languagehat.com

Back in 2016 I posted about Lucy Scholes’ list of “hidden literary gems”; now she has a Prospect essay describing what it takes to get forgotten books back into print:

Four years ago, I began writing “Re-Covered”, a monthly column for the Paris Review website about books that are out of print or forgotten but that shouldn’t be. And two years ago I started work as an editor at McNally Editions, the publishing imprint of the New York City-based independent bookstore chain McNally Jackson. We launched early last year and like to describe the books that we publish as hidden gems; titles that are not widely known but have stood the test of time, remaining as singular and engaging as when they were first written. […]

Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting titbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.

Faber’s classics and heritage editor Ella Griffiths’s playful description of herself as an “archive mole” feels spot on. Our endeavours might be dusty, but it’s easy to become addicted to the thrill of the chase, which is made all the more exciting because serendipity plays such a pivotal role. Griffiths was browsing the shelves of Faber’s in-house archive when her eye was caught by the striking post-apocalyptic cover of their original English-language edition of Termush, Danish author and playwright Sven Holm’s 1969 dystopian novella. She’s now reissuing the book under the new Faber Editions series—which spotlights radical rediscovered voices from history—this May. […]

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Toby Morris has an amusing piece for The Spinoff (NZ/Aotearoa) about a common problem in reproducing Māori words typographically: the macron doesn’t come out right. It’s in comic form, so I can’t easily quote from it, but I’ll type out one “speech balloon” to give you an idea:

It can be complicated though: Tainui in the Waikato prefer double vowels, and many older speakers grew up not using macrons at all.

Check it out! (Via MetaFilter, where you will find discussion of computer fonts, the Hawaiian ʻokina, the Ming Kwai typewriter, and other vaguely related matters. Cf. also The World of Ā.)

A couple of years ago I posted about Paul Anthony Jones and his online avatar HaggardHawks; now I learn from Lynne Murphy’s TLS review that he’s written what sounds like a useful book:

Those who follow Paul Anthony Jones’s work know him as a first-rate collector of linguistic curios. Through his books and prodigious Twitter output (@HaggardHawks), he entertains us with lost words, strange etymologies, and language puzzles. His ninth book, Why Is This a Question?, shifts from curios to a deeper curiosity – from wondering about individual words to wondering about language itself.

Each of the twenty chapters poses a question and explores its possible answers, roping in evidence from a university’s worth of disciplines – from archaeology to zoology, with history, neurology, psychology and plenty of linguistics along the way. Many of the questions are unanswerable, but that only makes the chapters more interesting. “What is the hardest language to learn?” (chapter 5) depends on many factors, including which languages one already knows. But in considering the question we get to learn about the US Foreign Service categories of language difficulty, the meaning of the word xenoglossophobia (“fear of foreign languages”), and how and why Lord Byron came to write Albanian textbooks. The pace is exhilarating. […]

Jones acknowledges the complexity of the issues, summarizing academic debates and explaining why some “common sense” ideas about language aren’t always helpful. (For instance, if you think you know what a word is, Jones has news for you.) He paints these often abstract and technical issues in clear and vivid tones. The reader is encouraged to blow a raspberry to understand the mechanics of our vocal cords and why their vibrations could not be controlled by our brains. By formatting text in unusual ways, Jones gets the reader to feel the ways in which our smooth experience of reading is anything but straightforward.

Examples from dozens of languages give us a feel for the range of human linguistic potential. Many of us know that French divides its nouns into “masculine” and “feminine” genders, but will be surprised by the Amazonian language Miraña, which has more than seventy such categories. We know about Roman and Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese characters, but what about the ingenuity of the Inuktitut writing system, in which a vowel is indicated by the written orientation of the preceding consonant?

Thank goodness we live at a time when popular books on language are written by people who know what they’re talking about!

Making my way slowly (but happily!) through Goldstein (see this post), I came across the phrase бросать зары ‘to throw zary’ and was (as often while reading this maddening book) at a loss. Eventually I discovered that зар is borrowed from Turkish zar ‘die, dice’ (Dmitry Pruss says in the comments “зары is a regular Russian word for dice when the 2 dice are used for playing нарды [backgammon]”). Then I checked the etymology of the Turkish word and found it’s from Arabic زهر [zahr] (of the same meaning) — at least according to Wiktionary (see the OED passage below) — and check out the Descendants section at that page! Besides Turkish, it’s been borrowed into Maltese, Persian (and thence into Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian), Greek, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and from French hasard we get English hazard, for which the OED (entry updated January 2018) has this copious etymology section:
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I was looking up the French word faîte ‘top, summit, pinnacle’ when I noticed the etymology said it was from Proto-Germanic *firstiz and cited Old English first as a cognate. I was surprised, but I quickly learned there was a noun first (“Now rare“) that means “An inner roof; a ceiling, esp. a panelled one” or “The ridge piece of a roof” (OED; “probably < the same Indo-European base as classical Latin postis doorpost”). The common adjective (“That is before all others”) is in origin just the superlative of fore, but the OED entry (updated September 2014) has an interesting “History of use as ordinal of ‘one’”:
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Andrey Gritsman, born in Moscow and living in the US, works as a physician and writes poetry; he has an essay in EastWest Literary Forum called On Bilingual Poetry and Self-Translation that, while rambling and occasionally unclear, says some interesting things. A few excerpts:

