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We’ve discussed the French of Québec before, but mostly in the context of its colorful swearing (tabarnak!); here are a couple of links about the language as a whole:

How to speak French like a Quebecker is an amusing introduction to the topic by the author of Le québécois en 10 leçons, with sample sentences and explanations:

J’peux-tu t’aider, mon gars?

This -tu may sound like the pronoun “you” but it’s actually a question particle, similar to the Mandarin ma, the Esperanto ĉu or the Japanese ka, except that it follows a subject-verb group. Note that mec is never used in Québec: we only use gars. […]

Pis, t’aimes-tu mon char? Si t’as frette, dis-moé-lé, gêne-toé pas!

In this sentence, pis is the equivalent of so, or alors. It can also replace et. In Québec, auto is much more common than voiture, and informally, people say char. Frette means froid. As you can see, the order of words in the imperative form is different (dis-moi-le instead of dis-le-moi), moi and toi are often pronounced moé and toé, and the object pronoun -le can be pronounced -lé. Since Québécois doesn’t use ne, the pronoun doesn’t move before the verb in gêne-toé pas.

And OffQc | Québécois French Guide (For lovers of French + diehard fans of all things québécois!) has been inactive since 2017, but there are 1,200 entries for your learning pleasure. Thanks, Ryan!

I was looking up a Russian particle I wasn’t sure of when I stumbled on William H. Girvan’s Russian Handbook of Spoken Usage, a marvelous analysis of the subtleties of usage which turns out to be available at HathiTrust (apparently only in the US — sorry!). As an example, here’s his entry for но [no] on p. 251 (not the word for ‘but’; I’ve changed his underlines to bold):

НО (as interjection)
1. Но, но, но, …! = Во, во, во…! = Вот, вот, вот…!
–А куда делись ребята?
–Она зашла за ними.
–Но, но, но, теперь ясно!
  –But where have the kids gone?
  –She stopped by and picked them up.
  –Oh yeah, right, now I see!
2. Used when urging or prohibiting, with a suggestion of threatening.
Но! Но! Чего перестали? Толкайте!
  Come on. Come on! What did you stop for? Push!
Но- Но! Это мне не нравится.
  Now watch it! I don’t like that.
3. Used in questions when reacting with surprise and doubt to what has just been said.
Н-н-о-о-о?
  Wha-a-at?

And then I discovered it was part of a whole HathiTrust Online Books Page (Browsing subject area: Russian language) with a whole slew of books on just about every aspect of Russian!

And here are two links readers sent me:

Живы ли русские диалекты? [Are Russian dialects alive?] by Igor Isaev; Dmitry Pruss said “I liked the narration a lot.”

Я послал тебе бересту… [I sent you a birch bark…] by V. L. Yanin; Steven Lubman said:

Came upon a great book about Novgorod birch bark manuscripts. It has an excellent afterword by Zaliznyak about the Novgorod dialect – apparently it didn’t go through the second palatalization process which practically makes it a unique separate Slavic language!

Thanks to both of you!

Addendum. Avva discusses the entry for но; he finds the first and third senses odd and asks his readers if they’re familiar with them. (He thinks the book in general is excellent, so he’s readier to suppose it’s his own ignorance rather than Girvan’s error.)

From Twenty Years Before the Mast, by Charles Erskine (via Far Outliers):

The following Monday I went to work at painting ships and steamboats for an old Portuguese, by the name of Desimees, in Algiers, a town situated on the opposite side of the river. A party of five, one an old shipmate of mine, hired a small shanty and kept bachelor’s hall. We employed an old colored woman as housekeeper. On Saturdays we used to quit work early and go across the river to New Orleans and purchase our weekly supply of provisions. Although there was a United States mint in the city, there were at this time no cents in circulation. The smallest pieces of money were a five-cent piece, and a picayune, — six and a quarter cents, — and a Spanish coin called fourpence. It used to confuse Jack before the mast very much, that in Boston it was six shillings to the dollar, and in New York eight; that an eighth of a dollar, or twelve and a half cents, should be called ninepence in Boston, a shilling in New York, a long bit in New Orleans, and a levy in the Western States.

“Jack,” of course, is Jack Tar.

Anna Elena Torres writes for In geveb about her seminar “Yiddish Poetics of the Border”:

This past spring, I taught a new course at the University of Chicago exploring Yiddish literature of the borderlands. Titled “Language is Migrant: Yiddish Poetics of the Border,” the course featured Yiddish writing in contact with Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, German, and other languages. As I wrote in the syllabus:

“What and where are the borders of Yiddish? How do the ‘borders’ of the Yiddish language shape its poetics? And how has Yiddish literature informed the development of other world literatures through contact and translation? This course aims to think with contemporary theories of the border/borderlands during our literary exploration of Yiddishland, as we listen more deeply to the hum of Yiddish etymology. As a diasporic language unattached to a single nation, Yiddish has long been constructed as subversively internationalist or cosmopolitan, raising questions about the relationship between language and the state, vernacularity and statelessness.”

