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Agnee Ghosh writes for BBC Future about an effort to track down vanishing languages of India:

It was 2010 and Ganesh N Devy was concerned about the lack of comprehensive data on the languages of India. “The 1961 [Indian] census recognised 1,652 mother tongues,” says Devy, “but the 1971 census listed only 109. The discrepancy in numbers frustrated me a lot.” So, Devy decided to find out what was going on himself. […]

As a professor of English at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujarat, Devy has always had an interest in languages. He has founded a number of organisations for their study, documentation and preservation, including the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Baroda, the Adivasis Academy in Tejgadh, the DNT-Rights Action Group, among others. As part of his work at the organisations, he used to go to villages where tribal populations lived and research them. He started noticing that these tribes have their own languages, which often do not get reported in the official government census. […]

Devy felt that it would take a long, arduous process to document every language in India, so he stepped in to help. He launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) in 2010, for which he put together a team of 3,000 volunteers from all over the country. Most of these volunteers weren’t researchers, but writers, school teachers, and other non-professional-linguists who possessed an intimacy with their mother tongue that was invaluable to Devy.

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Christina Karakepeli writes for Bloggers Karamazov about an interesting bit of literary history:

The first translation of Crime and Punishment was published in Athens in 1889. At that point, the Greek nation was no more than half-a-century old. […] At the time, production of national—modern Greek—literature was low. After Greece became independent, the question of what modern Greek literature should look like—what should be its goals, language, style and themes—was constantly debated. Literary critics dismissed Greek literary works written at the time as a passive mimesis of European literary models that did not reflect the realities of modern Greek society. For newspaper editors, publishing imported—mostly French—literature was easier and more profitable. Daily newspapers of the time featured regularly in their pages the works of popular French authors. Not everyone was in favour of French literature though, especially Greek literary critics, who saw French novels as superficial and morally detrimental lamenting their popularity with the Greek audience.

The answer to French romanticism was to be found in Russian literature, which was promoted at the time as a model for everything that modern Greek literature aspired to be. In one of the first introductory texts on Russian literature in Greece, Russian literature was presented as an alternative to the ‘wrinkled’ and ‘exhausted’ literatures of European nations. Russian literature was praised for its ‘originality and national colour’; the ‘young and vivacious’ literature of the Russians, as the author described it, could be a prototype for an ideal national literature: inspired by the life of the common people, written in their language, with a stated purpose of social reform’. The dissemination of Russian literature in Greece could be ‘invigorating […] for [the] perishing Greek literature’, the author wrote. From the 1860s on, a steady rise in translations of Russian works attested to the fact that Russian literature was not only favoured by literary critics but also very popular with Greek audiences. The most translated Russian authors of the time were Ivan Krylov, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov. Of Dostoevsky’s works, only five works were translated in the 19th century: two Christmas short stories, two excerpts from A Writer’s Diary, and Crime and Punishment.

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Hard to believe I’ve never posted about this before, but now, thanks to Slavo/bulbul, I offer you GORAZD: The Old Church Slavonic Digital Hub. They have digital dictionaries, collections of digitized Church Slavonic manuscripts, Slavic Historical Dictionaries Online, and what bulbul brought to my attention in his e-mail, “the Old Church Slavonic dictionary from the 60s finally complete.” Go to that link and click on “Access to the database” and Bova’s your uncle. As a sample, here’s the entry for азъ ‘I’:

ἐγώ|я|I|já: азъ же по срѣдѣ вас ъесмь L 22:27 Zogr Mar; ѣко оутвръ(ді)шѩсѩ паче мене Ps 17:18 Sin; а не противи сꙙ мьнѣ акꙑ онисиї Supr 48:27; рьці ми • како подобаше створіті лоучъшъ Cloz 5а33; ꙗко и мене грѣшьнааго … съподобілъ ѥси Supr 103:6-7; помилоуи мѧ Euch 84b21; ѣко мілость твоѣ велиѣ на мьнѣ естъ Ps 85:13 Sin; чⸯто же г‹лаго›лѫ о сихъ • ѥже положі прѣдъ мноѭ Supr 49:9 ♦ тако ми +acc. μά,νή|клянусь (кем)|I swear (by somebody)|přísahám (při kom): тако ми богꙑ не имамъ тебе поштꙙдѣти Supr 104:21 ◼ ми μου|мой|my|můj: сꙑнъ ми ѥси Supr 243:21 (мои Ps 2:7 Sin) ♦ свои ми ὁ ἐμός|мой (собственный)|my (own)|můj (vlastní): ꙇли нѣстъ ми лѣть сътворити въ своихъ ми еже хоштѫ Mt 20:15 Mar; EuchN 26b20.—Zogr Mar As Sav Achr Bojan ZogrPal Vat En Sin SinN Euch EuchN Cloz Supr FragZogr

Amazing stuff; thanks, bulbul, and a very merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

A couple of interesting topics came up in this thread, and since juha said “I think dative objects in Icelandic is a topic worthy of a separate thread,” I thought I’d start one.

