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The following letter to the TLS (Jan. 1, 2021) contains several curious words:

Merpeople

Apropos Shahidha Bari’s review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople (December 11), and its timely reminder that merpeople “are still with us, potent figures of human difference”: not many non-merpeople perhaps know that in what’s been hailed (by David Attenborough) as “the first natural history encyclopaedia”, besides mermen and mermaids, there’s a splendid image of a mer-monk, large as life and twice as unnatural. The source is Jacob Meydenbach’s Hortus Sanitatis, an incunable of 1491 from Gutenberg’s Mainz, a fine copy of which resides in Cambridge’s University Library.

Paul Cartledge
Clare College, Cambridge

Merpeople is a pretty obvious plural, but you still don’t see it very often; the OED (entry updated September 2001) has these citations:

1824 C. Lamb Let. 10 Aug. (1935) II. 434 A baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties,—sea dragons, ploypi, mer-people, most fantastic.
1882 Spectator 16 Dec. 1618 The idea of the ‘child of earth..’ carried away to consort with Mer-people is as old as Hylas.
1964 J. P. Clark Three Plays 46 Daughter of Umaloku, the delight of God and pride of unguents, Who the merpeople desire, I come Ahead of the snail and tortoise.
2007 Weekly World News 6 Aug. 11/1 While studying exotic marine life in the lowest depths of the Indian Ocean, marine biologist Vincent Harbor encountered a merpeople colony unlike any ever seen.

I am happier than I can say that the last citation is from the Weekly World News, the natural home of merpeople-related news. The word incunable is not particularly rare, though I myself usually use incunabulum. But the prize find here is mer-monk (I would prefer mermonk, since the other mer-words are not hyphenated); it’s not in the OED, and I thought perhaps it might be a hapax, but Google Books finds it in The English Illustrated Magazine, No. 5 (March 1898), p. 271:

The sea-monk or mer-monk of our Illustration may be regarded by comparison as a common object of the seashore, “for the hinferior horder of clergy,” in the nature of things, must be more numerous than their ecclesiastical superiors of episcopal rank.

And I presume that this refers to the very mer-monk, “large as life and twice as unnatural,” mentioned in the letter. How many can there be?

We were recently talking about phonaesthetic words, so this seems like a good time to post ‘Rough’ words feature a trill sound in languages around the globe, from Radboud University (at Phys.org). It begins:

In languages spoken around the world, words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a “trilled /r/” sound—a linguistic pattern that stretches back over 6,000 years, a new study reveals. The international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham, Radboud University, and the University of British Columbia has published its findings in Scientific Reports.

Language scientists first analyzed words for “rough” and “smooth” in a worldwide sample of 332 spoken languages—discovering a strong link between the sounds of speech and the sense of touch, which has influenced the structure of modern languages.

Compared to words meaning “smooth,” words that mean “rough” were nearly four times as likely to contain a trilled /r/ sound—from Basque “zakarra” and Mongolian “barzgar” to Dutch “ruw” and Hungarian “durva,” these words feature the common sound—an “r” pronounced as an Italian speaker might say “arrivederci.” […]

In the case of English and Hungarian, two unrelated languages, they found that in both languages, some 60% of words for rougher textures, such as “rough,” “coarse,” “gnarled” and “durva,” “érdes,” “göcsörtös” contain an /r/ sound—more than twice as frequent as for words for smoother textures, such as “smooth,” “silky,” “oily” and “sima,” “selymes,” “olajos.”

Co-author Mark Dingemanse, Associate Professor in Language and Communication at Radboud University, commented, “On their own, any of these patterns would be quite striking, but taken together, they demonstrate a deep-rooted and widespread association between the sounds of speech and our sense of touch.”

Mark Dingemanse has been at the Hattery before. I don’t know what to make of this, and I welcome all thoughts. (Thanks, Trevor!)

A while back, Anatoly Vorbei linked to V. N. Makeeva’s Материалы для толкования устаревших слов, which lists words that occur in Lomonosov’s Russian grammar and related materials that are difficult for modern readers to understand, with explanations taken from early dictionaries and from literature of the period. There follows this hopeful sentence:

Будущие исследователи раскроют, надо надеяться, значение тех, очень немногих слов, для толкования которых не удалось подыскать пока ни словарных, ни литературных материалов; таковы, например, слова артовль, ахидъ, березгъ, горлъ, слюгъ, хвихъ, хогъ, устрецъ, которые встречаются в черновых списках имен существительных мужского рода, кончающихся на ъ и ь.

