languagehat.com

I had known that Queen Elizabeth I was among the more literate of monarchs, but I hadn’t realized the extent of it; John-Mark Philo writes about it for the TLS:

Among the manuscripts preserved at Lambeth Palace Library is a translation of Tacitus completed in the late sixteenth century (MS 683). It focuses on the first book of the Annales, which sees the death of Augustus and the rise of the emperor Tiberius, tracing the steady centralization of governmental powers in a single individual. The translation has been copied by an amanuensis in an exquisite italic hand, with subsequent corrections made by the author. It is on a very specific kind of paper stock, which gained prominence among the Elizabethan secretariat in the 1590s. There was, however, only one translator at the Tudor court to whom a translation of Tacitus was attributed by a contemporary, and who was using the same paper in her translations and private correspondence: the queen herself. Above all, the corrections made to the Lambeth Tacitus are a compelling match for Elizabeth’s later handwriting, which was, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic.

As well as composing an impressive range of original works in verse and prose, Elizabeth I was an enthusiastic translator. Whether engaging foreign visitors in multilingual conversation or delivering withering ripostes in Latin to impertinent ambassadors, Elizabeth was celebrated for her linguistic abilities even in her own lifetime. Particularly strong in French, Italian, and Latin, she was also proficient in Spanish and Greek, whose alphabet would eventually pepper her everyday handwriting (in later years, she used “φ” for “ph”). She undertook translations of Jean Calvin, Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, Horace and Boethius, all of which survive today. Elizabeth’s perennial favourite, Henry Savile, produced a translation of Tacitus in 1591, which he dedicated to the queen, drawing particular attention to her “most rare and excellent translations of Histories”. John Clapham, another of Elizabeth’s contemporaries, refers to her translation of “some part of Tacitus’ Annals” in his history of the queen’s reign, which he composed with the help of the courtier Robert Cecil. Clapham mentions Elizabeth’s Tacitus first and foremost among the queen’s translations, which “she herself turned into English for her private exercise”. Though the other translations which Clapham mentions have since been accounted for, the Tacitus translation has thus far remained elusive. […]

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I have been neglecting the headgear-related portion of the remit of Languagehat, so without further ado, I present Richard in a Hat: “I have many hats and regularly post a new picture of me in a different hat, cap or other headgear with a few facts about what I’m wearing.” The most recent post is Börk hat (“Börk is a type of Turkish man’s cap or headdress”). He wears hats well, and I am pleased to note that he sports the same style of facial hair as your humble servant. (Via MeFi, where of course a commenter feels “slightly weird about pictures of this white dude in traditional hats from other cultures.”)

Another passage from Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (see this post):

It was Lutèce, or Lutetia, under the Romans, and became Paris around 300 C.E. François Villon called it Parouart in his fifteenth-century thieves’ cant; Rimbaud called it Parmerde in a letter written in 1872. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, people started referring to it as Pantin — ironically, since Pantin was then a rustic village on the plain northeast of the city (the word also means “puppet,” which may have had something to do with its use) — and then around 1849 the name acquired an argot suffix and became Pantruche; the -truche may have derived from autruche, “ostrich.” The moniker survived well into the twentieth century, although somewhere near that age’s beginning it was overtaken in popular speech by Paname. Was that name inspired by the 1892 government swindle concerning the faltering Panama Canal project, described as the largest corruption scandal of the nineteenth century? That seems a likelier source than the Panama hat, cited by some, the object of a vogue after adorning the heads of workers returned from the isthmus. Paname stuck because it was sort of perfect: raffish, satirical, swaggering, and pointed all at once. Paname, like argot itself, has come to be most enduringly associated with chanson réaliste singers, midcentury crime fiction writers (Albert Simonin, Auguste le Breton, San-Antonio), and movie gangsters from Jean Gabin to Lino Ventura. Today it enjoys another life in hip-hop, employed by rappers as the local equivalent to the Rastafarians’ Babylon: the root of all corruption, racism, and malice.

The inhabitants, for somewhat more than a century, have been Parigots, with another pejorative suffix. (Parisien, meanwhile, was the slang term for an old horse about to be put down; it is also a loaf of bread.) Now and then you still hear the term titi, which comes from a word for street urchin (and ultimately from tirailleur, “sharpshooter”) and denotes a working-class Parisian of old stock, someone whose family had lived in the neighborhood for a century or more. There aren’t many of those left. The titi was a creature of the city when it was composed of so many villages — quartiers with functional autonomy, ad hoc institutions, and unspoken codes; where everyone of a given age had been kids together and knew one another’s virtues and foibles intimately. The quartier was for centuries the basic local entity. When the city was a world, the quartiers were nations, and they correspondingly drew all the fervent loyalty and instinctual identification that cities or countries usually inspire — the larger entities generally went without saying, except maybe in times of war. In 1943, A. J. Liebling encountered a tattooed casualty, with a tricolor wrapped around his waist, in a field hospital on the North African front. “When I asked him where he came from, he didn’t bother saying ‘Paris’ — just ‘Nineteenth Arrondissement.’ […]”

What a wonderful book!