As a field, Yiddish Studies often emphasizes the internationalism of its subject, focusing on the volatile trajectories of language and culture across borders. Rather than these narratives of travel and cultural mobility, I became interested in examining the particularities of life and language within Yiddish borderlands, the peripheral spaces where the idea of the state inscribes itself most viscerally.

For our opening session, I introduced some ways that geographical and linguistic borders are discussed in Yiddish. The first-day materials included a vocabulary list of border terms, shading gradations of meaning between grenetz, geyder, rand, and the phrase ganvenen di grenetsn (to steal the border). We then read Yankev Glatshteyn’s puckish poem “Zing Ladino” (Sing Ladino), a macaronic text that makes merry with linguistic components and presses the sounds of Esperanto, Arabic, and others upon Yiddish.

“Zing Ladino” is a rich text for introducing the concepts of diasporic language, Jewish utopianism, reciprocal word borrowings, and komponentn-visikeyt (component consciousness, the Yiddish speaker’s awareness of the provenance of the language’s varied elements). We returned to “Zing Ladino” later in the semester when we read Monique R. Balbuena’s article “Dibaxu: A Comparative Analysis of Clarisse Nicoïdski’s and Juan Gelman’s Bilingual Poetry.” Gelman, an Ashkenazi Argentinian poet, wrote the bilingual book Dibaxu in both Spanish and Ladino, the Sephardic exilic language derived from Old Spanish. Balbuena describes the poet’s self-Sephardization as a political process: “Gelman proceeds backwards in an exploration of the Spanish language and arrives at Ladino as a way of rejecting a limited and oppressive national identity—that of an Argentina controlled by a military dictatorship. To write his exile and express his deterritorialized, decentered identity, Gelman instead writes in a minor and diasporic language, one of a culture created without a State.” Gelman’s poetry thus thematizes Max Weinreich’s insight on the presence and retention of Jewish words into non-Jewish languages: “Surely, we may draw conclusions from the facts that Jewish words penetrated into the language of the non-Jewish population on the Iberian Peninsula. […] Most interesting is desmazalado (unlucky), which has found its way even into Cervantes. To be sure, Cervantes was born fifty-odd years after the Expulsion, but Jews must have left the word; only people could be expelled, not their impact.” Their words persist after the desmazalados’ exile. Weinreich notes that “similar formations are found among so many nations that have Jews in their midst: kakomazalos (ill-starred) in Greek, Schlamassel (mess) in German, ślamazarny (negligent, slovenly) in Polish.” Reading Glatshteyn, Gelman, and Weinreich together illuminates the kinship between their language politics and linguistic melancholy.

There’s lots of good stuff there; it ends with a discussion of “Clarice Lispector, the iconic Brazilian novelist whose first language was Yiddish, and Bruno Schulz, the Polish prose writer and painter whose work was profoundly informed by his friend, Yiddish poet Dvoyre Fogel.” Thanks, Jonathan!

David Shariatmadari at the Guardian has one of those silly but enjoyable quizzes I can’t resist: Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse? The first couple questions are relatively easy, but don’t get cocky — the only way you can get 100% is with the help of luck, since some require you to guess what year a word was first recorded. That said, I should have done better than 15/20; I tried to second-guess the quiz and got a little too tricksy. Don’t do what I did; if it seems right, it probably is right. Thanks, Trevor!

Anatoly Vorobey sometimes says of his more recondite posts “вряд ли кому-то будет интересно” [unlikely to be of interest to anyone], and the same is probably true of this, but I have found a tear in the fabric of spacetime and I cannot be silent. Back in my college days, Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 story «Неделя как неделя» (A Week Like Any Other, also translated as The Alarm Clock in the Cupboard) was famous not only among students of Russian like me but internationally, as a look into the daily life of a Soviet woman trying to juggle life and work; it was translated into many languages and much discussed. Now that I’m finally reading it, I imagine it’s pretty much forgotten, and it’s not easy to find a Russian text online. The only version I’ve found is copied from the 1981 collection Женщина с зонтиком [Woman with an umbrella], which I happen to own and in which I’m reading it. At the bottom of page 17, continuing onto the next page, in a passage about hurrying to work on a Tuesday morning, we find:

Когда мы утрясаемся немного, мне удается вытащить из сумки «Юность». Я читаю давно уже всеми прочитанную повесть. Читаю даже на эскалаторе и кончаю последнюю страничку на автобусной остановке у Донского.

When we’ve settled in a bit, I manage to pull Yunost′ [Youth, a popular magazine] out of my purse. I read a story long since read by everyone else. I read it even on the escalator, and finish the last page at the Donskoi bus stop.

Frustrating — one wants to know what that story was. Well, if we go back to the original magazine publication in the November Novy mir, which happens to be available online as a pdf, we find out; the passage reads there (pp. 31-32; I’ve bolded the part omitted in republication):

Когда мы утрясаемся немного, мне удается вытащить из сумки «Юность». Я читаю давно уже всеми прочитанную повесть Аксенова о затоваренной бочкотаре. Я не все в ней понимаю, но мне делается от нее вeceлo и смешно. Читаю даже на эскалаторе и кончаю последнюю страничку на автобусной остановке у Донского.

