languagehat.com

Alex Foreman (frequently linked at LH, e.g. here and here) has an informative and (as is usual for this boisterous fellow) provocative essay called What Past Poets’ Rhymes Don’t Tell You About Past Speech:

I’ve just got to get this out there, after seeing so many people make terrible assumptions about what rhymes can tell you about the English pronunciation of the past. Did pre-modern English poets’ verse always rhyme perfectly in their own speech?

Not so much. No. They didn’t in the 16th century. They didn’t in the 17th. Nor at any later point. This becomes obvious when we get the rare chance to see a poem phonetically transcribed (or in this case, notated) by its author.

He provides examples from Richard Hodges’ The English Primrose (1644) and Robert Robinson (fl 1617), summing up as follows:

There is evidence that people in reciting verse might adjust their normal pronunciation to a degree to give full rhymes. For example, the only time Robinson transcribes secondarily stressed final <-y> with /i:/ is when rhyme requires it, e.g. misery/she. Alexander Gil’s transcriptions of Spenser show that when rhyme called for it he could adopt pronunciations of head (rhyming with lead v.b.), desert, swerve (rhyming with art, starve), dear (rhyming with were), and poor, door (rhyming with store, adore) other than his normal one.

But this kind of thing only went so far. Gil’s transcriptions in particular do not accomodate rhymes that rest on a pronunciation used by social groups he found objectionable: thus he transcribes Spenser’s rhyme despair/whilere as / (the rhyme rests on a monophthongized WAIT vowel which Gil condemned with mighty spleen as an effete affectation). Mismatches in shortening of ME /ọ̄/ simply do not affect his transcriptions at rhyme. Wood/stood and move/love are for him / and /. Nor does he drop the velar fricative in “fight” when Spenser rhymes this word with “smite”. Recitation practice (as one might expect) also seems like it varied considerably from person to person. (In Robinson’s transcriptions of his own verse, the two examples I cited are the only imperfect rhymes, but his transcriptions of Richard Barnfield’s verse are on the whole remarkable for how unconcerned with rhyme they are: he often opts to transcribe a non-rhyming form even when the form that would’ve made a perfect rhyme also existed in his own speech.)

And, as I’ve just shown, poets themselves could clearly rely for their rhymes on forms of speech other than their own. My point is that one cannot assume, without a good deal of other evidence, that a pre-modern poet’s use of a particular rhyme implies that the pronunciation on which such a rhyme rests was necessarily their own. It doesn’t even necessarily imply that the rhyme would have been perfect in their own reading of their own verse.

He finishes up with a swipe at careless scholars:
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A reader writes:

I came across a word in Wikipedia that seems to be hapax legomenon. It was on a page for Tarkhuna, a Georgian tarragon flavored soft drink. “Mitrofan Lagidze began to add odorous chukhpuch containing extract of Caucasian tarragon to sparkling water with natural syrups of his own production.” Google seems to send me back to the same text about Tarkhuna. The Russian version of the page has it as “чухпуч”. Curious if you or any of your readers would be keen of chasing down this mystery.

I thought I could clear it up with a little googling — though it’s not as easy as you might think, since Georgian has two different ch’s (ჩ, ჭ) and two different p’s (პ, ფ) — but no, all I got was translations of the same Wikipedia sentence. Georgian Wikipedia does not have an article on Tarkhuna, but they have one on Lagidze (properly Laghidze)… but it doesn’t refer to any chukhpuch. I checked my biggest Georgian dictionary, but no luck. So I’m giving up and turning to the assembled multitudes: any ideas? (Thanks, Andy!)

Geoff Pullum has a typically invigorating review of the new second edition of Randy Allen Harris’s The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure; here are a few excerpts:

It is quite difficult to explain in nontechnical terms what triggered the linguistics wars, but let me try. Chomsky in the mid 1960s maintained that the structures of sentences were nowhere near as simple as the sentence diagrams of yesteryear; they were more like se­quences or layers of such diagrams. The most concrete layer, called the surface structure, captured facts about the overt shape of the sentence (word order, inflec­tion, and pronunciation). More abstract layers accounted for things like con­nections between sentences — relations be­tween active and passive clauses, for example. […]

However, from about 1967 some of Chomsky’s earliest defenders and most talented students began to develop arguments undercutting his case for “Deep Structure.” They claimed it had no theoretical necessity or significance. Instead, they posited much more abstract syntactic layers, and suggested that the most abstract layer of all looked much like what philosophers would call the “logical form” of a sentence. Their hypothesis was dubbed “Generative Semantics” (GS). […] GS emerged directly out of Chomsky’s work, using the kind of arguments he used, but it diverged from his own views, and displeased him. In his view this meant that the promoters of GS had to be defeated and punished.

