John McWhorter goes into detail on why he can’t stand the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, and it’s music to my ears:
It bears mentioning, then, that for whatever it’s worth, I read (although do not speak) Russian well, and more to the point, have run my observations here past a native Russian speaker whose English is excellent-plus and has worked in the past as an interpreter and done translation. That person added insights of their own that I had not caught – and agrees with me that there is a major problem with the lionization of P&V.
I will use as an example just one page, taken (virtually) at random. It is from the 21st and final chapter of the second part of the first volume of the book, and it is typical of how this translation “feels” throughout, especially when people talk, but quite often just in descriptions. It’s a sequence from one of the “war” parts, with military men on a break wallowing in the privations of life outdoors with low provisions.
P&V seem to pride themselves on sticking close to the original. But the reason so many celebrated translators do not do so as diligently as they do is that languages differ in what means they use to convey concepts. This language conveys something with an adjective while that language needs a phrase for it. This language conveys something with a quiet resonance from a word while that language nails that something with an explicit suffix. This language expresses something which, rendered in that other language, sounds hopelessly affected or insincere and you have to work around it.
P&V just aren’t very good at wangling art from such things. And then surprisingly often, given that Volokhonsky is a native Russian speaker and Pevear is at least along for the ride, P&V miss basic nuances of how Russian even works. […]
1. A soldier wanders in and says “I’ve strayed from my company, Your Honor; I don’t know where myself. Worse luck!”
This is supposed to be a very ordinary man in rather desperate circumstances, and yet he sounds unnatural. We can’t grasp him as a real person. It starts with the “I don’t know where myself.”
Myself as opposed to who? If he has wandered away from the company, why would he suppose anyone other than himself would know just where it happened? If he is for some reason imagining that some other infantrymen in his company happened to see him peel off (but for some reason didn’t say anything), then still, why would he be thinking of them here, talking with other men many miles away who have no mental picture of his wandering? […]
3. P&V then depict a pair of soldiers fighting over a boot. They have them “pulling some boot from each other.” This follows the grammatical rules of English, but note that it is not only graceless, but we can’t quite parse what it means. Is it that one is trying to pull the boot off of the other one’s foot? Well, no, because that wouldn’t be a matter of “each other.” So we can work out, if we must, that they are engaged in a tug of war over a boot. As in how the Maudes put it: “each trying to snatch from the other a boot they were both holding on to.”
Why do P&V have it as “pulling some boot from each other”? Because it’s as close as you can get to a word-for-word match to how Tolstoy put it in Russian. However, in Russian, “pulling from one another some boot” instantly conveys what is happening, despite that in English, those same words are unidiomatic and even hazy. They are also just plain inaccurate. In Russian, the “from”-ness is indicated not with a preposition but with a prefix on the pull verb, such that the phrase is “from-pulling one another some boot.” However, in Russian the verb for pull alone, if used by itself, implies an ongoing process such as hauling a car out of mud it’s stuck in. The “from” prefix does two things: it indicates the “from”-ness, which P&V understand, but then it also renders the pulling abrupt, indicating not hauling but a smattering of yanks. Here is why the Maudes had it as snatching, the perfect rendition of what these men are doing.
There’s plenty more (he has fun with “Sure you picked it up! What a quick-fingers!” and “Some hot little fire for the infantry!”); he’s not always right — I agree with Erik McDonald, from whose XIX век post I got the link, that “burden” isn’t wrong — but his general take on them is indisputably correct, and I wish Erik didn’t feel the need to take their side as unfairly persecuted babes in the wood (“I’d say they need defending more than most!”). They’re far and away the most famous and best-paid translators from Russian, they bully anyone who dares oppose them, and they’re routinely (over)praised in all official venues; I think they can take a few bloggers tossing brickbats their way, and frankly those brickbats are richly deserved.
Can you explain how the Russian for “I don’t know where myself” works?
In Russian, the “from”-ness is indicated not with a preposition but with a prefix on the pull verb, such that the phrase is “from-pulling one another some boot.”
I… can’t quite figure out what it would actually be like in Russian. I’m sure this essay (or the quotes from it, at least) would have been quite improved by having relevant quotations (also) in the original Russian (even if in transliteration).
Can you explain how the Russian for “I don’t know where myself” works?
Well, he’s wrong that сам doesn’t mean ‘self’ here — that’s why I omitted the part where he says that; сам не знаю, где is literally ‘self don’t know where.’ But he’s right that the P&V version sounds unnatural. In English you’d say something like “I don’t even know.”
I’m sure this essay (or the quotes from it, at least) would have been quite improved by having relevant quotations (also) in the original Russian
I’ve added a link to the chapter in Russian (at “the 21st and final chapter”) so interested parties can compare.
That must be я сам не знаю где, of which the V&P would then be a literal translation. Russian uses сам for emphasis, similar to German – the literal translation ich weiß selbst nicht, wo is totally idiomatic, which seems not to be the case in English. I have to trust McWhorter and LH as native speakers on this, because I could have produced the P&V sentence myself (see what I did there?). From McWhorter’s discussion, I deduce that “myself” is much more contrastive (“as opposed to who?”) than Russian сам or German selber / selbst. The Russian (and German) means something like “I, who could be expected to know, don’t know”; I have no idea how to say that in English in a simple and colloquial way without straying far from the Russian wording.
EDIT: That was in response to Y’s question, and now I see that LH already answered while I was typing. Oh well…
Apparently the word that they’re translating as “from-pulling” is выдергивая, in which case… I’m pretty sure it never meant “pull” as in the continuous process in the first place (that’s тянуть, a completely different root). It’s closer to “yank”. So of course it’s unclear; the translator had misunderstood the verb. “Yanking some boot from each other” might not necessarily be idiomatic either but at least it would have been relatively clear.
EDIT: Wiktionary disagrees with me here. I’m not sure why I thought that way, or indeed whether I was in fact correct.
I’m not sure why I thought that way, or indeed whether I was in fact correct.
I frequently have that feeling.
Agree with many of McWhorter’s points but heartily disagree that “what Tolstoy meant was ‘buddy.'” Tolstoy was writing a historical novel, 40+ years after the time in which it was set. If an Anglophone author wrote a historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars (or the War of 1812) and had soldiers addressing each other with vocative “buddy” the author would be rightly mocked for anachronism.
Separately, I think a good translation should not be trying to pretend that the characters aren’t actually Russians carrying out a plot situated in Russia (as of a specific time period). You don’t achieve that effect by having the characters speak weirdly stilted English, but you do achieve it by e.g. having the characters say that such-and-such a location is “X versts away” (with a footnote somewhere explaining how to convert the units of measure) rather than having them say it’s “Y miles” (or, even worse “Z kilometers”) away. So having the characters address each other as “little dove” (or “dovelet” or ‘dovekin” or something?) may be the least bad solution. Have them use what is recognizably (after first use) a Russian idiom that when calqued into English isn’t something Anglophones would say to each other any more than they would express distances in versts. Think of it as akin to writing science fiction where you use odd/coined lexemes to remind the reader that the setting is different in time/space/culture from that of the author and the reader even while trying to keep most of the prose in reasonably idiomatic contemporary English.
JW: If they were speaking idiomatic Dickensian English (of the appropriate register), that would do the trick, in this case. A whiff of archaism, without appearing forced.
I mostly agree; of course, no two people will ever agree on exactly where to draw the line. I think versts are fine, necessary even; I frown a bit at “little dove” but accept it.
And what you would do with abundance of diminutives in Russian 100 years ago (but not today)?
They do carry an emotion. It is not that when priest became “батюшка”, шка ceased to be affectionate.
I wish Erik didn’t feel the need to take their side as unfairly persecuted babes in the wood
I’m on board with 90% of the criticism of their translation practice, but I don’t like when it veers into enthusiastic, mean-spirited attacks on them as people. They didn’t plagiarize someone else’s work or deliberately misrepresent Tolstoy or have a rival sent to the gulag—their crime is writing dialogue that sounds silly to many of their readers. If someone were misquoting Robert Chandler or Marian Schwartz to mock them in public, I’d want to defend them too, but AFAIK no one does that to any Russian-to-English translators except P&V and Constance Garnett. (To be clear, McWhorter doesn’t misquote P&V, but others have.)
Comparing them to Maudes or Garnett is apples to oranges, of course. Theirs is an experiment. It is very good that there has been such an experiment. Then the next quesiton is the quality.
вырывая друг у друга
выдёргивая друг у друга
In my Russian the former describes something forceful and is the most common way to say what to children fighting for an [item] are doing. The latter is less common and emphasizes abruptness (not force). But for Tolstoy it could be different.
In both cases it is “out-[root] each from/at other” (it is “at”, referring to possession, but we say “I took it at Mary”), so he is not right.
And for me it is almost a word, “вырывать-друг-у-друга”, just slightly more complex than “fighting for a sapog”.
One stock tic authors used to give characters-who-are-supposed-to-be-Russian in English fiction of my own lifetime is vocative “Comrade.” That’s of course a conventionally marked-as-Bolshevik usage which might thus seem off in a novel set a century before the Bolsheviks, but I now realize that I don’t know whether the Russian usage it calques was entirely a Bolshevik innovation or if the innovation was taking an existing Russian idiom that blue-collar fellows who worked in the same factory (or served in the same regiment?) might use with each other and extending it for political reasons outside its original sociolinguistic niche.
I suppose vocative “droog” or “droogie” a la Burgess (although I’m not sure how much it was used in the vocative in Burgess’ own dialogue as opposed to in subsequent Burgessian pastiche?) would also have a certain marked-as-Russian vibe.
An English translation of a novel which produces text which no competent English-speaking novelist would ever have written is always a bad translation, quite irrespective of its fidelity or otherwise to the original. It is perfectly possible to tell that a translation is bad even if you don’t know the original language at all (though the converse is false: one may falsely suppose that a translation is good if one is unfamiliar with the original.)
(This is a variation on the old Latin master’s dictum re construal of Latin: “Nonsense is always wrong.”)
My personal bête noire among novel translations has ever been the execrable Lowe-Porter translation of Der Zauberberg; I know enough German to be frequently able to see where L-P has outright mistranslated, but the main problem is a complete lack of feeling for halfway acceptable English prose style. I pity anybody attempting to appreciate Mann’s great novel through this particular dark glass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Tracy_Lowe-Porter
[Having posted this, I now feel bad: translation is hard and often thankless, L-P was indefatigable, and for years there was nothing better. Nevertheless, her work is not good.]
I already gave here a link, illustrating how we must translate.
Morpheme-by morpheme.
Indeed. The only safe way.
