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I love it when a book sends me off to visit other books, and Sharov’s Репетиции (The Rehearsals; see this post) has given me that pleasure. A passage about Patriarch Nikon had me returning to my favorite book of Russian history, James Billington’s classic The Icon and the Axe (see this 2006 post), and the discussion there of Nikon’s stint as a monk on the Solovetsky Islands reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to reading Roy Robson’s Solovki, which I got a couple of years ago. So I dived in.

I’m going to spend most of the post complaining, so let me start by saying it’s well written and Robson has clearly done a lot of research — you can learn a great deal from the book. There are fine black-and-white photographs and other images to illustrate the text. But Robson doesn’t seem very interested in geography, and that’s a significant drawback for someone who is, like me. Those images include a too-small segment of the 1740 Carte de Moscovie dresse par G. de L’Isle that is pretty to look at but should have been supplemented by a more accurate map that would show the places mentioned in the text; the founder of the monastery, Savvatii, started his career at the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, which is below the southern border of the segment, and then moved to Valaam, which is actually shown on the 1740 map but not mentioned in Robson’s caption, so the uninstructed reader will never notice the tiny caption “Valamo Ostrof” towards the north end of “Lac Ladoga.” Then, when even the remote Valaam proves too crowded for him (younger monks kept showing up to get his “wise counsel”), he heads for true isolation, and Robson writes: “Traveling eastward from Valaam toward the White Sea, Savvatii sought a place to settle as a hermit.” But a glance at a map will show that the Solovetsky Islands cannot reasonably described as “eastward from Valaam”; north-northeast, maybe, but “northward” would be the obvious choice.

The worst, however, comes later in the same paragraph: “On his way, Savvatii met his future companion German, who had built a small cabin in the woods, a solitary monastic cell near Soroka on the Vyg River, not far from the village of Belozersk.” I’m pretty sure “Belozersk” is a mistake for Belomorsk, which has now engulfed Soroka (Соро́ка), and it’s a very unfortunate one because he’s already mentioned the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, which is near the actual Belozersk. In any case, the thing that should have been mentioned about Soroka is not that it’s near some village but that it’s directly across the water from the Solovetsky Islands. Sheesh.
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Caroline Davies reports for the Guardian:

So it’s farewell to bloody Nora. The f-word has become Britain’s most popular swearword, overtaking “bloody”, as the nation’s use of expletives has dropped over the past two decades, a linguistics study has found. Data on the use of 16 swearwords in the 1990s and the 2010s shows the f-word was the most frequently used, taking the title from “bloody” which was beaten into third place by “shit”.

The study, by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University, found there was a 27% drop in swearing in Britain over the 20-year period, down from 1,822 to 1,320 swearwords per million. Men still swear more than women, and swearing still peaks in people’s 20s and declines thereafter, Love found.

His study, published in Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies, analysed transcribed spoken conversations that took place in 1994 and in 2014 and looked at changing preferences for the 16 swearwords. “Bloody” saw an 80% fall in popularity in the 20 years leading up to 2014, accounting for just 128 words per million. The word “fuck” was said slightly less, down to 542 from 564 words per million. “Shit” almost doubled in usage during the two decades, reaching 326 words per million in 2014. […]

Love, an English language lecturer, told the Guardian: “Overall the data suggests that while swearing occurrence in casual British English speech is still within an expected range, it is lower than it was in the 1990s. It’s hard to say exactly why this appears to be the case – it may be due to shifts in what we consider to count as swearing, or that speakers perform the functions of swearing using other words that might not be considered to be taboo.

See the link for further details of this sad decline. Thanks, Trevor!

Anyone who’s studied Russian history will be familiar with the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s separate territory within the borders of Russia over which he held exclusive power and within which his personal guard, the oprichniki, terrorized the population at will. (The word is from the old preposition опричь [oprich′] ‘apart from,’ which Vasmer says is related to Latin prīvus but remodeled after прочь [proch′] ‘away.’) It represents a terrible time in Russian history (however much revisionist historians try to soften it), and when Russian writers use the word, it is either a reference to the 16th-century phenomenon or a use of it as an analogy to describe something very unpleasant, e.g. “ГПУ, этой современной опричнины” (the GPU, that contemporary oprichnina) [Г. А. Соломон (Исецкий). Среди красных вождей (1930)] or “Но в начале 1918 года в Москве, где Дзержинский под свою опричнину занял на Лубянке грандиозные дома страховых обществ… (But at the beginning of 1918 in Moscow, where Dzerzhinsky occupied the grandiose building of an insurance company for his oprichnina…) [Р. Б. Гуль. Дзержинский (Начало террора) (1974)].

