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I recently ran across the odd word aviso — odd not in itself, but because of its variety of meanings and its restricted usage. I found its Russian equivalent in Irina Polyanskaya’s 2002 novel Горизонт событий [Event horizon], which I’m enjoying even as I have no idea what it’s “about” or where it’s going. Here’s the passage:

Зима 1992 года выдалась снежной. Белым снегом засыпало фальшивые авизо, чемоданы с компроматом, офисы с компьютерами, русские батальоны из Пскова и Рязани, переброшенные в Таджикистан, Абхазию и Приднестровье.

The winter of 1992 was snowy. White snow covered fake avisos, suitcases with kompromat, offices with computers, and Russian battalions from Pskov and Ryazan deployed to Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and Transnistria.

My Oxford Russian-English dictionary has the following entry:

ави́зо, indecl., n. 1. (comm.) letter of advice. 2. (naut.) aviso, advice-boat.

Which certainly makes it seem as if aviso is an English word, but it’s not in AHD or M-W, even the unabridged Third New International. It is, however, in the OED (entry updated December 2011):
[Read more…]

Yakov Pichkar and Nicole Creanza have a preprint “Subtle cultural boundaries reinforce genetic structure in England” whose abstract reads:

Genes and languages both maintain signatures of human history. The evolution of genetics and of culture both have features that can track population movements and demographic history. Further, cultural traits may themselves impact these movements and demography. In particular, while speaking a different language appears to act as a barrier to gene flow, it is not clear whether more subtle dialect-level linguistic differences within a language can influence mating preferences and thus affect genetic population structure. We examine the strength of cultural barriers and of association within England using the spatial similarities between rates of linguistic and genetic change. We find that genes and dialect markers have similar spatial distributions at all geographic scales, though these similarities are more pronounced at larger scales. This covariation, in the absence of geographic barriers to coordinate linguistic and genetic differentiation, suggests that some cultural boundaries have maintained genetic population structure in England.

Interesting stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what Hatters have to say. Thanks, Dmitry!

JC wrote me about Piotr Gąsiorowski’s paper “Gruit Grus: The Indo-European Names of the Crane,” saying “Cranes do indeed crane, but the Latin verb means to cry out like a crane.” Here’s the abstract:

The purpose of this article is to show that the variety and irregularity of the Indo-European ‘crane’ words is apparent rather than actual, and that their derivational history is in fact quite simple. In brief, they can be reduced to only a couple of related PIE lexemes, rather than a whole constellation of “dialectal” forms.

As you would expect from Piotr, it’s careful and thoroughgoing, and for what it’s worth I find it convincing. I especially like the modesty of passages like this:

The purpose of this section is to point out that Arm. kṙownk is a possible direct cognate of the ‘crane’ term found in Balto-Slavic and Latin. The relative insecurity of some aspects of reconstructible Proto-Armenian makes it impossible to clarify every detail, so the proposed derivation must be regarded as tentative. A large dose of scepticism is recommended in such cases, especially when the words we attempt to etymologise come dangerously close to being cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.

Thanks, John, and a shanah tovah to all my Jewish readers!

A reader writes “this article about the Yiddish translation of that NYtimes yeshiva article is super interesting,” and it certainly is; Zach Golden reports for the Forward:

The NYT report has been translated into an extraordinarily high-quality Hasidic dialect of Yiddish. The online version has been widely read and shared on Hasidic online forums. A PDF version, created to circumvent the community’s strict internet filters, has also been making the rounds.

In the Hasidic community, even worse than people who reject their way of life are those perceived as betraying their own community. Known as moyserim, or informers, they can face harassment, excommunication or even extrajudicial violence.

Members of advocacy groups for improved secular education in Hasidic schools have been labeled as such, making anyone perceived as supporting them — say, a Yiddish translator of a critical New York Times report — a persona non grata within the Hasidic community. It is for this reason that the identity of the Yiddish translator remains a secret.