To drasvi’s point, the best English translation of “батюшка” may well be “Batushka.” I think “Father” might be good enough (and can certainly be used quite affectionately in English in an ecclesiastical context) but “Little Father” just sounds weird and translationese and not nearly as good as treating “Batushka” like “verst.” The particular variety of English spoken by Anglophone Russian Orthodox Christians (including those with no personal knowledge of Russian or Church Slavonic) has a bunch of different strategies for churchy lexemes. I can think of at least five: use the word that Anglicans and/or Catholics would use for the most analogous referent; calque the Russian/Slavonic word; just take the Russian/Slavonic word as a loanword (with phonology anglicized as may be necessary; sidestep the Slavonic and take the Greek word as a loanword (English already being hospitable to Greek-origin loanwords in a variety of technical fields); and use an English word that relates etymologically to the right Greek word with a meaning that would seem a bit off or non-standard in other varieties of English. Sometimes different speakers will use different strategies in English and thus generate a range of synonyms which will all be understood rather than converging on a single lexical solution for a single referent.
Of course, this variety of English is the sort of in-group jargon that people who are sufficiently otherwise motivated to want to be part of the group will be sufficiently motivated to pick up and/or figure out. Maybe potential readers-in-translation of 19th-century Russian novels don’t have the same degree of motivation, but as with the “verst” example I think you ought to assume a reader that’s willing to do a little bit of work dealing with novel lexemes and/or idioms (if appropriately explained when first introduced) as the price of reading about a time/place/culture that is significantly removed from that of his own circumstances.
Not knowing anything about anything, could батюшка be reasonably translated as “papa”? The English word has the old-fashionedness, the affection, and maybe the religious overtones (at least in American).
I couldn’t even make sense of “pulling some boot from each other” before I got to McWhorter’s tug-of-war explanation: it sounds like “boot” is being used as a mass noun, i.e. they’ve shredded the object into an amorphous substance and are somehow taking turns pulling at that. (Or maybe “to pull some boot from someone” is an obsolete slang phrase, along the lines of “take the piss out of”.)
Apparently Russian has an indefinite construction (or “some indefinite construction”) that seems to Russian speakers to correspond to English some N, but doesn’t exactly. The reason I think this despite knowing practically no Russian is that I’ve been watching chess videos on YouTube lately, which are full of Russian players saying things like “my opponent could now play some e5”, apprently meaning “some move like e5”. I don’t know what the actual indefinite is that’s being mentally translated.
weird and translationese
On Russian diminutive
Olga Yokoyama, the use of the ” polite vy ” in Russian: A pragmatic change in progress:
Yes, exactly. It was a significant step forward in my understanding of Russian when I realized that the “diminutive” was not actually diminutive.
I remember reading a history book, and it was talking (somewhat tangentially, I think) about the Russian Revolution of 1905. The book described how, prior to the infamous massacre at the Winter Palace, a lot of the discontented peasants were strong supporters of the tsar—of the, “If only the tsar knew!” variety. They people wanted to be able to present their grievances directly to the ear of the “little father.” This was the first time (and probably the only time) the book had used that term for the tsar. It came completely out of the blue, and at first, I wasn’t sure who the “little father” was supposed to be; after I realized what the authors meant, my next conclusion was that it must be an extremely inapt translation of some Russian sobriquet.
My 2 cents are that a question about “little dove” or “some little hot fire” is not that some (sorry) expression in Russian might not be rendered faithfully enough. These two examples are obviously (to me) written by Tolstoy the way they were written to show mannerisms of the speakers. Tushin calls his soldier “uncle”, Junker Rostov who he sees for the first time is “darling”, and then Bolkonsky is “little dove”. I think the best a translator can do is to imagine a character who would have this way of speaking and run with it. Never mind precise words.
The soldier who says “some little hot fire” oversaturates his speech with diminutives and “unnecessary words” to show how friendly, well-spirited, and inoffensive he is. Exact words are of no particular significance as long as the translator can figure out how to convey this side of the character.
some Russian sobriquet
царь-батюшка
Every time I hear Peavere intervierwed he radiates such powerful Alan Partridge energy – the kind of self-satisfied obliviousness that cam lead a person to for example , decide to become a translator of Russian literature despite an inability to speak or understand the language, and without any evident effort to learn it. And not just ANY Russian literature, mind you, oh no – he went directly to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy! He was convinced that the previous translations of their novels were of inferior quality (how he was able to determine this without Russian remains a mystery). He has a longstanding beef with Constance Garnett on account of her numerous errors in translation of certain word. We can all agree that attention to factual detail is important, which is why the Brothers Karamazov is so poorly regarded on account of its numerous errors regarding legal procedure and the judicial system.
Anyway, Pevear and Volokhonsky were determined to correct all of these intolerable affronts to their aesthetic senses , and to their credit they did bring a fresh new approach to the already overcrowded field of translating the two most famous Russian authors. Since neither of them had the requisite skills to translate novels by themselves, they would do together. In essence, Larissa would read the novel and creat a rough crib shit/draft with “word for word translations” as well as annotations regarding style, mood, etc., Richard would then work from this draft, and only this draft, to create the final product.
This is effectively the same thing as me translating Mme Bovary with no knowledge of French but with a copy of the Cliffs Notes. In fact neither I nor Pevear are translating anything, more like reconstructing something we’ve never seen or experienced purely based on second hand reports. If anything, my scenario is more realistic since I don’t expect Cliffs Notes to contain exhaustive annotations AND to be the definitive interpretation whereas Pevear appears to very much believe that about his wife’s rough draft. (honestly, more power to him, I’ve always felt that the one thing that was missing from Dostoyevsky in English was the uncanny sense that you’re reading something that was translated into English via an intermediary language or like it was dictated via a children’s game of telephone)
Anyway given the whole setup and procedure these geniuses put into place, It’s not much of a mystery why all of PV’s translations sound pompous and stilted and why their Tolstoy sounds like their Dostoyevsky (a charge unfairly leveled at Garnett by Nabokov but more than valid here) – it’s because they’re all Volokhonsnky, stylisticaly tarted up by a guy who seems to believe writing well means using the thesaurus a lot. You can take any almost paragraph from PV and Garnet’s is better – sharper, crisper prose, far more agile solutions to the various problems of tone and register etc, (wild speculation here but could be that her knowledge of Russian language and culture gave her a leg up? Idk)
But really, no opinion of mine could ever be as devastating to Pevear’s credibility as the fact he’s never even bothered to try and learn Russian, has only been there once or twice without spending any significant time there, even openly broadcasting a lack of interest in (soome might say a disdain for ) Russian culture and society as well as its langauge. Even if he were 10 times the prose stylist he acutally is, his translations would neverthelss be inherently improverished because of this.
A kind of dilapidated mirror image of Deborah Smith who , a mere 5 years into learning Korean, did a brilliant job with her translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, with the specific goal of bringing more contemporary Korean ffction into English.
Or more pertinently and personally, when i read Celia Hawkesworth’s translations from BCSM into English I’m often left speechless at mananges to take a text full of localisms , things that are coommonly understood in the region but not elsewhere. And then I read her translations ,and I think , yeah this is basically the same thing Somehow I doubt that either of them were working off of crib notes provided by their spouse.
@drasvi
re batuschka, it is hard to translate epithets in English. The equivalent would be “dear Father / Reverend O’Brien” when speaking about him, but “my dear Father/Reverend O’Brien” when speaking to him sounds old fashioned and/or patronising. If you say “dear old Father/Reverend O’Brien” it implies he is a very good friend (or else, he is eccentric or has said or done something you find it necessary to explain or excuse)
nemanja: An excellent analysis.
Fun fact: ‘baćuške’ is sometimes used in Serbian as an affectionate name for Russians. I had no idea what the original meaning was until just now. 😀
Ha, that’s great!
well, -ce in Slavic *sъlnьce “Sol”, is diminutive, I think.
I’d say the “myself” thing in Russian and German* is actually contrastive: “I should be expected to know where, but I don’t know any better than you do”. In English, that is not expressed; any attempt to translate it is inherently wrong. Instead, what you say is something similar (indeed overlapping) but different: “I don’t even know where”.
Such things are probably the greatest hurdle to translation (of prose) in general.
* And French, though there you’d combine both strategies, I think: je ne sais même pas où moi-même…?
“Вот отбился от роты, ваше благородие; сам не знаю где. Беда!” is the original line, the italics marking the part under discussion. It’s plain, straightforward, natural, idiomatic Russian. “Беда” is very slightly dated. The register is conversational, not formal, but free from class markers: an aristocrat like Pushkin or Tolstoy could have written this in a letter to his wife or to a friend. The simplest sentences are sometimes the hardest to translate.
Матушка and батюшка: that’s how Russians used to address their parents and refer to them in conversation. These terms suggest a certain warmth of feeling. The narrator in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, born around 1755, uses them a lot although switches to отец where appropriate. Interestingly, the garrison priest is always called “отец Герасим,” never “батюшка.” Nowadays, it’s mostly Orthodox priests and their wives who get called “батюшка” and “матушка”. Sometimes you can still hear “матушка” used in the sense “my mother” but facetiously or ironically.
well, -ce in Slavic *sъlnьce “Sol”, is diminutive, I think.
Etymologically, yes. But as this has become the basic form of the word, it’s not a diminutive synchronically anymore, and the Slavic languages have formed new diminutives, like Russian солнышко.
Yeah, it’s sunce vs. sunašce in Serbian.
@David Marjanović, yes, it is the translation that I would use as well. But I am not sure if I am correct here. Sam is widely used in dialects in ways not very intuitive for me as a literary Russian speaker. This speaker is a soldier, so I suppose, he is a peasant. “Sam ne znayu” is common and idiomatic in my Russian, but the Russian that produced it is a different langauge and could have different use for “sam”.
@Hans, yes. The problem: was it normal and common enough for proto-Slavs to speak about the Sun and Moon (měsęcь) in affectionate and caring ways for a diminutive form to become the main one?
P.S> I mean: if it is actually a hypocoristic form, it is parallel to batyushka: Sun and Moon are for all purposes “superior” to the speaker.
@David Marjanović: The problem is not that the contrastive use of myself does not not exist in English; the problem is that such a construction is totally wrong for the register.
I remember watching a film on TV when I was a teenager, along with my next younger brother, where one of the characters (played, I think, by Jeff Bridges) said, “I don’t know, myself.” At least, that was how I heard an understood it—with just the same meaning as a construction with selbst could have in German, (your “I should be expected to know…, but I don’t know any better than you do”). However, my brother parsed the statement as, “I don’t know myself,” describing a failure of self-knowledge, which was also plausible in context, but I don’t think was the intended meaning.
“Self” forms are based on a whole lot of not-very-parallel constructions cross-linguistically. DM’s invocation of the French même “even” is interesting, though none of the Hattic Russophones seems to have expressed a clear opinion as to whether the Russian сам in я сам не знаю где could be construed as “even.”
Sɛf “self” can mean “even” in West African English-lexifier creoles, too:
Yu no sɛf, yu jɔs kan, yu no go sabi.
“Even if you know, if you’ve just come, you won’t know.” (from Kofi Yakpo’s Pichi grammar.)
Kusaal mɛŋ, which works almost exactly like English “self” when it has a preceding possessor, as an adjective stem means “real, genuine”, e.g. yɛlmɛŋir “truth” (“matter-real.”) [“Even” is usually expressed with the practically pan-Sahelian Wanderwort hali “up to, as far as”, which seems to be from Berber originally.]