With that background, I can now describe the experience of beginning Vladimir Sharov’s novel Репетиции (translated by Oliver Ready, apparently quite well, as The Rehearsals); it’s the first thing I’ve read by Sharov, whom I’ve been eagerly anticipating ever since reading praise by Lizok and the Russian Dinosaur. It starts with a quote from the New Testament and an intriguing paragraph about how Isay Kobylin “stopped being a Jew” in 1939; the next paragraph begins with the narrator saying he learned about this from Kobylin himself in Tomsk in 1965, “но начну я семью годами ранее и с другого” [but I’ll begin seven years earlier and with something else], and he describes going to college in Kuibyshev (now once again Samara) in 1958 and meeting a fellow called Sergei Ilyin, “who was trying to understand God.” The next chunk of the book consists of a long disquisition on the meaning of Jewish history and God’s relations with men, most paragraphs prefaced by “Ильин говорил” [Ilyin said]. This might be offputting to many readers, but I’m loving it — I’m not religious myself, but I’m endlessly fascinated by the ways religion has influenced people, history, and literature, and knowing that this discourse is setting up the machinery for the rest of the novel, I’m absorbing it eagerly. And on p. 16 of my edition, we find:

Ильин говорил: живущие под звездами волхвы и пастухи первыми заметили нарушение естественного строя жизни, оно было сильным: Господь спустился в мир, данный человеку в опричнину, в мир, где человек должен был управляться сам, и его пространство оказалось тесным для Бога.

Ilyin said: the magi and shepherds living under the stars were the first to notice the disruption of the natural order of life, which was powerful: the Lord had descended into the world given to man as an oprichnina, a world where man had to manage on his own, and its space proved cramped for God.

The world given to man as an oprichnina! I was stunned and had to stop reading and think about it. It brought to mind an image of early humans wearing black robes and riding horses with a wolf’s head attached to their saddles and carrying a broom to sweep away God’s enemies. I’m sure that’s not what Sharov is implying, but it certainly isn’t a favorable description, and I can’t wait to see how it resonates in the rest of the novel. I haven’t been so taken aback since the premature death of Jesus in Tendryakov’s Покушение на миражи [Assassinating mirages] (see this post). It takes quite a writer to produce such an effect with a single word.

I regret to report that when I checked Ready’s version at Google Books I found that he omits the crucial word: “God had come down into a world where man was meant to look after himself […].” I realize it would have been awkward to try to cram in all the requisite information in the course of the sentence, and maybe the publisher didn’t want footnotes, but dammit, use “oprichnina” and let the reader look it up. It seems to me malpractice to just omit it.

1) Alison Flood writes in the Graun about a literary mystery that has apparently been solved:

The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics. […] But after the Guardian article about the facsimile was published, a handful of Swedish scholars got in touch with Shillinglaw, pointing out the meaning of “slut” in Swedish. “It is the Swedish expression for ‘the end’, used on the last page of all kinds of books, especially children’s books,” wrote Jonathan Shaheen, an academic at Stockholm University, to Shillinglaw. “A well placed ‘slut’ always makes me laugh. I wonder if it might’ve been the same for Steinbeck or his wife, who I believe visited Sweden in 1937. As bookish types they might well have discovered the word. They might even have used it as an inside joke, as I have known other Americans around here to do.”

You can see an image of the MS at the link. Thanks, Michael!

2) Avva (Anatoly Vorobey) posts (in Russian) about Shakespeare’s line (from Macbeth) “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has” and wonders why the different forms of the verb. He consulted a bunch of sources and got no answers; the best suggestion seems to be that Shakespeare just wanted the variation. (“Hath” is noticeably more common in the plays.)

3) I learn (from this very useful Reddit thread) that DeepL is better for the languages it covers than Google Translate; its performance with German is particularly praised. Check it out.