Verb classes and dative objects in Insular Scandinavian, by Jóhannes Jónsson:

Dative case in Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese) exemplifies a fairly complicated relation between syntax and lexical semantics. Thus, monotransitive verbs selecting dative objects in Icelandic fall into various semantic classes and many of these classes also contain verbs with accusative objects (Maling 2002). The same is true of Faroese although the number of two-place dative verbs in that language is much smaller than in Icelandic. The reason is that dative objects of many verbs have been replaced by accusative objects in the history Faroese and this process is still ongoing.

Despite the complexities surrounding dative case selection in Insular Scandinavian, it is clear that some lexical semantic features are more strongly associated with dative case than others. This is also true cross-linguistically as can be seen by comparing two-place dative verbs across languages.

Dative in Icelandic: throw that ball!

And for general linguistic oddity, courtesy of PlasticPaddy, Quirky subject:

In linguistics, quirky subjects (also called oblique subjects) are a phenomenon where certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative. These non-nominative subjects are determiner phrases that pass subjecthood tests such as subject-oriented anaphora binding, PRO control, reduced relative clause, conjunction reduction, subject-to-subject raising, and subject-to-object raising. […] Icelandic was argued to be the only modern language with quirky subjects, but other studies investigating languages like Faroese, German, Hindi, Basque, Laz, Gujarati, Hungarian, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Russian, Spanish, and Telugu show that they also possess quirky subjects.

There’s even a Quirky Subject Hierarchy (QSH).

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera at Public Books writes about Don Quixote, which he calls “the Saturday Night Live of the Spanish Inquisition.” He says “A traditional line of scholarship holds that Cervantes was Islamophobic and something of a Catholic zealot,” giving examples, and continues:

“I have another view,” says [Muhsin] al-Ramli: Cervantes was “in favor [of Islam]” in Don Quixote. “The Inquisition was going on,” notes the Iraqi scholar, “and Cervantes knew how to camouflage his ideas.” Al-Ramli foregrounds the author’s lived experience in the Muslim world, saying, “without his experience in Algeria,” where he lived for six years, “Cervantes could not exist as we know him, nor his literature.” […]

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Dave Wilton has posted a Big List entry for frankincense, which we don’t seem to have discussed here (though we have talked about frankgum). He says “Frankincense is perhaps best known as one of the gifts the Magi bring to the infant Jesus” and quotes the Vulgate Matthew 2:11 (“et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera aurum tus et murram”):

The Latin tus or thus can refer to incense generally and the resin of the genus Boswellia in particular. The Koine Greek original is λίβανος (libanos, frankincense), a reference to what is now Lebanon, probably because trade routes for the product came through there into the eastern Mediterranean.

The English word is borrowed from the Anglo-Norman phrase franc encens. The basic meaning of franc is free, but it can also mean noble or distinguished. In other words, the term means high-quality incense. The Anglo-Latin francum incensum makes an appearance in 1206, although the more usual Latin nomenclature was liberum incensum. However, there is a slight problem with this etymology in that while the Latin liber means free, it was not generally used to mean noble or distinguished. Additionally, the noble/distinguished sense of franc in Anglo-Norman and Continental Old French was, as a rule, only applied to the social status of people. Francencens is the only example in Old French where franc is applied to a plant.

That issue does not rule the standard etymology out, but it does suggest an alternative. It may be that the Latin liberum incensum is a re-analysis of the Greek libanos, turning what was in Greek a reference to the Levant into a more familiar adjective in Latin. The franc would then be a straightforward translation of the Latin, with a subsequent semantic shift to mean noble/high quality, as that would make more sense in the context of incense […]

Makes sense to me. (He continues with a discussion of the word’s complicated history in French and English.)

