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I’ve finally started a long-planned retrospective of the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, accompanying my reading of Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema (a very welcome birthday gift from a few years ago — I didn’t want to start it until I’d accumulated a critical mass of DVDs, and now that I’ve got fifteen, I figure it’s time). After watching his early shorts on YouTube (god bless the internet!), I popped Breathless into the player and loved it as much as I did the first time I saw it all those decades ago (my wife and I are currently enjoying the many extra features included in the package — god bless Criterion!). I’ll doubtless be making a number of posts out of the retrospective, Godard being perhaps the most language-oriented of directors (see this 2003 post about 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle and this one about Le Mépris, both still among my favorite movies), and this is the first of them.

I called it Breathless, but its French title is À bout de souffle, which literally means ‘out of breath’; I used to be mildly annoyed by the slightly-off translation, but I’ve come to realize that Breathless makes a far better movie title, so good for whoever made the change. (In one of the extras, we see the original letter of agreement from the producer, where the title is in fact translated ‘out of breath.’) That’s not what I’m posting about, though. Like all of Godard’s movies, this one is a tissue of quotations and references, and Godard ascribes two of them to Lenin: “We are all dead men on leave” [Nous sommes tous des morts en permission] and “Ethics are the esthetics of the future” [L’éthique, c’est l’esthétique du futur]. Obviously the idea that Lenin, the most practical and materialist of men, could have said either of those is ludicrous, but my question was: who did? The first was easy enough — it turns out to be by Eugen Leviné (and one can see how the similar-sounding name helped with the misattribution). But who the devil came up with that pretentious quote about “the esthetics of the future,” which both Laurie Anderson and James Monaco have trustingly followed Godard in putting in the mouth of the Great Mushroom?

Another minor linguistic mystery is Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) ordering a coffee as “un direct.” The French noun direct has several meanings, but none involve coffee; this very question was asked at the WordReference.com Language Forums, but nobody seems to know (one person says “I’ve since found a few references to ‘un direct’ in online articles about Tunisia […] explaining it as a local name for un café au lait,” but in the first place Poiccard isn’t in Tunisia and in the second place he takes it black). I’m guessing it’s a very local term from Godard’s youth in Geneva — there are a number of such references in the film (e.g., Poiccard says huitante and nonante for 80 and 90) — but if anyone knows, do share.

My wife is unusually susceptible to cold, and I have often regretted that there is not a word in English for this quality — the French have frileux and the Russians зябкий, so why should we be deprived? Now I learn that such a word actually does exist, though only at the fringes (“Now regional,” says the OED in its 2003 entry), and I am posting about it to encourage everyone to start using it. Unlike so many of the words eager logophiles propose for adoption, this one fills an actual need. I want people to be able to say “I’m nesh” and have it understood.

Since you’re surely wondering, here is the OED’s etymology:

Cognate with early modern Dutch, Dutch regional (West Flemish) nesch, nisch soft (of eggs), damp, sodden, foolish (16th cent.), Gothic hnasqus soft, tender. A connection with Old High German nascōn and its cognates in sense ‘to eat dainty food or delicacies’ (see nosh v.) has been suggested, but seems unlikely.
The further etymology of the word is unclear: it has been suggested that it is related to Sanskrit kiknasa particles of ground grain (of rice), flesh of rice (represented in only one corrupt late Vedic text, with variants caknasa, cikkasa, in context implying an unattested compound piṣṭa-cikkasa particle of flour, from which some have posited a Sanskrit root cikk- to hurt) and further with Latvian regional knost, knosīt to peck at plumage with the beak, pluck, beat (compare Latvian knosīties to scratch oneself), but the connection between the two is difficult to make, and their joint connection with the Germanic word is not generally accepted.

And here’s a selection of citations:
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Andrew Dunbar wrote me:

I wonder if you have seen this in the wild yet. We all have seen the noun spellings of phrasal verbs like “work out”, “break up”, and “knock out” etc being more and more spelled as single units when there is also a related noun “workout”, “breakup”, and “knock out”, etc.

I often point out that a new class of irregular verbs has emerged, since not many people complain about this like they still do the established proscribed “errors” like split infinitives. The result being that the infinitive and present non-third persons now have a spelling as a single word where all other inflected forms retain their two-word spellings.

