languagehat.com

Marcus Perlman (a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Birmingham) writes for Psyche about a dubious idea with some interesting stuff attached:

Language gives us the power to describe, virtually without limit, the countless entities, actions, properties and relations that compose our experience, real and imagined. But what is the origin of this power? What gave rise to humankind’s ability to use words to convey meanings?

Traditionally, scholars interested in this question have focused on trying to explain language as an arbitrary symbolic code. If you take an introductory course in linguistics, you are certain to learn the foundational doctrine known as ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’, laid out in the early 20th century by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This principle states that words are meaningful simply as a matter of convention. […] But this raises a conundrum – what is known in philosophy as ‘the symbol grounding problem’. If words are arbitrary and purely a matter of convention, then how did they come to be established in the first place? In practical terms: how did our ancestors create the original words? This is a challenging question to answer. Scientists have little direct knowledge of the prehistoric origins of today’s approximately 7,000 spoken languages, at least tens of thousands of years ago. We do, however, know an increasing amount about how people create and develop new sign languages.

Sign languages – which are articulated primarily by visible gestures of the hands, body and face – turn out to be far more common than previously realised, with a roughly estimated 200 such languages used by Deaf and hearing people around the globe. Crucially, sign languages are, absolutely, languages, every bit as complex and expressive as their spoken counterparts. And many sign languages are much younger than spoken languages, making their origins more transparent. Indeed, within just the past few decades, scientists have actually observed the early formation of entirely new sign languages – a process that happens spontaneously when Deaf people who are deprived of a sign language have the opportunity to live together and communicate freely with each other.

So how do they do it? How do Deaf people first establish a shared set of meaningful signs? Their solution is an intuitive one. Without access to a sign language, Deaf people communicate in essentially the same way that people do when they travel to a place where they don’t speak any of the local languages, or when they play a game of ‘charades’. Tasked to communicate without words, the human strategy is universal: we act out our meaning, pantomiming actions and using our hands and bodies to depict the sizes, shapes and spatial relationships of referents. […] Key to this process of forming new symbols is the use of iconicity – the creation of signs that are intrinsically meaningful because they somehow resemble what they are intended to mean. Iconicity, that connection between form and meaning, is a powerful force for communication, enabling people to understand each other across linguistic divides.

He goes on to investigate studies of iconicity in speech showing that “iconic vocalisations can be a powerful way for people to communicate when they lack a common language.” Which is all very well, and the studies are interesting, but we then get “there is at least a possibility that the forms of many spoken words began – like the symbols of sign languages – as iconic representations of their meanings.” Sure, fine, I can go along with “at least a possibility,” though I don’t know about “many,” but that gets us no closer to the origin of language, which continues to be a mystery. Anyway, like I say, interesting stuff there; thanks, Jack!

The Untranslated (see this post) has posted Interview with Max Lawton, subtitled “on reading Russian literature, translating Sorokin, books in need of translation and retranslation, learning languages, and ambitious projects.” As I said in the comments, it may be the best, most enlightening translator interview I’ve ever read; I’ll quote a few bits and send you over there for the whole thing, which is long and worth every paragraph:

Eventually, I began to study at Columbia where, during my freshman year, I took two enormous lecture/survey classes about Russian literature with Liza Knapp, a wonderful professor who specializes in 19th-century Russian literature at Columbia. There, I read and understood (in undergraduate fashion, to be sure) all of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s masterpieces. So, no, we read neither Resurrection nor The Adolescent, but all the others––yes. I could almost always sense that I was reading a translation, it was something about the way the sentences were put together and because of words like “frippery,” but the artistic visions presented in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were powerful enough to blast their way through to the reader despite the distortion inherent to re-rendering. I also began to study Russian my freshman year. Then, my sophomore year, reading Nabokov with Cathy Nepomnyashchy, another wonderful professor of Russian literature at Columbia who tragically passed away the following year, I continued to feel somewhat immunized to issues of translation. After all, it seemed Nabokov had kinda written all of the texts of his that’d been translated. However, in The Gift in particular, I could sense an idiom that was untranslatable. I didn’t like that book at first, but wanted to have another crack at it––in Russian ideally. And, in another survey course, while reading Gogol and Pushkin, I sensed the whole of an idiom––an atmosphere, a feeling, a set of meanings––that didn’t come through in translation (or came through only in the briefest of snatches). […]