I was glancing at a news story on the Boston Marathon that headlined the (unsurprising) fact that both men’s and women’s winners were Kenyan, Benson Kipruto and Diana Chemtai Kipyogei respectively, and I couldn’t help noticing the repeated Kip-. And then I remembered that the first Kenyan runner I ever heard of was Kipchoge “Kip” Keino, and I wondered what was going on. A little research showed that the majority of Kenyan runners are Kalenjin, and as it happens there’s a Wikipedia article Kalenjin name that explains:

For most Kalenjin speaking communities, masculine names are often prefixed with Kip- or Ki- though there are exceptions to the rule e.g Cheruiyot, Chepkwony, Chelanga etc. Feminine names in turn are often prefixed with Chep- or Che- though among the Tugen and Keiyo, the prefix Kip- may in some cases denote both males and females. The personal name would thus be derived through adding the relevant prefix to the description of the circumstance of birth, for example a child born in the evening (lagat) might be called Kiplagat or Chelagat.

So I’m provisionally satisfied, though of course if anyone knows anything more about the prefixes or about how Kalenjin works in general, I’m all ears.

Joseph Carter’s review of Rakes of the Old Court, by Mateiu Caragiale, opens with a bang:

Tenebrous, mollitious, superal, advigilating, encoursive, orgulous, salubrious, appanage, siccicate, phanariot, inquination, schickster, seneschal, decretory, voivodes, bijouterie, uncinctured, deturpation, internunciary, noctambulant, autochthonous, urticated.

These are all words that appear in Sean Cotter’s translation of Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court. You’ll have difficulty finding the definition of some of them. Google the word “imbrumated,” which appears on page 25 of the book in the clause “he lived imbrumated with thick smoke,” and you will be taken directly to… excerpts from this translation of Rakes of the Old Court. I believe “imbrumated” to be a neologism of Cotter’s, and it is meant, as far as I can tell, as something of a portmanteau of “imbricated” and “inundated.”¹ Thrown into all this is the occasional not-even-italicized loan from another language, such as “saugrenu” – bizarre in French.

Such a vocabulary would be unorthodox for an English-language novelist to use; for a translation, it is borderline heretical.

I relish the heresy. In his introduction, Cotter describes The Rakes of the Old Court as having an “ornate style, filled with archaic Romanian and base street language, saturated with Turkish, Roma, German, and Greek vocabulary.” To read Cotter’s rendering of The Rakes of the Old Court is to encounter the rare work where both author and translator find euphoria in an unbounded display of language; it is among the finest works of translated prose I’ve ever read. It is certainly among the noblest and most ambitious recent attempts to render a unique piece of foreign-language literature into English.

Click through to the review to find more about the novel itself (“a novel of friendship […] centered around a circle of four dissolute men”); I’ll proceed to the final passage, which returns to language and translation:
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When I got up to 1992 in my reading of Russian literature, I finally had a chance to try Mark Kharitonov’s Линии судьбы, или Сундучок Милашевича, translated by Helena Goscilo as Lines of Fate. Usually, by the time I’ve finished reading a novel, I know pretty much what I think of it and what I want to say about it. That is not the case here. I will say what I can about it and throw up my hands in confusion. Perhaps someday I’ll read it again and it will all become clear. But probably not.

The novel (whose named chapters are divided into dozens of numbered sections) starts with an overwritten paragraph in quotation marks, then continues [I’ve revised my translation based on the comments]:

Так начинается один из самых странных рассказов Симеона Милашевича «Откровение», занятной судьбе которого Антон Андреевич Лизавин посвятил наиболее заинтересованные страницы своей кандидатской диссертации о земляках-литераторах 20-х годов.

Thus begins one of the strangest stories of Simeon Milashevich, “Revelation,” to whose curious fate Anton Andreevich Lizavin dedicated the most engaged pages of his dissertation about writers from his region of the ’20s.

I’m not sure about “engaged” for заинтересованные or “Russian men of letters” for земляках-литераторах (do my Russian readers find these uses as odd as I do?), but in any event it seemed like the book would be right up my alley, as well as fitting in with the preoccupation of writers like Trifonov and Bitov with trying to excavate the Soviet past. The problem is that the farther I read, the more confusing it got, and the more I felt I had no idea what was going on or why I was being told about it. After dominating the first part of the novel, Milashevich as a man virtually disappears, replaced by his enigmatic Rozanov-like fragments, which Lizavin (like the reader) keeps trying to interpret. Let me quote Goscilo’s introduction to the translation to give you an idea of what it’s like. After saying it “combines a love story with a spiritual voyage” and comparing it to Doctor Zhivago (a book I didn’t like at all), she writes:
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I suddenly realized that I hadn’t gotten around to alerting y’all to the existence of History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences (Hiphilangsci.net), whose About page says:

This blog is devoted to exploring and promoting the great diversity that exists in the study of language, in the past and today. Each blog post seeks to introduce a topic, idea or approach in language study — historical, current or completely new — with an invitation to all readers to engage in discussion in the comments. Everyone is welcome to contribute, regardless of academic standing, although there is an expectation that all contributions will be well informed. Controversial or unconventional views are not discriminated against, but polemical attitudes are discouraged. We want to maintain a scholarly atmosphere marked by reasoned argument, evidence and tolerance, and free of simple opinion-trading.