And I also joke about how the regular versions if we wanted to avoid introducing many new irregular verbs would be like “I workouted”, “they are breakuping” (or breakupping?), “he knockouts the other guy”, etc. But what I’ve actually seen in the wild, two times now, is internal inflection! The new third person present form of “to break down” is “he breaksdown”: Colion Noir Breaksdown Gun Laws & Gun Crime Statistics.

To be fair, the previous time I saw it was also in the title of another Joe Rogan podcast video. So maybe it’s just a quirk of one person on his team. Maybe they’re intentionally playing with the language? I wonder if you or anyone in Hattery has seen other examples yet?

I hadn’t noticed it, but Andrew’s right, it must be new if people haven’t been peeving about it yet.

1) Bloods, quoting from Jacob Wackernagel, Lectures on Syntax:

In the earliest period, Christian texts in Latin are almost exclusively translations from Greek texts, translations, moreover, which were made not by the intellectual elite but by simple people of limited education and learning, for whom the wording of the original was surrounded by a sacred halo. As a result, when they produced versions of holy texts, they committed gross infringements of the rules of their own language. For example, in an old translation of the New Testament, which is known in fragments—i.e., not in the Vulgate—we read at Mark 4:11 omnia dicitur, ‘all things (pl.) is said (sg.)’. In Latin it is a glaring solecism to use a singular verb with a plural subject. This is explained by the fact that the Greek original has πάντα γίγνεται ‘everything (pl.) comes to pass (sg.)’, with the familiar Greek construction (neuter plural subject with singular verb; cf. I, 101–3 below). Similarly, in the so-called Clementina, Greek participles in the genitive absolute are rendered with genitives in the Latin, e.g. §43 contendentium tribuum, ‘while the tribes were disputing’. Or again, in just the same way it can happen that in texts of the Bible even Hebraisms enter Latin. Several times in the Old Testament we have the expression ἀνὴρ αἱμάτων (lit. ‘man of bloods (pl.)’: 2 Kings 16:7, 8; Psalms 5:7, 25:9, etc.; Proverbs 29:10). From a Greek point of view the descriptive genitive is anomalous and so, too, is the plural, ‘bloods’ (αἵματα occurs only in poetry). Both features are conditioned by the Hebrew original, and accordingly the phrase used in the Latin text is uir sanguinum. This is particularly striking because sanguis in Latin has otherwise no plural at all; the grammarians, who take no notice of Christian Latin, make this an explicit rule (Servius on Aen. 4.687; Priscian 5.54 = GL II, 175).

Even though I studied Latin before Greek, I took to the latter so avidly that I have been known to make the same error of using “the familiar Greek construction (neuter plural subject with singular verb)” in Latin.

2) Professors and Clods, quoting Andrew T. Weil, “Joshua Whatmough,” Harvard Crimson (May 3, 1963):
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The new paper Monograph of wild and cultivated chili peppers (Capsicum L., Solanaceae) (PhytoKeys 200: 1-423), by Gloria E. Barboza, Carolina Carrizo García, Luciano de Bem Bianchetti, María V. Romero, and Marisel Scaldaferro, is focused on plant taxonomy rather than linguistics, but (aside from the fact that various Hatters enjoy talking biology) it has all sorts of interesting vocabulary. From the abstract:

We recognise 43 species and five varieties, including C. mirum Barboza, sp. nov. from São Paulo State, Brazil and a new combination C. muticum (Sendtn.) Barboza, comb. nov.; five of these taxa are cultivated worldwide (C. annuum L. var. annuum, C. baccatum L. var. pendulum (Willd.) Eshbaugh, C. baccatum L. var. umbilicatum (Vell.) Hunz. & Barboza, C. chinense Jacq. and C. frutescens L.). Nomenclatural revision of the 265 names attributed to chili peppers resulted in 89 new lectotypifications and five new neotypifications. Identification keys and detailed descriptions, maps and illustrations for all taxa are provided.

