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John Cowan sent me Francesco Perono Cacciafoco’s The Undeciphered Inscription of the Baptistery of Pisa, whose abstract reads:

This short communication is aimed at popularizing the puzzle of the undeciphered inscription engraved on a wall of the Baptistery of Pisa (Tuscany, Italy), which appears also in other religious monuments in Tuscany. The inscription is written in an unknown script and, being very short and without other examples with the same symbols all over the world (apart from some equivalent epigraphic documents from the same area), is still undeciphered.

The goal of the following note, which absolutely does not aim to be original, and which is just recapitulative, is to trigger a discussion about the inscription and to encourage possible interpretations and, ultimately, new deciphering attempts.

John adds: “Whodathunkit? Looks to me like something the Hattic polymaths could use as a chew toy.” So chew away! (And Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate it today; in a few hours I will be too preoccupied with turkey and visiting family to mind the store, so if a comment gets held up in moderation, be patient.)

John E. McIntyre, the official Favorite Copyeditor of Languagehat, recently posted on Facebook his Baltimore Sun column from October 30, 1994; those who are terminally bored and irritated by encomiums to physical books can skip this post, but I’m a sucker for them:

Three steps from my desk, I can put my hand on a shabby paperback with a faded pink-and-white cover. Anyone else would see Houghton Mifflin’s edition of selections from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” I open the book and hear Professor John Yunck reading aloud in Middle English with zest and glee. It is the spring of 1971 in East Lansing, Mich., and I am young.

Across the room rests a battered one-volume complete Sherlock Holmes, the first grown-up book I purchased with my own money. I found it at a store in Cleveland in 1962 on a visit to my older sister’s home. Everything in it (except the tedious “Valley of Fear” — Conan Doyle is not at his best in American settings) has been read and reread more times than I can count.

Near Holmes are a number of ratty drugstore paperbacks — Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe canon. Every few years, having forgotten the plots, I can enjoy them all over again. Nothing so pleasant after a long day at work than to sit for a time with a drink in a still house, reading about disagreeable people meeting violent ends.

A great gulf separates those who own books, who crave them, from those who see books as a dust-gathering impediment. […]

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I don’t know enough to even begin to evaluate Mena B. Lafkioui’s Rif Berber: From Senhaja to Iznasen. A qualitative and quantitative approach to classification (Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 28 [2020]: 117-156), but there are those who do (hi, Lameen!), and it looks very interesting, so I’m posting it. Here’s the Abstract:

By combining qualitative (synchronic and diachronic) and quantitative (algorithmic) approaches, this study examines the nature, structure, and dynamics of the linguistic variation attested in Berber of the Rif area (North, Northwest, and Northeast Morocco). Based on a cross-level corpus of data obtained from the Atlas linguistique des varieties berbères du Rif (Lafkioui 2007) and from numerous linguistic, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic fieldwork investigations in the area since 1992, this study shows that these Berber varieties form a language continuum with the following five stable core aggregates, which cut across administrative and political borders: Western Rif Berber, West-Central Rif Berber, Central Rif Berber, East-Central Rif Berber, and Eastern Rif Berber. Furthermore, data mining studies made it possible to objectively identify the principal aggregate discriminators of the Rif Berber continuum, which are dealt with in the study. A special focus in the article is put on the interplay be-tween system-internal and system-external parameters for the selection, diffusion, and transformation of variants in Rif Berber.

(Hat tip to John Emerson for the link.)

Robert Bly has died at 94. Here’s an early poem of his I like:

After Working

I
After many strange thoughts,
Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,
I came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.

II
Outside it covers the trees like pure sound,
The sound of tower bells, or of water moving under the ice,
The sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.

III
We know the road; as the moonlight
Lifts everything, so in a night like this
The road goes on ahead, it is all clear.

When I was in Argentina in the late ’60s and starting to buy Serious Books, I loved the Penguins in the bookstores that stocked English books (mostly from England itself, with prices in shillings and pence on the cover, which intrigued me). Emma Tucker at Creative Review reviews The Penguin Modern Classics Book, which “celebrates the series’ design legacy”:

Every single one of the 1,800 titles included in the series is featured in this compilation, which displays the first Penguin Modern Classics cover for each, alongside a brief summary and some background on the author. Chapters are divided into regions and countries, and helpful sidebars connect themes across different titles.

The first five Modern Classics covers were designed by Penguin typographer Hans Schmoller, who paired Eric Gill’s Joanna typeface with a grey, white and orange palette. The appearance of the series has varied over the years, as different art directors put their own stamp on the jackets. In 1963, Germano Facetti introduced the ‘Marber Grid’, which put a white, black or green panel on the cover, paired with full-bleed artwork.