FWIW, this Russophone considers сам in сам не знаю где (there was no “я” in the original Tolstoy, but it’s not significant here) as (mildly) emphatic, not contrastive. But native speakers are supposed not to know (themselves) what they are talking about, so…
@David Eddyshaw, “yes, it is the translation that I would use as well” referred to David’s “I don’t even know where”.
There is also this strange habit to say:
“I self from Birobidzhan” (or with fronting self I from Birobidzhan) in the sense “I am from Birobidzhan”.
And questions:
you self where-from?
self-that you where-from? / you self-that where-from?
Italic here for stress/intonation.
“fronting ” The idea of fronting is that you can stress it. It is also true for “self not know”:
” I not know” would sound strange.
“Self not know” (shrugging when saying “sam”) is natural.
“self-that” – sam-to ty otkuda?
This particle -to is widely used by villagers. In educated Muscovite Russian it is much less common and much more emphatical.
Contrastive emphasis in English: “Me, I’m from Birobidzhan.”
This is supposed to be a very ordinary man in rather desperate circumstances, and yet he sounds unnatural.
I didn’t even understand the meaning of “I don’t know where myself.” Where what? Where he is now?
But the part that sounded unnatural to me was “Worse luck!”. It sounds very, very lame.
I recall Elvis’s ghost in Mystery Train: “You? What are you doing here?” “Well, I — I don’t rightly know myself.”
From Turgenev, “Neschastaja”
Это само собою разумеется”. Иван Матвеич пришел в негодование и часто потом приводил эту фразу как пример бессмыслицы и нелепости русского языка. “Что такое есть: само собою разумеется? — спрашивал он по-русски, напирая на каждый слог.– А почему же не с простотою: разумеется? и зачем: само собою?!”)
Uses sam, soboi, and sja
— Дурак.
— Сам дурак.
Contrastive emphasis in English: “Me, I’m from Birobidzhan.”
The strange thing about it is that it became so idiomatic, that for some people it is the way to say “I am from”. Unfortunately I do not use “self” this way.
About the Proto-Slavic *sъlnьce “Sol”: this is parallel to French “soleil”, Occitan “solelh” or Romantsch (Sursilvan) “sulegl”, which all derive from a Latin diminutive *soliculum rather than from the form “sole” which is the etymon of the noun in most other Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan “sol”, Italian “sole”, Romanian “soare”…).
Now, interestingly, all Romance languages where *soliculum replaced *sole as the basic, unmarked word for “sun” are languages where final vowels other than /a/ had been lost, and thus I either read or was taught (I cannot remember where or by whom, I am afraid!) that the rise of *soliculum was a matter of homophony avoidance: with the loss of final /u/ and /e/ Proto-Romance */so:le/ and */so:lu/ fell together as */so:l/, which could thus mean “alone” or “sun”, an awkward situation which the rise of *soliculum solved.
Has any similar explanation been offered for the rise of *sъlnьce or of other lexicalized diminutives in Proto-Slavic?
I’m reminded of the Mandarin suffix 子, which is plainly diminutive in origin but has spread far beyond any readily identifiable meaning of that sort; IIRC it was YR Chao who glossed it as “that familiar thing that we often talk about.”
“That ol’ Sun there.”
日子 might have meant ‘Sun’ at some time. Now it means ‘days’, ‘life’.
Spanish -ita/-ito means ‘smile when you say that.’
Like in German, where you can even use selber like this to retroactively turn random words into insults!
English uses a different, extensible strategy:
“I’m rubber, you’re glue –”
“You’re glue.”
“Yo mama is glue.”
P.S> I mean: if it is actually a hypocoristic form, it is parallel to batyushka: Sun and Moon are for all purposes “superior” to the speaker.
Reminds me of when I was learning Japanese and attempted to refer to the sun with the word “hi” (remembering a common character’s kun-yomi). My addressee looked puzzled for a minute, then light dawned and she said, “Oh, you mean o-hi-sama” – the Honourable Lord Sun, more or less.
I think the normal everyday word for “sun” is actually the Chinese loanword taiyō, but it’s been a while, and I could be wrong.
Has any similar explanation been offered for the rise of *sъlnьce or of other lexicalized diminutives in Proto-Slavic?
I can’t give a direct answer to this, but the PIE word for sun had a complicated heteroclitic -l/n- stem, which several IE languages replaced by more regular formations derived with suffixes from either the l- or the n-stem*). For Slavic it looks like they first created a merged (but perhaps still irregular) -ln- stem and then plumped for the diminutive as the simpler and more regular variant.
*) Another strategy was to use the nominative l-stem as base form and build a regular paradigm based on it; that’s what e.g. Latin did.
WIktionary has a proto-Slavic word for “turkey”.
here
True. Like the Proto-Algonquian word for “whisky”, and (now I think of it) the Proto-Oti-Volta word for “motor car”, *lɔrɪ.The latter has reflexes in Nawdm, Yom and Moba, but is best attested in Western Oti-Volta: it seems likely that it was the possession of automobiles that conferred the key military advantage on the Western-Oti-Volta-speaking peoples in dominating their pedestrian neighbours and enabling the creation of the Mossi-Dagomba states in the fourteenth century.
*lɔrɪ must be proto-Bantu.
Well, Proto–Atlantic-Congo.
It says, “Proto-Slavic *pujęcь (“peacock”) : *pujęca (“turkey”).” Maybe a mistranslation?
Well-2. proto–Volta-Congo. Because I have only found reflexes in Gur and Bantu in Wiktionary. But I believe everything is not that simple. Wiktionary also gives Mandarin luólǐ…
Well-3, there is also Afro-Asiatic…
@Y, I used to think about turkey as a bird with systematically odd names (alongside with guineafowl). In Russian it is indyúk m. indéjka f.
But Bulgarian has: pújak, pújka (apart of a name that becomes turkey more: misírka)
It says, “Proto-Slavic *pujęcь (“peacock”) : *pujęca (“turkey”).” Maybe a mistranslation?
Well, it says: “analogous morphological ending as Proto-Slavic *měsęcь (“month”), Proto-Slavic *pujęcь (“peacock”) : *pujęca (“turkey”).”
The Bulgarian link does compare it to Old Bulgarian / OCS měsęcь and modern pújak/pújek: it says, for formation see “měsęcь ” and variants zájek/zájak are similar to pújak/pújek.
*sъlnьce
The diminutive suffix of Estonian is “-kene” in its long form, but can be shortened to “-ke”. In all grammatical cases except for the nominative and partitive singular, the “-ne” ending becomes “-se”. It is fully productive and can be used with every word. Some words, such as “päike(ne)” (sun), “väike(ne)” (little) or “pisike(ne)” (tiny), are diminutive in their basic form, the diminutive suffix cannot be removed from these words. The Estonian diminutive suffix can be used recursively – it can be attached to a word more than once. Forms such as “pisikesekesekene”, having three diminutive suffixes, are grammatically legitimate. As is demonstrated by the example, in recursive usage all but the last diminutive “-ne” suffix become “-se” as in forms inflected by case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diminutives_by_language#Estonian
the word “hi”
Perhaps it was difficult to perceive as such out of context because of 火, another hi-word, or the general restriction on monomoraic words in Japanese.
This paper explores the lengthening of monomoraic nouns in Japanese. An experiment has revealed that monomoraic nouns are lengthened by about 40–50% and/or followed by pauses when not suffixed with monomoraic case markers. The phenomenon is specific to one-mora nouns since bimoraic nouns do not undergo a similar amount of lengthening even without particles. Moreover, monomoraic nouns preceded by adjective phrases of up to three moras show neither lengthening nor pause insertion equivalent to that of sentence-initial monomoraic nouns. This suggests that an adjective phrase plus a monomoraic noun forms a single phonological word of three or four moras. The results suggest that in Japanese one or more lexical words can form an independent phonological word composed of two to four moras.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246677277_Lengthening_of_Japanese_monomoraic_nouns
7 – Moras and Syllables
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-japanese-linguistics/moras-and-syllables/F9213E649E5536ACE32E209AE7E11185
väike(ne)
That puts me in mind of Väike Illimar, an autobiographic book by Friedebert Tuglas.
Дом-музей Тугласа в волости Ахья
Дом-музей Тугласа – это дом, где провел детство родившийся 2 марта 1886 года Фридеберт Туглас. Свою известность Туглас получил благодаря написанному в 1932 году роману «Маленький Иллимар». История о маленьком Иллимаре одновременно является историей одного эстонского поместья. Места, связанные с Тугласом и «Маленьким Иллимаром», нанесены на большую карту, выставленную в музейной экспозиции. Созданная пространственная экспозиция является вступлением ведением для гостей, посещающих места маленького Иллимара и желающих ознакомиться с жизнью и бытом поместья.
The Under and Tuglas Literature Centre
The Literature Centreʼs museum is located in the house built in 1933 for the literary couple Artur Adson and Marie Under, in Nõmme, at 12 Väikese Illimari Street (orginally 12 Veere St). In 1944 the family fled from the war to Sweden, and after the war, having lost their own residence to the war, Friedebert and Elo Tuglas moved into the building, where they remained until their deaths.
The museum was founded in 28 September 1971, as part of the Language and Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and it bore the name Friedebert Tuglas House Museum. After the deaths of the Tuglasʼ couple, the building was expanded, with the addition of a small conference hall and a work-space for researchers. The museum was opened to visitors in 1976 on the 90th birthday of Friedebert Tuglas.
https://www.utkk.ee/en/museum/about-the-museum/
Маленький Иллимар
В издании представлен автобиографический роман Ф.Тугласа “Маленький Иллимар” (1937), изображавший большой мир глазами ребенка.
https://librusec.pro/b/603507
*lɔrɪ must be proto-Bantu.
The expected form corresponding to Oti-Volta *lɔrɪ would of course be *(dɪ)dodV (*rɪ/dɪ being a singular noun-class suffix/prefix), so the Bantu forms must in fact be borrowed from Western Oti-Volta; this is of course consistent with the pioneering role played by the Mossi-Dogomba states in car ownership in mediaeval Africa.
Wiktionary also gives Mandarin luólǐ…
The term was presumably brought to China by Zheng He.
@Y, I used to think about turkey as a bird with systematically odd names (alongside with guineafowl). In Russian it is indyúk m. indéjka f.
But Bulgarian has: pújak, pújka (apart of a name that becomes turkey more: misírka)
Given the existence of a similar paradigm poika ‘boy’ and pojat ‘boys’ in Finnish, I think this proves quite conclusively the validity of the Uralo-Indo-European language family. I will be sure to name everyone in the acknowledgements of my forthcoming paper on this topic.
David E.: The expected form corresponding to Oti-Volta *lɔrɪ would of course be *(dɪ)dodV (*rɪ/dɪ being a singular noun-class suffix/prefix)
Cf. Lapine hrududu “car”.
The word was presumably borrowed from the language of the Savanna hare*, as there are no true rabbits in West Africa.
