies at others and Middle Eastern Studies at yet others, so that when they have their own little professional-society get-togethers they are not, at the national level, an obvious subsidiary or auxiliary of any single larger grouping. (Also, bonus points for any university with a Tibetan Studies* program that allocates it to South Asian rather than East Asian!)
*I have no doubt previously told the story about how as an undergraduate circa 1986 working in a very obscure corner of the university’s library system I discovered in a basement corner a few shelves full of books in Tibetan, representing the university’s collection thereof which had been bought about a quarter-century previously with federal grant money because Tibetan was a Cold War “strategic language.” They were extraordinarily beautiful as hand-made artifacts – printed with wooden blocks rather than Western-style metal type, some with silk wrappings around their regular bindings, and of odd dimensions that were inconsistent from item to item. And they were languishing and gathering dust because the university at that point no longer had anyone on faculty with a reading knowledge of Tibetan and was presumably not attracting very many grad students who wanted to do research that involved reading Tibetan texts.
in a very obscure corner of the university’s library system
those books sound exquisite!
i suspect i’ve told the similar tale of acquiring the American Oriental Society’s beautiful Smith Premier No. 2 typewriter, with its separate keys for upper and lower case letters, by being a student worker in the linguistics department at the right moment. it doesn’t gather less dust in my living room than the bowels of a university building, but at least people do get to look at it every day, which i hope it appreciates (i certainly do)!
UC Berkeley has (or had) many volumes of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin, which throughout the 20th century was the premier publication for monographs on Polynesian subjects. The ethnographic volumes, at least, were bound in tapa cloth.
@V: A two meter difference is potentially too small to be independent of how you model the local sea level.
Oh dear. Datums will be judged by their patriotism.
Surely Greek nationalism is so hubristic and irksome that fair-minded third-party observers will be tempted to endorse the mountain-height claims of Bulgarian nationalists (and whatever laser-related measurement methodology they presuppose) just for tactical reasons.
To be clear, I have no doubt that Bulgarian nationalism has within it the potential to be equally hubristic and irksome given a fair and full chance, but I suspect it has had hitherto fewer opportunities to have worn out its welcome with hypothetical fair-minded third-party observers.
Tops of mountains have a habit of sliding off after a sharp icy winter. New Zealand’s highest lost about 10 metres from a 1991 rock/ice fall. Wait a bit more and there’ll be plate movements/earthquakes to uplift it back again.
According to the numbers quoted in WP, the difference is about 8 meters. Maybe that’s too much to be negated by a datum difference considering they are not so far from each other.
I didn’t look for authoritative numbers with a consistent datum.
All of my experience with Greek nationalism has been virulently anti-Bulgarian. I have Greek friends though, and assimilated Vlachs. I can deal with them, and have them as dinner guests, but they’re _weird_. Impolite. No table manners. I friend of mine is married to a Greek guy and he’s fine.
EDIT: They’re fucking weird.
Unless they’re referring to the Ulster Unionists, who don’t, as far as I know, campaign for bringing Donegal into the Union.
In recognition of the fact that the part-of-the-UK bit only includes six of the full nine counties of Ulster-as-traditionally-defined, the polite thing to do is to call the six-counties part “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Ulster.”
> Yes, Mitteleuropa was principally k. u. k. nostalgia.
What is k.u.k.?
I might have thought the primary exponent of Mitteleuropa was Czeslaw Milosz, as a stake in the ground against ghettoizing communist Eastern Europe.
Milosz grew up from the age of 8 or 9 in Wilno, as it was then spelled by the then-government. Wikipedia has a hilarious (unintentionally?) sentence asserting that “Vilnius has one of the largest and best-preserved old towns in northern, eastern, and central Europe.” It can be in whichever of those Europes you want it to be!
You can easily find internet boosters claiming that Lviv (as spelled by the current government) is in Central Europe, but not so much for Kyiv. So that’s consistent with the k.u.k.* nostalgia thesis. Minsk could have as good a claim as Vilnius, but I’m not sure that anyone is currently making it.
*Ryan, for a gloss of k.u.k. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_Royal
What is k.u.k.?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserlich_und_k%C3%B6niglich
My Hungarian friend, however, showed no nostalgia for the Habsburgs.
