languagehat.com

Recently I posted material about German from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople; Fermor has now moved into Hungary and has further observations on language. From Remnant Placenames in Hungary, 1934:

When I had unfolded my map under the carob tree, the Tisza river, flowing south-east to join the Danube, uncoiled straight ahead of my path; I was struck by the place-names scattered beyond the east bank: Kúncsorba, Kúnszentmartón, Kúnvegytöke, and so on. The first syllable, it seemed, meant ‘Cuman’ and the region was still known as Nagykunság or Great Cumania. On my side of the river, a slightly different profusion spread southwards: Kiskúnhalas, Kiskúnfélegyháza, Kiskúndorozsma. ‘Kis’ means ‘little’: they belonged to the region of Kiskunság or Little Cumania.

So this was where the Cumans had ended up! And, even closer to my route, lay a still more peculiar paper-chase of place-names. Jászboldogháza, for instance, only a few miles north; and a bit farther afield, Jászladány, Jászapáti, Jászalsószentgyörgy, and many more… Here the first syllable recalled a more unexpected and still hoarier race of settlers. In the third century BC, the Jazyges, an Iranian speaking branch of the Sarmatians mentioned by Herodotus, were first observed in Scythian regions near the Sea of Azov, and some of them made their way to the west. They were allies of Mithridates—Ovid speaks of them in his Black Sea exile—and, between the Danube and the Tisza, exactly where their descendants finally settled, the Romans had much trouble with them. We know just what these Jazyges looked like from the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna. The bas-relief warriors—and their horses, right down to their fetlocks—are sheathed in scale-armour like pangolins. Javelins lost, and shooting backwards in the famous Parthian style, they canter with bent bows up the spiral. Had they left any other traces in the Plain? Any dim, unexplained custom, twist of feature, scrap of language, or lingering turn of phrase? A few sparse reminders of the Pechenegs and the Cumans still flicker about the Balkans; but this entire nation seems to have vanished like will o’ the wisps and only these place-names mark the points of their evaporation.

From Eliciting Romany in Hungary, 1934:
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Now that the baseball season is drawing to the close (and my Mets are still not only in the chase but on top of their division, if only by a game), it’s a particularly good time for Ben Zimmer to write a WSJ piece about the word balk:

Major League Baseball has announced rule changes for the 2023 season intended to speed up the pace of play in a sport where games can seem to stretch on interminably. One new rule introduces a timer to limit how long pitchers take on the mound between their pitches.

As part of the pitch-clock rule, MLB has decreed that if a runner is on base, the pitcher is allowed to throw to the base or step off the rubber twice per plate appearance. If the pitcher attempts to pick off a runner a third time and doesn’t get the runner out, that will be called a balk, and all runners get to advance a base.

Confusing enough? The word “balk” was already one of the most perplexing in baseball. In use since the earliest formulations of the game’s rules, “balk” serves as a cover term for various illegal acts or motions by a pitcher, ostensibly made with the goal of deceiving the hitter or runner. But as baseball historian Richard Hershberger observed in his 2019 book “Strike Four: The Evolution of Baseball,” “confusion about balks has been a constant through baseball history.” (That confusion extends to the word’s pronunciation: it is generally pronounced “bawk” with a silent “l.”)

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Michael Paulson reports for the Times (or, if you report for the paper, The Times; archived link) on the upcoming German production of Hamilton — amazingly, “the first production of the juggernaut musical in a language other than English.” The process of translation was, of course, complex:

For “Hamilton,” Stage Entertainment executives invited translators to apply for the job by sending in sample songs, and then, not satisfied with any of the submissions, asked two of the applicants who had never met one another to collaborate. One of them, Kevin Schroeder, was a veteran musical theater translator whose proposal was clear but cautious; the other was Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter whose proposal was imaginative but imprecise.

“Kevin was like the kindergarten teacher, and I was that child who wanted to run in every direction and be punky,” said Finale, who hadn’t been to the theater since seeing “Peter Pan” as a child and had to look up “Hamilton” on Wikipedia. “If you have an open mic in Kreuzberg,” he said, referring to a hip Berlin neighborhood, “and you’re standing there with a blunt, normally you don’t go to a musical later in the night.”

Both of them were wary of working together. “I thought, ‘What does he know?’” Schroeder said. “And he thought, ‘I’ll show this musical theater guy.’”

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Or so said Rory Tingle in the Daily Fail last year (archived link if you don’t want to give them your clicks, and quite right too):

Northerners will pronounce words the same as Southerners within just 45 years, experts predicted today. Scientists say northern English will become lost within that timeframe as south-eastern pronunciations take over the UK. As an example, words like ‘strut’ – which currently rhyme with ‘foot’ in northern English – are increasingly being said with a southern pronunciation.

Similarly, dialect words used outside the south-east are in danger of dying out, with the northern term ‘backend’ for autumn and ‘shiver’ – a Norfolk and Lincolnshire word for splinter – among those that are already no longer used. The research released today [28 July 2021] comes after experts from the Universities of Cambridge and Portsmouth built a physics model to determine the future of the English language in England.