I would imagine that migratory swallows were involved in the transmission of this Wanderwort, but this is admittedly somewhat speculative. Further research is needed.
*This would also explain the unusual vocalism.
Not anymore.
Looks like the Bulgarian reflex of the claimed PSlavic peacock now means turkey — that should really have been entered as a descendant on the page for the PSlavic peacock, but that’s a redlink. So it goes. (Though I find it more likely that the PSlavic word meant partridge or even pheasant and was repurposed for peacocks in the daughters, I don’t have the time or resources to investigate).
The WP list of diminutives by language sadly only includes a couple of Bantu languages as its contribution for Africa. For shame! Fulfulde has three perfectly good diminutive singular noun classes, for a start.
Proto-Oti-Volta had a diminutive singular noun class suffix *-la, which is still going strong in a number of the modern languages, including Farefare/Gurenne and Mooré, but in Kusaal is now confined to the adjective bil “little.” No better than English, really.
There aren’t any Oti-Volta nouns in -la which have shed their diminutive meanings, AFAIK. Nothing like *sъlnьce.
@de
English has umpty diminutive suffixes, some of which are productive, viz. -ee, -een, -ine, -ino, -ita/o -kin, -ula/o/us, -y. At least two of these are native.
Channeling the late Prince Philip, I say “Take that, Africans!”
Ghomara Berber has both Arabic diminutives (formed by imposing the pattern CCiyyeC on the stem) and Berber ones (formed by making it feminine with the circumflex t-…-t); for some words, it allows both to be combined. Sadly, they have not yet taken advantage of the opportunity to integrate Spanish diminutive suffixes into the mix, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
would imagine that migratory swallows were involved in the transmission of this Wanderwort
Or, you-know-what-bird, flightless but swift of foot.
Of this bird we do not speak.
The memories are too distressing.
These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
1) A proud look, 2) a lying tongue, and 3) hands that shed innocent blood, 4) an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, 5) feet that be swift in running to mischief, 6) a false witness that speaketh lies, and 7) he that soweth wanderwörter among brethren.
For they have sown the Wanderwort, and they shall reap the Wandersprache.
There aren’t any Oti-Volta nouns in -la which have shed their diminutive meanings, AFAIK.
I spoke too soon: the indefatigable Fr Prost has Boulba cimbra “fish”, bunna “well”, kwasera “cutlass” and fitra “lamp” (though this last is an obvious Hausa loanword, so I hereby declare that it doesn’t count; words for “cutlass” are often loans too, though nothing immediately occurs to me as a source for kwasera.)
Moreover, the Mooré líuulá and Farefare níilá have replaced the inherited words for “bird”, as seen in the Kusaal niiŋ, Mampruli niiŋŋa, Buli nùim, Yom nyiɣa, Byali nēgə̄.
Lars, honestly, I think that the guy misunderstood the dictionary.
The dictionary has: За образуването срв. месец, стб. мѣсѧць. — Фонетичните особености на завършека се определят от думи като паяк / паек, пуяк / пуек, суяк / суек (вж.).
I am not aware of an old Slavic word for “peacock” apart of pav/pava (< Latin<Greek τᾰώς< "Oriental source").
Not that I must be necessary aware of it . We do not have elephants but have an obscure word (slon) of our own for them. Why not for peacocks.
have an obscure word (slon) of our own for them.
Yeah. What’s with that?
Wiktionary recounts an interesting story (Old Chinese > Turkic > Proto-Slavic). Surely it’s come up here at LH before?
Wiktionary lists several proposed etymologies, starting with the silliest (from a verb ‘to lean against,’ because sleeping elephants were said to lean against trees) and ending with a confused and suspicious-sounding derivation from Old Chinese *slaŋ.
Edit: Pipped by Y.
Surely it’s come up here at LH before?
So it has; I responded:
Russian has a word for “elephant”. Its etymology is unknown.
Not that this combination of phonemes is unexpected, we have a root -slon- “to lean”, for example. And? It is not enough to call it “etymology”. The mystery here (for me) is why we would have a word for an elephant at all.
I mean, if you are going to find etymology, you need the circumstances of initial contact and channels of transmission.
Contact: in a text or folklore or traveller’s (Russian or foreign) account or visual contact with an actual elephant.
Transmission: I mean, transmission from a generation of Russian speakers to the next one. Again, text or oral.
I do not think that etymology is all about phonemes, I think the cultural history is a part of it, and with elephants the most interesting part of it.
I wonder if it is the game of chess. Chess could come to here from the Vikings (who played it), Persians (who played it), West Slavs or from the South. We contacted all of these (and as I told before – intencity of our communication with Persia is easy to underestimate: Volga is a highway and they were our neighbours).
It is not clear how chess came to here, but clearly it was known in medieval Russia (archaeology).
Yet chess is poorly attested in medieval soruces: only one mention, and it is about discouraging people from playing it:)
The mystery here (for me) is why we would have a word for an elephant at all.
English had a word elp a thousand years ago, presumably well before any speakers of the language had ever seen an elephant. Words are not only transmitted through physical contact with the things named.
I guess I succumbed to the hype; I got a copy of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace (then set it aside, and I’ve never really started on it). So what translation do you recommend instead? (I read somebody’s translation about 45 years ago, but I have no idea which one, and it’s surely time to reread the book.) Thank you for any advice you can offer.
The Slavic “camel” words are irregular distortions of elephant. Evidently, tales of a large mythical beast spread very quickly.
German Elfenbein “ivory” goes back to more recognizable medieval forms like helfantbein – dentine misinterpreted as bone of an animal never seen.
The Mycenean adjective e-re-pa-te-jo “made of ivory” probably predates Greeks seeing elephants in Egypt or Syria by several hundred years, too.
Rheas have established a wild population in northeastern Germany.
So what translation do you recommend instead?
I always advise people to read a bit of each available translation (via Google Books, Amazon’s Look Inside the Book, or actual bookstore/library shelves) and choose the one that feels most readable to them. The Garnett is perfectly good (and free if you have an e-reader), but if you don’t care for the style, pick on that appeals to you.
“Words are not only transmitted through physical contact with the things named.
@LH, I said:
in a text or folklore or traveller’s (Russian or foreign) account or visual contact with an actual elephant.
No objections to textual transmission. But then an etymological study should demonstrate: there was such and such translation of such and such text dealing with elephants (why not, Romans did know them), which was popular in the Middle Ages. Then it should show how from there it smoothly moved to modern spoken Russian.
Identifying an actual elephant that you meet (when first elephants arrived to Russia) with an obscure word from an old text (and did this hypothetical “you” even read that text?) is not a trivial task. Such an encounter creates a wonderful opportunity for a new borrowing, unless the previous lexeme has enough currency.
Enlgish has lost “elp”, and that is when the Germanic world was in very close contact with Romans and “elp” itself has a rather transparent etymology.
I am just telling what I personally want to know.
Indeed, maybe there is an interesting textual history of elephants which I am unaware of. As for my “chess” idea: it is a fact that 1) Russians played chess, this tradition clearly existed but is invisible in literary sources 2) Russian preserved many old names for pieces 3) the piece “bishop” is slon in Russia and “elephant” in Persia.
Camel: medieval European illustrations of elephants often show them with ungulate feet (2- or 3-toed). Or with carnivore feet.
@Y, well, we have this this relief (1230s)
A clarification to the above:
from an illuminated manuscript translated from Greek to Slavonic you rather expect a variation of elephas or an attempt to “translate” it (any folk etymology that it could have).
Is the Russian сам connected to the Serbian sam, first person of “to be”. And could “я сам из Биробиджана” be a remnant of an older grammatical form?
Regarding Russian misuse af “some”, I believe this comes from the lack af articles in Russian and would be “a/an” if the speaker knew how such a thing were used.
It has to do with articles, but usually we just do not use any.
So this “some” does exress an attitude: “I do not know anything about this boot”, as in “the chalkboard was covered with some complicated formulas”. Sometimes it also implies “of negligible importance” (I do not know anything about this boot > and why it matters > because I do not think it matters, some stupid boot, какой-то дурацкий сапог).
P.S. not an objection. Just a gloss:)
“Is the Russian сам connected to the Serbian sam, first person of “to be”. And could “я сам из Биробиджана” be a remnant of an older grammatical form?”
The original phrase discussed here “я сам не знаю где” could be translated into Serbian, especially in a literary context, as “ni sam ne znam gde”. But this “sam” means “alone” in Serbian, and comes from Proto-Slavic samъ, unlike “(je)sam” meaning “I am”, which is from есмь.
Not just Russian – though I don’t know if the other Slavic occurrences are 19th-century loans from Russian…
Yes, sorry. And not 19th century. Doesn’t make me less perplexed, though.
—
There was an anecdote about the coat arms of the city of Irkutsk. It has a babr (one of words for tiger, better known in the form ببر), and according to the story an artist in the capital misunderstood it as bobr / bobyor, “beaver”.
A hybrid animal, or a bobr, but a very brutal, aggressive babr-like bobr – appeared on the coat of arms.
The current version of the anecdote in Russian Wikipedia ascribes the supposed mistake to an official rather than artist, and presents the creative solution as resistance of artists’ (plural) common sense to offending heraldic innovations:
It should be noted that despite this, no single depiction of the Irkutsk coat of arms with a bobr has been drawn by artists. Instead if that, they attached [at-drew] to the “babr” a large tail, similar to that of a beaver and webbed hind paws, having created a new mythical animal that we can conventionally call a “heraldic babr”.
(“Следует отметить, что, несмотря на это, художниками никогда не было нарисовано ни одного изображения иркутского герба с бобром. Вместо этого «бабру» в гербе пририсовали большой, похожий на бобровый, хвост и перепончатые задние лапы, создав новое мифическое животное, которое можно условно назвать «геральдическим бабром». “)
Why I remembered this: an Illustration of chess pieces used in Courier chess by Gustav Selenus from the book “Das Schach-Oder Königs-Spiel” (1616).
The artist has drawn a tiny piece that he was looking at, right before him. The piece, likely, was carved by a European. And I think the European was looking at an Indian (or otherwise Eastern) prototype: another tiny chess piece. I do not think that a European artist would carve it this way, of his prototype was an actual elephant that he had seen somewhere.
It is much more similar to our modern, familiar, depictions of elephants than this bloodthirsty animal.
this bloodthirsty animal
Looks like it’s wearing pants, too. And spurs.
I found this blog post about depictions of elephants in Russian manuscripts.
There are numerous quotations, and the author seems to be rather knowlegeable. Perhaps she – or he – could have answered some of my questions about history of elephants in our manuscript tradition, it is what the post is all about, after all. Alas, she decided that a popular post should not have references (and even one quote is unsourced), so I can’t “branch out” from here in DM’s words. She did not even told her name.
It has pictures though. This one is even lion-like.
Two excerpts (Old Russian and modern Old Believer literature) where the elephant is said to sleep leaning (pri-slon-ivshis’) on something because his knees won’t bend, are given.
The best part of Das Schach- oder Königs-Spiel is the hypercorrect Reutter for Reiter (“rider”).