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I was reading J.H. Elliott’s NYRB review essay (cached) on several new histories of the conquest of Mexico when I was struck by this minatory footnote:

Both authors have difficulties not only with “empire” but also with “Aztec,” which is a highly questionable term. The inhabitants of Tenochtitlan and surrounding regions that recognized their dominance were technically Mexica, but as far as is known the Mexica, along with other peoples of central Mexico, never identified themselves as “Aztecs.” Irrespective of their geographical location and political status, each ethnic or social group referred to itself when dealing with outsiders and others as “we people here.” To avoid inconvenience and make the nature of their topic clear to nonspecialists, [Frances] Berdan and [Camilla] Townsend tend to fall back, with obvious misgiving, on “Aztec.”

I thought I pretty much knew what Aztec meant, but as Augustine said about time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” So for the benefit of others in the same boat, here’s the thorough discussion at Wikipedia:
[Read more…]

I was investigating the odd-looking Russian word бьеф ‘reach, level, pond’ (верхний бьеф ‘upper pond, head water’) and discovered it was borrowed from French bief, which made sense… but where was that from? TLFi tells the tale:

Prononc. : [bjεf]. Antérieurement à Passy 1914 on indique également des prononc. sans f (Gattel 1841, Nod. 1844, Fél. 1851, Littré, DG). Sous la forme biez le mot est transcrit par Land. 1834 : bi-èze. Pour Mart. Comment prononce 1913, p. 350, au contraire on ne prononce pas de -z dans biez. Étymol. et Hist. 1. Ca 1135 bied « lit d’un cours d’eau » (Pelerinage Charlemagne, éd. E. Koschwitz et G. Thurau, 775 dans T.-L.) − xivᵉs., B. de Sebourg, ibid.; 2. 1248 bié « canal qui amène l’eau à la roue d’un moulin » (Ch. des D. de Bret. fᵈˢBiz., Bibl. Nant. dans Gdf. Compl.); la forme bief est donnée en 1635 par Monet, Invantaire des deus langues françoise et latine, mais elle ne s’est imposée qu’au xxᵉs.; 3. 1834 (Land. : Biez. Dans un canal à écluses, intervalle compris entre deux écluses). Très prob., et de même que les corresp. de l’Italie du Nord (REW³), d’un gaul. *bedum « canal, fosse » (gallois bedd, breton bez « tombe », Dottin, p. 232) en rapport avec le lat. fodere « creuser » (cf. Ern.-Meillet, s.v. fodire); le f final représente le traitement de -d- intervocalique (devenu ensuite final) dans un certain nombre de mots anc. d’orig. germ. ou celt. (cf. *bladu > *blavu [v. emblaver] > a. fr. blef, fr. mod. blé; germ. -bodu dans Elbeuf).

In other words, the final -f didn’t use to be pronounced, and the word was variously written bief, biez, bié, or bied; the suggested etymology is from a Gaulish bedum ‘canal, ditch,’ and the development of d to f is compared to that in blé ‘wheat’ < blef < *bladu. One wonders why blef lost its final f, while that in bief remained.

From Elaine Blair’s NYRB review of Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles, by Lydia Davis:

For Davis the translator, pleasure is closely tied to difficulty. “See if, for oiseuse, you can find a word in English beginning with o and ending in the z sound that means the same thing and, if possible, has the same derivation”—this is the kind of challenge she sets for herself. “Handily, for this last problem, there was the perfect solution, otiose,” which means, “like the French, ‘at leisure’ or ‘idle.’”