If you would like to write a post for the blog, please get in touch with a one-paragraph description. All posts are informally reviewed before they are published, but always with the blog’s goal of promoting diversity of opinion and approach in mind. Our guidelines are very minimal: posts should be around 1,000 to 1,500 words and outline their topic without being overly technical or assuming too much background knowledge. Most posts should contain links to web resources and references to printed literature, although more free-ranging, speculative posts unsupported by specific references will also be accepted.

(It also says it in French, Spanish, and German, though sadly not in Welsh.) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Back in 2017, I posted about Tevfik Esenç (1904 – 1992), the last known speaker of the Ubykh language; John Burnside (see this 2020 post) wrote a poem about him which the LRB published in 2002 [archived]:

The Last Man to Speak Ubykh

The linguist Ole Stig Andersen was keen to seek out the remaining traces of a West Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker he set out to find the man and arrived in his village on 8 October 1992. The man had died a few hours earlier.

At times, in those last few months,
he would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog,

the sound denoted:
the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind
and not the equivalent word in another language,

the speech that had taken his sons
and the mountain light;
the graves he swept and raked; the wedding songs.

While years of silence gathered in the heat,
he stood in his yard and whispered the name of a bird
in his mother tongue,

while memories of snow and market days,
his father’s hands, the smell of tamarind,
inklings of milk and blood on a sunlit floor

receded in the names no longer used:
the blue of childhood folded like a sheet
and tucked away.

Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square,

yet later they would memorise the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died:
the word for death, perhaps, or meadow grass,

or swimming to the surface of his mind,
that other word they used, when he was young,
for all they knew that nobody remembered.

Thanks, Trevor!
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The latest post at Balashon focuses on the odd semantic development of the Hebrew אימוץ imutz ‘adoption’ from the root אמץ, meaning ‘to be strong.’ (The post starts with a purported derivation of Amazon from that root, which I don’t believe for one second.) The discussion of the history is very interesting, and I commend the whole post to your attention, but what I’m bringing here is this section near the end:

Ultimately, the meaning of the verb אמץ is unclear in these verses (and the Daat Mikra, for example on Yeshaya 44:14, offers both “to strengthen” and “to set aside.”) But one thing is clear – these verses weren’t followed up with uses of אמץ to mean the adoption of a child in the remainder of Biblical literature, or any of Talmudic literature. In fact, a search of the Historical Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language shows the first clear example of that usage in an 1873 essay (page 143 and page 144) by the writer Peretz Smolenskin. And even following that, it wasn’t a very popular usage. For example, see the results of this Google Books Ngram Viewer search. I looked for the word אימוץ, which as a gerund wouldn’t be used for much else other than adoption. It only really picks up in the 1950s, growing to a much higher usage in the last twenty years.

So what happened here? I think this is an example of a phenomenon we’ve discussed many times before on Balashon. I don’t know the technical name of the linguistic phenomenon (but I have a feeling a reader will enlighten me in the comments), but what happens frequently in Hebrew when there are two synonyms is that one will become the popular one for common usage and the other will take on a different meaning. This new meaning will generally fill in a semantic gap, becoming the word for a concept previously without a good word as a fit. (This is part of the process called semantic change, but I don’t think it’s exactly semantic narrowing, since the new meaning isn’t necessarily less general than the earlier meaning – just different.) We saw it with etz and ilan, with atar and makom, with tzedek and tzedaka, and now with chizek and imetz. Hebrew today doesn’t really need two words for “strengthen.” So when a writer like Smolenskin borrows from a verse in Tehillim and turns imetz into adopt (a child), then the speakers will, well, adopt the usage with open arms. (Yes, the meaning of imetz has since expanded to mean adopting of any practice or idea.)

So: any thoughts on what this process is or should be called? (Or, of course, on the etymologies involved.)