The punishments Chomsky imposes on publicly announced enemies of his views are of two types: the dungeon and the fire.

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Back in 2014 we talked about Translating Frozen Into Arabic, but that’s just one tiny tile in the impressive mosaic that is Rhaomi’s MetaFilter post:

Unlike many cinematic exports, the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to dubbing. Through an in-house service called Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for lyrical reinvention). The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well — everything from Arabic to Icelandic to Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project, Encanto, debuted in more than forty tongues (can you even name that many?). Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney’s translations is thoroughly documented online in multilanguage mixes and one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards.

There are a bunch of links there (and he provides quite a few examples that I didn’t quote), but the only one I’ve linked here is the name-the-language quiz, which I did annoyingly badly on (37/47). Some of it is my fault (I couldn’t come up with some obvious-in-retrospect language names under time pressure), but some of it is theirs (to spare others my suffering, they call it “Mandarin,” not anything involving “Chinese”). You don’t have to put the cursor anywhere on the quiz, just type a language name into the box and if it’s correct the name will appear next to the appropriate translation. Fun, as is the whole post (unfond though I am of Disney movies).

I presume everybody knows about the absurdly addictive Wordle by now (and its many offshoots like Dordle, which you can play as often as you want); I’ve been playing them without feeling any need to post about them, language-based though they are. But I’m frustrated enough by Semantle that I’m passing it along to frustrate you as well:

Each guess must be a word (of any length) or short phrase. The game will tell you how semantically similar it thinks your word is to the secret word. Unlike that other word game, it’s not about the spelling; it’s about the meaning. The similarity value comes from Word2vec. The highest possible similarity is 100 (indicating that the words are identical and you have won). By “semantically similar”, I mean, roughly “used in the context of similar words, in a database of news articles.” […]

The “Getting close” indicator tells you how close you are –if your word is one of the 1,000 nearest normal words to the target word, the rank will be given (1000 is the target word itself). If your word is not one of the nearest 1000, you’re “cold”. (By “normal” words”, I mean non-capitalized words that appears in a very large English word list; there are lots of capitalized, misspelled, or obscure words that might be close but that won’t get a ranking. Those get marked with “????”).

You will need more than six guesses. You will probably need dozens of guesses. There’s a new word every day, where a day starts at midnight UTC or 19:00 your time. Yesterday’s word was “consume”.

I’ve already made 48 guesses on today’s word and have gotten no closer than 20.23 (today the nearest word has a similarity of 74.10, the tenth-nearest has a similarity of 45.08 and the one thousandth nearest word has a similarity of 20.28, so my best guess is damnably close to the top 1000); I don’t seem to have a good instinct for how to approach the semantic center. May you fare better!

From Susannah Clapp’s LRB review (archived) of Square Haunting, by Francesca Wade:

[Jane] Harrison’s father had resisted the idea of education for women and her stepmother insisted on trying to make her more feminine: she sewed a fringe on her mackintosh. Yet in 1874 she got a scholarship to Cambridge to study Classics (three years earlier Newnham had made accommodation available to women attending its new ‘Lectures for Ladies’). Her insistence on an alternative history – punching against the Olympian pantheon, revealing evidence for matriarchal husband-free goddesses – is central to Square Haunting and a direct influence on Woolf and HD. Central, too, are the obstacles she encountered (along with some coterie idolatry): in 1888 London academics pronounced it ‘undesirable’ that ‘any teaching in University College should be conducted by a woman’. She left Cambridge saying that ‘much of our ingenuity & energy goes in cringing’.

Something else makes Harrison all-pervasive. Fascinated by Henri Bergson’s idea of time as a series of changes melting into one another and finding this represented in the imperfective aspect of the Russian language, with its implication of collective memory, she evolved a theory, simply expressed, of merging boundaries between past and present, between one person and another: ‘Each of us is a snowball growing bigger every moment, and in which all our past, and also the past out of which we sprang, all the generations behind us, is rolled up, involved.’ Square Haunting reverberates with this notion. The connections Wade finds between her subjects’ work and lives are in the main echoes and overlaps – a kind of confluence – rather than direct inheritance, debts or tussles for supremacy.