I’m still reading David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, and I’m delighted to get to a passage I can feature on LH (it’s a superb book, and I want to finish it before I get my eagerly anticipated Christmas present, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity). He’s been talking about how reforms intended to increase “transparency,” for example in universities (his example is the Cambridge anthropology department), tend to “turn custom into a kind of board game”:

Faced with such demands, everyone’s first impulse was just to say, “Well, sure, we’ll just write that for the authorities and proceed as we always have.” But in practice this quickly becomes impossible, because the moment any conflicts crop up, both parties will automatically appeal to the rule-book.” […]

If we think about it, this sort of thing happens all the time—and even in contexts that have nothing to do with arbitrary personal authority. The most obvious example is language. Call it the grammar-book effect. People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars—at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language—by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

It’s easy to observe this phenomenon in places where grammars were only written recently. In many places in the world, the first grammars and dictionaries were created by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, intent on translating the Bible and other sacred texts into what had been unwritten languages. For instance, the first grammar for Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar, was written in the 1810s and ’20s. Of course, language is changing all the time, so the Malagasy spoken language—even its grammar—is in many ways quite different than it was two hundred years ago. However, since everyone learns the grammar in school, if you point this out, people will automatically say that speakers nowadays are simply making mistakes, not following the rules correctly. It never seems to occur to anyone—until you point it out—that had the missionaries came [sic –LH] and written their books two hundred years later, current usages would be considered the only correct ones, and anyone speaking as they had two hundred years ago would themselves be assumed to be in error.

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Slavomír Čéplö (aka bulbul) posted this two-hour Russian video on FB; it’s about the life and work of the great Mayanist Yuri Knorozov (note photo with cat), whose story is well worth reading — the Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of telling it. But what concerns me at the moment is his name. The English and Russian Wikipedia articles both give Кноро́зов, with penultimate stress, and so does a biographical dictionary published in 1998 (the Всемирный биографический энциклопедический словарь) — but everyone in the video, including his relatives, says Кно́розов, with initial stress, and that’s what’s given in Unbegaun’s Russian Surnames (he derives it from an old word кнороз ‘boar’). I’m reasonably confident the latter is correct, but I hesitate to change the Wikipedia articles when there’s a reference book published during his lifetime that says otherwise; I welcome all thoughts about the name, his work, or anything else that comes to mind.

From G.P. Goold, “Richard Bentley: A Tercentenary Commemoration” (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67 [1963]: 285-302), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

The greatest book written in Greek is the New Testament, though a Chinese who studied Greek in the classics departments of Occidental universities might well become an old man without ever discovering the fact.

I’m tempted, in the heat of the moment, to say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a scholar commit to print, though of course that can’t be right. Mind you, Goold was a perfectly respectable classicist; Paul Lewis’s NY Times obit (Jan. 24, 2002) says:

George P. Goold, a Yale classics professor who rejuvenated and debowdlerized the Loeb Classical Library, a collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts published with English translations, died on Dec. 5 in Holyoke, Mass. He was 79. […]

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Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912, by Donald Keene (Columbia U. Press, 2005), and I thought this was interesting enough to share:

As a further step in cementing the ties between the emperor and his people, the emperor’s birthday was proclaimed a national holiday, the Feast of Tenchō [天長節]. Observance of the emperor’s birthday as a holiday had begun as far back as 775, but the custom had long since fallen into abeyance. Its revival at this time was thus another instance of the intention to restore ancient practices.

On October 23 [1868] it was announced that the nengō [年号] had been changed from the fourth year of Keiō to the first year of Meiji and that henceforth there would be only one nengō for an entire reign. The name Meiji was derived from a passage in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination: “The sage, facing south, listens to the world; facing the light, he governs.” The day before the new nengō was announced, the emperor himself had visited the sanctuary (naishidokoro [内侍所 ‘inner samurai place’]) where he drew lots to determine the new nengō from among several names submitted by scholars. Although he probably did not realize it at the time, the emperor had also chosen the name by which posterity would know him; earlier emperors were known by a place-name from the site of their residence or (as was true of Meiji’s father and grandfather) by a posthumously chosen title. The name Meiji [明治], interpreted as meaning “enlightened rule,” came to seem an accurate description of his reign. Names like those of his father and grandfather, auspicious though they were, would have been less appropriate to the era.

It turns out that KDoore explained the basic fact in a 2009 comment, but I had of course forgotten, and this has more detail. I’m curious, however, about how exactly Meiji [明治] is derived from the I Ching; it’s apparently from the Shuogua (an appendix explaining the trigrams), and the passage is translated here as “The sages faced south when they listened to the world (that is, held court), they turned towards the brightness and ruled.” Is “enlightened rule” from “turned towards the brightness and ruled”? I want context!