languagehat.com

Laudator Temporis Acti has a brief quote from Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve’s “Brief Mention” (American Journal of Philology 30.2 [1909]: 225-236):

But to the true scholar no blunder is small. He insists on immaculate cleanliness. If ex pede is a good motto, why not ex pediculo? To him any and every mistake is a sin.

Eric Thomson responded: “Gildersleeve’s witty ex pediculo is an excellent riposte to the charge of nitpicking. Lousy scholars should have fine-toothed combs.” It is indeed witty: pēdiculus is Latin for ‘louse’ (OED: “perhaps < the same Indo-European base as pēdere to break wind […] and also Avestan pazdu- small harmful insect”). But I hadn’t been familiar with the scholarly tag ex pede, which turns out to be short for Ex pede Herculem ‘from his foot, [we can measure] Hercules’: “The principle was raised to an axiom of biology by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in On Growth and Form, 1917; it has found dependable use in paleontology, where the measurements of a fossil jawbone or a single vertebra, offer a close approximation of the size of a long-extinct animal, in cases where comparable animals are already known.” I’m guessing that by now it’s dusty enough that few scholars but traditional classicists would recognize it.

As for the sentiment about immaculate cleanliness, of course I would be the last person to deprecate close attention to detail, but it can be carried too far — my dissertation adviser, Warren Cowgill, one of the great Indo-Europeanists, never published a book because of his perfectionism. (I never finished the dissertation because of his perfectionism as well, but the academic world would have been a bad fit for me, so I have no resentment about it.)

Emily Feng writes for NPR about a Taiwanese woman who sings in her indigenous language:

At 41, Abao — her full name is Aljenljeng Tjaluvie — is one of Taiwan’s most beloved music stars. Her chart-topping tunes have swept the island’s top music accolades. And she’s done it all by singing in the Indigenous Paiwan language — not Chinese, which dominates Taiwan’s competitive music industry.

“When people think of Indigenous music, they think of some elder pounding a drum. That’s important too, but young Indigenous people have their own way of living and their own community and they want to be able to mix their culture with what they like,” she says.

The Paiwan people are one of 16 officially recognized Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, and the second-largest. Taiwan’s President Tsai Yingwen is one-quarter Paiwan.

Taiwan has long had an outsized musical influence on the Mandarin Chinese-speaking world. Despite the island’s small population (just over 23 million as of this year), it has generated abundant talent who, for decades, have graced music charts from mainland China to Hong Kong. Especially popular are Taiwan’s Mandopop hits — Mandarin Chinese power ballads and disco-inspired dance songs from singers like Teresa Teng, whose saccharine love songs are now classics in China.

Artists like Abao are at the forefront of a whole new generation of Taiwanese musicians who do not sing in Mandarin Chinese, but rather their own Austronesian languages, native to Taiwan. Their popularity reflects changing tastes in Taiwan, away from an exclusively Chinese-centered pop culture toward one that is uniquely Taiwanese. The shift has been further fueled by an overdue recognition of Indigenous culture and language in Taiwan, and a growing mainstream awareness of the island’s Austronesian roots.

[Read more…]

Just today I learned that there was such a thing as Ladino written in Cyrillic script; Michael Studemund-Halévy has published “From Rashi to Cyrillic: Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish (Judezmo) Texts in Cyrillic” (chapter in a Brill book: “The Cyrillic alphabet was used for notes and letters, and later increasingly used in printing, especially for religious writings”), and you can see a page of “Ла салидура де Мицраимъ” (La salidura de Mitsraim ‘The exodus from Egypt’) at the Gorazd.org Facebook page: “Mainly in the 1st half of the 20th century, numerous books were issued in Sofia (Bulgaria) in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish).” It’s very odd, and nifty, to read what might as well be Spanish in Cyrillic!

Daniel Monterescu, Rafi Grosglik, and Ariel Handel investigate for Haaretz (archived) an Arabic term that has diverged in usage in Israel. After describing its use as an upscale signifier in Tel Aviv restaurants (there’s one called Baladi Chic) and as a down-home symbol among Palestinians, they continue:

Is baladi in Hebrew identical to baladi in Arabic? How did the term evolve from signifying rural domestic produce into a sexy trend in Tel Aviv – and what does that say about Israeli identity? […]

The term baladi is derived from the Arabic word “balad” (بلد), which means village, city or geographical area.

Balad, explain Orphee Senouf Pilpoul, Jad Kaadan, Vered Shimshi and Ido Fuchs in an article recently published in “Mafte’akh: A Lexical Review of Political Thought,” symbolizes multiple meanings that denote “place,” but also the dim and at times ambivalent attitude toward place. Balad is the village (الكفر), the city (المدينة), the land (الأرض), but never the state (الدولة).