Some previous comments on the conventionalized depictions of animals that artists had never seen.
is said to sleep leaning (pri-slon-ivshis’) — For some odd reason I wrote a modern Russian word here. The text has vъ-slon-ivъ.
It is from a Slavonic transaltion of the Physiologus. The story about elephants who lean on trees to sleep is from the Physiologus too.
@Andrej, @Ilya, this question occured to me too in early 90s. That time in the Moscow metro you could often see groups of slender dark-haired women, Gypsy or not, who would enter the car and start: Сами мы не местные, мы беженцы из Приднестровья, поможите пожалуйста, кто чем может, люди добрые.
“Selves we not locals…”.
They used this intro so systematically (which is unsurprising) that it became idiomatic in Russian and remains so.
Clearly. they are not locals, Gypsy or not, and could have come from any place. So I wondered if there is an area where these two sam-s interact and produce usages that get borrowed by other dialect. The problem is that, as far as I know, the verb exists in this exact form sam only in South Slavic.
Vsevolod Ivanov wrote in his diary about Valentin Kataev’s 1974 trip to Paris:
I rendered идеологичность (a rare and highfalutin’ word that is treated as a Gallicism based on idéologique) as “ideological purity” without much confidence, but you get the general idea. And брехня is not a curse word like “bullshit,” but the latter conveys the idea succinctly and well. In any case, this is a clear use of сам where “(him)self” would make no sense.
And that’s specifically the 1sg; the 1pl is smo in FYLOSC at least.
I can make sense of it by interpreting а сам as “and yet, the selfsame”. Of course that’s barely English and wouldn’t be used in a translation.
Yes, I did not list this second problem, because maybe it is not. It can spread to plural.
As I said, self I from … is common enough. Back then I did not know this. The phrase did not sound as irregular as поможите, but it was peculiar. Apparently my classmates did not say it oftten or were too systematically from Moscow. The ladies’ native langauge could easily be Romani, or even Romanian* or even something Central Asian (but I do not think they were Lyuli).
Anyway, this idea predates my interest in linguistics.
—
* They are unusually honest ladies: “we are not locals, give us some money” is honest. I heard our president a year ago, and he lied 4 times in 2 seconds. Transnistria was in news in 90s, but maybe they were honest about this part too, why not.
брехня is rude enough in modern Russian. Yes, unlike bullsh*t or п…ж, you can’t asterisk it, it is not a непечатное “un-printable” word. But it is rude per se.
highfalutin
Someoen wrote that in 1960s, when “structuralism’ stood for everything modern and fashionable, структурный was used positively and структуральный was often used negatively (for “structural” linguistics). Cf. Стругацкие, “Попытка к бегству”, where a future linguist re-appropriates it: “структуральнейший лингвист”.
That’s one of my favorite bits from the novel. In fact, I think… (*checks*)… yes, I quoted it here. And D.O. said “in Russia structural linguistics meant the use of quantitative methods.”
“Kataev boasted … a sam spent …”
I wrote “a” because it is contrastive (of course “and” is the proper translation here). Yes, I have been curious about this usage of sam since my childhood – and since before I picked bad habits like linguistics – too. It is illogical. Logically: “I call you a drunkard, a sam have hardly been sober since January”. But here the speaker’s “himslef” is opposed to his speech, not to who he is speaking about.
That’s probably because of “pro-drop” (I actually don’t know the scope of this term, but I like its aura of sophistication). The assumed construction is “[pro] сам” which is often used in the wild, but then pro drops and “-self” remains alone and confused.
Nobody mentioned a forgoten construction “сам – [Nth, ordinal number]” which meant “her/himself and N-1 others with her/him”. I don’t know how it’s relevant, but it was out there 150 years ago and deserves to be mentioned.
I wonder if D.O.’s forgotten construction is a calque from Greek — “himself the fifth” is the normal Greek way of saying “he and four others”.
Norwegian:
Jeg kaller deg fyllik, men har sjøl knapt vært edru siden januar.
or
…, men jeg har sjøl knapt …
Not quite “opposed to the speech”, I think, but to the moral consequence of it. The reported act may just as well be Jeg selger lodd for losjen, men … “I sell lottery tickets for the [temperance] lodge, but …”. Jeg driver med forebyggende arbeid blant ungdom, men ,,, “I work in preventive youth care, but …”
forgotten construction
but it was out there 150 years ago and deserves to be mentioned.
I do not know about its popularity in Russian dialects though.
PS. and speaking about Belorussian:
сам in Wiktionary. They translate it as “even”:)
a forgotten construction “сам – [Nth, ordinal number]”
Not to be confused with a different and only slightly less forgotten construction “сам – [weird form of N used nowhere else that I know of]” which meant “harvest N times larger than the amount sown”.
Anna selvtredje
Not to be confused with a different and only slightly less forgotten construction “сам – [weird form of N used nowhere else that I know of]” which meant “harvest N times larger than the amount sown”.
My favorite of these is сам-сём ‘sevenfold’ (or however you want to translate it). I’ve often wondered how those weird forms arose.
Anna selbdritt – and before I googled it right now, I didn’t understand that name and didn’t know the word ever existed otherwise.
Anna selvtredje
Selbdritt ! I know the term from Catholic hagioplastic art.
In any case, this is a clear use of сам where “(him)self” would make no sense.
“His name was Ah Sin
And I shall not deny
In regard to the same
what the name might imply.”
—Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James”
“Sighted sub, sank same.”
—Donald Francis Mason, U.S. pilot during WWII. (But he hadn’t; no U-boats were destroyed that day, as postwar analysis showed.)
The words сам and same are related at the root but have different meanings.
“I heard our president a year ago, and he lied 4 times in 2 seconds. ”
I think I once wrote about this in another thread, but did not post it. It was March 2020. A week before that the lockdown began, but the government decided not to scare people and called it a “holyday week” (lit. “a week of days off”). Then the president was supposed to give a speech and say that this holyday week won’t exactly be a week.
The line that I heard when I happened near a workign TV set literally was “…this holyday week allowed us to deliver a pre-emptive blow….”. Then my jaw dropped and turned the sound off.
Why four:
– not a week (he was actually telling that it will be a month in addition to a week, and this was not true either)
– not holydays, but a lockdown. It was a very strange idea to try so hard not to scare people.
– not pre-emptive. Russia performed better than Europe back then, but it was the opposite opf pre-emptive. In military terms what Russia did is “organized retreat” (as opposed to offensive or less organized retreat, as in Europe).
– and no, everyone knew about the pandemics since January, (and actually Russia began preparations in February). So this week dod not “allow” anything.
I do not know how many inaccuracies others will count here, for me it is 4 false propositions (known to the speaker to be false), and I can not lie at this rate. I mean, I tried!!
I only can generate 0.5 lies in a second not 2.
I think it is because I need a conscious effort for this. To have 4 per 2 one has to think this way, as in “thinking in a foreign lnagauge”.
I do not know if it is Putin, or all politicians are like that. And yes, I try very hard not to hear working TV-sets. It is frustrating:)
I only can generate 0.5 lies in a second not 2.
You clearly have no future in politics or management. 🙂
The Wunderwastl has you all beat: Austria’s lockdown over Easter was called a mere rest, Osterruhe.
Regarding the etymology of the words for ‘elephant’ in the Slavic languages, earlier posters on this thread have put together some of the pieces of the puzzle (here numbered 1-7):
1. Wiktionary lists several proposed etymologies, starting with the silliest (from a verb ‘to lean against’, because sleeping elephants were said to lean against trees.
2. People have plenty of ideas, but nobody knows. Vasmer rejects the usual (in his day) derivation from the verb sloniti as a folk etymology and says it might be from Turkic a(r)slan ‘lion’; Jakobson compares Tocharian kloŋ; Machek in his Czech etymological dictionary says it’s probably from *slop-n < *solopont, related to the Greek word.
3. Not that this combination of phonemes is unexpected, we have a root -slon- “to lean”, for example. And? It is not enough to call it “etymology”.
4. Indeed, maybe there is an interesting textual history of elephants which I am unaware of.
5. Not just Russian – though I don’t know if the other Slavic occurrences are 19th-century loans from Russian…
6. Two excerpts (Old Russian and modern Old Believer literature) where the elephant is said to sleep leaning (pri-slon-ivshis’) on something because his knees won’t bend, are given.
7. It is from a Slavonic translation of the Physiologus. The story about elephants who lean on trees to sleep is from the Physiologus too.
Nobody disputes that silly etymologies out of number have been put into circulation and that quite a few have made their way into dictionaries claiming to be “authoritative” or “the voice of authority,” but that is not the case of the Slavic words meaning ‘elephant’.
Aristotle writes in Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν (Ton peri ta zoia historion), often called in English by the name of its translation into Latin, Historia Animalium, that ‘the elephant does not sleep standing, as some were wont to assert, but it bends its legs and settles down; only that in consequence of its weight it cannot bend its leg on both sides simultaneously, but falls into a recumbent position on one side or the other, and in this position it goes to sleep. And it bends its hind legs just as a man bends his legs’ (D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his translation published in 1910).
Whether or not Aristotle was right about elephants (zoologists can tell us), his influence on Western culture was so great that many believed him in later times, for example, the unknown author of Φυσιολογος (dating to the second century CE and often known in English by the name of its translation into Latin, Physiologus), which in the tenth century was translated into Old Church Slavonic (details in Caroline Macé and Jost Gippert, eds., The Multilingual Physiologus: Studies in the Oldest Greek Recension and its Translations).
Though the Old Church Slavonic translation of Physiologus does not contain any name for the elephant derived from Old Church Slavonic sloniti ‘lean’, its mention of Aristotle’s belief does include that verb, which spurred the coinage of derivatives meaning ‘elephant’ in the other Slavic languages (the Belarusian and/or Polish coinages later prompted now obsolete Lithuanian slonis and now obsolete Latvian zilonis).
In summary, a coinage based on a wrong (or right?) belief is different from a wrong etymology.
Elephants can and do crouch vertically or lie on their sides – they just don’t do any of that for long. Neither do horses.
In summary, a coinage based on a wrong (or right?) belief is different from a wrong etymology.
Very true, but I’d need more than a hypothesis based on Aristotle to accept that etymology. It seems far more likely to me that the fame of Aristotle provided fertile basis for a folk etymology. But you’re right, “silly” does not necessarily mean “false,” and I can imagine that etymology being real. I would just need more evidence, which is unlikely to turn up.
A folk etymology is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one, as when certain speakers of English call Alzheimer’s disease “oldtimers’ disease” or some school children say “for Richard Stands” instead of “for which it stands” when reciting the (American) Pledge of Allegiance.
In the case of the Slavic for ‘elephant’ there was no replacement and not even anything to replace. The coinages were made on the basis of Aristotle’s remark, just as “tidal wave” was once used in English in the sense of ‘tsunami’ because it was mistakenly believed that the tides cause it.
Were there a folk etymology here, there would be older words for ‘elephant’ in the Slavic languages not derived from sloniti or some related verb that were reshaped to look and sound as if they were derived from that verb or a related one.
