Anatoly quotes a passage from the Telegram channel “Минутка этнографии” (in Russian):
“Словаки клали в гроб к подозреваемому вампиру книжки, желательно на чужом языке, чтобы он пытался их прочесть и у него не было времени выходить из могилы (Низшая мифология славян… С. 259). “
My translation:
In the coffin of a suspected vampire the Slovaks placed books, preferably in a foreign language, so that he would try to read them and would not have time to leave the grave (Lower Mythology of the Slavs, p. 259).
He likes the idea but wonders if it’s true; there is a new book Низшая мифология славян. Этнолингвистические очерки, but he can’t find an electronic copy to check. At any rate, se non è vero, è ben trovato. I knew I’d find a use for that book of Albanian poetry! (One of his commenters suggests that the Slovaks could have put a set of Stalin’s complete works in Russian in the grave. That should work.)
Would Sudokus not work too?
You mean the philosopher Σουδωκος?
Of course.
The length and impenetrability of his discourses was proverbial.
(He’s a personal hero and role model of mine.)
The works of Αραουκαρία might work just as well, with many pithy sayings to ponder.
True.
I must say, I like the idea that vampires really only go around annoying people because they get so bored in their coffins. (I must admit, I can see that.) Netflix?
(I wondered about Amazon Prime, but any self-respecting vampire would probably draw the line at enriching Bezos. Even evil has standards.)
The trope that vampires have OCD and can be distracted by throwing rice or grain in front of them, or in this case throwing words in front of them, seems to be widespread in Balkan vampire lore. The X-Files even used vampire OCD as a plot point in one of their comic episodes.
I am impressed by how many dead people seemed to be wandering around Serbia in the old days, given how much advice Serbs seem to have for dealing with the undead.
-κάρυα, surely?
@Vanya: I think jiāngshī are also affected by the same counting compulsion
The Voynich manuscript was originally created by a group of alchemists to neutralize a particularly malevolent Bohemian vampire after they had woken him and subjected him to experiments in search of the Elixir of Life—experiments that went hideously wrong… Later, Georg Baresch broke into the tomb and stole the book, thinking they had recorded their secret results in it. Now, in 2025, the vampire has left his tomb again and is making his way to New Haven to take back what is his…
Coincidentally, I just watched The Fearless Vampire Killers; it’s very uneven, but there’s some interesting multilingual muttering in the Transylvanian inn, and the vampire ball is splendid.
languagehat: “I knew I’d find a use for that book of Albanian poetry!” A friend of mine translates Albanian poetry into Bulgarian. Is your book in Albanian, or translated into English?
The former; it’s Baba tomorri, by Andon Zako Cajupi.
The only book I have ever owned in Albanian was a translation of a lengthy tract by Spartak Beglov that I picked up for free in Sheremetyevo airport in 1973. It didn’t look very poetic. I seem to have lost it.
It may well have been just the thing for vampire control.
He _has_ been translated to Bulgarian, but not by my friend. Actually much earlier. As in just after WWI. This is with the post-WWII spelling, So I’m guessing before the breakup with the USSR but after Stalin’s death : https://albanianbg.com/prewod/Cajupi_PasVdekjes.htm
I love this scene:
Дванайсета картина
Лулуш, Адам-Ути
Лулуш: (уплашено): Вампир! Вампир! Не се приближавай. Върви си. ахай се!
Адам-Ути: (изненадан): Аз, вампир? Какви ги говори тази жена?
Лулуш: (ужасена): Вампир и то говорещ! (тя се прекръства)
Адам-Ути: (сериозен): Извинете, мадам. Може да съм грозен или не твърде атрактивен, но със сигурност не съм вампир. Само умрелите могат да се превръщат във вампири!
Лулуш: Какво? Вие не сте мъртъв?
Адам-Ути: По жив съм от всякога!
Лулуш: Мили боже, истина ли е?
Адам-Ути: Кълна се в Господ!
Лулуш: Прощавайте, разбрала бях, че сте мъртъв!
Адам-Ути: Защо така? Кой ви го каза?
Лулуш: Прочетох некролога ви тук и…
I’m reminded of this famous scene from The Fearless Vampire Killers.
I want to sleep at least 10 hours a day, and some people in my life disagree with me wanting to not. My double negatives are getting confusing.
