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I had never heard of namburbi, but it’s such a fine word I had to post it. Wikipedia sez:

The NAM-BÚR-BI are magical texts which take the form of incantations (Akkadian: namburbȗ). They were named for a series of prophylactic Babylonian and Assyrian rituals to avert inauspicious portents before they took on tangible form. At the core of these rituals was an appeal by the subject of the sinister omen to the divine judicial court to obtain a change to his impending fate. From the corpus of Babylonian-Assyrian religious texts that has survived, there are approximately one hundred and forty texts, many preserved in several copies, to which this label may be applied. […]

The Sumerian rubric, NAM-BÚR-BI, which devolved from the broader class of counter-rituals, literally means “(ritual for) undoing of it (i.e of the portended evil)” or “apotropaeon,” where the Sumerian possessive suffix BI was originally a reference to a preceding omen apodosis. The impending catastrophe identified in the apodosis was to be averted by the implementation of an apotropaic ritual. In addition to dissolution NAM-BÚR-BI, it is also a generic name for rituals, NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu in late Babylonian sources. In a few ritual descriptions of the 1st millennium BC, the caption NAM-BÚR-BI is found with its general, rather than the more specific “apotropaic ritual” context.

I don’t know what it means to say “NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu” — are they implying that that’s the sound represented by the cuneiform spelling? I don’t know why they start off using “NAM-BÚR-BI” (in small caps, which I’m too lazy to reproduce) and then later in the article switch to “namburbi” (multiple authors and no copyediting, I suppose). And the last paragraph is absurdly speculative: “The profound psychological effect of the release ritual cannot be underestimated. For the private individual it would have had a deep impression, akin to absolution, but to a monarch it may have altered his behavior.” But it’s an interesting topic and a great word. Thanks, Ariel!

Thanks to the comments on Dmitry Pruss’s Facebook post, I went to Wiktionary and learned (or re-learned) that the familiar Russian word чемодан (chemodan) ‘suitcase’ is “Via a Turkic medium, from Persian جامه‌دان‎ (jâme-dân, ‘suitcase’)” [literally ‘garment-holder’]. And they add this very interesting fact: “Note that this Russian term has later become the source of re-borrowing into modern Persian چمدان‎ (čamedân) and many Turkic languages.” In the FB thread, Jamile Modarress Woods wrote “Chamedan is the name of a BBC program about Iranian exiles.” Reborrowings are fun.

And the post itself featured the marvelous Russian palindrome “чемодан… а надо меч” [a suitcase… but a sword is needed], illustrated by an image of Julius Caesar being attacked by a horde of assassins. Sadly, no one thought to photoshop in a suitcase.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of it, but the immortal Yuz Aleshkovsky has turned out, alas, to be mortal after all; he died today in Tampa. Here’s my post about him.

Dave Wilton posted a Big List article about the history of the word bizarre that begins:

Bizarre is a word with a rather straightforward etymology. English borrowed it from French in the mid seventeenth century, which in turn had borrowed it from the Italian bizarro. But that has not stopped some baseless speculation about a weirder origin of the word.

The original Italian meaning of bizarro is angry. The word appears in Dante’s early 14th century Divine Comedy. […] In later Italian usage, bizarro developed the meaning of strange or odd, and French borrowed this meaning in the early sixteenth century. And this sense was borrowed into English in the mid seventeenth century. Edward Herbert, a soldier, diplomat, poet, and philosopher, is the first person known to have used bizarre in English. […]

Despite the etymology of bizarre being a rather ordinary one, a false etymology developed claiming that it comes from the Basque bizarra, meaning beard. The false etymology developed not only because the words are superficially similar, but perhaps out of a desire that a word meaning odd should not have an ordinary history, and also perhaps because Basque is a tempting language to associate with any word. […]

[Read more…]

Mana Kia has an Aeon piece called “Being Persian” that describes a premodern situation that has long been attractive to me. It begins:

At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory basis of solidarity to gain independence (or protect) from European colonial rule. Among its distinctive features is a conflation between land, a national(ised) language, and a people. But nationalism also sought to produce cultural homogeneity, and so fostered ugly forms of subordination and violence against peoples who, amid new ideals of the nation, suddenly became linguistic and religious minorities. In the case of Iran, nationalists seized upon the Persian language as a crucial basis of national identity, one that could be shared across religious and sectarian lines. But at the turn of the 20th century, fewer than half of the population of Iran spoke Persian as a first language (or at all).

Bound up in the spread of nationalism was not just repression of ethnic minorities (linguistic, as with Azeris, but also tied to other affiliations, as with the Sunni Kurds) and the repurposing of language as a basis of this necessary homogeneity, but a whole transformation of how it was possible to know oneself, one’s collective, and one’s relationship to other selves and collectives through the modern conceptual systems that came with a nationalist frame. In order for Iran to repurpose Persian as the national language of its people, it had to efface a number of significant aspects of its history and traditions shared with other countries. In the process, what it meant to be Persian changed profoundly.