Future researchers will hopefully discover the meaning of those very few words for whose interpretation we have not yet been able to find either dictionary or literary materials, such as the words artovl′, akhid, berezg, gorl, slyug, khvikh, khog, and ustrets, which are found in the draft lists of masculine nouns ending in ъ [hard sign] and ь [soft sign].

Anatoly is particularly taken with two of them:

Слюгъ и Хвихъ хорошо подходят как имена двоих слуг злой ведьмы в театральной сказке, мне кажется. Или абстрактных персонажей в пьесе Беккета.

Slyug and Khvikh work well as names of two of the servants of the wicked witch in a theatrical fairy tale, I think. Or abstract characters in a Beckett play.

Those are indeed excellent, but I am fond of artovl′ and khog as well; the first is impressively high-flown, the second sounds down-and-dirty.

Poetry, the magazine, is an American institution, founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912 and still going strong. I confess my interest in it peaks with the Ezra Pound years (I treasure my copy of the March 1915 issue, which includes some of his greatest poems); it was hit-and-miss during my college years (1968-72), and I pretty much stopped reading it after that. When I’ve looked at copies in recent years, my invariable reaction is “not my thing.” But the last three issues, edited by Srikanth Reddy (personal website; Poetry Foundation page), have made me snap to attention. His Editor’s Note to the March issue begins by describing the difficult life and career of Margaret Esse Danner (1915–1984), “the first Black woman on Poetry’s editorial staff,” and ends:

This issue of Poetry seeks to address an overlooked poet—and to bring Margaret Danner’s artful manner of looking at things to a wider readership. […]

My own guest editorship will turn, next month, to the diverse communities of language-users from a transnational perspective, with a special issue on “Exophonic Poetry”—featuring work by migrant, refugee, and other poets who write in a “non-native” language. And I’ll conclude my guest editorship at the magazine with a May issue on pre-modern poetries of the world in translation, titled “Make It Old.” A Black Chicago author who worked in Poetry’s offices; an immigrant chorus of exophonic voices; and the ancient poetries of our world in translation—addressing poetry from past to present, from the individual to the community, and from the neighborhood to the planet might, I hope, open new dimensions in our experience of art, language, and society.

Along with our folio on Margaret Danner, I’m grateful for the opportunity to introduce an extraordinary group of contemporary poets, hailing from Nigeria, Turkey, Bolivia, Japan, Chicago, and beyond, who have contributed their work to this issue of Poetry. Let’s turn now to their “blazing forms.”

In that issue I was struck by the substantial number of poems with the originals and en face translations, e.g. Rüştü Onur’s Hülâsa and the English version In Sum; I also very much liked Simone White’s From “or, on being the other woman”, which begins “I am an ignorant fucker. difficult to be close to in that i am unsentimental and intimate with everyone. This is connected to the problems I am working through regarding metaphor” and later includes this satisfying passage:
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I bought Tatyana Tolstaya’s Кысь (translated by Jamey Gambrell as The Slynx) in 2001, shortly after it came out; like everyone else, I was captivated by her brilliant short stories of the 1980s, and eager to see what her long-awaited novel was like (she’d been working on it since 1986). Alas, at the time its prose was too much for me, and I set it aside; now, having reached the year 2000 in my chronological reading program — and having gotten a lot more Russian literature under my belt — I’m finally in a position to read it without excessive difficulty, and I have done so. Alas and alack, it turns out to be a disappointment, as most Russian reviews said, although reviews of the translation seem to have been largely ecstatic (“a complex, deeply rewarding masterwork”; “A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy, and an impressive step forward for the gifted Tolstaya”; “It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of The Slynx” — John Banville in The New Republic). The New Yorker’s one-paragraph review (from the January 13, 2003, issue) provides a useful summary:

The hero of this spellbinding futuristic novel, a government scribe named Benedikt, lives in a primitive settlement on the site of Moscow, two hundred years after “the Blast.” No one knows quite how the old world was destroyed; as Benedikt puts it, “People were playing around and played too hard with someone’s arms.” Citizens born after the Blast exist on a diet of mice and “worrums” and bear frightening mutations, or “Consequences”—a tail, a single eye, a head covered with fringed red coxcombs. Other inhabitants, called Oldeners, haven’t aged at all since the Blast, and harbor memories of a lost culture that go unheeded by their descendants. Tolstaya’s radioactive world is a cunning blend of Russia’s feudal and Soviet eras, with abuse of serfs, mandatory government service, and regulation of literature. The dangers that threaten, however, feel more contemporary: to the south, Chechens; and to the west a civilization that might hold some promise, except that its members “don’t know anything about us.”

