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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:
[Read more…]

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.

A nice DMQ Review piece by Nan Cohen with Hattic-style imagery; here are the first couple of sections:

1. Countable and Uncountable

My students use less when English wants them to use fewer. One of them writes: If you give less presents, they had better be good. The traditional rule, by which I mean the one that I was taught, is that with countable nouns, like presents and sandwiches, you use fewer, not less: If you give fewer presents, they had better be good. Use less with uncountable nouns, like milk, ash, and love: Put less milk in the tea.

But it’s not so simple. Language is both countable (I speak one language well, three badly) and uncountable—language surrounds us every day—like water. And English ebbs and flows, leaving strands of seaweed, shells, mysterious pittings on the uncountable sand. Fewer is being left on the shore, unnecessary to the ocean.

2. Uncountable Milk

Milk is uncountable—Less milk in the tea, please—but can be divided into countable quantities: tablespoons, glasses, cartons, those six-gallon bags that go into cafeteria milk dispensers. The kitchen manager orders fewer of them as fewer children drink milk.

The Finnic languages, like Finnish and Estonian, use the partitive case for nouns when they identify a portion of something. So to describe milk in general, you use the nominative case, maito: milk is good, milk is a white liquid, milk comes from cows. If you want to ask for a glass of milk, or some milk, or milk with your tea, you must use the partitive case and ask for maitoa. My Finnish friend explained: “As if it were a portion of all the milk in the world.” Which, of course, it is, though English does not say so.

Thanks, JWB!

Thanks to OP Tipping at Wordorigins, I learn that Wikipedia has a list of extinct languages sorted by their time of extinction (mobile link). It is, needless to say, long. I learned about some interesting languages, like Zarphatic (which sounds like it should be spoken on the planet Zarph). And when I got to the 2nd millennium BCE I had the loss of Hattic thrown in my face yet again. (The latest entry at time of writing is Bering Aleut; I’m sure more languages have gone extinct since March 7…)

A few years ago I exclaimed Nick Nicholas Is Back!; now he’s updating his blog Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (“Set Union of Greek and Linguistics”) with reports on conferences he’s attending, and ATTENDED: Workshop on Modern Greek Koineisation is required reading for anyone interested in Modern Greek (anyone who didn’t make it to the workshop, that is). A few samples to whet your appetite:

As background: Contemporary Modern Greek as we know it emerged in Athens as the capital of the Modern Greek state; it owes only a couple of words to the native dialect of Athens, which was extinct by the 20th century, and a lot to the dialects that converged in the capital, settled from elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world. That makes it a koine, but a koine with a poorly understood history: we don’t have a lot of written records of how the dialects converged in Athens in the 1840s and 1850s.

We also don’t have a lot of records of Peloponnesian, the dialect group widely held to be the basis of that koine: dialectologists have not bothered to record it historically, precisely because they assumed it was identical to the Modern koine. (And as Nikolaos Pantelidis has been saying for decades, they were wrong.) […]

Pantelidis’ current interest is the survival of the Ancient Greek pronunciation of /y/ as [ʏ, ʉ] in Modern Greek dialect (as opposed to Standard /i/, with a few dialects doing [ju])—notably in the dialect group of Old Athenian, which also includes nearby Aegina and Megara. There are lots of quite clear statements in the 19th century that people in Athens were pronouncing it as <ü>, but they weren’t being made by Greek speakers (who could not hear the sound, because they were Greek speakers); those statements were being made by Germans and French, and they were either ignored by subsequent scholarship, or disbelieved.