Soon, I began to be able to read in Russian (emphasis on began to) and realized that the entire language of translated Russian I’d grown so accustomed to was a mere shadow of the world of light it had come down from. Like bootleg DVDs vs. IMAX. I discovered idioms that couldn’t possibly be translated into English––Gogolian strangeness, Pushkinian lightness, Nabokovian long-windedness, Sorokinian what-the-fuckness––and became quickly obsessed with the notion of translating Sorokin. I’m not entirely certain of why I was so sure I wanted to do it (or believed that I could). I could sense a world of incomprehensible words and objects through the screen of the Cyrillic-crabbed page, could sense something utterly new, and directed all of my energy toward seeing what lay beyond those strings of words––toward understanding what made Sorokin’s brilliance tick. I had to learn the language better, to study it more, and I devoted myself to doing so––at Middlebury in the summer and at Oxford during the year. I devoted myself to reading and understanding Sorokin with all of my intellectual energy. […]

The rural idiom of Faulkner and McCarthy has been an enormous aid in rendering Sorokin’s own rural Russian. This is a side of Vladimir’s work that, in my opinion, doesn’t get enough airplay. He is a sort of half-patriot divided between soil-borne love for homeland and its provincial traditions and a longing for European cosmopolitanism. As such, his loving depictions of down-home speech and ways of life are one of the only through lines that unite all of his work, from 1979 to now. It is a great gift to have an idiom at my disposal that is able to make this through line legible to Anglophone readers. Certain conceptual sci-fi writers like William Gibson have also led the way in terms of how to smoothly and effectively weave neologisms into knotty, muscular prose. While Sorokin’s style is rather different from Gibson’s, the mere existence of a predecessor is a blessing in this case.

There’s a list of pre-existing idioms he’s made use of (e.g., “I have attempted to cultivate Joyce’s ear for gibberish in a Wakeian mode whenever Sorokin starts to play with neologisms and gibberish”) and a discussion of the highly transgressive novel he translates as Their Four Hearts (“the difference lies in the sense of classical unity and proportion that Sorokin always brings to the depiction of absolute atrocity”), in the course of which he makes this interesting point:
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My wife has been going through old boxes of family stuff, and she just came across a carbon copy of “Memories of Oliver Gogarty (Written for BBC Radio Program, ‘Portrait of Oliver Gogarty’, tape-recorded at Station CFPA, Port Arthur, Ontario, January 17, 1961),” with no indication of authorship. I have no idea whether it was ever broadcast, but it makes for very enjoyable reading (and makes Gogarty — who “wasn’t exactly grateful to Joyce for having immortalized him as Buck Mulligan in ‘Ulysses’” — sound like quite a good fellow); I can’t let this wonderful anecdote go unposted:

I remember best of all a story Gogarty used to tell about Yeats. Yeats, nearing the end of his life, had just returned from the Continent, where he had been under the care of a famous specialist. Gogarty, his old Dublin friend, was attending the bed-ridden poet, when a telegram was handed to him. Gogarty read it in silence, then quickly stuffed it into his pocket. But Yeats had caught him in the act. “That’s a telegram, Gogarty! Read it aloud.” Gogarty protested it was nothing. But Yeats insisted, and Gogarty had to read him the message. Though it was couched in gentle terms, Gogarty, as a doctor, knew it amounted to a death sentence. It read:

WE HAVE HERE AN ADVANCED CARDIO-SCLEROTIC IN AN ANTIQUE FRAME.

On hearing these fateful words, Yeats, with a great effort, pulled himself out of his bed and began pacing the floor, his deep, doom-like voice rolling out the words in cadence:

“Advanced cardio sclerotic in an antique frame.”

Then he called out, with sheer delight:

“By God, Gogarty, I’d rather have written those lines than be Lord of Lower Egypt!”

Gogarty was a famous raconteur, and I think we have leave to doubt the literal accuracy of the tale, but se non è vero, è ben trovato: it certainly catches the essence of Yeats!

Via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti, Dumas Malone reports on the attitude of Thomas Jefferson toward the classical languages:

During his presidency he stated that he never read translations, but, since he had a good many of them, it would doubtless be more correct to say that he much preferred to read originals. He was at home in French, Italian, and Spanish, and stressed their importance, but he regarded Greek as the finest of human languages. He said that Homer must ever remain the first of poets until a language “equally ductile and copious shall again be spoken.”