The thing is that if you are familiar with Russian and other dystopian literature, little of what she does is all that new or interesting. Lisa Hayden at Lizok’s Bookshelf puts it well:
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Yesterday a difficult Hebrew word, today a Slavic one. I was looking up something else in my three-volume Russian-English dictionary when my eye fell on “усма́ ы́ f obs leather.” I’d never seen it before, and was of course curious, so I looked it up in Vasmer and found this lengthy but unsatisfying entry:

усма́ I “выделанная кожа”, диал. (Даль), усма́рь “кожевник”, др.-русск. усма ж., усмъ м. “кожа”, усмиѥ (ср. р.) — то же, усмарь “кожевник”, усмѣнъ “кожаный”, цслав. усма ж., усмъ м., наряду с др.-русск., цслав. усниѥ ср. р. “кожа”, усниянъ “кожаный”, уснѣнъ — то же, болг. усма́р “кожевник, дубильщик”, сербохорв. у̀смина “голенище”, словен. úsnjа ж., úsnjе “кожа”, чеш. usně ж. “кожа (дубленая)”, usnář “кожевник”. Форму usnьje объясняют из *usmnьje; см. Мейе, Ét. 428, 437. ‖ Существующие сближения неудовлетворительны; так, предполагали родство с обу́ть, о́бувь (Мi. ЕW 372, против см. Брандт, РФВ 25, 36), далее сравнивают (неудовлетворительно фонетически) с греч. εὕω “жгу” (*eusō), лат. ūrō, ussī, ustum “жечь, сушить”, др.-инд. ṓṣati “жжет”, др.-исл. usli м. “огонь” (Брандт, там же; Голуб–Копечный 404), кроме того, предполагали еще родство с греч. ἕννῡμι “одеваю”, др.-инд. vásanam “одежда”, vásman- “покрывало”, лат. vestis “одежда” (Горяев, ЭС 388 и сл.), а также со слав. udъ “член”, нов.-в.-н. Wade “икра ноги” (Миккола, IF 23, 127; RS 2, 248).

In other words, there are various Slavic words for ‘leather’ and ‘leatherworker’ (the Russian one is archaic and dialectal, but Slovenian usnje is the usual word for ‘leather’; the Church Slavic version occurs in Mark 1:6, where John the Baptist is described as wearing a leather belt: “Бѣ же Иоаннъ оболченъ власы велблужди, и поясъ усменъ о чреслѣхъ его…”) which have no clear cognates outside the family; Vasmer says some connect it with обу́ть ‘to put on shoes’ and (unsatisfying phonetically) with various descendants of PIE *h₁ews- ‘to burn’ or with descendants of PIE *wes- ‘to dress, clothe,’ not to mention Slavic udъ ‘limb, bodily member.’ I thought maybe a more recent source might have something more conclusive, or at least less scattershot, so I googled around and found L. V. Kurkina’s Лексические архаизмы родопского диалекта [Lexical archaisms of the Rhodope dialect], which has a paragraph on the word family:
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Balashon does a deep dive into an obscure Hebrew word:

The word shidah appears in only one verse in the entire Tanach. It appears twice in the verse, so I don’t know if it counts as a hapax legomenon, but it certainly suffers from the same fate that other such words do – without multiple appearances, they are hard to translate. In this case, it’s even harder, because the context of the verse itself leaves nearly infinite possible interpretations.

It appears in the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) in a section where the king is boasting about his possessions. Here is the Hebrew:

כָּנַסְתִּי לִי גַּם־כֶּסֶף וְזָהָב וּסְגֻלַּת מְלָכִים וְהַמְּדִינוֹת עָשִׂיתִי לִי שָׁרִים וְשָׁרוֹת וְתַעֲנֻגוֹת בְּנֵי הָאָדָם שִׁדָּה וְשִׁדּוֹת

And the English (but I’m not translating – yet – our word shidah)

I further amassed silver and gold and treasures of kings and provinces; and I got myself male and female singers, and the pleasures of people, shida v’shidot. (Kohelet 2:8)

This is an incredibly difficult phrase to translate. What does shidah mean here? Why is the singular shida followed by the plural shidot? Even the punctuation is hard to place properly, but I’ll leave that aside for now.

All we can really say is that it’s something (or a set of things) that a king would list among his treasured possessions.

