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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Gustaf Sobin’s Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc:

For just as the flora has left its ghostly imprint embedded in so much fossilized matter, so, too, its memory has been sprinkled across the surface of innumerable church cartularies, bullaria, monastic records; been buried within the archival wealth of countless wills and testaments, marriage contracts, notarized deeds; or, occasionally, been inscribed across the surface of cadastral survey maps, outlining the limits of given properties. Within such documents, a stray phytotoponym—an oblique reference, say, to some olive grove offered up as part of a medieval dowry—gives researchers, on occasion, an invaluable aperçu of the floral environment of a particular locale at a given historical moment.

Fagus sylvatica, or common beech, is a perfect example in point. For the expanse that that tree once occupied can still be measured today, either by the lingering presence of ancient place-names in current usage or by the detection of such names in medieval records. In toponymic form, the tree appears under a variety of synonyms: Fage, Fau, Fagette, Fageas, Fayard, and so on. In each and every case, these place-names testify to a vanished environment. Infallibly, they indicate the exact location of forests that—in retracting—have left nothing for memento but their own estranged vocables. Among the many eloquent examples cited by Aline Durand, one in particular—drawn from a medieval cartulary— refers to a certain Faja oscura located in the Causse du Larzac. Faja signifies the tree itself, with all the nutritive oils inherent in its woody fruit, whereas oscura evokes the darkness, and thus the density, of those once-flourishing beeches. Long since converted into pastureland, that arboreal stand endures in a lone microtoponym: Lou Fagals. Mnemonic marker, it designates little more than a tiny ramshackle hamlet in the commune of Les Rives (Hérault).

The word—along with its residual counterpart, the fossil—bears witness to those vanished landscapes. Properly interpreted, its seemingly inconsequential particles, buried in so much somnolent documentation, allow one a glimpse—at least—of that lost ecology. It’s as if the word, as a token of human consciousness, had withstood the retraction and ultimate disappearance of that dense sylvatic canopy—that Faja oscura—in order to preserve the wood’s very memory. Even more, it serves to preserve our very own. For in that retraction and ultimate disappearance, the interface between culture and nature—cultum and incultum—has vanished as well. Only the word, it would seem, has withstood that spoliation. Having done so, it reminds us of a time in which the woods—the earth itself—hadn’t yet been sacrificed, alas, for the sake of ourselves alone.

Of course it’s wildly overstated (“In each and every case,” “Infallibly,” “exact location”), but it describes something real, and I confess I like that sort of thing even if I’m not a tree-hugger.

Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik have an article in Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale (116 [2022]:113–166), “Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals!” Here’s the abstract:

This article presents two previously unpublished Old Babylonian tablets on which are inscribed similar bilingual vocabularies. The language in their right-hand columns is Old Babylonian Akkadian. The language in their left-hand columns is mostly North-West Semitic, with some admixture of Akkadian. Editions of the two tablets are accompanied by a commentary which finds parallels for this language in the grammar and vocabulary of other Semitic languages. Evaluation of the results of this enquiry lead to the conclusion that the language of the left-hand columns is a variety of Amorite. The main part of the article concludes with consideration of the two vocabularies’ content, composition and intellectual background. An appendix offers an edition of a Middle Babylonian synonym list related in part to Malku V. It contains a passage on domestic and wild animals which collects mainly North-West Semitic words for domestic and wild animals and probably provides several further items of Amorite vocabulary. Finally we add an index of the words in the Amorite columns of the two Old Babylonian vocabularies.

