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I’ve just discovered Etymologeek, “A free multilingual dictionary that not only shows word histories but also draws them.” From the About page:

Etymologeek shows you the origins of the words you search for. However, next to the textual explanation, we also include an etymology tree (directed graph) to show graphically how the word is derived and to what other words it is related. Moreover, we also aim to include word definitions and other relevant information. […]

Our data is derived from open sources, primarily from the Wiktionary (licensed under the CC BY-SA license) or other public domain etymology data repositories. Much of the data has been automatically extracted: we have used tools such as Etytree by Ester Pantaleo to do that. However, we have also been gradually refining the data, making corrections, modifications, and manually reviewing some of the etymology entries.

I like the answer to “Can I trust your etymologies?”:

No. Etymology is inherently speculative and uncertain. Moreover, some of the automated data extraction we have performed to build Etymologeek has resulted in errors or inaccuracies. We encourage you to independently verify any data you see on our website, and we disclaim any responsibility for your use of or reliance on it. We also encourage you to submit corrections and report mistakes.

The website was built by “Linas, the founder of Interlinear Books.” I discovered it by searching for the etymology of Latvian padome ‘council, board; (historical) soviet’; Wiktionary was no help (“This etymology is missing or incomplete”), but I saw that Google also offered Padome etymology in Latvian | Etymologeek.com, where I learned that “Latvian word padome comes from Latvian dome,” and clicking on dome “(often plural) council (legislative or administrative organ)” got me the information that it “comes from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-” along with a nice visualization and a list of related words. I’ll have to start checking it regularly, and I hope it thrives and keeps improving.

Back in 2007 (in a very interesting thread which brought me the astonishing news that some young Englishpersons pronounced ginger with /ŋ/, to rhyme with singer, when used as an insult) michael farris wrote:

since we’re already here, is ‘ginger’ meaning red-headed (pretty alien to my dialect) related to ginger the spice? If so, why? Ginger IME is yellowish (yeah, there are some ginger-like spices that are orange-reddish but they’re not ginger in modern usage).

An excellent question to which I’ve never seen a good answer. Now, over at Wordorigins.org, Syntinen Laulu supplies (along with rhymes like “Ginger, you’re barmy,/ You’ll never join the army”) what seems to me a plausible reason:

FWIW, in my London-and-SE-England childhood and youth, although we routinely spoke of ‘ginger hair’ I don’t remember ginger being used as a noun for a red-haired person: we would have been more likely to say ‘X is a gingernut‘. This may well have been a regional thing. (And in this connection I’m surprised that anybody should have been needed an explanation for ginger being used to describe red hair: gingernuts and other ginger-spiced baked goods such as gingerbread men are indeed the colour of ‘red’ hair.)

(We have also talked about the complicated etymology of the word “ginger”, not to mention gingerly.)

A Redditor asks:

So I was doing a bit of reading on Islamic Empires and one of the things that I noticed was that a lot of Empires (Mughal, Timurid, Delhi Sultanate….) all chose Persian as their administrative language, but why Persian? Arabic was literally the language during the golden age and the religious language of Islam what made Persian so special?

There are a number of responses; the best is by Draig_werdd, and I’m reproducing it below (silently correcting a few errors in spelling or grammar):

There is a bit of historical context that explains this situation.

At some point soon after the Arab conquests, the area in Central Asia known as Khorasan and Transoxiana but now in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, North Afghanistan and parts of Turkmenistan and NE Iran became Persian speaking. Other Iranic languages used to be spoken there in the past.

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Back in May, I posted about Osip Mandelstam. Translations by Alistair Noon, saying “On the whole, I think Noon does well; he doesn’t try to match the meters and rhyme schemes of the originals, but replaces them with his own rather than soggy free verse.” Now he’s come out with his version of The Voronezh Workbooks, the poems Mandelstam composed at the end of his life while living in internal exile in Voronezh, and the Guardian has published one of them, “Iota and Theta …” (translating “Флейты греческой тэта и йота…“), with Carol Rumens’ useful and well-informed notes:

Iota and Theta … from the Third Workbook, and dated 7 April 1937, is a response, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope , to the arrest of a German flautist the couple knew, referred to simply as “Schwab”: he was accused of spying and died in a work camp near Voronezh. Nadezhda records her husband’s repeated anxieties as to whether or not Schwab had been able to take his flute to the camp, and, if he had, whether further incriminations had been the result. These anxieties seem interlocked by the poem with Mandelstam’s recollections of his own imprisonment, torture and attempted suicide, and some profound forebodings about the approaching post-exile period.

Displayed in the art museum built in 1933 in Voronezh, the Greek earthenware included depictions of flute-players. These images, and perhaps the “ditties of no tone” remembered from Keats’ Ode, provide the silence haunting Mandelstam’s quatrains. […]

In this poem as elsewhere Alistair Noon’s translation aims to carry over into English not only Mandelstam’s knotted density of meaning, but the metrical and assonantal effects of the original poem. The tetrameter rhythm may be quick, light, and agile like a flute, or heavy and thump-ish like clay, depending on the choice of diction. English tetrameter’s accentual instabilities add an improvisational quality – which is true to the nature of these poems. They are, to some extent, experiments – as Noon’s choice of the term “workbook” in preference to the usual “notebook” implies.