Before modern nationalism, which led to today’s Iran (before 1934, the country was called Persia in European languages), Persians had an entirely different relation to land, origin and belonging. Prenationalist Persians (possessors of the Persian language) belonged to many lands, religions, kingdoms, regions, in what is now Iran and far beyond it. This earlier form of belonging allowed for a kind of pluralism, one in which Persians spoke other languages, observed different religions, and were part of various states or empires. Indeed, they accepted and even celebrated such overlapping multiplicity in language, religious affiliation and regional identification, which in more recent times has been the basis of so much conflict.

[Read more…]

Via Laudator Temporis Acti I learn of Max Nelson’s “Insulting Middle-Finger Gestures among Ancient Greeks and Romans” (Phoenix 71.1/2 [Spring/Summer 2017]: 66-88), which is available at JSTOR; it starts off mentioning the claim “that ancient Greeks and Romans used the insulting gesture in which a stiff middle finger is displayed (and sometimes also thrust upwards), with the palm facing inwards, in the same manner, and potentially even with the same meaning, as is common today in North America” and says “In what follows I attempt to demonstrate that there is no uncontestable evidence for this as a common gesture among ancient Greeks and Romans.” He begins with the Greek verb σκιμαλίζω, defined in dictionaries of ancient Greek as ‘to give someone the finger’ (in the sense described above), and shows that it seems to mean rather ‘prodding between the buttocks’ or ‘goosing.’ He discusses a couple of other verbs as well as a phrase meaning ‘extending the middle finger’ (horizontally rather than vertically), then proceeds to Latin phrases like infami digito and digitus impudicus. Here’s the final paragraph:

In conclusion, there is no incontrovertible evidence that ancient Greeks and Romans “gave the finger” in the same manner and with the same meaning common in North America today, or that the modern gesture descends from, or was inspired by, an ancient one. Various insulting gestures using the middle finger are certainly attested in ancient Greek and Latin texts. One source mentions holding the middle finger up in voting as a rude gesture and a number of sources make it clear that pointing to someone with the middle finger horizontally was insulting. Even ruder, as it involves the invasion of personal space and physical contact, was hitting someone’s nostril or nose with the middle finger, or goosing, that is, grabbing at someone’s buttocks or prodding someone’s anus, presumably as ways of ridiculing a male victim for his effeminacy or pathic nature (or maybe as an uninvited sexual advance, playful poke, flirtatious signal, or general insult). Finally, snapping the middle finger and thumb was thought of as impolite. Many of these gestures probably relied on the use of the middle finger to represent an erect penis. In fact the middle finger has been so used naturally and independently in many different contexts in disparate societies at various times. Therefore it would be rash to state that the modern gesture of “giving the finger” is directly linked to an ancient one. In the end then it is perhaps best to keep “the finger” to ourselves.

The whole thing is well worth a read, and incontrovertibly demonstrates the value of a classical education.

John Keay’s TLS review (November 13, 2020; archived) of Himalaya: A human history by Ed Douglas contains the following passage:

If “grasping after the particular” is indeed a Western trait, Douglas’s compendium turns it to good account by enlivening Himālaya’s disjointed history with a host of minor characters. Some are outsiders – explorers, philologists, plantsmen, sportsmen, mystics and mountaineers. Others are native observers whose testimony is often too oblique for standard works on “the mystic land of the lamas”. Who has heard of Zangbu Rabjamba, for instance, an early-eighteenth-century monk who “translated a Chinese work on European astronomy into Tibetan”? Before that, Zangbu had been engaged in conducting a survey covering the whole of Tibet. It anticipated similar exercises by the Survey of India in the nineteenth century and, during it, Zangbu evidently kept a journal. But we know of this work only by hearsay, and “the whole Tibetan contribution to the scientific understanding of their own country, the so-called ‘Lama Survey’, has faded from view”. Such unsung endeavours are a delight. They pop up in the text like marmots, the furry ground-squirrels of the Tibetan upland that bob from view before you can reach them, though not before their burrows have wrenched an ankle from its socket.