He was much interested in the pronunciation of classical Greek, and had made special efforts to ascertain this in Paris, where he learned the pronunciation of modern Greek from persons who spoke it. Though he accepted this as something of a guide, he fully recognized that, since sound is “more fugitive than the written letter,” there must have been very considerable change after so long a time. He did not really hope ever to recapture the voices of Homer and Demosthenes, but he never ceased to regard Greek as a notably euphonious language. He quoted it frequently to John Adams, though in letters to persons of lesser learning he generally contented himself with Latin.

He accepted the Italian pronunciation of Latin and seems to have harbored little doubt of its authenticity. In the last year of his life he bemoaned the necessity of admitting “shameful Latinists” to the classical school (department) of the University of Virginia, being specially disturbed by the pronunciation they brought with them. Thus he said: “We must rid ourselves of this Connecticut Latin, of this barbarous confusion of long and short syllables, which renders doubtful whether we are listening to a reader of Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, or what.”

He appears to have said much less about Latin as a language than about Greek, but, while something of a stickler about its pronunciation, he was not one about its grammar. Outside the realm of poetry his favorite among the Roman writers was Tacitus, of whom he said: “It is by boldly neglecting the rigorisms of grammar that Tacitus has made himself the strongest writer in the world. The Hypercritics call him barbarous; but I should be sorry to exchange his barbarisms for their wire-drawn purisms. Some of his sentences are as strong as language can make them. Had he scrupulously filled up the whole of their syntax. they would have been merely common. He was nearing eighty when he said this. A decade earlier he had made a similar observation: “Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, etc., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished.”

Gilleland adds:

I was probably one of Jefferson’s “shameful Latinists.” I remember that one of my exercises in Latin Prose Composition at the University of Virginia was criticized by the instructor as “Yankee Latin.”

Hunter Dukes at the Public Domain Review describes a Japanese rebus system; after describing the sad fate of Miminashi Hōichi (Hōichi the Earless), he writes:

If incantatory texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism work through recitation, are the illiterate barred from enlightenment, should they lack the supreme linguistic recall of Hōichi? The answer requires knowing more about literacy and language in Japan. The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early-modern era, with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sutra recitation (dokyō) becoming an artform in the following century. Charlotte Eubanks tells the story of Emperor Goshirakawa, who supposedly incinerated a wing of the imperial palace after mispronouncing “a single character of the Lotus Sutra”.

This is to say, even for the literate, the Buddhist scriptures could be vast palimpsests of code-switches and calques. First of all, most East Asian canons of sacred Buddhist texts — known as Tripitaka and venerated by practitioners in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan — have long been written in Classical Chinese. As Greg Wilkinson notes, for those who can read this Tripitaka, the canon’s lack of punctuation, the tonal requirements of Chinese, and the presence of Sanskrit transliteration, makes it “very difficult to understand for a Japanese reader without special knowledge and training”, and almost as difficult to pronounce “correctly”, given the variation in dialects and vernacular speech across the archipelago.

In order to circumvent these issues in the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable […]. Famously, the Japanese physician, scholar, and travel writer Tachibana Nankei (1753–1805) reproduced an early example of a Heart Sūtra for the illiterate in his 1795 Travelogue of East and West (Tōzai yūki). […]

As these texts were often most used in rural, agricultural regions, the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death. “Villagers, decoding these pictures and pronouncing them aloud in their local dialect”, writes Eubanks, “would thus produce sounds similar to those pronounced by educated clerics”. Furthermore, the presumed incantatory and magical power of an esoteric teaching, in a nearly incomprehensible language, coupled the sounds and promises of spirituality to the visual realm of everyday life.

Lots of striking images at the link.

Dave Wilton has posted a Big List entry for Alaska; here’s the first paragraph, which gives you the basics (go to the link for the interesting details):

The name Alaska comes from the Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland, originally only a reference to the Alaska Peninsula, from which the Aleutian Islands extend. Later it was applied to the entire territory that would eventually become the state.

At the discussion page, I wrote:

A fascinating post, but can you expand on “Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland”? Can that be broken down morphologically?

Dave said “I’m sure it can, but I don’t have the expertise and resources to do it.” So: anybody know anything about Aleut?

Dmitry Pruss wrote me about a Russian counting sequence “эне бене рес” [ene bene res] that he was surprised hadn’t been mentioned on LH; this Pedagogical Encyclopedia page gives an example of the full sequence:

«Эне, бене, рес, / Квинтер, финтер, жес, / Эне, бене, раба, / Квинтер, финтер, жаба».