Words like “lectotypifications” and “neotypifications” make me gape in wonderment. Check out these clade names: Andean, Caatinga, Flexuosum, Bolivian, Longidentatum, Atlantic Forest, Purple Corolla, Pubescens, Tovarii, Baccatum, and Annuum. And there is in fact an etymological excursus:

The word ‘capsicum’ was coined in the pre-Linnaean literature for the first time by Matthias de L’Obel (1576: 173) for the “Piper indicum longioribus siliquis”. […] Pre-Linnaean botanists (e.g. Dodoens 1554, 1583; Clusius 1611; Bauhin 1623; Parkinson 1640; Morison 1669) proposed many polynomials for the peppers emphasising the variable fruit characters (colour, shape, size, position or pungency). Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1719), in his influential work Institutiones, used the name Capsicum, gave an original description for the genus and listed 27 polynomial species that corresponded to his concept of the genus. He also mentioned the etymology of the word Capsicum, either from the Greek word δάγκωμα (= to bite), on account of the burning strength of the seeds or from the Latin voice capsa (= box), on account of the boxy shape of the cultivated fruits.

That seems to be still the preferred suggestion; AHD: “New Latin Capsicum, genus name, perhaps from Latin capsa, box (from its podlike fruit).”

I was stopped in my tracks at the very beginning of Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article [archived] on Chile’s new president:

February in Santiago, the capital of Chile, is like August in Paris: the end of summer, when everyone who can afford a vacation escapes for a last gasp of freedom. Many santiaguinos go to the nearby Pacific beaches, or to the chilly lakes in the south.

I was struck by santiaguinos, so I turned to my trusty Diccionario de gentilicios y topónimos (see this LH post) and found that, sure enough, that’s the name for people from Santiago de Chile. The reason it sounded odd to me is that people from Santiago del Estero in Argentina (the country where I went to high school) are called santiagueños, as are those from the Santiagos in Ecuador and Panama. But someone from Santiago in Cuba or the Dominican Republic is a santiaguero, while an inhabitant of Santiago de Compostela in Spain is santiagués. Just to mix things up, someone from Santiago de Cacem in Portugal is mirobrigense, while a person from Santiago Millas in Spain is a maragato. Gentilicios are complicated, but I love ’em!

A side note: people mock the New Yorker’s fossilized diereses in words like coöperation and their Anglophilic preference for got as the past participle of get, but I shrug those off as charming quirks; the article’s “biographies of Chilean Presidents,” however, seriously bothers me. President, like other titles, should be capitalized before a name (President Joe Biden) but not otherwise. I deprecate this folderol!

My pal Nick wrote me recommending a show called The Expanse, adding: “In particular, the Belter pidgin is delightful, even leaving aside the wonderful characters, acting, and surprisingly good VFX.” As I told him, “it sounds interesting but it’s on one of the many, many platforms (is that what the kids are calling them? we used to have channels) we don’t get.” But the language does look like fun, so herewith for your delectation, Belter Creole grammar:

This page deals with the grammar of Belter Creole, also known as lang Belta.

Typologically, Belter is an analytic language. Rather than inflections, it primarily uses separate words to build grammatical constructions, such as prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and the meaning of a sentence depends strongly on word order. However, it does use compounding and some suffixes for deriving new words. For example, the -lowda suffix is used to form plural pronouns (see below).

Enjoy!

The linguist Anne Cutler recently died, and presumably for that reason her paper “The perception of rhythm in language” (Cognition 50 [1994]: 79-81) has been making the rounds; in fact, mollymooly linked to it here a couple of days ago. But all the links I’ve seen go to this site, where it appears (at least in my browser) in a format too huge to read more than a few words of at once — the link I provided above with the title should be more readable. At any rate, do read it; it’s only three pages, and it makes interesting points. It also has a feature which you will want to discover for yourself, so do yourself a favor and read the article before the comments to this thread, where the feature will doubtless be mentioned.

Having finished Bulgakov’s The White Guard (see this post), I decided to stay with the year 1924 and read Konstantin Fedin’s Города и годы (Cities and Years), which I got for a buck last year; like the Bulgakov, it’s not a very good novel, but it’s got interesting bits and relates oddly to official Soviet fiction, so I’m posting about it. Happily, Sovlit.net has a chapter-by-chapter plot description that will save me some trouble: I’ll refer you to that for the details of how Fedin plays with chronology and confine myself to more general points.

