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During the last few days I’ve gobbled up Pavel Pepperstein’s 2011 novel Пражская ночь, translated by Andrew Bromfield as A Prague Night. It’s short and very readable, like the two previous novels I’ve zipped through — Yuri Buida’s Третье сердце [Third heart], about a Russian obsessed with his role in past killings who meets a psychopathic one-legged girl in 1926 Paris, and Vladimir Sorokin’s Метель [The Blizzard], in which Dr. Garin is so determined to bring zombie-plague vaccine to an affected town that he forces the cheerful Perkhusha and his fifty mini-horses to drive through an increasingly dangerous blizzard — and I’m posting about it because it’s particularly language-oriented as well as very well written. But before I get to that stuff, I have to confess that I fell in love with it because it’s set in, and saturated with, the city of Prague.

I spent a couple of weeks in Prague in the course of two visits, a quarter of a century ago now, and I found it magical, full of both antique ghosts (defenestrations! Kafka!) and modern energy, not to mention good food and superb beer (my favorite hangout was U Pinkasů near the northern end of Václavské náměstí). I walked as many streets as I could in both Old and New Towns, I visited the Castle and Vyšehrad and the Old Jewish Cemetery (where I placed a stone on Rabbi Löw’s grave), I tossed a coin off the Charles Bridge, I did all the tourist things, so I was the perfect audience for Pepperstein’s travelogue (at one point his narrator apologizes for describing yet another colorful part of town, and I mentally said “Don’t apologize, keep it up!”). So discount my enthusiasm a tad unless you are similarly besotted with the city.
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I was reading Nicholas Penny’s LRB review (archived) of the Carlo Crivelli exhibit at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery when I hit a word unfamiliar to me (my bolding):

Gesso relief of this kind was probably first devised and certainly most often used for the representation of haloes, but in the Vatican altarpiece Crivelli superimposed a crown on a halo – relief on relief. He sometimes attempted high relief, giving some of his saints accessories carved in wood (a morse in one case and a pair of keys in another).

I had absolutely no idea what a morse might be, but the OED came to the rescue: it’s “The clasp or fastening of a cope, frequently made of gold or silver, and set with precious stones.” It turns out that there are two nouns morse (ignoring the capitalized code); both entries were updated in December 2002, and both have interesting etymologies. This one says:

Etymology: < Middle French mors (c1160 in Old French in this sense; also in Old French in sense ‘piece, bit’ (1176), and in Anglo-Norman and Old French in sense ‘bite, mouthful’ (c1120 in Old French); compare morsel n.)) < classical Latin morsus bite, catch (of a buckle) < mordēre to bite (see mordant adj.) + -sus, variant of -tus, suffix forming verbal nouns.

It makes sense that a word for ‘clasp, fastening’ would come from a verb ‘to bite,’ but it was still unexpected. The other morse means either ‘walrus’ (“Now rare”) or ‘hippopotamus’ (“Obsolete”):
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This is just a minipostlet, but I have to record one of the best typos I’ve ever seen. I’m reading Christopher Priest’s sf novel Inverted World and have just gotten to a passage about how the world works; I won’t provide context (spoilers!), but in the e-book I’m reading I came across the sentence “Here the universe is the rule.” I was startled and amused, realizing in a split second (thanks to years of copyediting) that it was an error for “Here the inverse is the rule” (which is apparently what is found in other editions). That would make an excellent item for an editing test!

Back in 2010, when I was reading Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and reporting enthusiastically on it (see the final post and the links therein), I made several posts about the adoption of Latin-based and then Cyrillic-based scripts for the various languages of the realm, and in one of them I mentioned the proposed latinization of Chinese, called Sin Wenz (i.e., 新文字 Xīn Wénzì). Now I’m sharing a more detailed discussion from Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, via Far Outliers (see this post for an earlier quote from that book):

In 1921, twenty-two-year-old Qu Qiubai was dispatched by a Chinese news syndicate from Beijing to the Soviet Union with a mission to report on the post-Bolshevik regime. The journey would become a personal quest as well as a political pilgrimage for this rookie journalist with delicate features and a touch of melancholy. Qu unexpectedly met many compatriots on his way to Moscow, among them Chinese laborers and shopkeepers ensconced in the Far East cities of Irkutsk and Chita.
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Qu was sent back to Russia in 1928 with many of his fellow Chinese Marxists to regroup under the tutelage of their Bolshevik brothers. By this time, the language question occupied the forefront of the Soviet Union’s policy toward its own national minorities. The newly unified Soviet Union included swaths of Central Asia that did not speak or read Russian. […]

The Soviets were eager to include the Chinese laborers of the Amur region as a test group in their anti-illiteracy Latinization campaigns, hoping to extend their influence even further into Asia. These were the Chinese laborers whom Qu had met during his first trip to the Soviet Union. Their illiteracy rate was almost 100 percent.

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The origin of the word April is mysterious; Henry Hoenigswald called it “the most obscure of the Latin month names.” This was in his 1941 article “On Etruscan and Latin Month-Names” (American Journal of Philology 62.2: 199-206), which begins with Émile Benveniste:

After rejecting for good reasons the Indo-European etymologies of the word, he recognizes its Etruscan character and ties it up with the proper names Lat. Aprilius Aprius Apronius, Etr. apruntial, the combination of which leads to an Etr. *apru. *apru, for its part, may be identified with the Greek short-name Ἀφρώ “Ἀφροδίτα,” a form which the Etruscans would have taken over, like so many other mythical elements, from central Greece. Under such circumstances it is perhaps not a mere accident if in Thessalic calendars a month Ἂφριος appears, which corresponds to late March and early April.

