Cynthia Haven had a TLS review of a book of conversations with Tomas Venclova back in 2018; it’s available only to subscribers, but fortunately she did a blog post in which she provided a few excerpts, and this one amused me enough to post:
Lithuanian, the native tongue of 3 million people, continues to fascinate and sustain him, as it is “not only archaic, but rich and sonorous, virtually on a par with the Greek of Homer and Aeschylus. To me, as a poet, this has been rewarding”. He likens its rough phonetics to feldspar, adding that it has retained an archaic vocabulary and grammatical structure akin to preclassical Latin of the third century BC. And, Venclova points out, while it is one of the classical Indo-European languages, like Latin, Ancient Greek, Gothic, or Old Slavonic, it is the only one of them that is still alive. It nearly was not so. In the nineteenth century, it was in serious decline, like Gaelic or Welsh. Venclova compares it to the former, another archaic language that embodies an ancient past. Neighbouring Poland views Lithuania the way the English view Scotland, as wild and untamed, with “more primeval forests and a valiant but not-too-civilized people”.
I have no problem with his loving his native tongue — that’s what poets do, after all — but the idea that “it is the only one of [the classical Indo-European languages] that is still alive” is so ludicrous I don’t know how even a poet could entertain it for a second. Leaving aside the fact that Latin is alive all across Europe, under names like French, Italian, and Romanian, Greek is still alive under its good old name! Of course, Venclova would respond that Lithuanian has hardly changed at all, but any Greek would say the same about Greek. As I wrote here, “I once thought only uneducated people believed this, but then I read an essay by Seferis, one of the most cultured men of the twentieth century, in which he furiously attacked foreigners who pretended that the ancient Greeks used some sort of strange pronunciation, made up out of whole cloth, rather than the authentic speech of the Greeks!” Anyway, the myth of Lithuanian as a uniquely archaic language is remarkably persistent, but at least it doesn’t seem to have done much real-world damage, so I won’t worry about it. (Thanks, Peter!)
The full blogpost mentions others including Milosz, which reminds me that earlier today I chanced to see a photo of what is alleged to be a final exam administered in 1955 by Hannah Arendt to UC-Berkeley undergrads of the “pick-one-of-the-following-questions-and-write-an-essay-answering-it” genre, where one of the prompts was “Explain why intellectuals can be attracted by a totalitarian ideology (use Milosz).” I imagine Venclova would have some things to say about that, because even as a “dissident intellectual” in Soviet times he would have understood the genre he was contrasting himself to.
See also my prior poetic comment: https://languagehat.com/subjects-and-objects-slavic-at-yale/#comment-4510234
He likens its rough phonetics to feldspar
The language of the stone age, then.
Separately “so ludicrous an idea that even a poet shouldn’t entertain it” seems a pretty high bar …
>Anyway, the myth of Lithuanian as a uniquely archaic language is remarkably persistent
Lithuanians themselves are archaic.
They may have unique insight into the question.
Your URL is so archaic it’s irretrievable…
Lithuanian archaic? Bah! It’s so highly innovating that it hasn’t even kept PIE *w intact, unlike those truly archaic languages Welsh and English.
‘He likens its rough phonetics to feldspar’.
As a former geologist, I wonder what this reference to feldspar actually means. What are ‘rough phonetics’? What are ‘smooth phonetics’ and what mineral would they be likened to? Is feldspar actually rough? Minerals can be found with very smooth crystalline faces.
What are ‘rough phonetics’?
Very guttural languages, the three of them, the Gaelic and the German and the Lithuanian.
The sounds is all guttural do you understand.
What are ‘rough phonetics’?
Rough approximations to sound-science, produced by ruffians.
What are ‘rough phonetics’?
Woody.
> Your URL is so archaic it’s irretrievable…
That’s strange. It was just a link to median age by country in wiki. Lithuania is 4th oldest.
The feldspar comment is strange. Maybe the reference is to it being used as a (relatively soft) abrasive material? In the U.S., powdered feldspar is the abrasive component of the scouring powders Bon Ami (abrasive + soap) and Barkeeper’s Friend (abrasive + oxalic acid).