I like the marmot comparison (marmots at LH), but I’m curious about this Zangbu Rabjamba and his survey. I learn from Hosung Shim’s “The Zunghar Conquest of Central Tibet and its Influence on Tibetan Military Institutions in the 18th Century” (p. 75, n. 74; incidentally, the article has a very useful Appendix 1: Place Names in Different Languages) that rabjamba = Manchu ramjamba and Tibetan rab ’byams pa ‘doctor of Buddhist philosophy’ (we discussed Dzungar/Zunghar/Zungar/Junghar/Jungar/Dzhungar in 2017), so that’s Zangbu’s title… although now I learn from the more cautious Mario Cams in his Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c. 1685-1735) (p. 122) that La-mu-zhan-ba 藏布喇木占巴 “possibly stands for the Tibetan academic title of Rabjamba” (my emphasis). Cams also says “I have found no biographical information,” so I guess Zangbu is a dead end. As for the survey, googling “Lama Survey” gets me Clements R. Markham’s 1876 Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, which has a section (p. lxi) on the survey:

Kang-hi, therefore, resolved to have another map constructed, and accordingly two lamas were carefully trained as surveyors by the Jesuit Fathers at Peking, and sent to Tibet with orders to include the country from Sining to Lhasa, and thence to the sources of the Ganges, in their survey. The result was a map of Tibet, which was submitted to the Fathers, in 1717, and though not without faults, it was found to be a great improvement on the former attempt. From it the Jesuits prepared the well-known maps which were forwarded to Du Halde, and from which D’Anville constructed his atlas. The Lama Survey of Tibet still continues to be the basis of our geographical knowledge of that country, although it is rapidly being superseded by the efforts of Colonel Montgomerie and his native explorers.

Needless to say, all thoughts about any of this are welcome.

I posted about the Jewish Language Research Website back in 2006, but that link is now outdated (they’ve removed the hyphen from the URL), and the current site is very snazzy. They say “Since we launched in 2020,” which I guess refers to the new version; at any rate, it provides basically the same stuff, detailed articles on the various languages with bibliographies and links to sound clips and other sites. Here, for instance, is the page on Judeo-Tat/Juhuri (a language I posted about in 2010); the “Names of the language” section says:

In the past, community representatives were not aware of the distinctiveness of their language and defined the community vernacular as Tat (zuhun tati ‘Tat language’) and sometimes even as the ancient Persian language (Tsherny 1884; Altshuler 1990; Pinkhasov 1909). Nowadays, older people and others with a good command of Judeo-Tat refer to this language as zuhun imu ‘our language’, zuhun ʤuhur ‘language of Jews’, or zuhun ʤuhuri ‘Jewish language’ (ʤuhur is a cognate of Persian ʤohud, Arabic jæhudi/jæhud, and Hebrew jəhudi).

In Russian a great variety of names is used, though the most politically correct name nowadays is язык горских евреев ‘language of the Highland Jews’, and any reference to Tat is avoided. In Israel, Judeo-Tat is called קווקזית kavkazit ‘Caucasian’ in colloquial speech and טטית-יהודית or תאתית-יהודית tatit-jehudit ‘Judeo-Tat’ in linguistic literature. In the English of the Mountain Jewish community of Brooklyn, the word Gorsky, a borrowed form of the Russian adjective горский ‘highland’, is used to refer to the language, as well as to distinguish the community from other Jewish communities. Finally, the term Juhuri, derived from Judeo-Tat zuhun ʤuhuri ‘Jewish language’, is frequently used in all languages, by community members as well as by some scholars (Bram and Shauli 2001; Podolsky 2002; Nazarova 2002; Agarunov and Agarunov 2010; Authier 2012).

I got to the site via Hilah Kohen’s Facebook post, which links to the Project’s FB page, where you will find good stuff like:

Here’s an amazing story about an 18th-century Sephardic teenager named Luna who scribed the entire #Megillah “in Sephardi-Italian script – influenced by the new printed script of the period – on two parchment membranes…”

Not to mention the post she quoted on Purim for Juhuri speakers; alas, I can’t quote it here, because it’s an image rather than text. Bah!

Molly Young’s NY Times article on disgust (from Dec. 27, 2021; archived), which focuses on Paul Rozin, a psychologist known for his work on the topic, includes the following passage on an entirely different, language-related, subject:

As he quickly worked his way up from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, Rozin decided that he was tired of animal studies and wanted to focus on bigger game.

Around 1970, he turned his attention to the acquisition of reading. In Philadelphia — as in many American cities — there was a problem with kids’ learning to read. Eager to discover why, Rozin parked himself in elementary-school classes and observed something strange: A large number of children were unable to read by second grade, but those same children were always fluent in spoken English. They could name thousands of objects, and they could point to Rozin and ask, “Why is this strange man lurking in my classroom?” Compared with the vast dictionary of words filed neatly in their brains, mastering an alphabet of 26 letters would seem to be a piece of cake. Instead, it was a crisis. With a collaborator, Rozin devised an experimental curriculum that moved children through degrees of linguistic abstraction by teaching them Chinese logographs followed by a Japanese syllabary, and only then applying the same logic to English. Rozin says the system worked like a dream, but the school’s response was tepid.

