languagehat.com

Sorry for the clickbaity title, but it’s that kind of story; BBC News reports:

South Africans have condemned Irish airline Ryanair for making them take a test in the Afrikaans language on UK flights, calling it discriminatory. The country has 11 official languages, and many say they cannot understand Afrikaans – a language which was imposed during white-minority rule. The quiz contains questions on South African general knowledge. Ryanair defended the test, saying it weeds out those travelling on fraudulent South African passports. […]

A South African man who was flying from Lanzarote to London in May said he was “shocked” when Ryanair took away his passport and boarding pass before presenting him with the Afrikaans test. When Dinesh Joseph protested, Ryanair staff told him: “This is your language,” he said. […]

Only around 13% of South Africans speak Afrikaans as a first language, according to a 2011 census – making it the country’s third-most spoken mother tongue, after Zulu and IsiXhosa. The BBC asked Ryanair why they required the test to be taken in Afrikaans rather than any other South African language, but the company did not answer.

Apparently the quiz “is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors”; you can see it at this Metro story (here’s an archived version if, like me, you’re using an ad blocker). This does seem like a truly idiotic thing for an airline to do. Thanks, Craig!

In working through my massive Bunin collection Иван Бунин: Полное собрание рассказов в одном томе (over 1,100 pages, and it doesn’t include the longer works!), and once again I’ve come to a story that wouldn’t let go of me, that was so mysteriously powerful I had to translate it. It’s very short, one of a series of tiny stories he wrote in 1924 (back in 2009 I posted another one, Book), but I sweated as much over it as if it had been ten times as long. Bunin is so precise, so simple, and so carefully weighed (you get the feeling he read every sentence out loud many times until he was satisfied with it) that it’s a nightmare trying to even approximate the effect in English. You can read the Russian here.

MUSIC

I took hold of the door handle, pulled it toward myself – and at once an orchestra began playing. Outside the open window, moonlit fields went backward – the house had become a moving train. I pulled now tightly, now slackly – and conforming to my desire with unusual ease, now quieter, now louder, now solemnly spreading out, now charmingly dying down, sounded music before which the music of all the Beethovens in the world was nothing. I already understood that it was a dream, I was already frightened by its extraordinary resemblance to life, and I made a desperate effort to wake up and, waking up, threw my legs off the bed and lit the fire, but I realized at once that it was all a diabolical dream game again, that I was lying down, that I was in the dark, and that it was necessary at all costs to free myself from this hallucination, in which without any doubt some otherworldly force made itself felt, alien and yet at the same time my own, a force powerful in an inhuman way, because the human imagination of ordinary, everyday life, be it the imagination of all Tolstoys and Shakespeares together, can still only imagine, fantasize, that is, think, not make. But I had made, truly made, something completely incomprehensible: I had made music, a moving train, a room in which I apparently woke up and apparently lit a fire, I created them as easily, as wondrously, and with as much corporeality as only God can create, and saw my creations no less clearly and tangibly than I see now, in real life, in the light of day, this very table on which I am writing, this very inkpot into which I have just dipped my pen…

What is this? Who is the creator? Is it I, writing these lines at this moment, thinking and conscious of myself? Or is it someone existing in me apart from me, a secret even to myself, and incomparably more powerful than me, self-aware in this ordinary life? And what is corporeal and what is incorporeal?

As you can see, it’s something of a precursor of the 1929 “Penguins,” which is also about dreaming while dreaming; the later story is longer and very different in mood, and I’m glad to have both of them.
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John Gallagher reviews Arturo Tosi’s Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic experiences of travelling in early modern Europe for the TLS (January 22, 2021):

“For God’s sake learn Italian as fast as you can, if it be only to read Ariosto.” Charles James Fox wrote to a friend in 1767 that only an understanding of Italian language and literature would make him “fit to talk to Christians”. For Fox, as for the thousands of travellers before and after him who embarked on the continental pilgrimage known as the Grand Tour, crossing the channel meant encountering other languages. Some, like John Milton or Robert Boyle, returned accomplished polyglots, while the idleness and incomprehension of others helped build the modern image of the monoglot English tourist.

Arturo Tosi’s Language and the Grand Tour is a welcome study of the role of language in elite European travel from the late sixteenth century to the dawn of the nineteenth. Drawing on printed travel accounts and tourists’ letters, he explores how travellers learnt languages on the Continent, and how their linguistic skill (or lack thereof) shaped their interactions with everyone from border guards to courtesans. Lorenzo da Ponte, later Mozart’s librettist, wrote a romantic account of his first steps in German with a female innkeeper. The only payment she demanded for hours of German conversation and grammar study each day was that their lessons finished with an “Ich liebe Sie”: I love you.