That was (and I guess is) a bone of contention among Hungarians; many hated being yoked to the decrepit dictates of Vienna, but others appreciated the cosmopolitan polity that they found themselves part of. Oszkár Jászi (who was a Jew and thus a prototypical cosmopolitan) wrote an excellent book about the problems with the monarchy and his increasingly doomed attempts to remedy them. There was a lot of k.u.k. nostalgia between the wars (and of course later).
Funnily enough, the place where I have encountered the most sincere Habsburg nostalgia (as opposed to just putting up portraits of Franz Josef and Sissi to impress tourists) is that part of Friuli formerly known as Die Gefürstete Grafschaft Görz und Gradisca and Trieste. These aren’t German speakers either, it’s Italians who have told me they still think of Vienna as their “real” capital. I suspect people in these regions just recognize that they prospered more as Austrian resorts and working ports with a fair amount of autonomy than they do as afterthoughts in a remote corner of modern Italy.
I.e. these are Central European towns trapped in Southern/Western Europe.
The bit of now-Italy Vanya references is historically distinct because it had been Austrian-ruled for much longer than the Hapsburg’s other “Italian” territories, having e.g. not been under Venetian rule for at least the last few centuries of Venetian rule being a thing in that region.
With 20/20 hindsight one wonders if the Hapsburgs missed a trick by failing to aggressively promote the Friulian language with an eye toward promoting a distinct definitely-not-Italian ethnic identity as a safeguard against irredentism. Although since by the time language-based nationalism was first a thing the Hapsburgs were also ruling Lombardy and Venetia that might have seemed like too much trouble to be worth it? But it wouldn’t have been too late to try in the immediate aftermath of the loss of L & V, one would think.
An interesting quote I saw on wikipedia (supposedly from a book published in 2000 titled _The Marshall Plan in Austria_):
I have identified at least seven different “definitions” of “Central Europe”: Mitteleuropa (in the German imperial sense); German-Jewish Central Europe; the Central Europe of small (non-Germanic) nations (the Palacky-Masaryk tradition); the nostalgic, k.u.k. or Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa (without imperial Germans) which is related to the Austro-Hungarian version of Mitteleuropa in the 1970s and 1980s (Kreisky-Kadar-Busek); the Mitteleuropa of the West German left and peace movement in the 1980s; the “Central Europe” of Eastern European dissidents and intellectuals (for example, Milosz, Kundera, Konrad); and finally the “Central and Eastern Europe” of the European Union.
What kept Switzerland together without expansion? Were there times when other alpine regions joined the confederation? I might have thought the Swiss model would appeal to Ladin-speaking peasants and burgesses across the divide. Were the cisalpine valleys more easily accessed and controlled by their northern Italian overlords than the Swiss cantons by whatever lords might have wished to grab them?
(I’ll leave this up to see if anyone has interesting thoughts, but on looking at a map, I think the question was mostly rooted in my ignorance of Swiss and Italian topography.)
@Ryan: In pre-Napoleonic times what is now the canton known in Romansh as Grischun was not actually part of the Swiss confederation but an allied Alpine confederation of its own, whose territory extended further south into what’s now Italy than it currently does. There’s a map in this article (about the conflict that led to temporary loss of Grischun control of the area during the Thirty Years War before it was restored) that shows in gray the territory reallocated by Napoleon to his puppet Repubblica Cisalpina that was not retrieved in 1815 and eventually became part of a unified Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCndner_Wirren
Note the fun fact that the Romansh name for the 17th-century conflict in question (Troubles des Grisons in French) comes in three different spellings.
The eight cantons, the tre leghi, the vier dorfer. Switzerland offers an interesting model for why Celtic has so many number-ish tribal and place names yet little evidence that most of them are in sequence.
I did see the three different spellings that looked like two different etymons (Scumbigls/-pigls and Sgurdins).
Monte Disgrazia is the perfect place for a war…!!!
Many many years ago I went to a lecture by someone who had been climbing Mount Elbrus. He said that Russians never called it just “Mount Elbrus”; they always said “Mount Elbrus-the-highest-mountain-in-Europe”. One in the eye for those of us who think Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe.
It was in exactly that context that I found out that Russians consider Elbrus the highest mountain in Europe (from the Nabokovs’ translation of A Hero of Our Time and that I found out that Americans may be surprised.
Speaking of nostalgia for the Habsburgs, see Holly Case’s LRB review of Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation-States, 1867-1939, by Iryna Vushko, which starts:
How many Irish ministers are there in Britain?