When we’ve settled in a bit, I manage to pull Yunost′ out of my purse. I read Aksyonov’s story about surplused barrelware, which everyone else has long since read. I don’t understand everything in it, but it makes me happy and amuses me. I read it even on the escalator, and finish the last page at the Donskoi bus stop.

So the story is Vasily Aksyonov’s famous 1968 Затоваренная бочкотара (translated as Surplused Barrelware; see this LH post), which everyone was indeed reading at the time. Why the different texts? Between them came the Metropol Affair of 1979, after which Aksyonov was a nonperson and couldn’t be referred to in such an approving context. Now that the Soviet Union and its stupid censorship are history, it’s high time to restore this nod to a fellow writer.

An interesting point: when Olga, the protagonist, complains to her husband that they never talk about anything other than the kids and the hassles of daily life, he tries to come up with counterexamples and says they’ve talked “О войне во Вьетнаме, о Чехословакии …” [about the war in Vietnam, about Czechoslovakia…]; I’m surprised that covert equivalence (Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968) made it past the censors in either year.

My wife was scrolling through her news feed when she asked me “What’s a derecho?” I had no idea, though the context (something like “Destructive derecho brings 100 mph winds to Iowa”) implied a meteorological phenomenon, so I looked it up and found a Wikipedia page:

A derecho (/dəˈreɪtʃoʊ/ […]) is a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system.
[…]

Derecho comes from the Spanish word in adjective form for “straight” (or “direct”), in contrast with a tornado which is a “twisted” wind. The word was first used in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs in a paper describing the phenomenon and based on a significant derecho event that crossed Iowa on 31 July 1877.

So now I know, but if it’s been around since 1888, how come I’ve never heard of it? How come the OED doesn’t have it (though the AHD does)? Questions, questions…

Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered about -able vs. -ible, the M-W blog has a post about it.

I am sad to learn of the death of Geoff Nunberg, a fine linguist and a longtime friend of the Hattery. I don’t know any details yet, but you can read Mark Liberman’s memorial Log post for a bit more (he says “after a long illness,” so apparently it wasn’t coronavirus, which is the first thing one thinks of these days).

Update. The NY Times has published a good obit by Richard Sandomir; it begins:

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist whose elegant essays and books explained to a general audience how English has adapted to changes in politics, popular culture and technology, died on Aug. 11 at his home in San Francisco. He was 75.

Kathleen Miller, his wife, said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.

Mr. Nunberg’s fascination with the way people communicate found expression in acclaimed books like “Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times” (2001); in scholarly work in areas like the relationship between written and spoken language; and in lexicography — he was chairman of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

He was one of a small group of linguists, among them Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, renowned beyond their academic universes.

“I always saw him as the paragon of public intellectualism,” the linguist Ben Zimmer, who writes a column on language for The Wall Street Journal, wrote in an email. “He was a lucid, effective communicator about thorny linguistic issues for many decades.”

I recently figured out how to view my unread Gmail, and was horrified to see how many links people have sent me have languished, apparently ignored and forgotten, because of my bad habit of letting them hang around until I need them. Here’s one the much-missed Paul Ogden sent me back in 2014 (!): Ampersand, An International Journal of General and Applied Linguistics.

Serving the breadth of the general and applied linguistics communities, Ampersand offers a highly-visible, open-access home for authors. An international, peer-reviewed journal, Ampersand welcomes submissions in applied and historical linguistics, phonetics, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, sociolinguistics and syntax. […] In response to the global thrust toward open source, open data and open access in science, Ampersand offers the opportunity for authors to make their research freely available to everyone, opening their work to a wider audience and increased readership.

Delving at random into the archives, I find “English language teacher development in a Russian university: Context, problems and implications” by Tatiana Rasskazova, Maria Guzikova, and Anthony Green, “English collocations: A novel approach to teaching the language’s last bastion” by Rafe S. Zaabalawi and Anthony M. Gould, and “Tweaa! – A Ghanaian interjection of ‘contempt’ in online political comments,” by Rachel Thompson; it looks like there’s lots of interesting stuff there, though I have no idea how well regarded the journal is by linguists. It’s too late to apologize to Paul, but I hereby issue a heartfelt “Sorry!” to all those who have sent me links and never heard back or seen them posted; hopefully they’ll be showing up belatedly in posts to come.

A reader writes:

A nationally syndicated columnist here in Canada, born in Ireland and claiming to have some Gaelic, recently wrote this: “In Irish, the ladybug is the ‘Calf of God.’ Nobody knows why. Some other languages have similar names for this sweet insect. A linguistic mystery.”

Is that a mystery that languagehat could solve? I was interested in the point about “some other languages” and imagined you and your contributors might be able to add context.

So: thoughts on ladybugs?