Cherriwyn Magill changed things up again in 1982, with an inset artwork, and then in 1989 Penguin introduced a floating logo in a roundel and a white title box set in Jan Tschichold’s Sabon. A glossy silvery period followed in the early 2000s, and then in 2007 Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart introduced Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase’s Avant Garde as a typeface – which remains in use today.

I (of course, being an old fart) prefer the old ones, but they’re all good, and seeing those covers makes me intensely nostalgic (and raises my bibliophilia level to 11).

Helen Pidd reports for the Graun on Manchester accent diversity:

Greater Manchester is only about 30 miles from east to west but it has long been famed for its linguistic diversity: the rich rolling Rs and extra long “oos” of the northern mill towns where people looook in coook booooks are a world away from the nasal Mancunian drawl where your brother is “ahh kid” and words which end in a Y finish instead with an “eh” (ya cheekeh monkeh).

But now that its 2.8 million residents can zip across the region on a tram or a train instead of wearing out their clogs, have hyperlocal accents become a thing of the past? And did the omnipotence of the Gallagher brothers in the 1990s corrupt the accents of a whole generation of Greater Mancunians?

That’s what academics from Manchester Metropolitan University are trying to find out as they travel across the region’s 10 boroughs recording the way people speak.

Each week, Dr Rob Drummond and his research team park their Accent Van in a new location and invite people to get in the back. Participants are recorded answering a series of questions about their accent and how it makes them feel. Has it held them back or helped them on? Do they wish they sounded different? Do they ever dial it up or down depending on the situation?

There is then a standard reading exercise aimed to tease out certain regional variations: do they say “lickle” for little and “bockle” for bottle (particularly common in Bolton)? Do they pronounce the “r” in bear and does school have one syllable or two? Does “bus” sound more like “buzz”, as it traditionally has done in Bury? […]

Asked what differentiates a Tamesider from a Manc, the officer thought you could always tell by how they describe a bread roll. Barmcake = Manc. Muffin = Tamesider. Growing up, people knew if you were even a few miles away from home, he said. “I went to college in Openshaw [four miles from Ashton] and people there would call me a ‘Yonner’ because I was from over yonner, over yonder.” […]

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John Lanchester’s enthusiastic LRB essay on the career of Georges Simenon includes the following paragraph:

As you’d expect, there have been many translations of Maigret into English. The project is not straightforward, as we can see just from looking at the titles. These often betray a lack of confidence as they stretch for snazzy English renditions of Simenon’s enigmatically blunt French. Pietr-le-Letton from 1931 was first translated in 1933 – note that English publishers were onto Maigret pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has been The Crime at Lock 14, Lock 14 and Maigret Meets a Milord – a serious candidate for the worst translated title ever. Now, finally, we get to read it in English as Simenon’s deadpan original, The Carter of ‘La Providence’.

Which inspired this letter:

John Lanchester nominates Maigret Meets a Milord as ‘a serious candidate for the worst translated title ever’ (LRB, 4 June). As he will know, this is a prize for which there is fierce competition. French cinema has furnished at least two candidates, though its Anglophone distributors must carry the blame. François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups has spent its life outside France with the meaningless title The Four Hundred Blows. More recently, Claude Barras’s Ma vie de Courgette – the touching story of a small boy orphaned when he accidentally causes the death of his mother, whose pet name for him was Courgette – has been distributed as My Life as a Courgette (or, in the US, My Life as a Zucchini).

It would not have taken a genius to come up with ‘Big Trouble’ or ‘Up to No Good’ (which is roughly what ‘faire les quatre cents coups’ signifies) for Truffaut’s film, and with almost anything other than My Life as a Courgette for Barras’s, even if it was only to drop the indefinite article.

Stephen Sedley
Oxford

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Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) has posted about a series of videos he highly recommends: “Это очень, очень качественные и полезные материалы по английскому произношению” [This is very, very high-quality and useful material about English pronunciation]. He says (my translation):

I’ve been interested in linguistics and phonetics for many years, and I’ve read quite a bit about both English and Russian phonetics, and specifically about the problems of native Russian speakers in English, and I’ve written about it more than once. But this guy is a real professional, and he knows ten times more than I do, and can explain and demonstrate better than I would.