At times, specific feelings and emotional situations are better expressed in a non-native language due to the development of a new sensibility, more natural for a newly acquired tongue. […]

I was asked several times in which language I dream. I was thinking about this and realized that in my dreams people talk, I talk to them, and there is some language. But then I realized that it is not English and it is not Russian, it is a language that I understand but it does not have words or familiar sounds of one of the recognizable languages. And then it occurred to me that this is similar to the famous Pentecostal event in Jerusalem when a crowd of people of different nations heard the same sermon spoken in a “language” understood by them, i.e., in their native tongue. So, I concluded that this probably could be qualified as the language of poetry or a language above other languages. Some see it as a metaphysical substance that a poet puts into a certain language but which existed before him and which is transferred into words, and subsequently, it lives in the poet’s soul and mind. A monologue of the soul, so to speak. […]

The language itself dictates the way a poem is to be created. This is why attempts, by a great poet such as Joseph Brodsky, to place a poem from the original language, a Russian syllabo-tonic poem, into a framework of a totally different language sometimes produce cumbersome results. The number of words in poems in two different languages varies, which is only natural considering the vast differences between Russian and English. Sometimes unexpected images or different idioms enter the plot of the poem, or the language itself pulls apart the plot or adds an additional layer to the poem. However, the most important criterion in translation is recognizing the sound, although a poet-translator should maintain fidelity to the meaning of words, as much as the other language allows.

Tess Gallagher once mentioned that, when reading a translation of a foreign poem, the English language reader would like to see a good poem written in English. This particular philosophy was shared by Boris Pasternak, a great Russian poet and a famous translator of Shakespeare into Russian. […]

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As longtime readers of LH will know, I’m not a huge fan of Bryan Garner in his capacity of generalized style maven (though his books on legal usage are excellent), but as I wrote here: “if magisterial guidance, with an occasional twinkle in the eye and lots of citations, is what you want, Garner is your man.” I read Sarah Butcher’s OUP Blog Q&A with interest and pleasure, and I found this bit enjoyable enough to share:

By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.

I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. I liked combustible, raucous words, such as blast, bray, fulminate, and thunder. I liked arch, high-toned words, such as athwart, calumny, cynosure, and decrepitude. I liked toga-wearing, Socratic-sounding words, such as eristic, homunculus, palimpsest, and theologaster. I liked mellifluous, polysyllabic words, such as antediluvian, postprandial, protuberance, and undulation. I liked the technical and quasi-technical terms of rhetoric, such as asyndeton, periphrasis, quodlibet, and synecdoche. I liked frequentative verbs with an onomatopoetic feel, such as gurgle, jostle, piffle, and topple. I liked evocative words about language, such as billingsgate, logolatry, wordmonger, and zinger. I liked scatological, I-can’t-believe-this-term-exists words, such as coprolalia, fimicolous, scatomancy, and stercoraceous. I liked astonishing, denotatively necessary words that more people ought to know, such as mumpsimus and ultracrepidarian. I liked censoriously yelping words, such as balderdash, hooey, pishposh, and poppycock. I liked mirthful, tittering words, such as cowlick, flapdoodle, horsefeathers, and icky.

In short, I fell in love with language.

I think many of us can relate. But I can’t resist pointing out, with copyeditorial schadenfreude, that there is no such book as “Webster’s Second New International Dictionary.” There is, in its stead, a book called Webster’s New International Dictionary: Second Edition Unabridged. Put that in your style guide and smoke it!

A bit over a year ago I posted about Vladimir Sorokin’s 1994 novel Норма (Norma, forthcoming from New York Review Books in Max Lawton’s translation as The Norm); after that, put off by what I knew about his Ice trilogy, I didn’t read any more of his work until getting to 2006 in my long march and pulling his День опричника (translated by Jamey Gambrell as Day of the Oprichnik) off the shelf. The gap of a dozen years between the novels made this one feel like it was by a different writer, and that’s what I mainly want to talk about; for descriptions of the plot, I’ll send you to a good NY Times review (archived) by the deeply knowledgeable Stephen Kotkin (see my Year in Reading praise for his biography of Stalin: Volume I, Volume II), a recent n+1 essay by Michael Scott Moore that ties it in to current events, and a less-than-enthusiastic complete review review by M.A. Orthofer.