Rumens links to Vasily Moskvin’s “Стихотворение Осипа Мандельштама «Флейты греческой тэта и йота…»: поэтика неясности (The Poem of Osip Mandelstam «The Greek flute’s theta and iota…»: Poetics of Obscurity),” which is itself an extremely useful (and much more detailed) analysis. As I did in this post, I will juxtapose stanzas from all the English versions available to me — James Greene, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1991); Richard & ‎Elizabeth McKane, The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937 (Bloodaxe, 1996); Ilya Bernstein, Poems (Boston, 2014); and Noon — and let you be the judge. Here’s the first:
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LH’s favorite Russo-American poet is Irina Mashinski (see this for her poetry and this for her reading at Mount Holyoke), and she was kind enough to send me her latest book, The Naked World: A Tale with Verse (published by the wonderfully named MadHat Press). It’s an unusual mix of poems and short prose passages, often snippets of memoir but also featuring bursts of history like this paragraph, which illuminates the situation of poets in the Soviet Union:

In 1928, the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky shut the door tightly behind him and handed his wife a sheet with a poem about the Terror. Then he read aloud another, an innocuous lyrical poem about nature, in which the first lines and the rhymes are identical to the ones in the first — they were supposed to help him reconstruct the dangerous poem when better times arrived. Then he burnt the first poem.

The book title comes from one of the longer prose sections, similarly titled; here are the first and last paragraphs:

I sat by the window and ate red currants. Do you remember, Kostya, that short story of yours: you made it shorter and shorter, until all that was left was this single sentence. I took it with me to America — a crumbling yellowing page with just that one line. And see, now I can’t find it — I have neither your story, nor that dusty summer with its slightly sour twilight, the weak Moscow setting sun, fine city dust in the air. Nor do I have anyone of us here.
[…]

But who said “culture”? Who said that the skies should be worn-out from prayers? Try this parking lot. Try to live in this new winter light, with no rain and no snow, in this young naked world, reflected in the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds. Doesn’t it need me, along with the dent from my winter books on the table and the warmth of my unfocused sight?

That’s real poet’s prose — “the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds” — and I have to remind myself English isn’t her first language.
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My wife and I watched Une femme mariée last night as part of our ongoing Godard retrospective (it’s very good indeed), and at one point there’s an intertitle LA JAVA which is rendered in the subtitles as THE WALTZ. So just now I looked up java and discovered that my Collins-Robert defines it as “popular waltz,” whereas the very large Larousse gives “java” as though that were an English word. I thereupon checked the OED, and even though the entry was updated in September 2011 it gives no such meaning (only ‘coffee,’ ‘a breed of large domestic fowl,’ and ‘a general-purpose object-oriented programming language used for producing cross-platform programs’). So then I went to Google Books and turned up a bunch of examples in English-language books, but all in the context of French culture: “as dances, we did the one step, foxtrot, java, tango, and waltz”; “the success and institutionalisation of the java/waltz motif”; “For the java – a lumbering waltz that is almost a polka – each partner places his hands at the small of the other partner’s back to form a kind of whirling pretzel”; “This was the dance known as the apache, the java, or, more descriptively, the valse chaloupée (rolling waltz); “Odd, indeed, were he not to play the java, that fast, rural waltz that had become another of the key synonyms for the people”; etc. Here’s a long quotation from Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend by Michael Dregni (OUP, 2006) that gives some history and provides what is doubtless a folk etymology:

In addition, Vacher played the java, a dance that became the pride of musette. Legend held that the java got its name at Le Rat Mort, a grand bal reigning over place Pigalle. Here, the women were infatuated with the 3/4-time Italian mazurka “Rosina” that they danced in quick, minced steps with their hands planted on their partners’ derrières. Throughout the nights, the dancers demanded the band play “Rosina,” calling out for encores, “Ca va?” which in the Auvergnat accent came across as “Cha va?” Paris woke one morning and a new dance had been born. Yet the debut of a new dance was contentious. Some staunchly Auvergnat bals bore signs proclaiming “The java is forbidden.” Others cursed the java: Louis Péguri said the java was “a dance derived from the waltz but with a step that was debauched and vulgar.” Others decried it succinctly as a mazurka massacrée, whereas Parisian novelist Francis Carco summed up all bal dancing, stating, “Here, dance is not an art.”

The Trésor de la langue française informatisé defines it as “Danse à trois temps, assez saccadée, en vogue dans les bals populaires des faubourgs” and gives its origin simply as “Du nom de l’île de Java.” I’m curious as to whether others are familiar with this apparently once notorious dance and its music; is it still a thing?

