languagehat.com

S.I. Rosenbaum’s Input piece on Thomas Buchler and his Torah program TropeTrainer is fascinating and sad, and I recommend the whole thing; here I’ll excerpt some particularly Hattic bits:

One day — Zucker doesn’t remember exactly when, but it must have been in 1998 or 1999 — Buchler approached him about a project he was working on. He was creating software, he said, that would teach people to chant Torah. […] In the 1970s, home-recorded cassette tapes had been a huge technological innovation in teaching Torah: No longer did students have to study for hours with an older, learned Jewish adult; they could take home a cassette and learn from that. Some rabbis felt that this made the transmission of Torah an automated, machine-based experience; they worried the personal connection between generations would be sacrificed in the name of convenience.

For Buchler, however, the tape wasn’t convenient enough. There had to be a better way than winding and rewinding a cassette, he thought, and as an experienced software engineer he set out to create one. But in order to do so, he first had to learn a code much older than any he was familiar with.

Every written word or short phrase in the Torah is assigned one of a body of musical motifs, known collectively as cantillation or trope in English, or ta’amim in Hebrew. The words of this text had been written down, in the consonant-only Hebrew alphabet, by sometime around 400 to 600 BCE; but as the musical component continued to develop, it remained an entirely oral tradition. As more written texts were added to the Jewish sacred canon, they, too, were set to trope and sung aloud.

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Count Szechenyi was briefly mentioned here back in 2002 when mark said he “was personally responsible for cutting the number of respect-related forms of address down from five to three”; now (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti) we get a more sweeping claim by Priscilla Smith Robertson in Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 1952):

In the period before 1848, the outstanding Hungarian was, undoubtedly, Count Stephen Szechenyi, who spent his handsome fortune and considerable talents to build up modern institutions in his country. He traveled extensively in Western Europe and in England, where he was well-known and got most of his ideas; but it was easier for the west to understand the practical changes he wrought than the psychological ones which were just as important in his eyes. Wishing to force his country to become both proud and rich, he appealed to every motive among his countrymen—public spirit, private gain, patriotism, the wish to be in fashion, the spirit of fun, the sense of noblesse oblige.

He first struck the public eye in 1825 by offering to give a year’s income to help endow an academy for the Hungarian language. This, interestingly enough, seemed the prime step toward making a modern nation, and it was largely owing to his efforts that Hungarian came back to the lips of his countrymen. The gentry had been gradually forgetting it, talking German in Vienna, often using Slovak to their peasants, and, odd as it seems, Latin in their Diet. In some parts Latin was a general language of communication. Dr. Tkalac remembered his Croatian mother using it in her household (though this was more unusual in a woman than a man) and other observers reported the strange effect of hearing a nineteenth-century peasant greet his landlord, “Bonum matutinum, domine.” Szechenyi raged at this decay of his mother tongue. His appeals succeeded so well that in 1847, for the first time in history, the Diet members spoke Hungarian, even though it still came haltingly to some lords’ tongues.

Someone more familiar with the history of Hungarian than I will have to judge the truth of the claim that it was thanks to Szechenyi that it “came back to the lips of his countrymen.”

I was trying to find an etymology for the Russian word люрик ‘little auk‘ when I went to that Wikipedia page and saw “The little auk or dovekie (Alle alle) is a small auk, the only member of the genus Alle.” I was struck by “dovekie” and went to the OED, where I found (entry from 1897):

dovekie, n.
Pronunciation: /ˈdʌvki/
Forms: Also doveca, dovekey, doveky.
Etymology: Scots diminutive of dove: compare lassikie, wifikie, or -ockie (which are of 3 syllables), and see dove n. 1c, dovey n. b.

An arctic bird, the Black Guillemot (Uria grylle). Also (and now normally), the little auk (Plautus alle).