@Y: The term “scouring powders’ sounds almost absurdly non-American to me. I would never call those anything but “[kitchen] cleansers.” Notably, the brand I mostly grew up with, Comet, advertised that their formula did not actually contain any scratchy abrasives. I always sort of wondered how different that really made Comet from other powdered cleansers; it has never seemed to make a practical difference in my personal experience.
i would absolutely call them “scouring powders”, myself, with Ajax as the almost-generic. by contrast, to me “kitchen cleanser” is so basically meaningless – it could mean a scouring powder, a glass-cleaner, a dishwashing detergent, a bleach solution, even an oil soap – that i can’t picture ever saying it. but that’s lect’y difference for you!
If anyone asks me about IE languages, I will certainly describe Lithuanian as archaic in some respects.
the way the English view Scotland, as wild and untamed, with “more primeval forests and a valiant but not-too-civilized people“
Yep, I often tell my wife I regard her as wild, untamed, valiant, but not-too-civilised. Or I would if I didn’t fear her wild, untamed Scottish response.
Only Glasgow people are wild, untamed, valiant and not too civilised.
Edinburgh people have the Scottish parliament, and they invented High Tea.
I was walking through the wet woods by my wild lone Only This Morning.
(And I am doubtful about the parliament as a marker of civilisation!)
But High Tea .,,
(Though sadly, Jenners is No More.)
@jen
Surely “in your wild lone” (i d’aonar fhiáin).
Comet (WP: “an American brand of scouring powders”) is chalk, soap, and bleach. Ajax is quartz and soap.
Brett: How about “scrubbing powder”?
PP: I like that, but I was actually misquoting Kipling.
(Although I have never been able to see why you could not walk through the wild woods alone *and* love people very hard.)
“Scouring powder” seems OK to this American. “Cleanser” seems like marketingspeak.
Maybe Ryan was looking at something else, but I can’t get Lithuania-as-4th-most-archaic out of either the current CIA estimates or current UN estimates (which overlook some places the CIA tracks) in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age Lithuania certainly doesn’t have a young population, however, and when you add Latvia into the mix it seems plausible that of the various IE branches Baltic might have the second-oldest median age for L1 speakers after Greek. (No fair saying Tocharian’s median age is 1500 years or whatever.)
Although of course getting from country-based median age to language-community/ies-based median age is tricky because you may need to adjust (without necessarily always having good data) for: a) diasporic speakers of the relevant languages; b) recent immigrants with different L1’s than the national/regional language; and/or c) locally-born members of some ethnic group with an L1 that isn’t the “national” one. Not all of those will be factors for any given place, and c) may be less likely to affect median age although it might in a given country.
Ajax is a powder in America???
Yes, as opposed to a power in Europe.
I was working on my phone, and then from memory. It looks like I sorted by female median age rather than full median. And then couldn’t remember how many I’d excluded on the basis of insufficient population (of Monaco and St. Pierre/Miquelon).
Anyway, I am sometimes jolted by the fact that people who’ve lived a century have experienced a significant fraction of recorded history. I wasn’t serious in suggesting they’d have more insight into the development of the IE branch, or a hold on a way of speaking that was closer to the IE mother tongue. But that was the joke I was bungling.
I was surprised at some point recently to see snark in a soccer context about someone who pronounced the team name A-jacks (the way we pronounce the cleaning powder). All right-thinking soccer fans now say Ai-acks. But I checked my memory, and sure enough, YouTube proved that British announcers in the 80’s pronounced it A-jacks as well, and a Brit pronunciation will trump almost any snobbery in these circles.
For what it’s worth, I pronounce Ajax [a’jaks], whether it be the football team, the cleaning solution, or the guy from the Iliad.
“He likens its rough phonetics to feldspar…” If rough means hard, and if Lithuanian is feldspar – scoring 6.0-6.5 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness – what is Russian then? Quartz (7), topaz (8) or even corundus (9)?
From The Routledge Concise Compendium of the World’s Languages by George L, Campbell and Gareth King (the Welsh specialist):
1) What do they mean by “unremarkably modern syntax”?
(2 is it possible to be remarkably modern?
3) “archaic” means retention of certain features known to have once existed (and disappeared since) in related languages. So are they using “modern” in the sense of “innovative”?
Or do they think modern IE langauges all have the same “modern” syntax?
I generally have a problem with “such and such syntax”.
I understand what I’m going to find find in respective chapters “phonology”, “morphology” and “phonology” of a grammar. I understand “[adj.] phonology”. A big red pretty phonology.