Harrison knew 16 languages (11 living and five dead), and in a nifty footnote Wade comments that she ‘began teaching Russian almost as soon as she began learning it’.

Yes, of course the idea of the imperfective aspect of Russian implying collective memory is silly; so what? Many fine things spring from imaginary roots.

A reader writes to say “Lingthusiasm (https://lingthusiasm.com/) is a podcast that (this is all too uncommon) comes with transcripts.” From the homepage:

Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us. From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn’t realize you were already making.

And yes, they have transcripts, from Episode 1: Speaking a single language won’t bring about world peace to (as of now) Episode 62: Cool things about scales and implicature (“But first, it’s our 5th anniversary! I can’t believe we’ve been making this show for five years”). A fine site; it was mentioned in a comment in 2018, but it definitely deserves its own post. Thanks, Pau!

I saw on Facebook an announcement of the publication of Ha! Linguistic Studies in Honor of Mark R. Hale (publisher’s page); needless to say, I was curious about the title, and the first paragraph of the preface not only answers that question but is so entertaining I thought I’d post it here:

Mark Hale’s work is among the most original, thought-provoking and provocative in the field—or fields, rather, since his interests range from comparative Indo-European linguistics and reconstruction to phonological theory, syntactic change, Polynesian comparative reconstruction, Middle Iranian philology, and subgrouping methodology all the way to sociolinguistics (as anybody who has ever heard him lecture about change and diffusion will know). It is not easy to do justice to all these interests in a single volume, but we are proud to say that the contributions collected here pay homage to quite a respectable subset of them—hence the all-encompassing “linguistic studies”. This is all the more pleasing given that when we began the project of organizing what was then referred to by its preliminary working title as “Mark Hale’s so-called Festschrift” (have you heard him talk about “Wackernagel’s so-called Law”?) for his 65th birthday, we certainly did not anticipate having to navigate a global pandemic. “Ha!” aptly describes how we felt when we were finally able to complete this volume despite such adversities. It is, of course, also an interjection that you might utter while reading one of Mark’s articles and suddenly encountering a new solution to an old problem—or to something that you hadn’t even realized was a problem! And, finally, “ha” is also one of the infamous particles and clitics in Vedic that we now understand so much better thanks to Mark’s work. In fact, it is also in the title of his contribution to the Gedenkschrift for Jochem Schindler (Hale 1999, “ha: so-called ‘metrical lengthening’ in the Rigveda”), in which he elegantly explains the distribution of the particles h ̆ ̄a and gh ̆ ̄a and the variation in their vowel quantity as having arisen through the interaction of regular sound change (Brugmann’s Law) with metrical position. This article, which is such a good representative of Mark’s careful application of philology and linguistic theory, inspired us to recycle the eponymous particle for him.

I also liked their reference later on to “the perfect photo of our honorand”; I had forgotten the delightfully donnish word honorand (OED: “< classical Latin honōrandus worthy of honour, gerundive of honōrāre”), meaning “A person who is the recipient of an honour (esp. an honorary degree) or the subject of an honorary inscription, monument, etc.”; the OED’s first citation is from the Times of 27 June 1935: “The Hall of Worcester College where the honorands..and Doctors had met to partake of Lord Crewe’s benefaction.”

A couple of days ago I watched the pre-release “book launch” event hosted by Globus Bookstore for Irina Mashinski’s new English-language book The Naked World — she’s a wonderful poet whom I met at a reading in 2014 (see this post), and now that the event is on YouTube it’s worth a watch (it features Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, among others), but what drove me to post is a mention of Mashinski’s English translation of a famous Soviet song, “Журавли” [Cranes]. (The site I just linked has many versions in languages from English to Vietnamese.) It was popularized by the Russian version recorded by Mark Bernes in 1968, but the original lyrics were written by Rasul Gamzatov in Avar, and since we recently discussed Avar in another thread, I thought I’d post the original (also available at Avar Wikipedia). The first stanza:

Дида ккола, рагъда, камурал васал
Кирго рукъун гьечӀин, къанабакь лъечӀин.
Доба борхалъуда хъахӀил зобазда
ХъахӀал къункърабазде сверун ратилин.