The article itself is paywalled, but there’s a popular summary at Haaretz, “Two 3,800-year-old Cuneiform Tablets Found in Iraq Give First Glimpse of Hebrew Precursor“:

The two tablets were found in Iraq during the Gulf War and were transferred (some would say stolen) from there to a safe place overseas. However, they subsequently got swallowed up among thousands of other documents and archeological findings from the field. Only recently, more than 30 years after their discovery, did they catch the eye of two researchers. “Andrew George of the University of London and Manfred Krebernik of Germany’s University of Jena are the Ronaldo and Messi of the archeology world,” says Wasserman, as a way of making his field of scholarship more relatable for the wider public. […]

Cohen transcribed the Amorite/Canaanite text from cuneiform into Hebrew letters and presented a modern Hebrew translation. The result speaks for itself. The line ti -nam me -e la – a – i -de -ni translates to ten mayim al yadenu (“Give water on our hands”); ia – a – a -nam si -qí-ni – a -ti becomes yeinam shiqiniti (“Pour us wine”); si – ḫa šu -ul – ḫ a -nam is have et hashulhan (“Fetch the table”); la – a ḫ -ma -am bi -lam na – a -NAM is have lehem eleinu (“Bring us bread”); and bi -ik -ra -ti -ia za -ba – a – ḫa a -na DI ĜIR -ia la -am – [ti] -in equals et zevah bikurai lo eten le’eli (“I will make a sacrifice to my god”).

Thanks, Y and Dmitry!

I’m currently reading Спокойные поля [Peaceful fields] by Alexander Goldstein (or Goldshtein; see this post); it’s a real struggle because of his uniquely difficult prose. It’s not only that he uses unusual words and obscure cultural references; as Stanislav Lvovsky’s preface to my edition says, “все усложняющийся от книги к книге синтаксис в «Спокойных полях» временами совсем сходит с ума и отказывается говорить, сходит на бормотание, почти ремизовскую хлыстовскую скороговорку” [the syntax, increasingly complex from book to book, in Peaceful Fields at times goes completely out of its mind and refuses to speak, descending into mumbling, almost Remizovan Khlyst patter]. (Remizov had a notoriously complex style, but I don’t know what the Khlysts are doing here — perhaps a reference to his 1906 novella Чертик [The Little Devil], which features a very similar sect, or is there a Khlystov I’ve never heard of?) Here’s a sterling example, from the chapter На тропе [On the path]; I’m giving a substantial chunk for context, but the phrase that baffled me is in the last sentence (I’ve bolded it):

Месяца через три, через шесть, через девять, время имело иное значение, не мерилось привычной мерой, месяцы были иные, подвижные, яркие, с ящеричной повадкой, о них нельзя было знать, с какой скоростью, почтовой, курьерской, побегут минуту спустя, а взбрыкнут — совсем остановятся, что будет крайней, опаснейшей прытью, гнетущим сердцебиением и одышкой, выпаденьем то марта, то прериаля, то сентября, обморочной перетасовкой всей дюжины, ничего, обошлось, он сидел на прогретом камне в лесочке, босой, холщовые штаны, кобзарская рубаха, летатлин-бандурист. Складской запас маскарадный, личина телесного сокрывания, послеполуденный дремного отдыха театр — нет, не так, все не так: вещного мира, в котором одежда, не замечающий, вышел в первом, что приглянулось для пешего хода.

I’m not even going to try to translate it, but if you know Russian, you might take a moment to try to figure out why that phrase is in the genitive and what it depends on. In desperation, I wrote to the always helpful Anatoly, and his response is after the cut.
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Frequent commenter ktschwarz made a Wordorigins post about the construction “the more the merrier,” pointing (with a sigh) to a meme that’s going around claiming that “the” here is “not the article […] it is a different word” meaning either ‘when’ or ‘then’: “‘The more, the merrier’ literally means ‘when more, then merrier.'” This is not even a little bit true; kts quotes a Twitter thread by linguist Danny Bate that begins:

‘The more, the merrier’ is an example of a comparative correlative.

The construction is formed through the pair ‘the… the…’ in Modern English – the two come from Old English ‘þȳ… þȳ…’ and are therefore relics of the instrumental, an extinct grammatical case of English.

That is to say, the ‘the’ in phrases like ‘the more, the merrier’ and the definite article come from different forms of the same word (Old English sē, sēo, þæt). The fact that the two are now identical in modern spelling and pronunciation is due to a later accident of history.