[…]

Her goal of staying as close as possible to the vocabulary of the original novels leads her far down the path of etymology, both in English and in French. (Pleasure #10: “You become more and more knowledgeable about your own language and its resources as you work.”) Translating into a language that offers so many synonyms, Davis tries to find one that either shares its etymology with the French original or derives from a similar context. She might translate a word not into its exact contemporary equivalent but into its etymological ancestor: “Alors, ‘then,’ comes from the Latin illa hora, ‘at that hour.’” Knowing this, Davis might in some cases use “at that hour” instead of “then.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just crazypants. Sure, if you find a good equivalent that happens to be etymologically related, it’s pleasing (if your mind is that way inclined), but it’s also purely decorative — it has nothing to do with the actual business of translation. To use “at that hour” instead of “then” because of etymology is malfeasance, in my opinion, and I will regard Davis’s translations with increased suspicion in future. (For another view of her essays, see this post from last year, and for a different complaint about her methods, see this one from 2018.)

Multiocular O (ꙮ) was mentioned here back in 2019 (starting with Owlmirror’s comment); I’m giving it its own post because it’s shown up on MetaFilter (ꙮꙮꙮ Be Not Afraid ꙮꙮꙮ) and Eyebrows McGee has provided the following origin story:

Most Proto-Indo-European languages had a grammatical number for nouns between the singular and plural called the dual. That is, we have “cat” and “cats,” but most PIE languages had a special form for things in pairs. A lot of Celtic and Slavic languages preserve at least some dual forms. […] (In Slavic languages, a really common dual form, even in languages that have otherwise dropped it, is “riverbanks.”)

ANYWAY, in some Old Church Slavonic manuscripts, where a dual form was used (most often to say “two”), the scribes would turn “two” — двое– into двꚙе with the “double O” glyph.

Some OTHER scribes thought this was amazing, so specifically in the word “eyes” — “очи” — which is a dual-form noun because they typically come in twos, they’d use the “double monocular O” (Ꙭ, aka “boobs”) to make two Os and turn them into eyes, thus: ꙭчи. See? TWO EYES!

WELL. ANOTHER scribe comes along and says, “two eyes? Seraphim have MANY eyes!” and when he comes to the phrase “many-eyed seraphim (Серафими мн҄оочитїи), he chooses to render it as “Серафими мн҄оꙮ҄читїи҄”. CAUSE THEY’VE GOT A LOT OF EYES, y’all.

ONE TIME. This occurs ONE TIME in ONE MANUSCRIPT, but Unicode is dedicated to making sure manuscripts can be replicated accurately in unicode, so in 2008 we get a multiocular O.

BUT IT GETS EVEN MORE AWESOME, because they’re updating it to the full 10!. Although do look at the manuscript and note that the original 10-eyed multiocular O has FLAMES LICKING OUT ON THE SIDES, so Unicode should get on that!

Anyway, I 100% approve of literally all of this, because there is nothing I love as much as TAKING A JOKE WAY TOO FAR, especially when the joke is more than 600 years old.

It’s a great story, and I certainly hope it’s all true, including the ten-eye update.

I started reading Sergei Gandlevsky’s 2002 novel НРЗБ (an abbreviation for неразборчивый ‘undecipherable, illegible’) some time ago on my Kindle; it was one of those well-spoken-of books I didn’t really know anything about, but I figured I’d give it a try. The more I read, the more I liked it, so a little over halfway through I ordered it in hardcopy from Globus Books in San Francisco (plug: they’re great, buy your Russian books from them!) and waited for it to arrive, at which point I started all over again, happy that I could now make marginal notes and create my own index on the endpaper. Since I’m going to be enthusing about it, I’m glad to report that it’s available in Susanne Fusso’s translation as Illegible, so if you don’t read Russian but are infected by my enthusiasm, you can give it a try; I’ve ordered a copy myself so I can read it to my wife once we’ve finished Louis Couperus’s Eline Vere (impressively modern for a book from the 1880s, with female characters my wife is surprised were created by a man).