In the canonical Russian version:

Мне кажется порою, что солдаты,
С кровавых не пришедшие полей,
Не в землю эту полегли когда-то,
А превратились в белых журавлей.

And in Irina’s translation:

Sometimes I think that soldiers, who have never
come back to us from the blood-covered plains,
escaped the ground and didn’t cross the River,
but turned instead into white screeching cranes.

You can hear it sung in Avar by Zainab Makhaeva here. And for those who know Russian and want to try to figure out how the original works, there’s a useful online Avar-Russian dictionary (e.g., the first word, дида, turns out to be an oblique case of дун ‘I’).

I finished Yuri Buida’s second novel, Ермо [Ermo] (1996), with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration that I have felt before. As with Veltman’s Странник [The wanderer] (see this post) and Pisemsky’s Сергей Петрович Хозаров и Мари Ступицына. Брак по страсти [Sergei Petrovich Khozarov and Marie Stupitsyna: Marriage for passion] (see this post), I ask “Why does nobody know about this wonderful book?” “Nobody” is an exaggeration, of course, but I can’t find any discussion of it aside from a couple of unperceptive paragraphs in Norman Shneidman’s Russian Literature, 1995-2002 (“one may wonder whether Buida and Ermo are not one and the same person” [!]) and an admiring review by Andrei Nemzer (“Он красиво и продуманно выстроен, написан с должным стилизаторским мастерством и еле приметной, но оттого особенно действенной, самоиронией, наконец, но не в последнюю очередь, вполне интеллектуален” [It is beautifully constructed and carefully thought out, written with fitting mastery of style and a barely perceptible, but for that reason particularly effective, self-irony; last but not least, it is quite intellectual]), and I can’t find a copy for sale either new or used (I really want to reread it in a physical copy that I can annotate). I admit that I’m particularly susceptible to this kind of writing, which might be called “cosmopolitan,” using as it does all the resources of world culture, scattering names, quotations, and allusions on every page — other Russian writers who scratch that itch for me are Leonid Girshovich and Lena Eltang. But I would think anyone who enjoys, say, Borges and Nabokov would love this novel, and I commend it to the attention of translators looking for something to do. And since the main character is an American (even if Russian-born and resident in Italy), I would think it would appeal to readers in these United States. But enough generalities: what’s it about?

It’s a literary biography of an invented writer, born Georgy Mikhailovich Ermo-Nikolaev in St. Petersburg in 1914 just after the outbreak of war, whose father, an engineer of noble birth, soon took him to New England, where he grew up: “В отличие от Бунина и Набокова, рядом с которыми его чаще всего ставят, он не вывез из России почти никаких воспоминаний и впечатлений” [Unlike Bunin and Nabokov, with whom he is most often compared, he brought almost no memories and impressions out of Russia]. His beloved Sofya marries another man, he studies literature and begins a career as a professor (writing a promising essay on Dante and Bonagiunta), unexpectedly goes to Spain as a war correspondent, and winds up living in a palace in Venice, where his writing becomes more and more famous and eventually wins him a Nobel Prize. (Cleverly, Buida leaves us guessing what language he writes in until halfway through, when he reveals it’s English, though Ermo also begins writing essays in Russian; I think it might have been even better never to tell us, leaving it a mystery, like so much in the book and in life.) Though it tells a chronological tale, it jumps around, opening with a long quote from Ermo’s last novel, Als Ob (German for ‘as if’ — Ermo is just as multicultural as Buida), and frequently jumping back and forth in time, with ever-richer accumulations of repetitions and allusions. By the time it’s over, you have not only a strong sense of who Ermo was but an appreciation of Buida’s skill at simulating an eager, slightly pompous biographer who perhaps takes too many liberties (“что и вовсе затрудняет работу биографа, оказывающегося в опасном зазоре между вымыслом и домыслом” [which greatly complicates the work of the biographer, who finds himself in the dangerous gap between invention and speculation]).

The book is full of brilliant little set pieces and stories-within-stories, but I don’t see any point in trying to summarize them; instead I’ll quote some favorite passages so you can get an idea of what it’s like. From a description of his forebears:
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