Pantelidis concedes that in most places, the old pronunciation has vanished with nobody remembering it was ever otherwise. But he has been digging up more recent recordings of Aegina and Megara, and he’s got the instrumental phonetics to prove that people are still producing [ʏ, ʉ] in 2016—a millennium after a poem in 1030 mocked a priest as coming from a village “where people’s intellect is not better than oxen”, because they were using the new-fangled [i] pronunciation. And he’s been the first to notice it. […]

[Read more…]

This is a combination public service announcement and request for information. I ran across a mention of the Russian town of Де-Кастри (De-Kastri), on the Pacific coast opposite Sakhalin Island, and was perturbed by the spelling: why the final -i? It was clearly named for a de Castries (Wikipedia confirmed it was Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix de Castries, marquis de Castries, who sponsored the expedition of La Pérouse), and as I learned in my young youth, that name is pronounced counterintuitively as /kastr/, so the Russian equivalent should be Де-Кастр. Of course, they could have used a spelling pronunciation… but maybe I was wrong? I hurried to my Petit Larousse, where I was relieved to find “Castries [kastr].” (If you want online backup, here: “kastr, castres; le i ne se prononcerait pas.”) So whether you’re referring to the 18th-century marquis or General Christian de Castries who was in command at Dien Bien Phu, don’t pronounce that -i-! (And somebody should add pronunciations to both articles.)

But the aristocratic family takes its name from this commune in the Hérault department in southern France, and for that name Wikipedia says “French pronunciation: [kastʁi].” What’s going on here? Perverse aristo pronunciation, or spelling pronunciation on the part of the villagers? Anybody know?

Occasional commenter Martin writes to ask about adjectives:

The rule in English apparently goes something like, “number + judgement/attitude + size + age + color + origin + material + purpose + noun.” (Wikipedia has an expanded and annotated list.) But there are exceptions, for example “modifying adjectives that are homophonous with reduced relatives, or exhibit a special intonation pattern (such as ‘comma’ or focus intonation) are allowed to escape ordering restrictions.” That’s from this 2006 paper by Alexandra Teodorescu which is focused primarily on this and other exceptions.

One question around the ordering rules is, why are they that way? Why is it that “the strange old Polish ladies” sounds correct to our ears, while “the Polish old strange ladies” does not? This 2017 paper by Gregory Scontras, Judith Degen, and Noah D. Goodman argues that subjectivity governs the standard ordering, with the most subjective adjectives being placed the farthest away from the noun being modified. (It would seem that quantity or number is an exception to this rule, which the authors don’t mention in the paper.)

But in their final discussion the authors acknowledge that their findings about subjectivity just raise another “why” question: “While subjectivity accounts for the regularities we observe in adjective ordering, the deeper explanation for how subjectivity determines the relative order of adjectives remains unsettled.” They continue:

For now we can only speculate about the ultimate source of this desire. Subjective content allows for miscommunication to arise if speakers and listeners arrive at different judgments about a property description. Hence, less subjective content is more useful at communicating about the world. An explanation along these lines, based on pressures to facilitate successful reference resolution, would have to depend on the hierarchical, not linear, ordering of adjectives: noun phrases are built semantically outward from the noun, and more useful, less subjective content enters earlier in this process (cf. the mirroring of preferences in pre- vs. postnominal languages). A full explanation must examine not only why we observe the preferences that we do, but also how and to what extent these preferences get conventionalized via the diachronic processes that shape language—a promising direction for future research.

Whatever its source, the success of subjectivity in predicting adjective ordering preferences provides a compelling case where linguistic universals, the regularities we observe in adjective ordering, emerge from cognitive universals, the subjectivity of the properties that the adjectives name.

This conjecture does start to explain why this particular grammar rule feels so natural or internalized, and maybe is less subject to gradual change over long periods of time, as compared to many others which feel (and are) more artificial and likely change, for example not ending sentences with prepositions or splitting infinitives.

Then there is the question of how the ordering rules vary among different languages, which I can’t find much about. Apparently most languages have rules for the order of adjectives, but does the subjectivity rule apply generally in other languages?

Thoughts?

Somehow I thought of “to step foot” as a recent distortion of the good old phrase “set foot.” But I just ran across it in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) — “if you stepped foot where they forbade you to go” — so I thought I’d check the OED (s.v. step, not updated since 1916). Imagine my surprise:

9. To move (the foot) forward or through a specified step. Chiefly with adverbs, as down, in, across. to step foot in (a place). Now only U.S.