In the case of the Slavic for ‘elephant’, we are looking for an etiology (why is the animal so called?) rarther than an etymon.
One thing that speaks against that theory is that at the time when Russian speakers became acquainted with Classical Greek literature, simple o-stem formations from verb stems like slon would be in that case didn’t form agent nouns anymore outside of compounds (e.g. voe-vod, ljudo-ěd). Simple o-stems like e.g. svod, sbor, stok denote actions, their results, and places where such actions happen. For coining an agent noun name at that time, a suffix would be expected, e.g. *slonitel’, *slonyak or similar. IMHO, the fact that some Slavic languages have a -yo- stem here (e.g. Polish słoń and the distribution throughout Slavic speak against a (late) medieval coinage. But none of these arguments is conclusive.
I would just need more evidence, which is unlikely to turn up.
Perhaps a good question is whether there are other languages, outside Slavic, where the word for “elephant” looks like it could be derived from the word for “leaning”. If the association originates from Aristotle, surely it’s not just the Slavs who would have used it for the animal’s name.
(Compare the lying whale; surely there was also a way in which whales were perceived to lie.)
Were there a folk etymology here, there would be older words for ‘elephant’ in the Slavic languages not derived from sloniti or some related verb that were reshaped to look and sound as if they were derived from that verb or a related one.
That’s actually exactly what I suspect had happened – a borrowing from somewhere else (Turkic?) that was slightly reshaped to fit the association.
For coining an agent noun name at that time, a suffix would be expected, e.g. *slonitel’, *slonyak or similar.
…this is actually a pretty good argument.
(In fact Wiktionary says that there was a separate word slon actually derived from this root, which was extended to zaslon in most Slavic languages.)
OTOH, IIRC the definite (i.e. the actual origin is known) folk etymology for *velьblǫdъ “camel” involves a similar suffix-less derivation, so this does not necessarily exclude the folk-etymology option.
As befits the fact that once (at any rate) elephants were not exotic creatures for the Kusaasi, wabʋg “elephant” is unanalysable and seems to mean nothing but “elephant.”
The only remarkable thing about it is that it belongs to a noun class which for animals generally implies “vermin, unpleasant creature”, along with cobras and vultures, for example. But subsistence farmers don’t have any very romantic conception of elephants, so that figures.
“I’ve got a terrible elephant problem with my back garden.”
@Hans. ” Russian speakers became acquainted with Classical Greek literature,”
The suggested etymology does not presuppose Slavic contact with Classical Greek literature. Rather, the suggested chain is:
Aristotle’s Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν –> the anonymous Physiologus –> the tenth-century translation of Physiologus into Old Church Slavonic –> suffixless coinages of the word for ‘elephant’ in other Slavic languages.
I have not checked to see whether Aristotle, the author of Physiologus, or the translator of Physiologus into Old Church Slavonic calls the elephant by a name that might be relevant to the discussion.
What is your opinion about the possibility of suffixless coinages dating to no earlier than the tenth century?
@ January First-of-May. Buck 1949 (full reference below) lists no word in any non-Slavic Indo-European language derived from a verb meaning ‘lean’, but maybe he did not make an exhaustive search.
It is always good to be able to say “compare….” but it is not essential. Even if one can find analogous coinages, an argument from analogy can be fallacious.
“For coining an agent noun name at that time, a suffix would be expected, e.g. *slonitel’, *slonyak or similar.”
What time do you have in mind?
A general remark. In the main, the etymology I have offered above is not original with me. Maybe I’ve offered a new detail or two or made implicit parts of it explicit, but, in essence, it has been on the table for close to a hundred years. It is in Carl Darling Buck’s A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1949) and he presumably took it from Brückner’s etymological dictionary of Polish, which he mentions in his treatment of the Slavic words.
The foregoing paragraph is not intended to mean *‘because Brückner and Buck supported it, it must be right’. Rather I should have stated at the very beginning of my first post on the subject that I am reporting the etymology suggested by at least two other people and it is therefore not original with me.
What is your opinion about the possibility of suffixless coinages dating to no earlier than the tenth century?
The same, basically. I also would expect suffixed coinages at that time (this is anyway only 1-2 centuries before Greek literature became known in Russia).
I also wouldn’t know of any case where a name for an exotic animal for which no established Slavic name existed was coined in Old Church Slavic instead of simply loaned. But I’d really have to check on that, and I don’t have time for that at the moment.
The attestation per Vasmer and the distribution throughout Slavic makes me doubt that the word was coined in Church Slavic and spread West (influence of CS, via Russisn, on learned words in West Slavic languages is rather late (19th century)); it must be either a common Slavic word existing before the Christian mission*1) and contact with Classical literature, or, if it’s a learned coinage, it should come rather from Czech, which had a huge influence on other Slavic languages in the late medieval / early modern period. But again, I wouldn’t expect a suffixless derivation here, either.
*1) We can safely assume that elephants weren’t roaming through the Slavic heartlands, but for the Common Slav the elephant may have simply been the animal ivory came from; all major Slavic languages call ivory variations of slonovaya kost’ “elephant bone”.
@ Hans. I understand your desire to see nouns with an agentive suffix.
Anyone pursuing the matter would want to ascertain the dates of the currently earliest-known use of each of the words in question: s’lon, słon, słoń, słóń and слон, and so on.
I’m not sure that the suggested etymology implies the coinage of a word in Old Church Slavonic. Rather, the idea may be that people read Physiologus in OCS and coined words in their vernacular, but, if so, one would be surprized that all chose a suffixless form.
There is some discussion, with references, here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/slon%D1%8A, which may have been mentioned in an earlier comment.
If the Slavic words meaning ‘elephant’ are Slavicizations of some non-Slavic word, would you not expect an agentive suffix to be added to the Slavicizations to give them the canonical shape of Slavic nouns?
Thus, it seems that whether one sees the words as spontaneous Slavic coinages or as Slavicizations of one or more non-Slavic words, the absence of an agentive suffix is puzzling.
Only if they were immediately interpreted as derived from the verb, which is unlikely.
That said, where did the first syllable of a(r)slan go? Was it interpreted as a Hungarian article and dropped….?
One of the suggestions mentioned here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/slon%D1%8A, is that the Slavic words meaning ‘elephant’ are related to Turkish aslan ‘lion’.
Although semantic change is attested in zoonyms, would not *’lion’ –> ‘elephant’ be too radical to be explainable? One could readily accept, say, ‘lion’ –> tiger’ or ‘hare’ –> ‘rabbit’, but ‘lion’ –> ‘elephant’ seems implausible. How could someone mistake a lion for an elephant?
“Only if they were immediately interpreted as derived from the verb, which is unlikely.”
I should have said, “expect a Slavic agentive suffix whenever the borrowing came to designate the elephant.” By our times, all of them should have had such a suffix.
I’m not sure that the suggested etymology implies the coinage of a word in Old Church Slavonic. Rather, the idea may be that people read Physiologus in OCS and coined words in their vernacular, but, if so, one would be surprized that all chose a suffixless form.
You mean several times in different Slavic languages? I can’t see how that could happen. And if it was coined only once, it’s very unlikely that such a coinage would spread to all Slavic languages. I wouldn’t know of any case where new coinages would be shared between all Slavic languages for words that entered their lexicon after the Common Slavic period. If the word wasn’t there already in Common Slavic, before the contact with Greek (or Latin) scientific literature, one would expect different coinages, and at least some of the languages should have loaned some form of elephas.
From the Wiktionary article you link to, I actually find Vovin’s proposal of a loan from Old Chinese via Turkic Bulghar quite attractive. If the Bulghar form that was loaned still had final /ŋ/, that might even explain the stem variation between -n- and -nj- in Slavic.
@DM: Vasmer mentions some other examples where an initial vowel was dropped from Turkish loans. But I like the Old Chinese theory more than the “lion” theory.
“You mean several times in different Slavic languages?”
I have no precise thoughts on the matter, but whatever the story behind the words is, there must be some explanation of why they are so much alike and why none has an agentive suffix.
I am not sure that positing a Common Slavic etymon is necessary (to explain their similarity to one another or for some other purpose) and positing one may even be unjustified because it may be that during the Common Slavic period most of its speakers had no idea what an elephant was and therefore had no need for a word so meaning.
In Romance linguistics it has been shown (though no examples come to mind at the moment) that the widespread occurrence of a form (say in all the Romance languages, with little phonological difference between them) does not necessarily justify the reconstruction of a Proto-Romance or a Colloquial Latin (formerly called Vulgar Latin) form.
In particular, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, the author of the Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1911), has been criticized for unjustifiedly reconstructing so many Colloquial Latin forms that he created his own Colloquial Latin idiolect.
As in all diachronic studies, distinguishing horizontal influence, vertical influence, and spontaneous innovation may be hard or impossible.
but ‘lion’ –> ‘elephant’ seems implausible. How could someone mistake a lion for an elephant?
The idea is that people mixed up exotic animals they had never seen. Exactly this happened when a word deriving from “elephant” came to mean “camel” in Slavic.
I should have said, “expect a Slavic agentive suffix whenever the borrowing came to designate the elephant.” By our times, all of them should have had such a suffix.
There is a difference between coinages, which can be expected to follow the rules of word formation valid at the time when they are created, and loans, which don’t have to and often are unanalysable in the languages that loaned them. Even if loans undergo folk etymological changes, these have to do with assonances and associations, and don’t need to result in words that are fully in line with word firmation rules.
As in all diachronic studies, distinguishing horizontal influence, vertical influence, and spontaneous innovation may be hard or impossible.
It’s a good thing to know (because it is true) and then ignore (or you’ll lose hope of ever getting anywhere).
I am not sure that positing a Common Slavic etymon is necessary (to explain their similarity to one another or for some other purpose) and positing one may even be unjustified because it may be that during the Common Slavic period most of its speakers had no idea what an elephant was and therefore had no need for a word so meaning.
As I mentioned up thread, they don’t need to have known more about the elephant than that it produced ivory (variations on slonovaya kost’ “elephant bone” in all major Slavic languages). And assuming a common Slavic etymon is more parsimonious than assuming an 1) unusual suffixless formation, based on 2) the same property of the elephant described in Classical texts known only to a small number of scholars, happening at the same time in several Slavic languages or spreading across areas of Slavic that normally don’t share such neologisms.
As I said, my money is on the Old Chinese loan going through Bulghar Turkic. It’s the right time frame to get into Common Slavic before words stopped spreading across the whole Slavic area, it doesn’t require any phonological or semantic contortions, it fits with the influence of Turkic languages on Slavic and with the role of Turkic in mediating Chinese cultural lexicon to Slavic. I can’t judge the quality of the Old Chinese reconstruction, but my understanding is that reconstructing Old Chinese has made big progress in the last decades, and opened up material for comparison that simply wasn’t available to Brückner, Buck, or Vasmer.
Ooh, I like that.