Happily, Fusso’s introduction (as well as a brief excerpt from her translation) is online at the Jordan Center website (1, 2, 3), so I can send you there for a plot description and background on the author if you want it; I’ll just say he’s a well-known poet who dislikes “poetic prose” and the book is in four sections, the first and third in close third person and set around 1972, when the hero Lyova was a young, impetuous, and foolish poet, while the second and fourth are in first person and set thirty years later, when he’s older and in poor health but just as foolish. And one thing that impressed me is that Gandlevsky creates a perfectly appropriate prose style for him, competent and endlessly allusive, showing off a command of Russian idioms and a knowledge of classic poetry (especially, of course, Pushkin), but no real fireworks — it’s clear the protagonist is clever but no genius, and that’s a hard thing to pull off (I’ve read too many novels where supposedly mediocre people think in high-flown poetic metaphors). And yet within those constraints he creates brilliant effects: at one point, he talks about the world coming alive with the spring thaw and compares the grass shooting up with “a botany class film, when in the darkness on the screen a sprout under the ground sprouts out of a pea and butts the ground with its crown, and in a moment or two the shoot is wriggling in the open and pushing out leaves left and right, growing before your eyes” [стремительность учебного фильма по ботанике, когда в темноте на экране росток под землей выпрастывается из горошины и бодает маковкой почву, а уже через миг-другой побег извивается на воле и выбрасывает вправо и влево листья, взрослея на глазах]; then a couple of paragraphs later comes the capper: Krivorotov’s jealousy “grew, sprouted, and matured like that plant from the school movie” [росла, колосилась и матерела не хуже того самого растения со школьной киноленты] (my translations). That’s how to work an image!

Once I’d realized how good it was, what most surprised me was how its plot kept surprising — even shocking — me. It’s one thing to create a plausible portrait of young writers competing over poetry and women; it’s another to dole out information so cunningly you can make the reader feel as sandbagged as the hero when he belatedly discovers important facts about his own life. And I kept being reminded of earlier novels I loved, like Nabokov’s Дар [The Gift], Makanin’s Андеграунд [Underground; see this post], and Buida’s Ермо [Ermo; see this post] — in fact, there’s a setup-and-resolution that is so reminiscent of that last novel I think it must be a deliberate allusion. I’m going to be thinking about this book for quite a while.

Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief of Random House, writes for the NY Times (archived) about his life as a copyeditor (or, as he puts it, copy editor); his origin story is unsurprising (he noticed errors even as a kid and was eventually pointed to a profession where you could be paid for it), but the anecdotes are a lot of fun:

Proofreading a new edition of a 50-year-old translation of a French classic, I was stopped in my tracks by a section of a half-dozen or so unattributed lines of dialogue in which one line seemed to be missing. He said, I pointed with my finger, she said, he said, she said … she said again? (It’s an indication of my stubborn faith in the printed word that I had to run my finger down that passage several times before I was sure that the error was on the page and not in my head.)

As it happened, the novel’s translator was still alive, and he was (I was told) delighted to fill in the missing line, which had apparently gone unnoticed all this time.

A more elaborate version of this story occurred a number of years later, when a puzzled email from a reader about what appeared to be a continuity glitch in a major work of 20th-century science fiction inspired me to do a bit of detective work. Assisted by a book pirate’s online post of the entire text, I uncovered eight paragraphs that had somehow gone missing decades before.

How can this happen? you might be wondering. I can’t be certain, but I infer that in the translation of the book from its original hardcover version to a mass-market paperback, an overburdened editorial assistant, tasked with photocopying the original, skipped a spread — two consecutive pages, a left and a right, that is. Or perhaps that assistant dropped the spread on the floor, and because the missing text, improbably and unluckily, began at the beginning of a sentence and concluded at the end of one, the gap went unremarked. (To be fair, this particular book drones on so uneventfully for pages and pages that one could be forgiven for not noticing that some of the drone was absent.) Of course, we fixed the error.

I’m just glad some publishers are still bothering to fix such errors. (Of course, one can’t help wondering what that “major work of 20th-century science fiction” was, but we’ll never know.)