Hoenigswald then adduces Etruscan Amp(h)iles ‘May’ and says that not only does it share “the well known Etruscan -l-suffix,” but “it can also be shown that its structure is essentially analogous to that of Aprilis.” After much discussion of other Etruscan names, he concludes:

Thus, the mediaeval tradition of Etruscan month-names deserves more credence than it is usually given. It is highly probable that the Etruscans named their months after gods; and it is a lucky accident that just that part of the Etruscan language with which we are most familiar, the proper names, contains enough related elements to let us know or guess the significance of those denominations, and the principles of their formation.

The OED (entry updated December 2008) is dubious, saying Latin Aprīlis is “of uncertain origin; perhaps < Etruscan,” but the derivation is certainly attractive and I’m tentatively adopting it. Anatoly Liberman, in his investigation, says “All things considered, the Etruscan origin of April is hardly more convincing than the others we have examined here,” but he doesn’t reference Hoenigswald, and I rarely agree with him anyway. Thanks for the links, Bruce!

Update. Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has kindly provided Robert Maltby’s entry on Aprilis from A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1991).

I vividly remember when Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came out in 1977, and the rave reviews it got (the bloody thing was nominated for the National Book Award!); I thought then, and continue to think, that it is as prime an example of crackpottery as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came out a couple of years later to similar acclaim. I was lured into reading Scott Alexander’s review because he started so winningly, saying it has “only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.” Thus suckered in, I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but wouldn’t have thought of it as LH material except for this excursus:

Jaynes partisans are able to come up with a few anthropological works suggesting that the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don’t seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way.

I’m tempted to answer “yes, obviously”, but for the counterargument, see this Reddit thread.

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Simon Romero reports for the NY Times (archived) on a dialect of Spanish that is slipping away:

QUESTA, N.M. — When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, N.M., a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish. Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect. But Spanish speakers from four centuries ago might have recognized the unusual verb conjugations — if not the unorthodox pronunciations and words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America.

For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region.

Even just a few decades ago, the New Mexican dialect remained at the forefront of Spanish-language media in the United States, featured on television programs like the nationally syndicated 1960s Val de la O variety show. Balladeers like Al Hurricane nurtured the dialect in their songs. But such fixtures, along with the dazzling array of Spanish-language newspapers that once flourished in northern New Mexico, have largely faded. […]

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John Cowan wrote me as follows:

Proto-Semitic and Egyptian is a chapter by John Huehnergard from a forthcoming book Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic, obviously descended from a conference talk. Here’s a money quote:

My frustration in working on Afro-Asiatic was brought into sharp focus one semester, twenty-five or thirty years ago, when my late Harvard colleague Calvert Watkins, the eminent Indo-Europeanist, asked me to present the status quaestionis on AfroAsiatic to his graduate seminar on historical linguistics. At the end of my two- or three-hour presentation, Watkins’s first comment was something like, “So, not really an established family, then.” And I believe he was right, in the sense that there was still a long way to go to elicit significant numbers of plausible cognate sets across the branches and to formulate consistent sound correspondences on the basis of those cognates, the most fundamental goals of the comparative method. And I also believe that is still true today.

What is needed, still, is a reconstruction of the earlier stages of the other branches of Afro-Asiatic besides Egyptian and Semitic. If, for example, the Cushitic languages constitute a family, and if they are related to the Semitic languages, the comparanda must be Proto-Cushitic and Proto-Semitic. It is not acceptable to compare a form in a particular Cushitic language with a possibly similar form in a particular Semitic language; we are dealing with an enormous time depth, and the chance of accidental similarity is simply too great. Likewise, if there is a genetic relationship between Egyptian and Semitic, it must be because they descend, separately, from an ancestor that predates both of them.

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A pleasing obiter dictum from the melancholic and magisterial Samuel Johnson (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

Every man’s opinion, at least his desires, are a little influenced by his favourite studies. My zeal for languages may seem, perhaps, rather over-heated, even to those by whom I desire to be well esteemed. To those who have nothing in their thoughts but trade or policy, present power, or present money, I should not think it necessary to defend my opinions; but with men of letters I would not unwillingly compound, by wishing the continuance of every language, however narrow in its extent, or however incommodious for common purposes, till it is reposited in some version of a known book, that it may be always hereafter examined and compared with other languages, and then permitting its disuse. For this purpose, the translation of the Bible is most to be desired.

Needless to say, I disagree with the idea that once it is reposited a language can be disposed of, but still: a noble sentiment.

Back in 2007 I posted about a radio talk Deborah Tannen gave about “New York Style”; now here’s her early paper on a version of the topic, “New York Jewish Conversational Style” (International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30[1981]:133–149). That link is the paywalled De Gruyter one, but you can read the paper here, and an enjoyable read it is. Some excerpts:

My own findings on New York Jewish conversational style were in a way serendipitous as well. I had begun with the goal of discovering the features that made up the styles of each participant in two-and-a-half hours of naturally occurring conversation at dinner on Thanksgiving 1978. Analysis revealed, however, that three of the participants, all natives of New York of East European Jewish background, shared many stylistic features which could be seen to have a positive effect when used with each other and a negative effect when used with the three others. Moreover, the evening’s interaction was later characterized by three of the participants (independently) as “‘New York Jewish’ or ‘New York’”. Finally, whereas the tapes contained many examples of interchanges between two or three of the New Yorkers, it had no examples of talk among non-New Yorkers in which the New Yorkers did not participate. Thus, what began as a general study of conversational style ended by becoming an analysis of New York Jewish conversational style (Tannen, 1979).
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