“The bureaucracy, the politics — I was overwhelmed,” he said. Nothing about the process of pitching and marketing and lobbying appealed to him. He calculated that it would take years to sell administrators on the curriculum and train teachers to deliver it. Instead, he and a colleague wrote several papers with the findings and walked away. “It’s the right way to teach reading,” he said nearly 50 years later, with a shrug. “As far as I know, nothing happened with it.” At the time, he wondered if maybe some other researchers would run with the idea. But Rozin was done. His mind was elsewhere, percolating on the subject he would become best known for.

Sounds weird to me, but hey, maybe it works. Thanks, Bathrobe!

I was delighted to read Alexander Jacobson’s A Soviet Imprimatur on Imperial Smut: Politizdat’s “Luka Mudishchev” as Parody of the Soviet Book (Jordan Russian Center); not only is it a fascinating bit of literary (or sub-literary) history, it has a personal resonance for me. It begins:

On January 11, 1970, the British émigré newspaper Wiadomości reported on the publication of a new Russian book, a pocket-sized volume that had been a London bestseller during late 1969. In its article, Wiadomości emphasized the volume’s pedigree, writing “[t]he book was published in Moscow by the Central Committee of the CPSU, the editorial board was composed of eight of the most eminent members of the Soviet Writers…the book is dedicated to Sholokhov, and the preface was written by Furtseva, the Minister of Culture.” However, after laboriously establishing these credentials, the newspaper continues in an unexpected direction: “the reader, so prepared, opens the book – and is unable to believe his eyes.” Rather than a work of socialist prose, the book constituted an edition of Luka Mudishchev, an infamous pornographic poem popularly attributed to the eighteenth-century poet Ivan Barkov.

To both Wiadomości and most contemporary readers, publishing this text under a Soviet imprint seemed like some sort of absurd joke. However, beneath its irony, this volume presents a sincere argument. At its core, the 1969 Luka Mudishchev offers a scathing critique of the Soviet publishing process.

To uncover this argument, we need to begin with the book’s true provenance. Of course, this volume was not actually produced by the Soviet government. Instead, it was created by a tamizdat publisher named Alec Flegon, an eccentric Romanian expat famous for his brazen literary stunts.

I don’t know how many people remember Flegon today — I’m surprised to see I don’t seem to have mentioned him at LH — but he was quite a presence in the scruffier suburbs of Russian literature when I was studying the language half a century ago, and I still have a couple of his editions. Here’s a nice tidbit from Jacobson’s essay:

Flegon’s modus operandi was to combine prominent texts, such as Doctor Zhivago, with fake Soviet imprints. In his words, he believed that this pairing could trick “unsuspecting [Soviet] customs” into allowing his books into USSR. Amazingly, Flegon was correct. As Paolo Mancosu recounts, a copy of his Zhivago found its way to Prague, where it convinced Czechoslovakian authorities that the Soviet government had signed off on Pasternak’s text. In response, the government authorized a 1969 Slovakian edition of Zhivago.

But it’s Luka Mudishchev that sets off my nostalgia. It came out while I was in college, and when I saw it I couldn’t believe what I was reading; like most adolescent males, I couldn’t get enough of dirty language, and I translated a chunk of the poem into appropriately filthy English. My then girlfriend and I took turns reading the original and my version at a department party, and a good time was had by all. The original is available here; as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been translated into English (except, of course, by me, and God knows what became of that scribbled sheet of obscenity).

Aaron Reiss and Denise Lu have a wonderful NY Times story (archived) about street signs in New York’s Chinatown; it’s one of those things that wouldn’t have occurred to me to wonder about, but as soon as it’s brought to my attention I want to know all about it. A snippet:

Bilingual street signs have hung over the bustling streets of the city’s oldest Chinatown for more than 50 years. They are the product of a program from the 1960s aimed at making navigating the neighborhood easier for those Chinese New Yorkers who might not read English.

These signs represented a formal recognition of the growing influence of a neighborhood that for more than a century had largely been relegated to the margins of the city’s attention. But as the prominence of Manhattan’s Chinatown as the singular Chinese cultural center of the city has waned in the 21st century, this unique piece of infrastructure has begun to slowly disappear.

The details are fascinating, and you can read about the laborious process of reporting, involving walking more than 12 miles, creating hand-drawn maps for every corner that needed checking and recording each bilingual street sign by taking a picture and jotting down the location, here (archived). When my love for urban history intersects with my love for language, how can I resist?

And a quick shout-out to Scotty Scott for responding to every question in his NPR interview with a straight answer: no “What a great question,” no “So…” — just the facts. You get the Languagehat Responsive Response Award for March, Chef Scotty!