Përmes vargjeve të kësaj lirike shoqërore, me ligjeratën poetike të së cilës, zë fill periudha e re në letërsinë shqipe, ajo e realizmit, nis kështu shkëputja nga romantizmi (Rilindja). Andon Zako Çajupi (Sheper, 27 mars 1866 – Heliopolis, 11 korrik 1930) ishte poet, dramaturg, patriot dhe veprimtar i Rilindjes Kombëtare.
I looked up rilindje ‘rebirth, renaissance’ and it turns out the root verb lind ‘be born; give birth’ (odd that it means both) is said to be from Proto-Indo-European *leyd- ‘to let go,’ said to be the source of Russian лист ‘leaf.’
odd that it means both
I forgot the term for this, when a verb can have both an active and a (medio-)passive meaning depending on whether it’s transitive or intransitive, or on the degree of agentiveness of the subject? English has a couple of them (break, cook, boil…)
Ambitransitive.
Or “labile”; Dixon says “p-labile” for the “break” kind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labile_verb
English has a great many, in fact.
Kusaal has a lot of such verbs too (though not du’a “bear/beget.”) Most of them are derived with the suffix *g, and historically they have probably ended up as ambitranstive because the causative suffix *l was deleted after another derivational suffix by a morphophonemic rule:
Mbelime fòò “be alive”, Kusaal vʋe;
Mbelime fòòkì “come alive”, Kusaal vʋ’ʋg;
Mbelime fōòkı̄nɛ̀ “make alive”, Kusaal vʋ’ʋg.
@de, hans
A lot of these in English are functionally reflexive in “intransitive” use (maybe some were previously with reflexive pronoun): wash, hide, turn, adjust, get ready, undress, etc.
There’s a lot of overlap between English and Kusaal in the verb semantic categories involved; typically they’re inchoative (in the sense “describing entry into a state”):
tʋl “be hot”, tʋlig “heat up”;
bʋgʋs “be soft”, bʋk (*gg > k) “soften.”
Some of the Kusaal verbs don’t have inchoative (or p-labile) translations in English, though, like bɔdig “lose/get lost.” (In Kusaal itself, this verb actually does work as “enter/bring into a state of lostness”: there are formal syntactic tests for this in Kusaal.)
lind ‘be born; give birth’ (odd that it means both)
Some notes quickly assembled… For convenience in what follows, an overview of the active and nonactive (mediopassive) in tense/mood systems for another Albanian verb, ‘wash’:
(The auxiliary kam ‘I have’ (cf. the use of avoir, haben) is used in the perfect system of the active voice, and the auxiliary jam ‘I am’ (être, sein) used in the perfect system of the nonactive voice.)
1) From Bardhyl Demiraj (1997) Albanische Etymologien : Untersuchungen zum albanischen Erbwortschatz on lind (apologies for text capture errors); boldface added to the relevant bit:
Here is the Demiraj’s entry on lej that was cross-referenced (boldface added):
A brief look by googling forms suggests that a normative Standard Albanian might has present active indicative lind ‘(s)he bears, gives birth’ but present nonactive indicative lindet ‘(s)he is born’, but actual usuage varies in Albanian varieties as they are spoken (and influence formal and informal written texts).
2) Note this remark from Joachim Matzinger and Stefan Schumacher, ‘The morphology of Albanian’, ch. 96 in volume 3 of Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (2018), edited by Jared Klein:
3) On fluctuating usage, also observe the note on p. 199 in Linda Mëniku, Héctor Campos (2015) Colloquial Albanian: The Complete Course for Beginners, p. 199:
4) And from Dalina Kallulli ‘Passive as a feature-suppression operation’. in Passivization and Typology: Form and function (2006), ed. Werner Abraham and Larisa Leisiö:
Holy crap, that’s impressive and informative — thanks very much!
The quoted book is quite new, so I wasn’t able to find its electronic copy, but I found a slightly earlier paper (2020) by the author of the relevant chapter (on Slovaks): https://shorturl.at/86Npf
There is a similar method describe there, but it is more specific:
“Многочисленны способы защиты от вампира: клали в гроб «еврейские письмена»
(žyduvs’ko pis’mo), чтобы читал и у него не было времени ходить к живым”
[The methods of protection against vampires are numerous: they placed ‘Jewish writings’ (žyduvs’ko pis’mo) in the coffin so that he would read them and have no time to go bother the living.]
So I wonder whether the scholar had gathered more material before the book was published where she formulated a more general method (about foreign-language books) or the author of the Telegram channel punched up the fact a bit.
(Although, I read his blog regularly and it should be said he seems to be quite conscientious and meticulous when it comes to sourcing his posts.)
Thanks, that’s very helpful!