1819 A. Fisher Jrnl. 18 June in Jrnl. Voy. Arctic Regions 1819–20 (1821) 27 Another species of diver was seen today..it is called by the seamen, Dovekey.
1823 W. Scoresby Jrnl. Voy. Northern Whale-fishery 421 Colymbus Grylle—Tyste or Doveca.
1835 J. Ross Narr. Second Voy. North-west Passage liv. 693 The second dovekie of the season was seen.
[…]
1954 J. M. M. Fisher & R. M. Lockley Sea-birds i. 17 Among the auks the dovekie and the Brünnick’s guillemot from the north join the puffins, razorbills and guillemots in ocean wanderings.

There are no entries for lassikie, wifikie, or -ockie, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to compare them, and I don’t know what they mean by “which are of 3 syllables,” but never mind — what a charming word!

I never did find an etymology for люрик (it’s not in Vasmer), so if anybody knows anything, do share.

After I finished Margarita Khemlin’s Дознаватель (The Investigator; see this post), I turned to a novel I’d been anticipating for years, Alexander Chudakov’s 2000 Ложится мгла на старые ступени [A gloom is cast upon the ancient steps (a quote from a 1902 Blok poem)], which won the only Booker of the Decade prize ever awarded. As is sadly often the case when I’ve been eagerly looking forward to a book, it was a disappointment — not that it was bad, mind you, but it wasn’t what I wanted. As I told Lizok (the usual recipient of my complaints), “it seems like a standard-issue intelligentsia memoir/novel, with too many relatives to keep track of… There were some good anecdotes, but it was basically just one damn thing after another.” So I gave up after a hundred pages or so and turned to Dmitry Bykov’s first novel, Оправдание [Justification]; having loved his second, Орфография [Orthography], when I read it fifteen years ago (see the links at the start of this post), I was pretty sure I’d enjoy it, and indeed I did.

But it was a bumpy experience. To quote another e-mail to Lizok:

At first it was moving along at a nice pace and kind of reminded me of the Strugatskys, except with a mystery set in the past rather than the future. Then it settled into a quest narrative and it took me a while to adjust. Then it looked like a big chunk was going to be told from the perspective of an Isaac Babel who survived the camps, and I was irritated (I don’t mind Famous People showing up as furniture, so to speak, in historical novels — “Hey, isn’t that Pushkin over there?” — but I don’t like novelists trying to write from inside their heads), but then it turned out it was the main viewpoint character, Rogov, trying to imagine Babel’s experience, so that was all right (and it didn’t last too long), and now Rogov is in a situation reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and I don’t know where Bykov is going with it…

The basic idea (and this is not a spoiler, since it is manifested early on and is what people know about the novel if they know anything at all) is that Stalin’s Terror was not about punishment, it was a filtering system to create a group of supermen — if they could resist six months of torture, they would be the kind of people who could save Russia in the war Stalin knew was coming and help him build a new society. This was not a new concept (as Bykov says, Alexandre Kojève had said something similar decades earlier), but Bykov uses it brilliantly, starting with his young protagonist, the historian Rogov, finding clues that point in that direction and eventually, in 1996, going off to Siberia to try to locate the camp where his grandfather and other survivors had supposedly been held for a decade. Bykov keeps setting traps for readers, pulling the rug out from under their feet over and over again, and by the time I got to the end I was very glad of the experience. (Bykov said a few years ago that though it got terrible reviews when it came out, it is the reading public’s favorite of his novels, “probably because it’s the shortest.”)
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Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul posted on Facebook (reposted from Johannes Preiser-Kapeller):

In the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PmbZ), one can find an entry on a certain Prince Přzibislav of #Maghrebinia, who had intensive diplomatic contacts with #Byzantium in the 9th century.

As already Alexander Beihammer pointed out in his contribution to “Prosopon Rhomaikon”, this and some connected entries (such as the one on a certain “Chuzpephoros”) are based on the “Maghrebinische Geschichten”, a collection of short stories by the author Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998), which take place in the fictitious (!) country of Maghrebinia in Southeastern Europe.