John Ashbery is a longtime LH favorite (see my 2017 obit post, as well as the previous ones linked therein), so I read Ange Mlinko’s NYRB review (September 23, 2021, issue; archived) of his posthumous Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works, edited by Emily Skillings, with great pleasure, and I will quote below some bits that particularly grabbed me (from one of which I excavated the clickbait post title):

When we say that a poem is “good”—not with the dubious implication that it’s not great but with genuine satisfaction—are we unconsciously echoing Genesis, “And God saw that it was good”? It’s not such a stretch: the poet and critic Susan Stewart theorizes that the declaration of goodness is one of the three qualities of the biblical phrase that make it “a paradigm for the philosophy of art in the West.” And what this paradigm implies is that the work, in order to be judged good, must be done: “The proclamation of something’s goodness indicates it is time to stop making.” The scriptural word in the Hebrew borrows from an Akkadian verb meaning “to inspect and approve,” used in the Code of Hammurabi to refer to the work of masons and other craftsmen; surely a building is good if it’s finished enough to keep the elements out and not fall on one’s head. Alternate translations of the Hebrew have found English terms other than “good”: “It was declared finished” or “brought to a satisfying close.” […]

Collage was the major innovation of modernist poetry in English, and Ashbery wielded the method his entire career. Pound and Eliot introduced it, studding their work with quotations from the classical canon; Moore mixed high and low, newspapers and guidebooks, the famous and the anonymous. Collage was Ashbery’s medium in visual arts; he had pursued painting lessons as a teenager, then became an accomplished collagist at Harvard.

In 1962, when The Tennis Court Oath was received with bewilderment, he probably took the method further than anyone besides Pound. […]

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Back in 2014, I posted a couple of short videos by Nelson Sebezela about Xhosa clicks; now here’s How to pronounce Zulu Clicks with Sakhile from Safari and Surf. It covers a little more ground, including p and hl as well as x, c, and q; comparing the two is useful (Sebezela gives more detailed information on how to make the sounds), but I still can’t say q for the life of me. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Unrelated: somebody had the bright idea of putting together “Пространственная диагностика глуши” [Spatial diagnostics of the hinterlands], a map of “ближайшие к Москве местности, характеризуемые русскими литераторами как глушь, захолустье” [the closest places to Moscow that were characterized by Russian writers as the hinterlands, the back of beyond], each dot labeled with the name(s) of the writers who so designated it; it’s funny and enlightening, and can be seen as Figure 20 on p. 39 of this pdf. I saw it in a different format on somebody’s Facebook feed, but didn’t want to link to that swamp unless I had to.

Sometimes posts come in batches. I had two squirrel posts in a row and three with Latin titles; now comes my third on translations, after Balzac and Cervantes. Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post (“This is fucking awesome”), Wael Almahdi’s Jabberwocky in Arabic:

This is an Arabic translation of Lewis Caroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky. It’s the first translation of this delightfully wacky work into Arabic (at least I think it is.) Arabic is an ideal language for Jabberwocky, it being replete with flowery expressions and fanciful synonyms. The morphological structure of Arabic, with three-consonant roots and fluid vowels, makes inventing words equivalent to the original creations an especially delicious task. The major inspiration for this translation, in addition to Jabberwocky itself, is Al-Asmai’s equally nonsense, much more ancient poem “Safiru Sawtu Al-Bulbuli” (The Bulbul’s Song). Al-Asmai was an important 9th century Arabic scholar and poet, known for his books on subjects as wide-ranging as zoology, natural science, and anecdotes. There is an interesting story behind The Bulbul’s Song: apparently the Abbasid Caliph at the time could memorize poems from one hearing. He also had a slave who could memorize a whole poem from two hearings, and a slave-girl who could do it from three hearings. Whenever a poet came to the Caliph with a new poem, expecting a prize, the Caliph would tell him he’d heard the poem before, recite the poem, and have his slave and slave-girl recite the poem. Al-Asmai, knowing there was intrigue involved, invented a nonsense poem that would stump the Caliph and his slaves. Upon hearing the inimitable poem, the Caliph resumed the time-honored tradition of rewarding creative poets.

Almahdi has columns headed Original English, Arabic Transliterated, and العربية Arabic; I’ll quote the first stanza in transliteration and send you to the link for the rest:

Jarâdhilu l-wâbi dhuhâ
Tadarbahat tadarbuhâ
Mufarfirun tanahnaha
Wa tâ’iru l-burburi fahâ

We discussed Jabberwocky translations in 2003 and 2006; I checked, and sure enough, there were none in Arabic back in those benighted days.

Via Leanne Martin’s Facebook post, I learn of one of the strangest translations ever made; Sam Jones reports for the Graun:

There is an adjective that all too invitingly describes the wildly optimistic endeavours of the American book collector, the Hungarian-British explorer and the two Kashmiri pandits who, almost a century ago, took it upon themselves to translate Don Quixote into Sanskrit for the first time. Today, the same word might equally be applied to the efforts of the Bulgarian-born Indologist and Tibetologist who has rescued their text from decades of oblivion.

In 1935, the wealthy American businessman and book collector Carl Tilden Keller – whose shelves already held Japanese, Mongolian and Icelandic translations of Cervantes’s masterpiece – embarked on a quest to have some of the book rendered into an Indian language. To do so, he enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Marc Aurel Stein, an eminent orientalist, archaeologist and explorer who knew India well. “I am frank enough to admit that while I recognise the childishness of this desire of mine I am still extremely interested in having it carried out,” Keller wrote to Stein in November 1935. […]

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