This is a nice similarity between English and Czech – the same construction also makes use of the instrumental case, which in Czech is alive and well. For example, the phrase ‘čím více tím lépe’ (‘the more, the better’) relies on the words čím and tím, both in the instrumental.

The OED has an entry the, adv. (updated June 2018), “Used with a following comparative adjective or adverb to emphasize the effect of circumstances indicated by the context”:
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This BBC Future piece by Sophie Hardach has a typically silly thumbsucker premise (“Here’s what they can teach us about crafting an immortal message”), but I liked the focus on one particular beer-brewing scribe. Here’s the start:

More than 2,000 years ago, in a temple in the city of Borsippa in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq, a student was doing his homework. His name was Nabu-kusurshu, and he was training to be a temple brewer. His duties involved brewing beer for religious offerings, but also, learning to keep administrative records on clay tablets in cuneiform script, and preserving ancient hymns by making copies of worn-out tablets. These daily tasks, and his devotion to beer, writing and knowledge, made him part of an extraordinarily resilient literary legacy.

Cuneiform had already been around for roughly 3,000 years by the time Nabu-kusurshu picked up his reed stylus. It was invented by the Sumerians, who initially used it to record rations of food – and indeed, beer – paid to workers or delivered to temples. Over time, the Sumerian texts became more complex, recording beautiful myths and songs – including one celebrating the goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, and her skilled use of “the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound“. When Sumerian gradually slid out of common use, and was replaced by the more modern Akkadian, scribes cleverly wrote long lists of signs in both languages, essentially creating ancient dictionaries, to make sure the wisdom of the oldest tablets would always be understood. 

Nabu-kusurshu’s generation, who would have spoken Akkadian or maybe Aramaic in everyday life, was among the last to use the cuneiform script. But he probably assumed that he was just one ordinary young writer in a long line of writers, preserving cuneiform for many more generations, under the benevolent eye of Nabu, the god of writing and “scribe of the universe”. He faithfully copied the old tablets, noting down for example that a Sumerian sign pronounced “u”, could mean marriage gift, burglar, or buttocks. He wrote on the tablets that he copied them “for his own study”, perhaps as practice or scholarship, and placed them in the temple as an offering.

“He’s learning how to write, and learning these lists, alongside other things, and then dedicating his work to the god Nabu and the temple,” says Jay Crisostomo, a professor of ancient Near Eastern civilisations and languages at the University of Michigan, who has studied Nabu-kusurshu’s tablets in depth.

It was these humble lists, quietly written in the shadow of a giant ziggurat – a pyramid-shaped stepped temple tower – that would earn Nabu-kusurshu immortality.

I’ve reproduced a couple of the links, but there are more at the original article, along with passages on Linear B and Mayan and a continuation about how you too can ensure that your message will last through the ages. Thanks, Trevor!

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Stephanie W. Jamison, The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India (Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 39:

I assume that the language in which a myth is told is an integral part of the telling, not a gauzy verbal garment that can be removed without damage to the real meaning of the myth. The clues to contemporary understanding of myth often lie in its vocabulary and phraseology, which have complex and suggestive relationships with similar vocabulary and phraseology elsewhere. Examining other instances of the same words and phrases will often allow us to see these associations.

I think this is probably true of all mythology: that the verbal expression is of major importance and that abstracting themes or archetypes or patterns from their verbal expression does violence to the ‘meaning’ of the myth.

I am in hearty agreement. In general, it’s a bad idea to ignore the words in which people express things.

In E.M. Cioran’s “Lettre à un ami lointain” (Letter to a Faraway Friend), the first chapter in his book Histoire et utopie (History and Utopia), there is a remarkable passage about his switch from writing in Romanian to French:

It would be the narrative of a nightmare, were I to give you a detailed account of the history of my relations with this borrowed idiom, with all these words so often weighed, worked over, refined, subtle to the point of nonexistence, bowed beneath the exactions of nuance, inexpressive from having expressed everything, alarming in their precision, burdened with fatigue and modesty, discreet even in vulgarity. How should a Scyth come to terms with such terms, grasp their true meaning and wield them with scruple, with probity? There is not one among them whose exhausted elegance fails to dizzy me: no longer a trace of earth, of blood, of soul in such words. A syntax of severe, of cadaverous dignity encompasses them and assigns them a place from which God Himself could not dislodge them. What consumption of coffee, of cigarettes and of dictionaries merely to write one half-way decent sentence in this inapproachable language, too noble and too distinguished for my taste! I realized as much, unfortunately, only after the fact, when it was too late to change my course; otherwise, I should never have abandoned our own, whose odor of growth and corruption I occasionally regret, that mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, its splendid squalor. Return to it, I cannot; the tongue I was obliged to adopt pinions and subjugates me by the very pains it has cost me.

It’s reminiscent of Nabokov’s famous lament about having to give up Russian for English; I wish I could quote the original French, but the French keep their literary treasures locked up tight.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska’s Asymptote interview with José Vergara about his All Future Plunges to the Past (see this LH post) is full of good stuff, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but what drives me to post it is this exchange:

KB: Who are the Russian translators (ie, people translating into the Russian)—of Joyce or any other authors!—whose work you especially admire?

JV: Given the context, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the monumental work of Andrey Rene (a pseudonym referring to André the Giant), who completed the first Russian Finnegans Wake at the end of 2021. Others have published some fragments before, and Rene’s version is, indeed, imperfect, but the fact that he was able to do it at all is worth commending. There’s a three-volume edition without annotations, as well as a seventeen-volume edition with his commentary—all available for free here.

It’s called «На помине Финнеганов», as distinguished from what is apparently the canonical rendition of the title, «Поминки по Финнегану», and begins:

      рекутопия, после здания Евы и Адама, уйдя от берега, найти чтоб устья изгиб, принесёт нас по разомкнутому прочному круговику назад к границам и Замку-на-Взгорье.

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I found this post by Anatoly Vorobey (in Russian) so interesting I thought I’d translate it here (I’ve added a few links):

Ya. F. on Facebook (link) wrote well a few years ago about diglossia in Israeli high tech:

An acquaintance told me that in their office they write on Slack in Hebrew. And I was like, “What?”

Nowhere I’ve worked do they write anything in Hebrew. I mean, electronically. E-mails, instant messages, presentations, documentation — everything is in English. At the same time, they speak Hebrew, of course. At the Technion, too: lectures in Hebrew, textbooks in English. E-mail messages, too. Well, that’s understandable — just try to write in Hebrew on that scary green terminal.

I think it’s partly for technical-historical reasons (even when you could write in Hebrew, there was no guarantee that the recipient would get the text in readable form), partly (in)convenience (the terms are in English anyway), and partly that you often work with foreign countries, and then if the e-mail is in Hebrew, you can’t forward it.

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Joe Baur writes for BBC Travel about the way Berliners talk:

Berliners generally have a reputation for being cold, outspoken and blunt. This modus operandi is cheekily (or fearfully) called the Berliner Schnauze, literally the “Berliner Snout”. It plays off a need for order, an assumption that everyone else is doing something wrong, followed by a brash correction of the behaviour.

Victims of the Berliner Schnauze are usually passersby, getting told off for something they didn’t realise they were doing wrong. In our case, it was triggered by the recycling bins overflowing at the apartment building. Others have experienced it on the U-Bahn when they were too hasty getting on and someone barked, “Erst raus dann rein!” (“First out, then in!”). Whatever the case may be, the Berliner Schnauze strikes without warning, usually unprovoked, delivering a brutal level of honesty you never asked for.

On paper, Berliner Schnauze is simply a dialect of German spoken in and around Berlin. In reality, it’s a visceral dialect merged with working-class attitude and influences from French and Yiddish that can be as polarising as it is varied.

Dr Peter Rosenberg, a West Berlin-born linguist whose familiarity with Berliner Schnauze comes from years of study and lived experience, describes it as a “schlagfertig”, or quick-witted linguistic game. He says that it’s the colloquial language of Berlin – the spark behind a comment or the way you respond to a situation.

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