Ene, bene, res, / Kvinter, finter, zhes, / Ene, bene, raba, / Kvinter, finter, zhaba.

Which was interesting but didn’t seem worth a post of its own (I was going to add it to the “Yan tan tethera” post) until I googled it in the Latin alphabet and found it’s a Latvian thing as well: you can see a woman reciting “Ene, bene, res, Kvinter, finter, džes, Ene, bene, rupucis, Kvinter, finter, pasprucis!” here, and it’s listed with a bunch of other Latvian children’s rhymes on p. 12 of this pdf. So now I’m thinking there’s some Russo-Baltic Kindersprachbund thing going on here; anybody know anything more?

David-Antoine Williams was kind enough to send me a copy of his book The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry last year, and it looked so interesting I didn’t want to rush through it, so shortly after starting it I set it down for a minute and… well, things happened, it slipped out of my field of view, and (to my shame) I forgot all about it. Fortunately, a reader sent me a link to Stephanie Burt’s review for the University of Chicago Press Journals, so I can bring it to your attention that way. She begins:

Neither the sound of a word nor its history provides a metaphysically or intellectually reliable guide to its present-day use and force. Poets, however, sometimes write as if such a guide could exist, or as if their poems could provide one: these imaginary guides stand behind, or direct, some recent poets’ major works. So David-Antoine Williams concludes in this learned, careful, insightful study of how these poets take account of etymology: not only the histories and the origins of words, but also the stories we tell about them, whether or not we believe them.

According to a durable myth—or story or philosophical axiom—the present-day meanings of words, along with their sounds, conceal the truths in their Proto-Indo-European (PIE), or perhaps Edenic or Hebrew or archaic Greek, beginnings. To reactivate the history of a word is to make available for one’s own modern poem these truths, to return the phonemes and graphemes that make up a language to their nonarbitrary, cosmic roots. Martin Heidegger sometimes seemed to believe as much, with his hope to connect “origin, truth, primacy and propriety” (31). So did the Christian Hebraists of John Milton’s time, and the “Latin-speaking early Christians” who heard malum (sin) in mālum (apple) and saw more than coincidence or pun (27). So did such ambitious modern poets as Charles Olson, who promised his followers a way of writing (and reciting, and even breathing) that could extend “from the root out,” from the “Aryan root, as, to breathe” (“Projective Verse” [1950; repr., Poetry Foundation).

Such claims run exactly counter to Saussurean linguistic theory, and to modern historical study, with its emphases on “the non-teleological nature of linguistic development” (35). Signs are not referents, not even in PIE. We have, instead, only words and their empirically, imperfectly researchable histories. And yet those histories give—as Williams shows—contemporary poets ways to make poems: etymology, false or true, conjectured or historically supported, mystified or demystified, supports the verse-making strategies—and the various attitudes toward truth and art—in Williams’s chief subjects, Seamus Heaney, J. H. Prynne, R.F. Langley, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

I’ll quote a passage on J.H. Prynne, whose poetry I have come to love (see this thread):
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A repost from 2003 (the past is never dead):

Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere terrae, mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper, ambitiosi, quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit: soli omnium opes atque inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

The long-forgotten Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been having a revival lately; New York Review Books has published five collections of his fiction, and now Columbia University Press’s Russian Library series (which started with a bang and has gone from strength to strength) has put out Countries That Don’t Exist: Selected Nonfiction, edited by Jacob Emery and Alexander Spektor, which they were kind enough to send me. It’s every bit as impressive as you’d expect, fourteen pieces dated from 1912 to 1949 rendered into English by a range of translators and provided with a general introduction as well as introductions to each piece, and there are over forty pages of notes at the end. The first essay, “Love as a Method of Cognition,” is a sort of response to Vladimir Solovyov’s “The Meaning of Love” and is apparently his only actual work of philosophy; the last, “Writer’s Notebooks,” is a collection of epigrams (“I have noticed that in games played for one’s life, the trump card is always from a black suit”). In between there is everything from “The Poetics of Titles” (see the detailed discussion at Russian Dinosaur) to “A History of Unwritten Literature,” and of course the title piece, which was not published until 1994 and which the introduction calls an “imaginary autobiography.” Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has a good review where you can find out more; I’ll just say this is one more bit of evidence that the Russian Library is one of the best innovations in the publishing world in recent years. Keep up the good work!