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Ange Mlinko reviews Lydia Davis’s collections Essays One and Essays Two in the latest LRB and has interesting things to say. Mind you, I often find Davis irritating even though she’s clearly a good writer, and I found Mlinko’s versions of classical Arabic poetry irritating a decade ago, but never mind, I’ll quote some chunks that you may or may not find stimulating:

Essays Two places us at the intersection of two pleasures: ‘(1) the pleasure of writing; and (2) the pleasure of solving a puzzle’. This is translation. It all goes back to a first-grade classroom in the Ursuline Cloister School in Graz in 1954, where Davis found herself, aged seven, without a word of German. Her father, an academic, had uprooted the family for a year. ‘I theorise now that I must have gone through a few weeks, at least, of some frustration and bewilderment,’ she writes:

Then, this frustration must have been followed by gradual enlightenment as I became progressively more familiar with the meaning of what I was hearing, and eventually it must have implanted in me a hunger to repeat the experience, or at least a strong desire, at the sight of words that mean nothing to me, to find out what they mean.

As the mongrel child of immigrants who moved to the US less than a decade before my birth, I have also always thought my ‘experiences of incomprehension, of opacity’ led to my obsession with verbal arts (although, perhaps to my shame, it expressed itself in poetry rather than translation). […]

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I was trying to decide whether to say “deck of cards” or “pack of cards” when it occurred to me to wonder which was older. It turns out they both go back to the late 16th century — first OED cite 1583 for “pack” (H. Howard Defensatiue sig. Hh4ᵛ “Some marke Cardes, and some the dealing of the Cardes, some sette theyr rest vppon the packe..when all the packs, are shuffeled”) and 1594 for “deck” (1st Pt. Raigne Selimus sig. F4ᵛ “If I chance but once to get the decke, To deale about and shufle as I would”) — but the interesting thing is the distribution; the “deck” entry says “Since 17th cent. dialect and in U.S.” But that entry is from 1894, and I’m curious if the situation is still as described there: do Brits say only “pack”?

I’m always interested in the ragged edges of the English wordhoard, where borrowed terms and foreign ones mingle uneasily. I just ran across an example in Perry Anderson’s LRB review (2 December 2021) of Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union, by Stella Ghervas:

[Ghervas] rarely loses sight of the imperialist plunder that accompanied continental peace and war alike, from Utrecht to Geneva and beyond. Unlike Schroeder too, she highlights the blindness of the pentarchs at Vienna to the realities of decaying Ottoman rule in Balkan lands excluded from the precincts of Christendom, and the indifference of the Great Powers of Europe to the fate of its subjects, which had so much consequence in the serial déboires of the Eastern Question: a pointed lesson in realism.

Now, déboire is by no stretch of the imagination an English word, and it’s not one that was familiar to me as someone who reads French decently. Wiktionary defines it as “(figuratively and literally) unpleasant aftertaste, bad taste” (and says it’s from dé- +‎ boire ‘to drink’), my ancient Concise Oxford French Dictionary (a reprint of the 1935 edition) says “Nasty after-taste; (fig.) vexation, disappointment,” my Collins Robert bilingual (2nd ed. 1987) has it as plural déboires ‘disappointments, heartbreaks; setbacks, reverses; trials, difficulties’ (note that there’s no mention of aftertaste), and the Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French by René James Hérail and ‎Edwin A. Lovatt has “‘Heaving’, vomiting (after a bout of heavy drinking” (presumably not what is intended here). The general sense is clear enough — the Balkan situation caused a lot of problems — but what precisely was intended by déboires is impossible to discern, and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Anderson is simply showing off. English has a capacious vocabulary, people; use it!

Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) wrote me as follows:

Stephen, what do you think of “some [numeral]” construction?

In this article we find two instances of it:

“Some 6.26 million Israelis have received at least one dose of the vaccine, 5.76 million at least two and 4.05 million have had the booster shot.”

“Some 682 corona cases were registered on Monday, the highest number since the end of last month, as the Health Ministry reported on Tuesday, 463 of whom were schoolchildren.”

What exactly is different, to you, about these sentences compared to bare numerals, i.e. “6.26 million Israelis have received…” and “682 corona cases were registered…”?

I suddenly realized I’m not exactly sure what’s the semantic nuance here, and how to render it e.g. in Russian. What’s more, on checking dictionaries it seems that they don’t carry this meaning at all! (I checked M-W, the OED, and American Heritage). All dictionaries have “some” to mean “approximately”, but that’s precisely not what’s happening here. “682 cases” is not approximate, it’s in-your-face exact.

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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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