The novel consists of several more or less incompatible genres (or, if you’re feeling Bakhtinian, chronotopes) mashed together, which is one reason it isn’t a success. The first the reader encounters is the mystery: why is this guy yelling out his window, what is this rambling letter about, and whoa, why does he get shot? Yes, the protagonist’s death is revealed in the opening chapter: modernism! But we won’t find out why for a long time.

The second is the literary novel. Fedin was a Serapion Brother and thus addicted to literary analysis of an academic nature; like his fellow Brother Yury Tynyanov he felt compelled to ditch boring, traditional elements that kept the reader engaged on a primitive level and make something New to match the new world of Soviet Russia, and unfortunately, as with Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара (The Death of the Vazir-mukhtar), “the result is … lacking in inner truth, smacking of ‘literature.’” Since he doesn’t bother to make the characters “real” in the boring old Tolstoyan way, the reader doesn’t much care about them and their entanglements.

The third is melodrama. The plot, reduced to its most basic elements, is that Andrei and Max (Margrave von zur Mühlen-Schönau) are both in love with Marie, but neither knows about the other; meanwhile Andrei’s best friend, the German painter Kurt Wahn, hates Max because Max, a rich and possessive lover of art, is subsidizing Kurt but insisting on not only buying up everything he paints but keeping it stashed away in his crumbling Bavarian castle. When World War One breaks out, Andrei is interned as an enemy alien (as was Fedin himself) and spends a couple of years canoodling with Marie before trying to escape and being caught by Max, who could turn him in and let him be executed but takes a liking to him and spares him. Kurt goes off to fight on the Eastern Front, becomes a Bolshevik, and is captured but freed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Max, also sent to fight, is also captured and interned in the invented town Semidol somewhere in Mordovia, where he joins a group of Germans who are trying to start a revolt among the Mordvins and somehow fight their way back to Germany. Kurt and Andrei somehow also wind up there as part of the local Bolshevik leadership, and Andrei somehow winds up getting involved with a local woman named Rita; when the revolt is discovered, Andrei is supposed to kill Max but instead helps him escape and take a letter to his love Marie in Germany. Max, having discovered that Andrei is his rival, delivers the letter but tells Marie about Rita — “If you don’t believe me, go to Russia and see for yourself.” She does, she discovers it’s true, and flees; the appalled Andrei flees Rita and their baby, goes mad, and is eventually killed by Kurt for failing in his Bolshevik duty. All of that might make for a great opera, but it feels a little silly in a novel.
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I had occasion to look up the Russian word чапан (chapan), which turns out to be a kind of outer garment worn in Central Asia (there’s an English Wikipedia article as well, although the OED has it only in a citation for “colourful”: “The chapan, a colorful ankle-length cape, usually in striped silk fabric”). That would have been the end of it, except that I checked Wiktionary and discovered that its etymon, Arabic جبة ‘jubbah,’ is the source of an astonishing variety of words: Italian giubba (as in “Vesti la giubba”), French jupe ‘skirt’ (which gives Spanish chupa ‘leather jacket’ and English jumper), Russian ю́бка (júbka) ‘skirt,’ Japanese 襦袢 (juban) ‘a type of lightweight under-robe worn under a kimono,’ жупан/župan/żupan in a bunch of Slavic languages, Chagatai Turkish چپان‎ (çapan; presumably the source of the Russian word, though its Wiktionary article gives no etymology), Greek ζιπούνι ‘short jacket or waistcoat’ (which gives yet another Russian word, зипун ‘medieval Russian type of peasant upper garment’), Tibetan ཕྱུ་པ (phyu pa; this gives English chuba ‘long sheepskin coat,’ a word entirely unknown to the OED), Ottoman Turkish جبه‎ (cübbe; this has descendants all over the Balkans), and a bunch of others. Another of those well-traveled words!

As lagniappe (via Trevor Joyce’s Facebook post): ‘Book of Leinster’ pages to be restored and digitised. That’s excellent news, of course, but I’m a little surprised they’re only getting around to it now.