But I don’t really understand without context what subset of phonemena is implied by “[adj.] syntax”
____
E.g. WP
unremarkably modern, mostly.
¹ajaks here, for all three of them.
David M.: Ajax is a powder in America???
I’m pretty sure Ajax skurepulver is still in sale in Norway, and I even think we may have a bottle of it misplaced somewhere in the house. The one currently kept under the kitchen sink is of a different brand, and a skurekrem rather than a powder,
We use Bon Ami (pronounced in the maximally Americanized way) in this household.
I am sometimes jolted by the fact that people who’ve lived a century have experienced a significant fraction of recorded history.
People from the interior of New Guinea have experienced all of it.
Yes, as opposed to a power in Europe.
Sadly « power » is a bit of a stretch when talking about a team that is currently only a few points above the drop in the Eredivisie, and whose club coefficient has been dropping like a stone.
I wonder if the cleaning powder is having better luck?
feldspar – scoring 6.0-6.5 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness – what is Russian then? Quartz (7), topaz (8) or even corundus (9)?
less guttural; keep them all in your crop.
People from the interior of New Guinea have experienced all of it [recorded history].
All is nothing.
I suppose what is meant by “recorded” history is events that are documented in a non-living medium, or maybe even only where the original recorder obtained the information firsthand (or secondhand from actual participants or witnesses). There is a lot of history “recorded” by oral transmission and written down only after many retransmissions. I would suspect that the New Guineans have been at this for as long as anyone else.
Leaving aside “recorded,” there’s plenty of room to quibble about “significant.” My maternal grandfather lived from 1903 to 2003, and it’s not obvious that that was an *insignificant* fraction of recorded history, especially if you do some population-weighting and assume e.g. that a larger planetwide population can plausibly generate more history-per-year than a much smaller planetwide population 500 or 1000 or 2000 years earlier.
especially if you do some population-weighting and assume e.g. that a larger planetwide population can plausibly generate more history-per-year than a much smaller planetwide population 500 or 1000 or 2000 years earlier
Of course if you try to do the weighting per the amount of history actually being recorded, it would probably turn out to be a fairly small fraction, but only because by this weighing the vast majority of recorded history would have occurred after 2003.
(Facebook was founded in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006.)
…and the camera drone was invented similarly late, if not later. One of the historic firsts of the Ukraine war is that the entire fucking war is being filmed – most of the “footage” (ha!) isn’t public as of yet, but even the parts that have made it to Facebook, YouTube, “the platform known as Twitter” or at least a public Telegram channel are way beyond what most people dreamed of in, say, the Iraq war of 2003.
For a more conventional meaning of “significant”, though – well, both world wars, the entire Cold War, nukes, men walking on the fucking moon…
Surely the consequences for military tactics, e.g. suppressing mortar fire, are dramatic. But I can’t see what else:(
Historiography. There are already YouTube channels that explain the previous day’s battles in detail – down to hours and tens of meters.
I first noticed the influence of recorded-events weighting while reading a thick book on the history of China. There was maybe 20% of the book left when I came across the first appearance of someone who was still living when I was a young adult (Chiang Kai-shek, died 1975).
@DM, yes. But again, it is tactics.
Meanwhile, war is more than just tactics.
Also contemporary coverage of wars in news is 1. often is based on claims that have little to do with reality 2. in countries that take active part in wars is meant to.. er, mobilise people, make people want more blood rather than less:(
@January 1st-of … As the man said, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” The problem for the future historian of the present age will be less gaps in archival evidence than the difficulty (it will probably be outsourced to stupid AI software) of discerning the interesting wheat among petabytes of chaff.
The problem for the future historian of the present age will be less gaps in archival evidence than the difficulty (it will probably be outsourced to stupid AI software) of discerning the interesting wheat among petabytes of chaff.
That too, but plenty of the petabytes would probably be lost as well – the likes of Geocities, Google+, and Yahoo Groups, possibly about to be followed by the-website-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
Yes, it’s quite remarkable how evanescent online material has turned out to be. Hooray for paper!
Geocities has no less than four partial backups: the Internet Archive, Oocities, Reocities, and Geocities.ws.
I assume has Oocities four copies of all the data, although three of those will be discarded when it is actually time to export the data.