[Read more…]

Last year I wrote about my experiences with the early work of Mikhail Shishkin, particularly praising his first published story, “Урок каллиграфии” (“Calligraphy Lesson”), and saying of his first novel, Всех ожидает одна ночь (One night awaits us all), “It was perfectly pleasant reading, but I kept asking myself ‘Why is he telling me all this?’” Last April I was cryptic about his second novel, Взятие Измаила (The taking of Izmail): “I find I don’t have anything coherent to say about it except that it’s long and difficult and I’ll doubtless need to reread it to get anything useful from it.” Now that I’ve finished his third, Венерин волос (translated by Marian Schwartz as Maidenhair), I’m starting to feel that that first story will always be my favorite Shishkin; I don’t seem to connect well with his novels. Or they don’t connect with me. Bear with me while I try to sort out my reactions.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning. After an epigraph from 2 Baruch (“And the dust shall be called, and there shall be said to it: ‘Give back that which is not yours, and raise up all that you have kept until its time’”), the first line is “У Дария и Парисатиды было два сына, старший Артаксеркс и младший Кир.” This is the beginning of Xenophon’s Anabasis: “Δαρείου καὶ Παρυσάτιδος γίγνονται παῖδες δύο, πρεσβύτερος μὲν Ἀρταξέρξης, νεώτερος δὲ Κῦρος” (translated by Carleton L. Brownson as “Darius and Parysatis had two sons born to them, of whom the elder was Artaxerxes and the younger Cyrus”). We then get something completely different: “Интервью начинаются в восемь утра” [The interviews begin at eight in the morning], followed by several Q&A exchanges between Russians claiming refugee status in Switzerland and interviewers trying to evaluate their claims, mediated by a толмач [interpreter] who turns out to be the main protagonist of the novel. After a few pages of that, we get the start of a letter from the interpreter to his son, who he calls Навуходонозавр [Nebuchadnezzasaur]; then comes a third-person narration about the interpreter, followed by another Q&A session where the first question goes on for fifteen unparagraphed pages, then some more Xenophon, another letter in which the interpreter tells his son about being commissioned to take down the reminiscences of an aged singer named Isabella, and eventually (almost a hundred pages in) we get the singer’s diary, which begins in her pre-WWI childhood in Rostov-na-Donu and continues through war, revolution, musical education in the capital, a growing career, a visit to Paris, and the loss of an infant son (the last datable entry is from 1936). But the diary, though it forms the largest part of the novel, is frequently interrupted by various other elements, and the reader is sometimes at a loss as to what exactly is going on and who is involved; the book ends with a tissue of fragments consciously modeled on Joyce (José Vergara has a chapter on the novel in his excellent All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature — see this LH post). In short, a defiantly modernist novel that you’d think would be for a limited audience of cognoscenti.
[Read more…]

The MIT Press Reader presents excerpts from a new book with a theory of how language evolved (yes, yet another one); here’s the introduction:

In their book “From Signal to Symbol,” Ronald Planer and Kim Sterelny propose a novel theory of language: that modern language is the product of a long series of increasingly rich protolanguages evolving over the last two million years. Arguing that language and cognition coevolved, they give a central role to archaeological evidence and attempt to infer cognitive capacities on the basis of that evidence, which they link in turn to communicative capacities.

If protolanguages began as largely gestural systems, Planer and Sterelny ask in the excerpt from the book featured below, why and how did vocalization become so important? They meet that challenge through the idea of a “firelight niche” — a term adapted from a phrase used by anthropologist Polly Wiessner in a 2014 article analyzing the fireside conversations of the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of South Africa — and the changed social and physical environments that came with the control of fire. In their view, selection for something like wordless singing and laughter led to improved vocal control. These behaviors helped to ease tensions and strengthen affiliative bonds as hominin social life became more complex and intense. With more vocal control available, the vocal channel offered various efficiencies, which were particularly salient at the fireside, in the firelight niche.
–The Editors

The excerpts themselves begin with an excursus on the contrasts between humans and great apes in feeding time (“Chimpanzees and orangutans, it is estimated, spend around 7 hours per day feeding, while gorillas spend some 8.8 hours per day on this activity”), then continues:
[Read more…]

Hester Blum has an OUPBlog piece on the oddness of the language of Moby-Dick:

There are a lot of peculiar phrases in Moby-Dick. My new introduction to the second Oxford World’s Classics edition of Herman Melville’s novel highlights the startling weirdness of the book, both in its literary form and its language. Weirdness extends beyond strangeness: weirdness also invokes enchantment, fate, curiosity, and the supernatural. In other words, when I say that Moby-Dick is weird I mean that in the best imaginable way. The novel’s weirdness does not subvert its monumentalism (nor its monumental reputation!) but serves as a sly sidelight on Moby-Dick’s ambitious attempts to create meaning. […]

In what follows I share some more of the most delightfully weird phrases or descriptors in the novel, in rough categories. First is the playfully, animalistically weird: 

• “It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros [Louis VI] might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season” 
• “anonymous babies”
• “a sort of badger-haired old merman”
• “an eruption of bears”
• “immaculate manliness”
• “the coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs”
• “how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle”
• “that unaccountable cone” [the whale’s penis]

Tnere’s more at the link, including a list of Melville’s “baroque adverbs”: wastingly, suckingly, rivallingly, inspectingly, and the link. I posted on Moby-Dick and its language back in 2016 (1, 2).