Clicking on the character doesn’t actually bring up a reconstruction as *slaŋ, but AFAIK that’s the expected intermediate between the Old and Middle Chinese reconstructions. There’s a bunch of Middle Chinese loanwords in Proto-Turkic, so I don’t think we need Vovin’s hypothesis that specifically West Turkic was ever that far east.
“lion” > “mythical beast of faraway lands” > “elephant”, like the known “elephant” > “mythical beast of faraway lands” > “camel”. We could even waffle about large teeth in the first pair.
Likewise Elfenbein for “ivory” in German, borrowed long before the end-stressed Elefant.
“The idea is that people mixed up exotic animals…..” I agree.
“There is a difference between coinages… ” Your paragraph so beginning does not seem to cover Turkish aslan ‘lion’ –> Slavic slon, etc. ‘elephant’ (let us assume for the sake of argument that that etymology is accurate) because here we would have a Turkish word borrowed into Slavic that was reshaped under the influence of the Slavic verb meaning ‘lean’. After that reshaping occurred, the word lost all ties to Turkish and was thenceforth a purely Slavic word (synchronically speaking). At that time, the need to give this new Slavic word a Slavic agentive suffix should have been strongly felt, do you not think?.
In a different connection, I am reminded of the German family name Beck ~ Peck, at least certain tokens of which, I assume, are shortened from Bäcker ~ Baecker ~ Päcker ~ Paecker. As a native speaker of German (not as a linguist), how do you react to the absence of an agentive suffix in that name? I assume that non-standard German also has an appellative *Bäck ~ *Päck ‘baker’. If so, how do you react to it? Do you feel that something is missing?
Ah, but the suffix is there: the two dots (a superfix if you will). The verb is backen.
Beck etc. is a southern (southeastern?) form. The umlaut trigger is preserved in more northern varieties, though not in that word AFAIK, as -e, cognate with the Gothic -ja (fiskja “fisher”, timrja “carpenter”, containing “timber” – indeed the impossibility of umlaut in these words may be why they’ve been remade in German to Fischer & Zimmermann).
So… to me it does feel like something is missing, but the word isn’t just the verb root either.
A folk etymology is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one
Eleanora Infanta of Castile > Elephant and Castle.
But:
The real story of why the Elephant and Castle are thus named.
Location: Elephant and Castle, Southwark, London
Description: There are many ideas of where the name Elephant and Castle comes from about on the Internet.
The most plausible is the most wrong, that it’s from a corruption of la Infanta de Castile referring to any of a number of Spanish princesses connected to English history including Eleanor of Castile, Catherine of Aragon, and Maria, daughter of Philip III of Spain.
The second is that it’s from the name of a pub (oldest records date to 1765), which places the pub in the same position as the area – where did they both get the name from?
Author John Timbs documents the story from the 21st March 1661, repeated from a pamphlet printed at the time and now in the British Library.
Some was standing on old London Bridge and saw a vision in the clouds of an Elephant with a Castle on it’s back. Now, those times it was common place that if someone saw a vision then crowds flocked, in fact the author of The History of the Great Plague tells us that he was in danger from a crowd in St Giles, because he could not see an angel in the air holding a drawn sword in his hand.
This story almost certainly, once documented in rare written form, became famous in London, and pubs (as was the wont) were named after such things.
(http://www.shadyoldlady.com/location.php?loc=1528)
WP:
I’ve always wondered about that name. (Though transport elephants, the ones with howdahs, are not the ones hunted for their ivory.)
1. Physiologus speaks about elephants who sleep leaning on a tree.
2. Ivory is mentioned in the Old Testament, including books possibly translated in the time of Cyril and Methoduis (Psalms, Song of Songs, etc), also in Revelation.
Elephants as such appear in the Books of Maccabees. These were translated later.
After that reshaping occurred, the word lost all ties to Turkish and was thenceforth a purely Slavic word (synchronically speaking). At that time, the need to give this new Slavic word a Slavic agentive suffix should have been strongly felt, do you not think?
No. Existing words are existing words. You can’t form nouns by zero derivation from verbs in German anymore, but there are hundreds or thousands of them (historically o-stems etc., but with the apocope of the historical vowels end endings, they look like zero derivations synchronically). Nobody feels the need to e.g. turn an established word like e.g. Schmied “smith” into “*Schmieder” or Schlag “hit” into “*Schlagung”. But when you form a new agent noun or action noun in contemporary German, you have to use a suffix. (I use German examples, because English does a lot of zero derivation and so can’t be used to illustrate this.) It’s similar with Slavic at the time when Slavic speakers could reasonably have come in contact with the idea that elephants have to lean against trees – at that time, agent nouns could be formed by zero derivation only in compounds, so one would expect a suffix in a new formation (coinage). If it was an existing word, or a loan, that pressure doesn’t apply. And even if it, being an unanalysable word, was folk-etymologised under influence of that belief about elephants, it wouldn’t be necessary to expect a suffix – folk etymologies work on assonances and associations, going part of the way of making sense of unanalysable words, but don’t need to result in fully regular formed words.
In any case, folk etymology is not necessary for the Old Chinese etymology, and not really necessary for the “lion” etymology, as there are Turkic variants of the lion word without “r”, and there are other cases where an initial vowel was lost in loans from Turkic.
Ivory is mentioned in the Old Testament, including books possibly translated in the time of Cyril and Methoduis (Kings, Psalms, Song of Songs, etc), also in Revelation.
We can fairly assume that ivory as a trade good and a material prestige objects were made of was known to the Slavs long before C&M’s mission and bible translation.
One place where elephants, castles and camels (but not lions) are collocated (and words for elephant and camel are interchanged in different languages) is the chessboard.
I just checked the (the) ivory tower in the Song 7 of songs. A 14th century manuscript:
Выа твоa ꙗко стльпъ слоновъ, …
For a modern Russian speaker so much used to specifying “elephant bone” it means: “neck your as elephant’s column”. In Greek it is just elephantinos. Could have worked in modern Russian too (“oaken” and “oak’s” are the same form), but….
The idea is that people mixed up exotic animals they had never seen.
One example:
norsu
Finnish
Etymology
Originally synonym of mursu (“walrus”), which is a loan from Northern Sami morša (“walrus”). Centuries ago, elephant was known in Finland only from stories for being a big, thick-skinned animal with handsome tusks, hence the initial confusion. The meanings differentiated around 18th century.
Noun
norsu
elephant
Synonyms
elefantti
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/norsu
For what it’s worth, in Serbian we have both ‘slon’ (elephant) and ‘arslan’ (a lion, or somebody brave). The latter is now obsolete and contemporary speakers will only encounter it in 19th c. epic poetry and the like.
In addition to having a different vowel, the two have quite a different pitch-accent pattern.
But I suppose one and the same word could have been reborrowed, or entered Serbian via a different intermediary language.
Obviously a loan from Turkish in Ottoman times. 😐
The unicorn is a combination of the rhino and the narwhal. This may have been the result of a marketing strategy for narwhal tusks, but Big Mammal certainly took advantage of pre-existing folk processes
Artificial intelligence is intelligent. I was going to post this excerpt:
….Likewiſe of tarre they make a great quãtity out of their firre trees in the countrie of Duyna& Smolensko,whereof much is ſent abroad.Beſides theſe(which are all good and ſubſtantial commodities)they haue diuers other of ſmaller account,that are natural and proper to that countrey: as the fiſhe tooth(which they cal Ribazuba which is vſed both among thẽſelues& the Perʃians& Boughariãs that fetcht it from thence for beads,kniues,& ſword hafts of Noblemen,&gentlemẽ,& for diuers other vſes. Some vſe the powder of it againſt poyſon,as the Vnicornes horne. The fiſh that weareth it is called a Morſe,& is caught about Pechora. Theſe fiſhe teeth ſome of them, are almoſt two foote of length, and weigh eleuen or twelue pound apiece.
In the prouince of Corelia,and about the river Duyna towardeth the North ſea, there groweth a ſoft rocke which they call Slude…
And then typed in the word рыбазуба.
Google said:
…Materials used.–A third circumstance may be mentioned, namely, the very extensive use of a substance that must be characterised as an ivory substitute. In none of the extensive series of monographs on ivory (recently published by the various Governments and Administrations of India) is any mention made of this material and yet there is hardly an armoury or a centre of ivory work where it is not to be seen in fair abundance. Ivory is in Indian as in European commerce spoken of as the “elephant tooth”, but a second substance is called the “fish tooth ” (machlika-dant). This is always of a dirty (oily) yellow colour with the texture looking as if crystallized into patches. The significance of being called in every language and dialect of India “fish tooth” at once suggests a common and, most probably, foreign origin for the material. Upon inquiry it was found that it was more highly valued for sword and dagger hafts and more extensively used for these purposes than is ivory. It is put through an elaborate and protracted process of curing before being worked up. The crude “fish tooth” is wrapped up in a certain mixture (masala) and retained in that condition for various periods, the finer samples for as long as 50 years. The advantages are its greater strength, finer and smoother surface, and greater resistance (less liability to slip in the hand) than is the case with ivory.
So far as the writer has been able to discover, the “fish tooth”of Indian trade is mainly, if not entirely, the so-called fossil ivory of Siberia—the ivory of the Mammoth—a substance that has lain for countless ages in the frost-bound drifts of Liakoff and New Siberia. It is also possible that a fair amount of hippopotamus or “sea-horse ivory” and even of the “walrus ivory” finds its way to India by passing like the Siberian ivory by land routes to India. And from the antiquity of some of the swords, found in the armouries of the princes of India with “fish tooth” hafts, it would seem possible that there has existed for centuries a traffic in carrying this material to India….
sorry, … machlí-ka-dant…
It was from here (Sir George Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, Being the Official Catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition 1902-1903)
And the first excerpt was from here (Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth).
Laufer and Pelliot, 1913, wrote on walrus and narwhals ivory in China in the Arab world. It’s at JSTOR, which I can’t get from here.
The range of the walrus includes much of the Arctic, east and west. After about 1000 AD New World walrus ivory might have been available in the East.
After about 1000 AD New World walrus ivory might have been available in the East.
It’s weird to think that, in principle, in the 11th (and 12th and possibly even 13th) century AD the theoretical Arctic trade range would have covered the entire inhabited circumference of the Arctic, with both the Bering Strait and (to a lesser extent) Atlantic links still somewhat active.
I occasionally wonder how far back in time a very determined traveller who knew exactly where they were going (…probably a visitor from a future era) could have made a successful circumnavigation without having to make their own sea crossings. 11th century AD is a fairly plausible option; any earlier and they would probably have at least had to make their own overland crossings through uninhabited areas in a few places.
African Elephants drove the Norse out of Greenland! Yes, that’s how tangled the interplay of transcontinental socioeconomic dynamics and sensitive environments can be. The intriguing historical puzzle of Norse disappearance from Greenland had eluded resolution, until late when an interdisciplinary approach seems to have done the trick – elucidated the disastrous effects of human indiscretion and imprudence. The new explanation holds lessons for us that are quite pertinent contemporarily.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/culture/18183-a-reminder-from-the-past.html
So the German practice of keeping units of measurement strictly in the singular with numerals isn’t completely isolated after all…
Where I come from, “five foot tall” is considered rustic, but Tolkien uses it a lot (as he would).