Ralph-Johannes Lilie, the initiator of the PmbZ, used these collections of satirical stories like a historical source and smuggled the resulting entries into the prosopographical database. Thus, unfortunately, you will not find #Maghrebinia among the adressees of the #Byzantine Emperor in De cerimoniis…

I shake my head in wonderment. It would be one thing for an easily distracted blogger like myself to mistake a fictional kingdom for a part of actual Byzantine history, but for the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit to do so should be deeply embarrassing, if not humiliating, for that presumably august institution. I wonder if they’ve noticed? As Slavo said, “it’s the -řz- that gets me.”

In the course of my ongoing Godard retrospective, I had occasion to read Louis Aragon’s “What Is Art, Jean-Luc Godard?” (an encomium of Pierrot le fou), and I was struck by the following rhapsodic passage:

Red sings in the film like an obsession. As in Renoir, where a Provençal house with its terraces reminds one here of the Terrasses à Cagnes. Like a dominant color of the modern world. So insistently does Godard use the color that when I came out of the film, I saw nothing else in Paris but the reds—signs indicating one-way streets; the multiple eyes of the red stop-lights; girls in cochineal-colored slacks; madder-colored shops, scarlet-colored cars, red-lead paint on the balconies of rundown buildings, the tender carthamus of lips; […]

Carthamus? Quel minuto più non vi lessi avante — I headed straight for the reference works. Wikipedia told me “The genus Carthamus, the distaff thistles, includes plants in the family Asteraceae. […] The best known species is the safflower (Carthamus tinctorius).” As for safflower:

Safflower petals contain one red and two yellow dyes. In coloring textiles, dried safflower flowers are used as a natural dye source for the orange-red pigment carthamin. Carthamin is also known, in the dye industry, as Carthamus Red or Natural Red 26. […] The dye is suitable for cotton, which takes up the red dye, and silk, which takes up the yellow and red color yielding orange.

And the word carthamus is from Arabic قرطم (qurṭum):

From Classical Syriac ܩܽܘܪܛܡܳܐ‎ (qūrṭəmā, “safflower”), from ܩܰܪܛܶܡ‎ (qarṭem, “to cut off gently, to trim”), from the plucking off petals which are used for dyeing.

I was pleased (and surprised) to find that the original of the Aragon essay is available online; of course it sounds better in French:
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I love stories about using multiple languages, and Nicole Chang has one for BBC Future:

I’m standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper. He’s just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French. I’m equally baffled: I’m a dominant English speaker, and haven’t used Mandarin properly in years. And yet, here in this most Parisian of settings, it somehow decided to reassert itself.

Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur. And the science behind why this happens is revealing surprising insights into how our brains work.

Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don’t expect them. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent.

She says the speaker “needs to have some sort of language control process”:
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I got curious about the word Negus, “Used formerly as a title for emperors of Ethiopia” (AHD) or, as the more expansive OED entry (updated September 2003) puts it, “(The title of) a king of Ethiopia or of a province or kingdom within Ethiopia; spec. (the title of) the supreme ruler of Ethiopia; the Ethiopian emperor.” The OED has:

Etymology: < Amharic nəgus king < näggäs- to become a king (as the title of the Ethiopian emperor also as nəgusä nägäst, lit. ‘king of kings’). Compare French négus (1556 in Middle French as negus; rare before 18th cent.).

Well, if the Amharic word is nəgus, how come the English pronunciation is /ˈniɡəs/? Happily, the AHD also gives /nɪˈɡuːs/ (in their own idiosyncratic rendering), which suits my sense of things much better, so I am adopting it.

But the AHD etymology says Amharic nəgus is “from Ge’ez nəguś, king, ruler, verbal adjective of nagśa, to rule, become king; see ngś in the Appendix of Semitic roots.” What did this ś represent? Wikipedia, s.v. Śawt (the name of the corresponding Ge’ez letter), says the Proto-Semitic sound was a “voiceless lateral fricative *ś [ɬ], like the Welsh pronunciation of the ll in llwyd,” and Rick Aschmann’s Reflexes of Proto-Semitic sounds in daughter languages says:

2. Proto-Semitic */ś/ was still pronounced as [ɬ] in Biblical Hebrew, but no letter was available in the Phoenician alphabet, so the letter ש did double duty, representing both [ʃ] and [ɬ]. Later on, however, [ɬ] merged with [s], but the old spelling was largely retained, and the two pronunciations of ש were distinguished graphically in Tiberian Hebrew as שׁ [ʃ] vs. שׂ [s] < [ɬ].