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It seems fitting that today, when we learned about Godard’s death (NYT; more links and appreciative comments at chavenet’s MetaFilter post), I watched his mysterious, glorious, gorgeous Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), which, as Richard Brody said, should have had the impact of Breathless and Every Man for Himself (a new “first film” every twenty years) except that nobody went to see it despite rave reviews. At one point the main character, Edgar (played by Bruno Putzulu), asks someone “Do you think about death? Your own death?” It’s clearly something Godard thought about a lot, and apparently he chose his own. Repose en paix.

I wanted to mention some amusingly vague quotes used in the movie and a couple of minor errors in Richard Brody’s discussion of it. Starting with the latter, Brody says the dialogue beginning “Jean wants money because the hotel is failing” is said by Berthe (the woman Edgar falls in love with, played by Cécile Camp); it is not, it is said by the grandfather (Jean Davy). And he translates the title of Robert Bresson’s 1975 book Notes sur le Cinématographe as Notes on Cinematography — a common and understandable mistake, but by cinématographe Bresson meant neither ‘cinematography’ nor ‘cinematographer,’ he meant cinema itself in its higher form: “movies as an art,” if you will.

As for the quotes (all Godard movies are full of quotations, acknowledged and otherwise), at one point Edgar responds to a mention of Tristan Bernard with “Ah, he’s the one who said « Quand on voit Le Havre, c’est qu’il va pleuvoir. Quand on ne le voit pas, c’est qu’il pleut déjà ».” (When you see Le Havre [from Deauville], that means it’s going to rain. When you don’t see it, that means it’s already raining.) I looked it up and discovered it’s been attributed to everyone from the Duc de Morny to Simone Simon to Jean Gabin to “un jardinier normand”; another source calls it “un vieux dicton,” which is probably the safest description. “The measure of love is to love without measure” is attributed to St. Augustine, but the internet attributes it also to Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis de Sales (frankly, it sounds like one of those “inspirational” sayings that might as well be attributed to Hallmark). Towards the end, Edgar says “Quand je pense à quelque chose, je pense à autre chose, toujours” (When I think of something, I always think of something else), which is a useful way of thinking; Google tells me it’s a quote from Marcelline Delbecq. And during another of Godard’s beloved nighttime drives lit by the reflections of headlights, Edgar says to Berthe “C’est étrange comme les choses prennent du sens quand elles finissent” (It’s strange how things acquire meaning when they’re finished). Now we must say that of Godard’s filmography.

1) We discussed this issue back in 2018 (Janet Freeman: “In my editing experience, when you have two ‘the’s’ competing for the same space — ‘in the The New Yorker’ — style often calls for keeping the generic one and dropping the one in the title”; Articles and articles: “In cases when the name is used as an adjective, though, no cap: ‘the Times reporter So-and-So’”), but it still annoys me greatly, and the Times appears to be violating its own guidelines (if Articles and articles is correct), so I’m going to complain about it again: the Crime & Mystery column in this week’s NYT Book Review (or, to give the name in its full glory, The New York Times Book Review), we find “I felt like The New York Times reporter who shows up to interview Kick late in the novel.” There is no excuse for that capitalized The; here, the article is modifying “reporter.” If you insist on your stupid The, what you have to do is change the structure: “I felt like the reporter from The New York Times who shows up to interview Kick late in the novel.” Ah has spoken!

2) I have discovered that there is a Sartre short story called in English “Erostratus.” The description in Wikipedia begins: “A story about a misanthropic man who resolves to follow the path of Herostratus and make history by means of an evil deed—in this case, by killing six random people (one for each bullet in his revolver).” (As a side note, I find that kind of “existentialist” story idea supremely silly.) But if he’s following the path of Herostratus, why is he called Erostratus? Presumably because the French original is “Érostrate,” but that’s an artifact of the inconsistent French attitude towards rough breathings:

Érostrate ou Hérostrate (en grec ancien Ἡρόστρατος / Hêróstratos qui signifie littéralement Armée d’Héraᵃ) est l’incendiaire du temple d’Artémis à Éphèse, considéré par beaucoup comme l’une des Sept merveilles du monde du monde antique.
[…]
ᵃLe nom propre s’écrivant en grec avec un êta initial aspiré, il peut aussi être transcrit en français Hèrostratos comme l’écrit A. Bailly, ou Hèrostrate.

There is no such inconsistency in English; rough breathings are always rendered with h-, and the story has to be either “Érostrate” (if you choose to keep the fancy French form) or Herostratus, the only acceptable English equivalent. Shame on whichever translator made that indefensible decision!