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Alex Foreman, whom I have linked to with some frequency (e.g., 2020, 2021), specializes in reading texts in reconstructed pronunciations (as with the passage of Deuteronomy he did in six stages of Hebrew here), and in a new Facebook post (friends-only, but I’ll quote the whole text) he does it for anglicized Latin, something that has always fascinated me:

This is the first Latin poem I wrote a translation of as a kid. Also the first poem of Horace’s that I was able to actually make it through. I remember feeling so very excited.

I read this one first in a reconstruction of 1st century Roman Latin, then in my translation, then in a reconstruction of “Cromwellian” or mid-17th century English Latin pronunciation, followed by an English translation from the same period.

People are always obsessing over reading Latin in reconstructed Roman pronunciation from the 1st centuries BC and AD. I’m like: dude there are a whole lot of other reconstructible pronunciations for Latin you could use.

This type of Anglo-Latin is basically that attested by Robinson in 1619, only filtered through a form of English that had gone through some sound changes that his English hadn’t, in order to arrive at something more plausible for the 1650s. Robinson’s Latin pronunciation was of the newer mode and had been put through at least some of the reforms initiated by John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith, and thus distinctions of vowel-length in inflectional endings are respected, chiefly in open syllables.

Thus in this type of Anglo-Latin pronunciation, final etymologically short /ĭ/ takes the KIT vowel (as in “ubi” [ɪʊ̯bɪ]) whereas final etymological /ī/ takes the PRICE diphthong (as in “superī” [sɪʊ̯pɪrǝi]). Final etymological /ĕ/ merges with short /ĭ/ in the KIT vowel (as in “ducere” [dɪʊ̯sɪɾɪ]) whereas long ē like æ is rendered with the MEAT vowel (as in “comae” [koːmeː]). The ablative of the first declension singular -â happens not to occur here, but it would take the MATE vowel. There would be a distinction between the final vowels of “modŏ” which would end on the STRUT vowel, and “modō” which would end in the GOAT vowel. And yes that pronunciation of “Theseus” /ʃ/ is an attested thing. Robinson actually transcribes <þēšius>.

Here’s the Patreon post with the reading; I hope everyone can access it, because it’s fascinating stuff. And “Diffugere nives” is a really nice poem.

Keith Kahn-Harris, featured here in The Languages of Kinder Surprise earlier this year, writes for Psyche about the pleasure to be had in not understanding a language:

[…] I haven’t lost this heady, even mystical, faith in the possibilities of meeting and talking with the other. But more recently I’ve sought to understand how similarly transcendent possibilities can arise from not talking with the other, or even being able to understand their voice. Philosophically and theologically, I’ve subscribed to Martin Buber’s ideal of working towards ‘I-Thou’ encounters, in which we each meet the other mutually as authentic individuals, without objectification or qualification.

Here we come back to the Kinder Surprise. I love to peruse scripts I cannot understand, signs I cannot parse: Czech diacritics, the loops and curves of Georgian, the intricacies of Chinese characters, the elegant fluency of Arabic. In my book The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (2021), I went further, commissioning dozens more translations of the Kinder egg message into tongues as out of the way as ancient Egyptian and Klingon. My passion for not understanding language releases me from the effort of comprehension, freeing me to revel in the manifold sounds the human mouth can make, the tiny nuances the pen produces on paper. It made me wonder if Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ encounter might not require any dialogue at all? What if his concept of ‘dialogue’ – which he contrasts with the ‘I-It’ instrumentalism and objectification of ‘monologue’ – could be taken non-literally? […]

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The Untranslated does it again — calls my attention to a work that I’d never heard of but that I now very much want to read. The review starts “Vladimir Gubin has remained in the history of Russian literature as the author of one work, which he kept reworking and polishing for 15 years, from 1981 to 1996,” describes the wacky plot (involving the brutal dictator Illarion and his nemesis the Dwarf, who works in a Tower whose function is to generate ideas for state legislation and who gets imprisoned for trying to help Illarion’s sister Pomezana, who never wears any clothes and “has recently taken to flying in the sky like a character in a Marc Chagall painting”), then continues with this passage on the style, which is what grabbed me:

Of course, the way this novel is written is more important than what it is written about. This becomes evident from the very first paragraphs, which describe the swarms of blood-thirsty fleas causing mayhem among the citizens of Sycophantia. We do not know this yet, but the sporadic attacks of these uncannily trained insects are Illarion’s doing. From time to time, he orders his servants to release the fleas into public places as the indispensable “scourge of the masses”. The whooshing of the nasty swarms is conveyed by the repeated sibilants, something that a good English translator would be able to recreate after some time of concentrated effort. […]

Gubin’s rhythmic prose deserves a separate article, perhaps even a monograph, so I will just lightly touch upon it, giving you a couple of examples. Some of his sentences are likely to spark an acute sensation of déjà-vu in any reader who has been exposed to the Russian canonical translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. It is a peculiar feeling when you realise that a scene or a description in the novel suddenly bursts into a dactylic hexameter or at least into its truncated version. […] There are more likewise ingeniously metered sentences and phrases scattered throughout the text, and I cannot stress enough how important this rhythmic ornamentation is to the overall aesthetic experience of reading the novel.

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Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Wackernagel’s Lectures on Syntax with Special Reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic (tr. David Langslow):

In this course on syntax, we shall have constantly to deal with inherited material, which is to be found in even the smallest details and in oddities concerning which one would hardly think in terms of inheritance. For example, at Iliad 3.276–7, in a prayer to Zeus and the Sun-god, we read: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε (‘Zeus father (voc.) . . . and Helios (the Sun) (nom.)’), i.e. in the invocation one god is named in the vocative, the other in the nominative. It would be superficial simply to refer this to the requirements of the metre, since the poet would have had other means at his disposal for turning out a correct hexameter. From the point of view of Greek this is an oddity, particularly as vocatives elsewhere occur in coordination. This puzzle was solved by an outstanding philologist, Theodor BENFEY (1809–81). He showed (1872: 30–4) that in the Rigveda, the oldest written remains of an Indo-European language, when two forms of address are joined together with the little word ca ‘and’ (corresponding to Greek τε ‘and’), the second is in the nominative rather than the vocative. So Homer’s use of the nominative instead of the vocative is conditioned by the little word τε. This tiny detail reveals the power of linguistic habit and the influence of inheritance.

Here’s the original German:

Überall in unserer Syntax werden wir es mit Ererbtem zu tun haben. Es erstreckt sich bis auf kleinste Kleinigkeiten und Seltsamkeiten, bei denen man kaum an Vererbung denken würde. So heisst es I 277 in einem Gebet an Zeus und den Sonnengott: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε. Da wird also der eine Gott bei der Anrufung im Vokativ genannt, der andere im Nominativ. Es wäre oberflächlich ohne weiteres von einem Zwange des Metrums zu sprechen, da dem Dichter andere Mittel zu Gebote gestanden hätten um einen richtigen Hexameter herauszubringen. Vom Standpunkt des Griechischen ist dies eine Seltsamkeit, besonders da sich in andern Fällen Vokative koordiniert finden. Das Rätsel wurde gelöst durch einen ausgezeichneten Sprachforscher, Theodor Benfey. Er wies nach dass wenn im ältesten indogermanischen Sprachdenkmal, dem Rigweda, einer ersten Anrede eine zweite durch das dem Wörtchen τε entsprechende Wort ča beigefügt wird, diese zweite Anrede statt des Vokativs den Nominativ hat. Die Setzung des Nominativs statt des Vokativs ist also durch das Wörtchen τε bedingt. So enthüllt sich in dieser minimalen Kleinigkeit die Macht der Gewohnheit und der Einfluss der Vererbung.

I note that Langslow felt it necessary to add the qualifying “linguistic” to Wackernagel’s “die Macht der Gewohnheit” [the power of habit]. At any rate, this is the kind of cross-linguistic comparison that provides so much of the thrill of historical linguistics. (More details at the Laudator link.)

Maria Bloshteyn writes for Punctured Lines about her family’s library, painfully assembled and now being disposed of equally painfully (her essay is preceded by Yelena Furman’s brief introduction):

The books are a heartache. I have been dreading this moment for years. My mother, the adored and formidable matriarch of our small family, had moved into a nursing home after struggling with dementia for the past several years. She doesn’t care now what will happen to the family library, but I do. These are, after all, the books that we brought with us from the Soviet Union, when we left it forever in 1979. I grew up looking at their spines both in our Leningrad flat and in our Toronto apartment: light brown for the complete edition of Pushkin, mauve for Heine’s poems, beige for Tolstoy’s collected works. The classics, the translated classics, the poetry chapbooks, the art albums, the subscription editions, children’s literature—they are all here. Once, they provided the continuity between the two vastly different worlds: one that was forever lost to us and the other that we were slowly learning to inhabit. Reading and rereading them kept me sane as I, rarely at a loss for words, found myself suddenly language-poor and unable to either defend myself against nasty verbal attacks I faced in school as the Russian kid, or to express myself adequately to friendlier others.

