languagehat.com

A few years ago, Princeton University Press published How Literatures Begin: A Global History, edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney; having had a chance to examine it, I find it a fascinating look at a phenomenon of great interest, and I’ll share some excerpts here, starting with the introduction:

Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all, very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.

With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.

It is not hard to recognize the risks built into such a project. Neither the concept of literature, nor that of a beginning, can be taken for granted. There are, to be sure, intrinsic difficulties in translating the concept of literature from one idiom to another, especially because of the term’s modern European provenance. Using the term literature universally, that is, runs the risk of projecting a historically and culturally specific set of textual practices and aesthetic values onto times and places that worked very differently. Along the same lines, the search for beginnings can easily be construed as the attempt to uncover a single pattern or a uniform set of enabling conditions, common to each of the case studies included here. In reflecting on processes of literary beginning, it is all too easy to impose a hegemonic mold that all examples either manage or fail to live up to.

I normally bristle when I read the word “hegemonic,” but here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning. A later passage:
[Read more…]

My wife asked me (she knows I love these out-of-the-blue language questions) where the word parlous was from, and I said confidently that it was a variant of perilous showing the same sound change as parson (< person) and varsity (< university). But then I thought I’d check the OED for details, and was surprised by the order of senses:

1. Of a person or his or her attributes, behaviour, etc.: keen, shrewd, esp. dangerously cunning or clever; mischievous; capable of harming; malicious. Also (in positive sense): extraordinary, excessive, wonderful. Now rare (in later use colloquial or English regional).

c1390 Whon þeos perlous [variant reading parlous] prestes perceyued hire play.
Pistel of Swete Susan (MS Vernon) 53

1584 O you whose noble harts cannot accord, to be the sclaues to an infamous lord: And knowes not how to mixe with perlous art, the deadly poyson with the Amorus dart.
T. Hudson, translation of G. de S. Du Bartas, Historie of Judith v. 71
[…]

1696 Parlous, a kind of made Word, signifying shrewd, notable.
E. Phillips, New World of Words (new edition)
[…]

2.a. Perilous, dangerous, precarious; desperate, hazardous, dire. (Now the usual sense.)

c1425 Ful perlous is displese hem or disturbe.

J. Lydgate, Troyyes Book (MS Augustus A.iv) ii. 2273 (Middle English Dictionary)

I don’t think I’d run across the ‘dangerously cunning or clever’ sense before. Perilous itself only goes back to c1300 (“He nolde lete for no-þing þene perilouse wei to wende”); both words, of course, are based on peril, from Latin perīculum, which I hadn’t realized was “< an unattested verb only recorded in the compound experīrī to try, make trial of (see expert adj.¹) + ‑culum ‑culum suffix.” AHD has it under per-³ ‘to try, risk’ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.
[Read more…]

Alexis Soloski has an entertaining piece in the NY Times (archived) about how to pronounce the name of the titular (though absent) character of one of the most famous of plays; of course, the idea that there is one “correct” way to say it is silly, but it’s fun to see how various actors have dealt with it. It starts:

Godot is a big name in theater. How do you say that name? Depends.

The actor Brandon J. Dirden articulates a variation on the word Godot at least a dozen times a night in the current Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” As he speaks, vowels and consonants dance around in his mouth, emerging as Godet, Goday, Godan, Godin, Gahdeh.

Dirden plays Pozzo, an aristocratic man who chances on two tramps, Didi and Gogo, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. When told that they are waiting for a man named Godot, Dirden cheerfully massacres the name, accenting a French pronunciation (Beckett wrote the original in French) with a viscous Southern twang.

“As if this play wasn’t confusing enough,” he said in a recent phone interview.

Here’s a particularly annoying quote:

In 2009, Anthony Page, the British director of a Broadway revival starring John Goodman and Nathan Lane, told The New York Times: “GOD-dough is what Samuel Beckett said. Also, the word has to echo Pozzo. That’s the right pronunciation. Go-DOUGH is an Americanism, which isn’t what the play intended.”

I fart in his general direction; his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.