Conrad Brunstrom, “an eighteenth-centuryist. Born in London, based in Ireland, fixated by Canada,” writes about the accents in the “new staggeringly expensive Second Age Tolkien adaptation”:

But there’s also been some disquiet over here about the “Irish” accents conferred upon the Harfoots (proto-Hobbits) in the series. […] These Harfoots remind me a bit of Ewoks. I can imagine them taking out imperial stormtroopers with their amusingly rustic woodland booby traps. They are adept at camoflage. And they have sort of Irish accents. Of these accents let it be said that Lenny Henry’s is not the worst. With the gargantuan budget at their disposal, it is clear that inability to afford a qualified dialect coach is not the reason for the erratic vocal stylings of many of these Harfoots. It is rather that these actors perfected an “accent” that satisfied the director and producers. It’s the sort of accent that has no real existence on this island but has a particular “universal” semantic value.

And I suppose what we’re worried about is that there’s an “accent” that is identified globally as “Irish” that somehow still means “primitive”. Since we’ve heard hobbits speak in Peter Jackson movies, the vague assumption is inculcated that once upon a time the shaggy itinerant Harfoots were Irish but they had evolved past that by the Third Age. There’s an undoubted association of Irishness with “pastness” which connects with disturbing teleologies. Although this “Irish” accent is deployed affectionately in the sense that everyone is supposed to like the Harfoots, we are left wondering what is it that the wide world loves Ireland “for”? What do they want from us? Do they want this country to remain the repository of a “backward” pre-industrial set of values?

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Eliot Gelwan, “60-something clinical psychiatrist and unrepentant counter-culturalist and contrarian,” has a nicely designed website with a page which features quirky takes on his name. His surname is unusual, and he’s written about trying to find out about its origin(s) (“As the part of the world from which my ancestors emigrated shifted back and forth between Slavic and Germanic dominance, between Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, so too did the rendering of family names. I would have to pursue the Gelvans, the Gelmans, and even the Hellmans and who knows what else for relatives”), but on the first-linked page he confines himself to this jocular quote:

“a-gelwan: To stupefy, astonish; stupefacere, consternare: ‘-Ðá wearþ ic agelwed’, ‘then I was astonished’, Bt. 34, 5; Fox 140, 9.”
–Bosworth and Toller, Online Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

Naturally, I wondered if that OE verb had left traces in later English, and the OED turned up two: begallow “To frighten or terrify” (only citation: c1320 Sir Beves in Ellis Spec. II. 171 That horse was swift as any swalowe, No man might that horse begallowe) and gally “To frighten, daze, scare, startle” (first citation 1608 W. Shakespeare King Lear ix. 44 The wrathfull Skies gallow, the very wanderer of the Darke, and makes them keepe their caues). The latter has the longer and more prestigious history, but I like the prefixed form begallow; it sounds scarier.

Joel at Far Outliers is posting a series of excerpts from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, which I really must get around to reading (I love his books on Greece, Mani and Roumeli — see this post), and a couple of recent posts provide glimpses of German dialects in the mid-1930s. From Hitching a Ride in Swabia, 1934:

The driver opened the door and reached down a helping hand, with the words “Spring hinein!” When I was beside him in the steamy cabin he said “Du bist ein Schneemann!”—a snowman. So I was. We clanked on. Pointing to the flakes that clogged the windscreen as fast as the wipers wiped, he said, “Schlimm, niet?” Evil, what? He dug out a bottle of schnapps and I took a long swig. Travellers’ joy! “Wohin gehst Du?” I told him. (I think it was somewhere about this point on the journey that I began to notice the change in this question: “Where are you going?” In the north, in Low Germany, everyone had said “Wohin laufen Sie” and “Warum laufen Sie zu Fuss?”—Why are you walking on foot? Recently the verb had been ‘gehen.’ For ‘laufen,’ in the south, means to run—probably from the same root as ‘lope’ in English. The accent, too, had been altering fast; in Swabia, the most noticeable change was the substitution of -le at the end of a noun, as a diminutive, instead of -chen; Häusle and Hundle, instead of Häuschen and Hündchen, for a little house and a small dog. I felt I was getting ahead now, both linguistically and geographically, plunging deeper and deeper into the heart of High Germany . . . . The driver’s Du was a sign of inter-working-class mateyness that I had come across several times. It meant friendly acceptance and fellow-feeling.)

And from Impressions of Bavarians, 1934:
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Helen Santoro writes in the NY Times (archived) about her difficult birth and unexpected development:

In my first few hours of life, after six bouts of halted breathing, the doctors rushed me to the neonatal intensive care unit [… and] rolled my pink, 7-pound-11-ounce body into a brain scanner. Lo and behold, there was a huge hole on the left side, just above my ear. I was missing the left temporal lobe, a region of the brain involved in a wide variety of behaviors, from memory to the recognition of emotions, and considered especially crucial for language. […] They told [my mother] I would never speak and would need to be institutionalized. […]

But month after month, I surprised the experts, meeting all of the typical milestones of children my age. I enrolled in regular schools, excelled in sports and academics. The language skills the doctors were most worried about at my birth — speaking, reading and writing — turned out to be my professional passions.

My case is highly unusual but not unique. Scientists estimate that thousands of people are, like me, living normal lives despite missing large chunks of our brains. Our myriad networks of neurons have managed to rewire themselves over time. But how?

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