These are the books that I am now packing into large cardboard boxes, as I am deciding their fate. Lowering them in, one by one, I think of the books that we weren’t allowed to bring with us as we left: most prominently, unfairly, and painfully, the single volume of Pushkin’s poems that my grandfather, part of the 13th Air Army during World War II, sent to my mother, evacuated to a village in the Urals. We weren’t allowed to take it, because it was published before some arbitrarily assigned cut-off year, which made it, ridiculously, a possible antiquity of value to the State. The passage of years hadn’t dimmed my sense of outrage.

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Mitra Taj writes for the NY Times about the latest expansion of Google Translate:

When Irma Alvarez Ccoscco heard that the language she has spoken her entire life, Quechua, had been added to Google Translate, she hurried to her computer to try it out. “I said: ‘This is it. The day has finally arrived,’” Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco, a poet, teacher and digital activist, recalled in a phone interview. She started with some basic sentences. “I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she said. “And yes, it worked.”

It was more than a new tool for communication; it was vindication that Quechua and its several millions of speakers in South America deserved greater voice and visibility, Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco said. She and other Quechua activists had been making that argument for years. After all, Quechua is one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas. But now, “a company as big as Google says so,” she said. “It’s like saying to the world, ‘look, here we are!’”

Quechua — or more precisely southern Quechua, the main language in the Quechua linguistic family — was one of 24 languages that Google added to its translation service this month. Collectively, they are spoken by some 300 million people. Many, like Quechua, are mostly oral languages that have long been marginalized, spoken by Indigenous or minority groups. […]

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Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker essay on bicycles (archived), describes their origin story thus:

A few years back, the bicentennial of the bicycle wheeled past at breakneck, bike-messenger speed. In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais, the Master of the Woods and Forests to the Duke of Baden, invented a contraption called the Laufmaschine, or running machine. A climate crisis had led to a great dying off of livestock, including horses, especially in Germany. Drais meant for the Laufmaschine to be a substitute for the horse. It had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you sort of scooted around on it, and a full-grown man could pick up pretty good speed. (“On descent it equals a horse at full speed,” Drais wrote.) In England, Laufmaschinen were called “swiftwalkers.”

I was, of course, curious about this alleged “swiftwalkers,” a word I didn’t recall ever having seen. Sure enough, it is unknown to the OED. [Not true — it’s there, but hyphenated; see Jen’s comment below.] That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, so I turned to Google Books, where I got a lot of hits of the type “About 1817, Baron Karl von Drais of Germany created the Swiftwalker, an improved wooden model with iron wheels and no pedals” and “Another early 19th Century version was called the ‘Swiftwalker.’” Clearly, Lepore picked it up from some such modern history. But when I restricted my search to the 19th century, I got exactly two hits, to The Velocipede: Its History, Varieties, and Practice by J. T. Goddard (1869) and Digest of Cycles Or Velocipedes with Attachments Patented in the United States, from 1789 to 1892, Volume 1 (1892)… and when I clicked through and searched within the books, I got “no results found.” When I restricted my search to the 20th century, I got hits like “Dubbed the dandy horse, the swiftwalker, the velocipede, hobby, and the running machine, von Drais’s invention took off” and “The velocipede gained rapid popularity in France, and almost immediately migrated to England, where it was known variously as a Draisine, Swiftwalker, Hobby Horse, Dandy Horse, or Pedestrian Curricle.”

So my current theory is that someone joining the throng of people trying to cash in on the new craze decided to call their version a Swiftwalker; some later historian happened on this obscure and forgotten term, thought it was colorful, and added it to their collection of colorful terms (I have to say I myself am particularly fond of “Pedestrian Curricle”); and such lists proliferated in the same way as lists of supposed names for groups of animals (the “exaltation of larks” phenomenon), so that any later writer on the subject could pluck out whatever pleased them, and “swiftwalker” pleased Lepore. All well and good, and there would be nothing wrong with saying something like “In England, Laufmaschinen were called many things, including ‘swiftwalkers,’” but her actual phrasing suggests that “swiftwalker” was the English word for it, which is flatly untrue. This is the trouble with popularized history, even from actual historians — the temptation to be as colorful as possible leads you into the swamp of error.

(Oh, and Drais’s name is perpetuated in the draisine used on railways.)