An ABC news story by Scout Wallen and Monty Jacka about a Tasmanian woman selling a 1937 edition of The Hobbit is interesting on a number of counts (there were two impressions of the 1937 first edition, and the second, with color illustrations, is worth a lot less; also, if you suspect you have a rare book, why would you throw out the dust jacket?), but the linguistic hook is the phrase I’ve bolded here:

Renee Woodleigh says she bought the book — which she says is a first edition copy — at the St Vincent de Paul op shop in Huonville, south of Hobart.

I had no idea what an op shop might be, but Wiktionary enlightened me:

(Australia, New Zealand) A shop, usually operated by a charity, to which new or used goods are donated, for sale at a low price.

It’s a contraction of opportunity shop, which makes sense but which I would never have guessed.

Also, I have to register my objection to the fact that among the illustrations of the book in question they include a film still with the caption “The Hobbit was adapted into a series of films by director Peter Jackson. (Warner Bros Pictures).” Gee, thanks for that extremely relevant information.

Josephine Quinn’s “Insider and Outsider” (NYRB November 6, 2025; archived) is a favorable review of Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare; here are some bits of Hattic interest:

He was baptized by the militant bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387, seven years after the Edict of Thessalonica attempted to enforce Christianity on all Rome’s subjects and five years after the emperor Theodosius launched a new campaign of persecution against Manichaeans. In another change of heart, Augustine gave up his imperial sinecure to return to North Africa, though not to his former companion: now he was committed to chastity. Monnica died on the way back, but Augustine finally arrived home after five years overseas in 388. After that he never left Africa again.

At first he settled in his hometown of Thagaste, where more grief awaited him with the loss of his beloved son at the age of sixteen around the year 390. The following year he was seized by the local congregation on a visit to the port of Hippo and ordained a presbyter, or priest. […] In 395 he was promoted to the unusual position of coadjutant bishop with the incumbent Valerius, a native Greek speaker who needed the support, and finally became sole bishop on Valerius’s death in 396. This prompted him to write his Confessions, an autobiographical account of his spiritual journey and his first work of real brilliance. […]

Conybeare focuses throughout on the ways in which Augustine’s developing theology and theological self-positioning were “inflected by his view from Africa.” One example is his interest in Punic, a western form of the Phoenician language originally introduced to African coastal areas by Iron Age Levantine settlers. It had been adopted by local communities and even kings by the third century BCE, seems by the third century CE to have entirely obliterated the “Libyan” languages previously used in the area, and was still widely spoken across northwest Africa in the early fifth century, alongside Latin. Punic was the first language of many African Christians, and though Augustine wasn’t fluent he seems to have had a functional understanding of it and a good sense of its importance to the Christian mission in the region. Much of our evidence for its continuing popularity comes from Augustine himself, as he renders words and phrases into Punic and back for his own congregation and finds translators, interpreters, and even a Punic-speaking bishop for others.

[Read more…]

The always interesting Public Domain Review has a post about a striking medieval manuscript:

As the seventh, final seal is opened during the Book of Revelation, unlocking the scroll that John of Patmos envisions in God’s right hand, a silence breaks out in heaven for half an hour. For centuries, artists have avoided depicting this apocalyptic caesura by focusing instead on the action-packed aftermath: thunder and lightning, the seven trumpets, hail and fire mingled with blood. From John Martin’s 1837 mezzotint of cataclysmic crags above turbulent seas back to Albrecht Dürer’s noisy 1511 woodcut of flames engulfing life like tinder, the “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” is absent, implied only apophatically, as the converse of the chaos that now reigns over, and rains down upon, the earth.

This is not the case for a miniature from the twelfth-century Silos Apocalypse (British Library Add MS 11695, fol. 125v), a codex copy of the Tractatus de Apocalipsin, eighth-century Spanish theologian Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Book of Revelation. Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow. Just as silence blankets the ears, in this manuscript, a monochromatic rectangle “serves as an effective screen that blocks the beholder’s gaze”, writes art historian Elina Gertsman. Auditory interruption gets transposed onto the textual plane, as the rectangle veils the ruled lines it floats above. “It’s not that yellow as a color ‘stands for’ silence according to medieval symbolic logic”, argues scholar Vincent Debiais, “it’s that the colored area on the page opens a visual moment, a space of silence within the manuscript itself.” The effect becomes all the more palpable when we consider that the manuscript may have been read aloud.