But how do they know? Via loan words in other languages?

Furthermore, the Śawt article says “See also Ḍäppa ṣ́ ፀ,” but that Ḍäppa link redirects to Ḍād, and a Google search on Ḍäppa essentially turns up only the Śawt article. What’s going on? Is Ḍäppa a thing? All information gratefully received.

Leanne Ogasawara (a translator from Japanese) describes an amusingly cockamamie proposal:

After Japan’s defeat in World War II, one of the famous novelists of the time, Naoya Shiga, published “National Language Issues” in the periodical Kaizo, in which he proposed that the Japanese language be abolished. And more, he suggested the country adopt French, “the most beautiful language in the world.” This created a huge uproar, given Shiga’s stature as an artist. It also fed into the suspicion the Japanese had at the time that their “exceeding difficult language” could be holding them back in terms of development.

Again and again, Japanese people would tell me how difficult Japanese is. I always thought it was a way to encourage me by saying, “It’s hard for us too!” But it wasn’t just the Chinese characters that Shiga found problematic, otherwise he would just have suggested they start using hiragana to write. This was what happened in Korea, when Hangul was developed in the 15th century. Because it was devised with much study and thought after using the Chinese system for a thousand years, Hangul is an almost perfect phonetic system.

Shiga knew this was a possibility and yet he suggested French because he felt it was not only the characters that was the problem. The defeat in the war had caused much soul-searching in Japan, leading to the idea that the Japanese language was somehow “too ambiguous”—aimai na nihongo. And that this had ultimately caused the country’s downfall.

(Shiga lived from 1883 to 1971 — quite a tumultuous span.)

I was distressed to see that a long-time favorite blogger was thinking of giving it up in favor of a personal website; he mentioned Michael’s Notebook as an ideal to emulate, citing the page How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? So I took a look and quickly backed away. Nothing against Michael, I’m glad what he’s doing works for him, but it’s the polar opposite of what I’m about, with its overemphasis on the vital importance of “thinking well” and contempt for purportedly lesser beings: “Far better to have one brilliant, knowledgeable person respond strongly and in depth to a piece than to have a hundred thousand respond shallowly.” Ranking people by “brilliance” vs. “shallowness” is morally equivalent to ranking them by skin color, religion, nationality, or anything else; once you accept the principle that some lives are worth more than others, you’re on a bad road. And of course people who rank by brilliance always seem to put themselves near the top of the rankings.

Me, I accept as an axiom that all lives are equally valuable and that there is no such thing as “intelligence” as a single, measurable quantity — different people are intelligent in different ways. I find the idea of wanting to interact with only “brilliant” people both laughable and repugnant. I love blogging because it gives me the opportunity to learn from a wide variety of other people with a wide variety of spheres of knowledge and experience; the more I blog, the more I realize the limitations of my own knowledge and appreciate the truth of Isaac Newton’s famous quote about being like a boy playing on the seashore “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” I intend to keep blogging until the keyboard falls from my cold, stiff fingers, because it keeps me learning and keeps me humble. And I am deeply grateful to all of you who read and respond and chat among yourselves and keep this jalopy on the road.

I recently ran across a comment by Alex Case that ended:

[…] can I just say that this is the first blog I’ve ever come across that’s being going continuously since 2002. Congratulations!

That was in 2008! I certainly wouldn’t have bet money that the blog would still be going in 2022, but I’m glad it is. Thanks again, and forgive the above rant; I figure after all these years I’ve earned the right to shake my cane and grumble a bit.