The Talmud gives two interpretations: “Here [in Babylonia] they interpreted the phrase as follows: ‘male and female demons’ [shedim]. In the West [= in the Land of Israel], they said it means shiddeta.” Balashon dismisses the “demon” translation (“this is a drash, and not the plain meaning of the verse”) and quotes Rashi as saying that “shiddeta (and shidah) refer to carriages for women and nobles.” There is a long discussion of this, finding it unsatisfactory, and then Ibn Ezra is quoted as saying it means ‘women’:
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Back in 2013 we discussed some silly and/or overstated ideas about languages possibly spoken by Neanderthals; now I have to bring to your attention a paragraph from an otherwise excellent LRB review by John Lanchester (of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 17 December 2020; archived) which is similarly credulous:

There has been debate over whether the Neanderthals could make fire, as distinct from using it once they found it. Bruniquel shows that they had mastery of fire, and is evidence also of social organisation, the ability to imagine, and perhaps of a structured society. Does all this structure and learning and social context imply that they could talk? Wragg Sykes thinks that, ‘taking everything on balance, it’s very likely Neanderthals spoke in some form.’ The gene FOXP2 is sometimes, misleadingly, called the ‘language gene’, which it isn’t quite, but we do know that it is crucially linked to the development of speech. Neanderthals had FOXP2, though in a variant with one protein different from ours. It is sometimes argued that the oldest surviving human languages are those of the Khoisan peoples in Southern Africa, which make extensive use of clicks and glottal noises. If the oldest H. sapiens languages were like that, perhaps Neanderthal languages were too.

Note the progression from Wragg Sykes’ unexceptionable “it’s very likely Neanderthals spoke in some form” to “It is sometimes argued” (a blinking red warning sign) to the wild-blue-yonder “If the oldest H. sapiens languages were like that, perhaps Neanderthal languages were too.” Why, oh why, are people so unable to resist this kind of thing when it comes to language?

I repeat, the rest of the review is fascinating, and I learned some things I hadn’t known; I just wish they’d left out those last two sentences.

Back in 2013 we discussed Aranese pretty much in the abstract, the post being based on Norman Davies’s ill-informed and misleading description of it as “a unique language that mixes Basque and neo-Latin elements”; Richard Collett has a nice piece at BBC Travel that describes both its history and its place in today’s world:

Borders are supposed to be simple in the Pyrenees. On the southern side of the mountain range, you’re in Spain. On the northern side, you’re in France. Visit Val d’Aran, though, and geopolitics takes a more complicated turn. Val d’Aran is on the wrong side of the mountains. Geographically, this small mountain valley with its population of 10,000 people should be in France. But Val d’Aran is the only community within Spain’s contiguous borders that’s located on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees.

Officially, Val d’Aran is within the administrative boundaries of Catalonia, but despite being caught between larger kingdoms and nation-states for centuries, Val d’Aran has never surrendered its local identity. Key to that local identity is the Aranese language, which alongside Catalan and Spanish, is officially recognised as the third language of Catalonia. […]

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Tom Shippey is a medievalist, a Tolkienist, and a spectacularly grumpy fellow to judge from the quotes I’ve seen from him at Laudator Temporis Acti. The latest (from The Road to Middle-Earth) proves him to be spectacularly ignorant about dictionaries as well:

Dictionary definitions are, symptomatically, unhelpful. The OED, though conceived and created by philologists and borne along by the subject’s nineteenth-century prestige, has almost nothing useful to offer. ‘Philology’ it suggests, is: ‘I. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation … polite learning. Now rare in general sense.’ Under 2 it offers ‘love of talk, speech or argument’ (this is an offensive sense in which philology is mere logic-chopping, the opposite of true philosophy); while 3 recovers any ground abandoned in 1 by saying it is ‘The study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1.)’ So ‘philology’ is ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ too, all very charitable but too vague to be any use. The Deutsches Wörterbuch set in motion by Jacob Grimm (himself perhaps the greatest of all philologists and responsible in true philological style for both ‘Grimm’s Law of Consonants’ and Grimms’ Fairy Tales) could do little better, defining philologie with similar inclusiveness as ‘the learned study of the (especially Classical) languages and literatures’. The illustrative quotation from Grimm’s own work is more interesting in its declaration that ‘none among all the sciences is prouder, nobler, more disputatious than philology, or less merciful to error’; this at least indicates the expectations the study had aroused. Still, if you didn’t know what ‘philology’ was already, the Grimm definition would not enlighten you.

Like so many people, he wants the dictionary to define words not as other people (the unwashed masses) use them but as he (the One Who Knows) wishes them to be used. But what shows him to be not merely ignorant but duplicitous as well is that “ … ” in the first OED definition. Here’s the unabridged version:

1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning. Now rare in gen. sense except in the U.S.

Note that the part he excises — I’ve bolded it — is exactly the part that covers the sense he wants. His grumpiness doesn’t shock me, but that dishonest twisting of the evidence does; I have even less respect for him than I did before.
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