It can be tempting, despite scholarly reservations, to view this yellow silence as an early precursor to the color field abstractions and monochromatic paintings that preoccupied the mid-twentieth century. Rather than claiming that the Silos Apocalypse prefigures works like Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow (1956) or Yves Klein’s “Untitled Yellow Monochrome” (1956), it would be more productive (and interesting) to ask how those modern investigators of the chromosphere approached a type of representation that converged with medieval forms of contemplation. As Debiais writes, “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.”

Links and (of course) an image of the miniature itself at the PDR post. The Wikipedia article on Beatus of Liébana’s work has Commentaria in Apocalypsin, which strikes me as better Latin than “de Apocalipsin,” but I Am Not a Latinist.

Mignon Fogarty, online as Grammar Girl, interviewed Ben Zimmer for her podcast; I link to the transcript, which is what I require as a text-based person. Fogarty starts out:

So it turns out one of the many things you’re known for is antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. After I had a show about the word “scallywag” recently, you pointed me to an antedating you’d done on it. And it’s a great story.

It is indeed; I posted about it here. She goes on to discuss “Ms.” (LH) and “jazz” (LH); just when I was thinking I’d heard it all before, she got to “the Big Easy,” a nickname for New Orleans:

Ben Zimmer: Today, it’s great how sometimes these are kind of ongoing stories and, like, sometimes what I’m doing in my columns is just trying to capture the research for something like that. As it’s going, you know, as people are trying to piece it together. And so, the Big Easy is one of those as the sort of label for New Orleans that people were like, it was very hard to tell exactly how far back it went. And so, there was one researcher named Barry Popik, who’s done a lot of research on a lot of these terms, is one of the sort of foremost people for figuring these things out. Because he, once he gets on a particular word or phrase, whether it’s Big Apple for New York or Big Easy for New Orleans, he’ll just sort of keep digging and seeing what he can find. And so, Barry Popik had found out that there was a name of a dance hall across the river in Gretna, Louisiana, that was called the Big Easy as early as 1910.

But I mentioned another one of these researchers, Fred Shapiro, who is the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. And he is, he’s always looking to see, well, what new resources are out there that we can look at? And he brought something to our attention that there’s a digital library called JSTOR, and that they added this collection of American prison newspapers. And so, yeah, these are newspapers that were published in prisons for inmates. And this was this whole kind of trove of material that really had never been looked at before in any serious way. And if you look in that database that’s now available on JSTOR to search through, you can find one particular newspaper from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That penitentiary was sort of known as Angola, and so their newspaper edited by inmates there was called “The Angolite.” And so it turns out, if you look up Big Easy, you will find these references going back to 1957 about the Big Easy, where they’re talking about, oh, they wanna get out so that they can go to the Big Easy, meaning New Orleans.

And so, that was way earlier than anyone had found previously for that phrase referring to New Orleans. It would eventually get sort of more famous. You might remember, in the 1980s, like there was a movie called “The Big Easy” in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. And so, things like that it sort of got more national attention, but that’s a case where it’s like, yeah, I mean, you know, just thanks to this sort of prison newspaper database, we were able to sort of fill out this history about, you know, how it first got used, and otherwise we wouldn’t have known because it wasn’t showing up in just sort of more, you know, mainstream sources, newspapers, and so forth.

She continues with “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (LH), another great excavation, and finishes up with an interesting question:
[Read more…]

Almost a decade ago we discussed “why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar” (1, 2); now Manvir Singh has a thoroughgoing and amazingly sensible New Yorker article on the subject (archived). It begins:

I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging through mud and interviewing locals about gods and pig thieves for my dissertation. Each evening, after darkness fell, my research assistant and I would call it a night, switch off the veranda’s lone bulb, and retreat to our separate rooms. Alone at last, I snapped on my headlamp, rigged up my mosquito net like a kid building a pillow fort, and read.

Those were good hours, although, honestly, little of the novel has stuck with me—except for Casaubon. The Reverend Edward Casaubon is Eliot’s grand study in futility: an aging, self-important, faintly ridiculous clergyman who has dedicated his life to an audacious quest. Casaubon is convinced that every mythic system is a decayed remnant of a single original revelation—a claim he plans to substantiate in his magnum opus, “The Key to All Mythologies.” He means to chart the world’s myths, trace their similarities, and produce a codex that, as Eliot puts it, would make “the vast field of mythical constructions . . . intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.”