So the German practice of keeping units of measurement strictly in the singular with numerals isn’t completely isolated after all
Not singular but Old English genitive plural: “the plural of fōt ‘foot’ was fēt, which became feet, but the genitive plural (‘of feet’) was fōta, which became foot just like the singular.”
@hat
In the same sentence there was “eleven pounde”. This would be a possible dialectal modern usage, especially for the money, rather than the weight. Middle English has both pound(e)s and pound for the plural.
David Marjanovic: Obviously a loan from Turkish in Ottoman times.
Don’t miss the possibility of a loan from Old Narnian.
Rodger C: Where I come from, “five foot tall” is considered rustic, but Tolkien uses it a lot (as he would).
Lewis’s friend Tolkien did use that construction, but not in the (by far) most famous instance of a height measurement in his work: “Five feet high the door, and three may walk abreast.”
I also have a longer comment about the origin of tidal wave as the English word for a tsunami forthcoming
Curses! Foiled again!
(Probably the same in German.)
I had managed to forget about 50 Cent!
J1M: It’s weird to think that, in principle, in the 11th (and 12th and possibly even 13th) century AD the theoretical Arctic trade range would have covered the entire inhabited circumference of the Arctic, with both the Bering Strait and (to a lesser extent) Atlantic links still somewhat active.
Yes. But it’s also weird to think that the establishment of intercontinental links didn’t lead to permanent and increasing trade relations. Unless you subscribe to the hypothesis that Columbus’s journey really was a continuation and extension of the no longer economically viable trans-Atlantic tradition in Northern Europe.
So far, the absence of Old World germs is a strong argument against more than rudimentary contact. But I wouldn’t be very surprised if the pre-Columbus demographic changes, with i.a. population loss in the Mississippi Culture and contraction of the Ancient Pueblo Culture, turned out to be related to transcontinental pandemics.
@ David Marjanović . If in writing “I had managed to forget about 50 Cent!” you have in mind the stage name of Curtis James Jackson III, that use of a bare noun is unrelated to “five foot tall,” etc.
“Fifty cent,” “two dollar,” three car,” “eight egg,” and so on are found in certain varieties of Black American English:
http://events.ff.uni-mb.si/mir/files/2012/EzgetaGrammar.pdf (page 12, line 3)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/455515?seq=1
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267255600_Bare_Nouns_in_African_American_English_AAE
Trond, pack-rats in the southwest US still are vectors for plague. The Black Death wiped out the Greenland colony. Your recent comment fills in the middle parts and explains several mysteries, but if the abandonment of Cahokia is one of them, the bacillus must have spread very quickly to get there by 1350, then sputtered out before infecting Mexico, where it was introduced by the Spanish.
On rethinking, it makes more sense to blame the pack-rats on the Spanish. And mass burial sites in Cahokia have been excavated without any outcry about disease being part of the other horrors.
@Hans, yes. I mentioned the Bible because it is worth mentioning:) Also it gives us an early attestation.
But I think ivory items reached Slavs long before 800s.
Also it gives us an early attestation.
The translation is assigned to “Methodius” stage in some periodization (“C&M” , “M”, “M’s tradition” etc.) based on its langauge. As I understand, they translated from Greek, later the text evolved: they corrected it rather than just copied. Manuscripts (I think the earliest Psalms are from 11th century?) are not mere inaccurate copies of a 9th century translation.
@Phil: I don’t think I’ve filled out any parts yet, but I’m trying to get a better idea of what could be in them.
By “Old World germs” and “transcontinental pandemics”, I don’t necessarily mean the plague. It could just be the common cold — or a new form of it, as we are reminded these days.
@Trond. Yes, that works better.
ꙮ
“this glyph variant can be found in certain manuscripts in the Old Church Slavonic phrase “серафими многоꙮчитїи” (serafimi mnogoočitii, “many-eyed seraphim”).”
Just discovered this when looking for elephants in Wikipedia. …ꙮ-)
Hah, I ran across that very odd glyph not long ago when trawling through some Old Church Slavonic documents!
In a document (outside of the word “many-eyed”) or just in Wikipedia?
It looks like somethign I could use if I wrote a word “многоꙮкий” a bit more often than I do (this was my first time:/).
I still can write волꙭкая “ox-eyed”. And because of improper rendering in my browser it even has eyelashes (dots that look like those). Wikipdeida said itis for the dual ꙭчи “eyes”, but must work for ꙭx-eyed too.
In a document (outside of the word “many-eyed”) or just in Wikipedia?
In a document, but I think it was the word “many-eyed.” It was a big surprise.
P.S. it would be logical if the idea originated with Greeks (ꙭπε as a completion of the omega in ωπε “eyes (dual)”). And then βꙭπις / βοꙭπις for βοωπις.
P.P.S. Wiktionary: “cow eyes pl (plural only) (US, informal) A wide-eyed expression meant to discreetly signal otherwise unstated romantic attraction to the one it is directed at.”
I wonder if these “cow eyes” have to do with Homeric βοῶπις “ox-eyed” (and other Mediterranean parallels between women and cow eyes, like in Arabic Maha).
P.P.P.S. Russian волꙭкая is a Homeric (and then just poetic) epithet for me. But Wictionary has:
1. имеющий большие выразительные глаза с поволокой
2. поэт. устар. имеющий большие выразительные глаза ◆ Великий Зевс с супругой волоокой. А. С. Пушкин
volookij m., volookaya f.:
1. having large expressive eyes s povolokoj.
2. poetic, dated, having large expressive eyes. (and then a quotation from Pushkin: “great Zeus with his ox-eyed wife”).
Eyes s povolokoj (“with povoloka“) means “misty eyes”.
Apparently people associate obscure volookaya (from an archaic word for bull and an archaic word for eyes in absence of cultural connection between women and cow eyes) and elusive s povolokoj. And the assocation went far enough for the dictionary’s complilers to mark “large expressive eyes” as outdated and poetic (with an exmaple from Pushkin about Hera:/) and “large expressive misty eyes” as the main meaning.
@drasvi “I wonder if these “cow eyes” have to do with Homeric βοῶπις “ox-eyed”
Homeric usages are unlikely to influence informal American English.
Not directly, but there could be a chain of influences.
Yes, I meant a chain. “Cow eyes” can be based on 1. immediate impression of cows and their look or 2. the role/interpetation of cows in the culture. Homer [or cultures of Homer’s region] could have contributed in the latter.
@David L. Gold: I’ve finally had time to make formulate my comment about the actual origin of tidal wave. The term (probably originally as tide wave) was first used to describe the elevation of the worldwide ocean tides as they (appear to*) propagate around the globe. The term originated in the early nineteenth century; the OED‘s first citation is Charles Lyell in 1830.
For whatever reason, some scientists adapted this term to other large solitary waves on the ocean, rather than using the term solitary wave itself. Solitary waves were famously discovered by John Russell in 1834, when he saw an isolated pulse from a canal boat coming to a sudden stop; fascinated, he chased after the propagating disturbance for some distance on his horse. Russell called what he had discovered the “wave of translation,” but the modern name came into use within just a few years. However, in spite of a seemingly better term being available, for quite some time, there remained Earth scientists who used the term tidal wave for both kinds solitary ocean disturbances. Thomas Huxley, in his book Physiography, referred to both tsunamis generated by earthquakes and the twice-daily tidal bore that moves up the Thames Estuary as tidal waves, in spite of having a full understanding the nature of each.
* Of course, it is really mostly the Earth’s surface that is motion, as the planet rotates relative to the oceans’ tidal bulge. And while the bulge position changes relative to the longitude, the actual water that makes up the bulge is local, rotating along with the crust. The tidal forces of the moon and sun only change the water molecules’ positions by a few feet one way or the other.
@ Brett. Thank you for the interesting information.
My understanding is that the word “tidal” is justified in the term “tidal bore” when reference is to the funneling of water caused when the incoming tide moves through a progressively narrower channel, as in the Bay of Fundy, but you are in all likelihood better informed than I on that subject.
Oh yes, the tidal bore really is a tidal phenomenon, where, as you say, a narrowing channel squeezes and thus further elevates the tidal bulge. I was just highlighting that Huxley called it a “tidal wave,” which we would not today.
Speaking of elephants and camels, I just got to this, in Chingiz Aitmatov’s И дольше века длится день [The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years]:
In the Aitmatov novel I just ran across the adjective снулый ‘dead’ (of fish), which is related to the verb снуть ‘to die,’ also used only of fish. Truly Russian is a great and mighty language.
@hat
Vasmer has
—
-снуть
засну́ть, усну́ть, ст.-слав. оусънѫти κοιμᾶσθαι, ὑπνοῦν (Супр.). Из (u-, zа-) *sъpnǫti; см. спать, сплю.
—
so it means “sleep with the fishes”. But how did it become attached to fish?
Yeah, the derivation is obvious (though Wiktionary omits it), but I don’t know the history of how ‘sleep’ > ‘die’ in this case. Maybe because dead fish look as if they’re only sleeping?
maybe because half-dead fishes is something you see often. Or because dokhnut’ was not appropriate for fishes.
Maybe because dead fish look as if they’re only sleeping?
That’s what I would have guessed, and the part where they’re often only half-dead (but could be revived if put back into water) probably makes sense as well.
I think I’ve seen/heard? the word used to mean “sleepy” of people; if I had seen it applied to fish I would probably have assumed it refers to this very “out of water” state that isn’t quite death.
Note though the etymology of anima, “animal”, “animated”, “spirit” and so on, and then [iz]dokhnut’ – and notice how these all can be not totally applicable here.
Another quote from И дольше века длится день:
There’s also the English euphemism “to put [an animal] to sleep”.
I can’t read Russian, but I’ve read most of Dostoyevski’s novels in both the P&V and the Garnett translations, and I definitely prefer the Garnett. In retrospect, I’m so glad I didn’t opt for the celebrated P&V when I started to read Tolstoy.
When reading P&V, you’re constantly reminded that you’re reading a translation, that this is not an English language novel that you’re reading, you can never relax enough into the story, you’re constantly being brought up short by some bizarre, strained locution.
LH, You couldn’t always read Russian, right? Is that correct, that when you first encountered and disliked P&V you hadn’t yet read any of the originals? I’m just curious if your estimation of their translation work is the same as it was then, or if it’s sunk even lower now that you know exactly what they’re translating.
You are correct that I couldn’t always read Russian, but by the time P&V achieved their unmerited and overweening supremacy I had already read it in the original. As I always say to people who want a recommendation, go with whichever one appeals to you and makes you want to read more of it, but for God’s sake don’t just automatically go with P&V because of the hype. They are no better than the competition despite their self-confident claims, and in many ways they’re worse.
Unfortunately, I just discovered that McWhorter has now descended to peddling (racist!?!) conspiracy theories on his podcast. Just nuts.
@Brett. “McWhorter has now descended…”
Can you please guide us to one or two podcasts you have in mind?