Indeed the original Sinn Féin policy of 1905 was not independence but dual monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model.
A dual monarchy with a powerless king though. I like it but it basically meant independence, right? More or less like commonwealth states today? In Austria-Hungary the Emperor-King maintained control of the military.
After the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Free State (1922–1937) still had a king, and while the king had very little power in the United Kingdom, he had virtually none in the Free State. However, prior to 1931, the Westminster Parliament still had some authority to legislate for the entirety of the British Commonwealth, including the Irish Free State, whereas after 1931, the self-governing states of the Commonwealth were fully independent. Then in 1937, the Ireland became the republic it is today.
prior to 1931, the Westminster Parliament still had some authority to legislate for … the Irish Free State — that was certainly the UK view; the Free State’s official view was that the 1921 treaty had already given it the degree of independence that the other Commonwealth Dominions got from the Statute of Westminster 1931. This was a stretch given that the treaty explicitly said the Free State had the same constitutional status as Canada. The question is moot since there were no attempts to apply post-1922 Westminster statutes in the Free State. It would have been interesting; on the few occasions when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled against the Free State authorities, they always ignored the ruling.
in 1937, the Ireland became the republic it is today — that’s a minority view. Admittedly, the current constitution came into force in 1937 and created the office of President, but other dates are available: most obviously, the Republic of Ireland Act did not come into force until 1949. Alternatively there is the fact that the monarchy was removed from the previous constitution when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936. In the 1936-49 period George VI was either “external head of state” (the President being the “internal of state” ) or else just a functionary to whom had been delegated certain duties within the diplomatic service.
Another quote from the Holly Case review:
I read that story a long time ago and it gave me the creeps (to Čapek’s credit). I didn’t remember Czech for Newts, though! I must find a copy right away (on waterproof paper, obviously).
There are lot of jokes about the Czech language in The War With the Newts. I’m sure I didn’t get most of them. That passage, near the end, with the newt who speaks Czech, refers back to an earlier section where the Czech public becomes outraged that Czech—in spite of the critical role of some Czechs in bringing the newts into contact with humans—seems to be the only language that the newts have not mastered.
We discussed Čapek and the Czech (or not) character of various writers, previously.
I have identified at least seven different “definitions” of “Central Europe”:
I just noticed in the newspaper today that Philip Ther is the professor for the “Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas” at the University of Vienna, which their website translates as “History of Central Europe” in English. So apparently “Mitteleuropa” can still include Germany, at least in the German speaking academic world, and it is necessary to tack an “Ost-“ on to it if you’re excluding Germany. But you still need the “Mittel” to keep out Russia.
News from the Old Chinese branch of proto-Celtic.
It appears to be an exercise in cherry-picking so-called ‘soundalikes’ Edo Nyland would be proud of
A foolish mistake. Both Mandarin 咳嗽 kesou “cough” and proto-Celtic *kwaso– “cough” are loans from Kusaal kɔns /kɔ̃s/ “cough.” The archaeological record is quite clear that the custom of coughing originated in the West African savanna (possibly to frighten lions away.)
Mandarin houlong 喉嚨 “throat” and Welsh llwng “throat” are, likewise, borrowed from the Kusaal lɛuŋ “throat.” (The human throat is thought to have evolved in Africa.) The hou- element of houlong is from proto-Bantu *gʊ-, the singular verbal agreement prefix for Bleek-Meinhof Class 3, which contains “long thin things”: this detailed non-trivial morphological correspondence puts the relationship beyond reasonable doubt.
[Isn’t it about time that Mark Liberman set up some kind of intervention?]
I fell out of the habit of regularly reading LL a couple of years ago and stuff like that doesn’t entice me to come back…
Did not the damper climate in higher latitudes bring a certain bisyllabification to the practice of coughing?
(Very llwngmatic the Welsh language.)
Kusaal in fact also has kɔnsim “cough”; though the relationship to kɔns is now unclear, it seems likely that the disyllabic form was originally used only for coughing in the rainy season.
Another Western Oti-Volta word which has been widely borrowed across the world is Mooré tĩsi “sneeze.” Again, there is a longer form, tĩsimdi, and we can reasonably surmise that this verb originally specifically described sneezing in the rainy season.
Sneezing is thought to have been introduced to China by the Tocharians, but the path from West Africa to the Tarim Basin is not yet clear. The Indus Valley civilisation was probably involved in some way.