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John Lanchester’s enthusiastic LRB essay on the career of Georges Simenon includes the following paragraph:

As you’d expect, there have been many translations of Maigret into English. The project is not straightforward, as we can see just from looking at the titles. These often betray a lack of confidence as they stretch for snazzy English renditions of Simenon’s enigmatically blunt French. Pietr-le-Letton from 1931 was first translated in 1933 – note that English publishers were onto Maigret pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has been The Crime at Lock 14, Lock 14 and Maigret Meets a Milord – a serious candidate for the worst translated title ever. Now, finally, we get to read it in English as Simenon’s deadpan original, The Carter of ‘La Providence’.

Which inspired this letter:

John Lanchester nominates Maigret Meets a Milord as ‘a serious candidate for the worst translated title ever’ (LRB, 4 June). As he will know, this is a prize for which there is fierce competition. French cinema has furnished at least two candidates, though its Anglophone distributors must carry the blame. François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups has spent its life outside France with the meaningless title The Four Hundred Blows. More recently, Claude Barras’s Ma vie de Courgette – the touching story of a small boy orphaned when he accidentally causes the death of his mother, whose pet name for him was Courgette – has been distributed as My Life as a Courgette (or, in the US, My Life as a Zucchini).

It would not have taken a genius to come up with ‘Big Trouble’ or ‘Up to No Good’ (which is roughly what ‘faire les quatre cents coups’ signifies) for Truffaut’s film, and with almost anything other than My Life as a Courgette for Barras’s, even if it was only to drop the indefinite article.

Stephen Sedley
Oxford

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Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) has posted about a series of videos he highly recommends: “Это очень, очень качественные и полезные материалы по английскому произношению” [This is very, very high-quality and useful material about English pronunciation]. He says (my translation):

I’ve been interested in linguistics and phonetics for many years, and I’ve read quite a bit about both English and Russian phonetics, and specifically about the problems of native Russian speakers in English, and I’ve written about it more than once. But this guy is a real professional, and he knows ten times more than I do, and can explain and demonstrate better than I would.

The channel is called PhoneticFanatic; I checked out an example Anatoly particularly recommended, Английское ударение, ритмика и сонорные согласные – Как лаять правильно [English stress, rhythm, and sonorant consonants — How to bark properly], and it really is that good. The guy talks about Scotch snaps and why they occur in English and Scottish music but not German or Italian (good examples from rap videos); about Kenneth Pike and how his division into stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages has been refuted by later linguists (there is no clear distinction, and we perceive our languages as more rhythmic than they are); how Polish has differing consonant length (czysta vs. trzysta) and Czech differing vowel length (lože vs. lóže); how in Russian a longer vowel is perceived as stressed; how stress can be manifested in volume, tone, length, and vowel quality (Russians hear second-syllable stress in Czech Becherovka because of the length of the second /e/); he illustrates English stressed syllables with barks, chainsaws, and motorcycles; he explains that words ending in resonants, like fun, need a short vowel and a long consonant (“You pronounce these words wrong!” — similarly сын vs. sin, сам vs. some, был vs. bill — but only at the end of a stress group: “She’s the one” [n:] vs. “She’s one of them”); and how Americans draw out the vowel in words like hand, while Brits don’t. He talks about the need to overemphasize in practicing so you can do it right when you’re using it in speech. Furthermore, his Russian is so clear I never had any trouble understanding him, and I learned a lot about both Russian and English. I join Anatoly in his recommendation!

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:
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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. […]

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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.