1540 J. Palsgrave tr. G. Gnapheus Comedye of Acolastus v. v. sig. Aaivᵛ Steppe not one foote forth of this place.
a1547 Earl of Surrey Poems (1964) 22 Good ladies,..Stepp in your foote, come take a place, and mourne with me awhyle.
1702 H. Blackwell Eng. Fencing-master 51 Engage him in Carte, disingage in Tierce, stepping your Right-Foot a-cross at the same time.
1849 G. Cupples Green Hand (1856) xiii. 130 Stepping one of his long trowser-legs down from over the quarterdeck awning.
1864 R. B. Kimball Was he Successful? ii. i. 182 When Hiram stepped foot in the metropolis.
1880 S. G. W. Benjamin Troy i. iv. 26 (Funk) Calchas announced that the first man who stepped foot on the enemy’s soil was doomed at once to die.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Aaron McManamon has a think-piece (or whatever you want to call it; it’s full of one-sentence paragraphs and uses phrases like “brand uplift”) about the use and abuse of English in advertising campaigns:

Standing out is hard, we’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: standing out is hard. That’s the main job of agencies like ours, to try and cut through the noise to deliver our client’s message. This might be through clever media planning and ad placement, it might be from exceptional, viral-baiting creative or snazzy copy.

And it’s in copywriting aiming for the standout tagline where we’ve seen a trend. Weird, grammatically goofy wording.

He gives some examples, then says “We’re trying to understand the trend. What’s happening? Is it clever copywriting, or a lazy word-sneeze?” And I liked that last phrase enough to post the thing. I also like his impeccably descriptivist attitude:

But we’re okay with it, mostly.

Language is something that continuously evolves. It shifts with culture changes, geographical movements of the people that use it, how it’s used and for a thousand other reasons. And right now it’s changing faster than ever.

And he has fun mocking Lexus’s “Experience Amazing.” Thanks, Trevor!

Erhard Rostlund’s “The Evidence for the Use of Fish as Fertilizer in Aboriginal North America” (Journal of Geography 56:5 [1957], 222–228) is an attempt to debunk the apparently widespread (at time of writing) belief “that the Indians used to put fish in the ground to fertilize their corn fields.” Rostlund writes “The first and rather obvious point to make is that fish, a valuable food, would hardly have been used as manure unless it was so abundant that people could easily catch more than they could eat. […] The interior of eastern North America, which constituted by far the greater part of the aboriginal farming area, was not rich enough in fish to warrant its use as fertilizer.” Under “The Negative Evidence” he says “in the entire record there is virtually no reference to the use of fish as fertilizer.” But what brings it to LH is this section:

The Linguistic Argument:

Another type of affirmative evidence, or at least affirmative argument, is based on the etymology of “menhaden” and “poghaden” (also called “pauhagen” and “pogy”), which are local names of Brevoortiu tyrannus, an Atlantic fish of the herring family. These names, according to J. H. Trumbull as quoted by G. Browne Goode, are derived from Indian words that mean literally “to fertilize,” and Goode argues that this derivation constitutes “unanswerable evidence” for the manuring with fish in aboriginal time. The validity of the argument naturally depends on the correctness of the etymology, which can be verified only by authorities in the Algonquian languages, and such verification is clearly needed and would be welcome[…]

If a speculative note may be introduced, one may wonder, since the evidence for Indian use of fertilizers is at best rather dubious, whether they had a word meaning “to fertilize.” The missionaries, who compiled many of the Indian dictionaries, studied the aboriginal languages largely for the purpose of translating the Bible, and had the problem of finding Indian expressions for manuring, for example in the parable of the fig tree, “I shall dig about it and dung it” (Luke 13,8). If the Indians had no word for dunging, they soon got an idea for it — suggested perhaps by the missionaries — from seeing the New England colonists manuring their fields with fish. The question is perhaps whether the etymological cart has been put before the horse. Maybe the fish gave its name to manuring, instead of vice versa.

Thoughts? (Thanks, Warren!)