The ill-fated project founders between the unruly diversity of cultural traditions and the fantasy of a single source, between the expanse of his material and the impossibility of ever mastering it, between the need for theory and the distortions it introduces. These failures are deepened by Casaubon’s limitations—his pedantic love of minutiae (he “dreams footnotes”) and his refusal to engage with scholarship in languages he doesn’t know (if only he’d learned German). […]

Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” lingered with me less as a cautionary tale than as a temptation. Like Dorothea Brooke—Casaubon’s much younger, idealistic wife and the novel’s protagonist—I found his vision thrilling. As an aspiring anthropologist, I understood the seduction: the promise that somewhere, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there might be a hidden order. Of course, my method was different. I was mud-caked and by myself on a remote island, chasing a crocodile spirit; Casaubon was at his desk, trying to map out myths he barely knew. But, amid all the pedantry, I recognized a kind of kinship.

Singh namechecks Max Müller, James Frazer, Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and Robert McKee before continuing:
[Read more…]

Lauren Collins (a good but sometimes annoying writer) has a Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker (archived) about Where Should I Go?, a company that “creates custom itineraries” in Paris:

They’ve done vegan Paris and occult Paris, romantic Paris and rainy Paris, and arranged for a superfan of the French TV series “The Bureau” to meet one of the show’s producers. “We just had a client who was really into needlecraft,” Solanki said. (They sent her to a yarn shop called Lil Weasel, in the Passage du Grand-Cerf.) Yet she and Colin could not have anticipated an unusual request that they received, about a year ago, from two American customers: they wanted to attend a soirée appart—a Parisian houseparty.

I was struck by the phrase soirée appart: was that some sort of variant of à part? Turns out appart is a clipping of appartement ‘apartment’; it must be pretty new, because it’s not in my dictionary of French slang or the TLFi, and the earliest example I found in a Google Books search (admittedly cursory) was this 2017 book by David Lebovitz (“the deed to my apartment in Paris. Or as time-pressed Parisians shorten it: l’appart”). And how is it pronounced? The Wiktionary page says /a.paʁt/, which makes sense for a clipping of appartement, but the audio file has /a.paʁ/, which makes sense for the spelling. I suppose both are used.

Later in the piece she mentions “an oozing Saint-Marcellin”; I guess the adjective is supposed to clue you in that it’s a cheese. And the quote “They floated the idea and I was down” would make a good test for a translator — no, “down” doesn’t mean ‘depressed’!

Longtime Hatter Martin Langeveld writes me as follows:

In the Dutch edition of Wikipedia, I came across this article about “locofaulisme”, the Dutch term for a nickname or insult for the inhabitants of a particular place or area. The article speaks only about Dutch and Flemish instances, and includes a link to a list of such terms which is quite extensive. Most of them are intended to be humorous, of course. For example, in Amsterdam and elsewhere “stoepeschijters” (stoop shitters); Ijmuiden “vissekoppen” (fish heads); Schiedam “jeneverneuzen” (gin-noses); Eindhoven “keienschijters” (bouldershitters); Vlissingen “flessendieven” (bottle thieves). (There are a lot of dialectical ones I can’t translate.)

These nicknames extend even to the smallest villages and hamlets — I first came across the term here on the page about Texel, the island where my family is from. In order, the village nicknames listed there translate to fingerbiters, sandbellies, stoopshitters, shitpullers, stonethrowers, spitters/barleybellies, cake-eaters, plumpers.

US instances might be things like the Wisconsin cheeseheads, Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, etc., as well as the amorphous “Yankee,” the definition of which depends on your point of view. (The old joke being that to a Southerner, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is an old Vermonter. To an old Vermonter, a Yankee is one who eats apple pie for breakfast. To the old Vermonter who eats apple pie for breakfast, a Yankee eats it with a knife.)

But is there an English word that’s equivalent to the Dutch “locofaulisme”? The obvious English version would be locofaulism, but the very few instances Google supplies of that spelling all refer back to the Dutch term. Also, are these insult names as ubiquitous in any other countries, or is this a particularly Dutch practice?

I don’t know of an English equivalent term, but of course there are such terms everywhere, and they are definitely a fit topic for Hattic discourse. (According to Dutch Wiktionary, the Dutch word is only attested from 1988 onwards, which seems oddly late.)