The channel is called PhoneticFanatic; I checked out an example Anatoly particularly recommended, Английское ударение, ритмика и сонорные согласные – Как лаять правильно [English stress, rhythm, and sonorant consonants — How to bark properly], and it really is that good. The guy talks about Scotch snaps and why they occur in English and Scottish music but not German or Italian (good examples from rap videos); about Kenneth Pike and how his division into stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages has been refuted by later linguists (there is no clear distinction, and we perceive our languages as more rhythmic than they are); how Polish has differing consonant length (czysta vs. trzysta) and Czech differing vowel length (lože vs. lóže); how in Russian a longer vowel is perceived as stressed; how stress can be manifested in volume, tone, length, and vowel quality (Russians hear second-syllable stress in Czech Becherovka because of the length of the second /e/); he illustrates English stressed syllables with barks, chainsaws, and motorcycles; he explains that words ending in resonants, like fun, need a short vowel and a long consonant (“You pronounce these words wrong!” — similarly сын vs. sin, сам vs. some, был vs. bill — but only at the end of a stress group: “She’s the one” [n:] vs. “She’s one of them”); and how Americans draw out the vowel in words like hand, while Brits don’t. He talks about the need to overemphasize in practicing so you can do it right when you’re using it in speech. Furthermore, his Russian is so clear I never had any trouble understanding him, and I learned a lot about both Russian and English. I join Anatoly in his recommendation!

I’ve just read two first novels that, while irritating enough that I was tempted not to finish them, contained enough good things that I withstood temptation (also, in the case of Girshovich, I had read a chunk of a later novel [see this post], so I knew he was worth the effort). The first is Я — не я [I am not I], by Aleksey Slapovsky (published in the journal Volga in 1992 and as a book in 1994). Conveniently, I wrote to Lizok about it after I finished it, so I’ll reproduce my report here:

I’ve finished Я — не я, though for a while I wasn’t sure I would — about seventy pages in, I was thinking “this is pretty silly and not what I call literature, maybe I should bail out.” But then I reflected I was almost halfway through and persevered, and eventually realized I had been looking at it through the wrong lenses. It’s not a Russian Novel like Tolstoevsky or Trifonov or Sokolov, it’s a snarky social satire of the kind that was so popular here in the ’60s and ’70s: Heller, Vonnegut, Roth (in his wild-and-woolly phase: Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel). A shlemiel from Saratov acquires the ability to look into someone’s eyes and change places with them (each person’s self in the other’s body); this gives Slapovsky the chance to describe in loving and/or parodic detail every layer of late-Soviet life from the Kremlin to the lowest alcoholic bum. It’s the kind of book a clever reporter writes when he wants to write fiction (if he’s not the kind who writes lumbering ripped-from-the-headlines doorstops), and Slapovsky started out (per Wikipedia) as a school teacher, a truck driver, and a journalist for TV and radio in Saratov. (And one of the things I liked best about the book is the description of the city; I’ve complained at LH about the fact that Russian fiction ignores everything outside the two capitals and the countryside, and it’s a real pleasure to me to have an image of walking up the main drag, Prospekt Kirova — the Nevsky of Saratov — from the Lipki park to the Rossiya hotel/restaurant, which has since been demolished.) It gives a rich picture of Soviet life on the cusp of perestroika, and is worth reading for that if not for its meager literary virtues (the characters are standard-issue, the prose prosaic, the plot developments sometimes eye-rollingly silly). I won’t reread it, but I’ll read more Slapovsky (at least Первое второе пришествие [The first second coming] and Победительница [The victorious woman], both of which I have).

I should add that at one point Nedelin, the protagonist, changes places with a chicken (and nearly suffers a chicken’s predestined fate) and that Slapovsky inserts himself into the story as a Saratov reporter.

Here’s a Hatworthy excerpt:
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In our bedtime reading, my wife and I have just finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis; the ending was abrupt and didn’t really resolve anything, but we enjoyed it enough we’re about to start on her novel Cranford. One sentence we read was so funny/startling that it sent me off to the OED, and I now report on it here: “Her mother’s sister, Lydia Green, her own aunt as was, died of a decline just when she was about this lass’s age.” Died of a decline! It sounds absurdly Victorian, but it turns out it’s not quite as nugatory as it seems:

1. d. Any disease in which the bodily strength gradually fails; esp. tubercular phthisis, consumption.

1783 Gentleman’s Mag. 53 ii. 1066 [Died] at his brother’s at Enfield, of a deep decline, by bursting a blood-vessel in coughing.
1790 F. D’Ablay Diary Dec. (1842) V. 171 A general opinion that I was falling into a decline.
1845 S. Austin tr. L. von Ranke Hist. Reformation in Germany (ed. 2) I. 285 He fell into a rapid decline, and died prematurely.
1857 T. Hughes Tom Brown’s School Days ii. i. 240 She said one of his sisters was like to die of decline.
1882 New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon   Decline..applied to the later stages of phthisis pulmonalis. Also, a term for the condition formerly called Tabes.

The original of the Ranke quote reads “ſo daß er ſich raſch verzehrte und vor der Zeit ſtarb”; I presume “verzehrte” is the verbal equivalent of our “consumption.” At any rate, the usage was entirely new to me, perhaps because I haven’t read enough Victorian literature.