I started reading Colm Tóibín’s Jan. 27 TLS review of The Letters of John McGahern (I’ve never read McGahern; any thoughts from those who have?) when I was stopped by a word unknown to me, and apparently to almost everyone:

The first letter​ – five lines written to his father in April 1943 when John McGahern was eight years old – could take an entire book to gloss:

Dear Daddy,
        Thanks very much for the pictures. I had great fun reading them. Come to see us soon. We got two goats. Uncle Pat does not like them. Will you bring over my bicycle please and games. We are all well. I was gugering for Uncle Pat Thursday.
        Goodbye from Sean to Daddy

At the time, McGahern and his siblings were living in Aughawillan, County Leitrim, with their mother. […] ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’

The OED doesn’t have “gugering,” and Google turns up almost nothing — but it does find this entry in the Wannaskan Almanac for June 29, 2022, which includes vital incorrect information on pronunciation:

gugering: /GOO-jə-riNG/ v. IRISH, the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.

Anybody know anything more about this rustic word?

And a merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!

Update. Xerîb points out (in a 3:41 pm comment) that the pronunciation is actually /ɡʊɡərɪn/.

A couple of years ago I posted about Vadim Drozhzhinin, a character in Aksyonov’s novella Surplused Barrelware who prides himself on being an expert in the (imaginary) Latin American country of Haligalia, and wondered about other examples of “total immersion in another country.” Now Joel of Far Outliers has provided a fine example (from A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling, which sounds like a very interesting book):

I met San Sanych’s friend Sergey, the most exotic inhabitant of Abaza. He was an instrument maker. His house was stuffed with self-made didgeridoos and shaman drums, which he sold at Siberian folklore festivals. The business was going well; Sergey had almost enough money saved to realise his life’s dream. He wanted to emigrate. Abaza was not remote enough for him. He was drawn to a tiny island named Sonsorol, located in the middle of the Pacific. It had 23 inhabitants; Sergey wanted to be the 24th. So far he had only seen the island on pictures, but through the Internet he was in contact with two residents who supported his relocation plans. ‘They both know the Governor of the island,’ Sergey said proudly. I wanted to argue that with 23 inhabitants, every second one was presumably related to the Governor, but I bit my tongue. Sergey meant business. He had already filled out the visa form for the Pacific Republic of Palau. Now he was teaching himself the local language. Fascinated, I leafed through his rudimentary Russian-Palauan dictionary:

Mere direi – Babushka [Grandmother]

Haparu ma hatawahi – Spasibo [Thank you]

Hoda buou – Do svidaniya [Goodbye]

Joel adds:

According to the Sonsorol.com/language page, these are genuine words in Sonsorolese, a Chuukic language related to Woleaian and Ulithian in Yap State, which lies to the north of the Republic of Palau. The Palauan language is very different. One of my graduate school classmates did her dissertation on Pulo Anna, a dialect of Sonsorolese.

Does anybody know where the stress goes in the word Sonsorol?

Enrico Denard writes for Gothamist about a fraught and interesting topic:

In New York City, where nearly 200 different languages are spoken, the names people go by aren’t always as common as John, Mary, Jane or Steve. For those with less common monikers, mispronunciations of their names may come as frequently as train delays.

Although this issue can be just a minor nuisance for some, it can also be a chronic strain for people who say they experience additional social barriers because of their names. A person with a name that is easier to pronounce and write in English may not have this issue — unless they’re at Starbucks. But when a name deviates from the norm, mispronunciations can become a daily challenge. And, worse, native English speakers may avoid saying a name or even addressing the person in order to circumvent a challenging or unfamiliar pronunciation. […]

A 2013 research study [by Costanza Biavaschi, Corrado Giulietti, and Zahra Siddique] titled “The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization,” which looked at European and Northern Asian immigrants’ experiences during their naturalization processes from 1919 to 1930, showed that those who Anglicized their names went on to do better financially.

The study stated that, “When comparing the labor market trajectories of two migrants both named Guido at birth, one who Americanizes his name to John and one who keeps his name, John’s occupational-based earning growth is 22% higher than Guido’s occupational-based earning growth.” Today, people of immigrant descent still negotiate with the tension to fit in with an ethnic or uncommon name. WNYC spoke with New Yorkers who maneuver through life with names that affect their sense of place and community.

It’s easy to sympathize with both sides of the assimilate-or-not debate, and I recommend reading the experiences described by the people interviewed. (Even such a standard name as my own, Stephen, is mispronounced with surprising frequency, which is why it’s easier to use Steve at, say, Starbucks.)