When we last met up with Sorokin, he was gleefully deconstructing Russian and Soviet reality and its reflection in literature, combining clichéd plots with wild and frequently obscene stylistic inventions. His avowed aim was to blow it all up so that it couldn’t be used any more; having succeeded, he had to decide what to do next as he stood amid the smoking wreckage. It would seem that he turned to the kind of skewed reflections of post-Soviet reality that his rival Pelevin had built a career on (see, e.g., this post), except instead of pop Buddhism and werewolves he has a revived oprichnina and some accompanying early-modern phenomena, all coexisting with modern cellphones, cars, and drugs. As I wrote Lizok: “It’s fun, mind you, I’m not complaining, and it’s good when authors change things up (Pelevin got predictable pretty fast), it’s just a bit of a shock.” The thing is that even though it’s readable and enjoyable, it doesn’t feel especially necessary in the way that Roman and Norma did — it’s like Sorokin has come down to earth and is venting his outrage against the outrageous nature of Putin’s Russia in reasonably typical Russian-novel ways. I expect I’ll read and enjoy more of his novels (I have copies of Метель and Манарага), but I doubt they’ll surprise me the way his early work did. The only author I can think of who made a comparable shift from the brilliantly experimental to the comparatively mundane is Alexander Veltman — see my posts about his first novel, Странник [The wanderer], and his later Саломея [Salomea], which is tremendously enjoyable but not strange in the way his early work was.

As a linguistic note, among the obsolete words he revives for use by his oprichniki, one of my favorites is уд [ud], a hilarious term for ‘penis.’ Pelevin used it in his 1999 novel Generation «П» as part of a slogan for a condom: МАЛ, ДА УД АЛ ‘SMALL, BUT THE PENIS IS RED’ (see this post for further explanation).

And now, back to Alexander Goldstein’s Спокойные поля [Peaceful fields] (see this post); I had to take a break from it because it was such a dense read, but now I’m eager to get back to it.

I don’t know why I posted about this on Facebook instead of here; I guess I happened to be there when the question occurred to me. At any rate, the word is so interesting and the solution so satisfying I’m going to repost it here:

I’m reading the Calvin Tomkins piece on Tala Madani in last week’s New Yorker, and I just got to this:

“Fortunately, I loved school, and reading was a big part of my life, especially history and Runi mythology,” she told me.

I’ve read a fair amount about Iranian history and culture, and I’ve never heard of “Runi mythology”; furthermore, there’s no “runi” in either of my Farsi dictionaries. Is this a lapse on the part of the famed NYkr fact-checking department? Should it be “Rumi” (but what might “Rumi mythology” be)? Or is it some obscure thing that Madani and the NYkr fact-checkers know about but I don’t? Any enlightenment is welcome.

UPDATE: It turns out that, as Lameen Souag suggested and Patrick Taylor confirmed, it’s the word “Irɑni” (‘Iranian’) with the colloquial shift ɑ > u before nasals, so it means “Iranian mythology.” I’m glad it’s not a mistake, but I wonder if the fact-checkers investigated — you’d think the magazine would have added an explanation…

Another interesting linguistic tidbit occurs later in the article: “a tasty Iranian soup called Ash-e-anar.” Setting aside the pointless capital A (would they write “a tasty Italian dish called Pizza”?), we have two common words, آش âš ‘(thick) soup’ and انار anâr ‘pomegranate,’ joined by the ezafe, which is omnipresent in speech but (to the annoyance of learners) not indicated in writing. Both nouns are of obscure etymology; for the former, Wiktionary says:

Perhaps from a Turkic language, see Common Turkic *aš. […] however there seems to be an unexplained mismatch in vowel length. Compare Azerbaijani aş, Bashkir аш (aş), Yakut ас (as).

Alternatively, inherited from Middle Persian (/āš/), a hapax legomenon found in the Vendidad, although this word is claimed to be misread.

Connections with Sanskrit आश (āśa, “food”) are also sometimes proposed, but the correspondance would not be regular.

And anâr is “Probably ultimately related to the pomegranate terms under Arabic رُمَّان‎ (rummān)” (itself “Uncertain direct and ultimate source, not Semitic,” with an impressive list of ancient comparanda). At any rate, the soup looks delicious.

Back in 2017 I posted about a crackpot theory of the Germanic presence in Britain called “Anglish and English: Why our language is 750 and not 1,500 years old”; Yvy tyvy commmented: “When I saw the word ‘Anglish,’ I thought this was going to be about modern English without borrowings. I am saddened.” Well, let the unsaddening begin, because that’s the point of anglish.org:

What is Anglish?

Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. Anglish is linguistic purism applied to English.

For example:

Dictionary > Wordbook
Famous > Nameknown
Native > Inborn
Decide > Choose
Computer > Reckoner

This is achieved by simply choosing to use a native word over a borrowed word, or if there is no modern native word for a given concept, Old English words can be revived and updated to modern spelling and phonology to be used for a modern meaning.
[…]

More recently in the 21st century, author David Cowley has released his book called “How We’d Talk If the English Had Won in 1066“, among others, that goes into depth on the vocabulary and sound changes that happened to English as a result of Norman influence. Cowley is not the only one making new writings in and about Anglish, there are many online communities from YouTube to Reddit to Discord that generate new Anglish works on a regular basis. Many creators see this form of constrained writing as inspirational and challenging to their creativity.

As long as it’s just a stimulus to creativity and not a claim of superiority, I see nothing wrong with it. But I suspect the good people of the Anglish project (who sent me the link) expect more from it than it will give, and I’m also pretty sure that if the English had won in 1066 their language would have borrowed a lot of words anyway. That’s what languages do.