Alexander Jabbari at Newslines writes about Yiddish and Arabic:

Through modern Hebrew, Yiddish words occasionally find their way into Arabic. A notable example in Palestinian Arabic is balagan, meaning “chaos,” borrowed from Hebrew. […] While balagan came to Palestinian Arabic through Hebrew, the source of the Hebrew word was likely Yiddish. The word is ultimately from Persian bālākhāna, meaning “upper room” or “chamber.” It passed from Persian into Tatar or another Turkic language and from there entered Russian as balagan, where it came to refer to a temporary wooden structure for circus performances. Because of the circus context, the Russian word also acquired connotations of buffoonery. When borrowed from Russian and put into Yiddish (and Polish), the chaos of the circus setting gave the word the sense of a mess, bedlam or chaos. It’s hard to say with certainty whether the Hebrew word balagan came from Yiddish, Russian or Polish, as all three are common lexical sources for modern Hebrew. In any case, there have been other, more direct encounters between Yiddish and Arabic.

In Ottoman Palestine, and especially in Jerusalem before 1948, it was common for Yiddish-speaking Jews and Arabs to understand each other’s languages, particularly in neighborhoods where the two communities abutted each other. Among Jews, it was more often women engaged in business or neighborly relations with Arabs who learned Arabic, whereas men were more often secluded in yeshivas, engrossed in the study of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Arabic was taught alongside German in the “modern” Sephardic schools established after 1850, and while there were attempts to integrate Arabic into the Ashkenazic institutes of learning, in order to provide graduates with practical job skills, these were usually resisted by the religious authorities. Nevertheless, in the 19th century there were groups of Ashkenazic men in Jerusalem who learned Arabic, both spoken and literary. Arabic words became part of the everyday Yiddish spoken in Palestine — even for terms specific to Judaism, like khalake, a boy’s ritual first haircut, from the Arabic for haircut, ḥalāqa. These were documented by Mordecai Kosover in his lengthy dissertation on the Arabic elements of the Yiddish spoken by the Ashkenazic (central and eastern European origin) Jewish community in Palestine.

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Back in 2014, Sashura said “Even Russian Vinni Pukh is different from Winnie the Pooh.” Now Sabina Amanbayeva at the Jordan Center tells Тhе Story of the Russian “Winnie the Pooh” (Part I, Part II). It begins:

The story of the Russian Winnie the Pooh, or “Vinni Pukh,” is inextricably tied to the experience of readers who enjoyed the book in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to viewers of eponymous cartoons released in 1969, 1971, and 1972. Vinni Pukh holds a special place in the hearts of many Russophones, but is a very different character than the one familiar to English speakers.

In fact, upon discovering the English-language Winnie the Pooh, many Russian speakers feel surprised and claim, justifiably or not, that “ours is better.” He is certainly more Russian. It is almost unimaginable to a Russian speaker that “another” Vinni Pukh exists. Just imagine that the American Star Wars turned out, in fact, to be an adaptation of a story based in a different culture. However “authentic” the “original,” fans of the “adaptation” are unlikely to care: Star Wars is, by now, well established as American. Similarly, Vinni Pukh has lodged himself so firmly in the Russian imaginary that most Russophones see him as a fundamentally Russian bear, though with an English connection.

The Russian Vinni Pukh “looks more like a potato than a traditional bear and is beloved by the older generations,” writes Galina Zakhoder, the wife of Boris Zakhoder, the writer and translator who gave the bear his Russian identity. In Boris Zakhoder’s own words, he “re-told [pereskazal]” A.A. Milne’s story in Russian rather than simply translating it. Zakhoder’s “Vinni Pukh and so on and so on and so on [Vinni Pukh i vse-vse-vse]” was first published by the publishing house Detskii Mir in 1960, and has since become a Russian classic.

What does it mean to “re-tell” the story as opposed to translating it? According to translation scholar Lawrence Venuti, a translation always “domesticates” the original, that is, reframes it in terms of the tropes and beliefs of the receiving culture. Every translator is a prism that reflects the original according to his or her own understanding. While Venuti criticizes this “domestication” as potentially colonial (domesticating the foreign), Zakhoder took a markedly different approach. His goal, as he states in his History of My Publications, was not to domesticate the original, but to tell it afresh. Per Zakhoder, “There is only one way to translate the untranslated, and that is — to write it anew.” In contrast to Venuti’s hypothetical translation-as-colonization, Zakhoder’s work makes no attempt to change the original source. The idea is, instead, to write in another language in the spirit of the original — so that it looks Russian, feels Russian, but A. A. Milne remains its author.

She gives a number of specific examples, and continues:
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Vesna Goldsworthy has an interesting — and depressing — Asymptote review of a book I’d definitely like to read:

Miloš Crnjanski’s A Novel of London (1971) is one of the key works of twentieth century Serbian fiction. Given the novel’s significance in the former Yugoslavia, its powerful and enduringly relevant story of East–West migration and exile, and its meticulously evoked setting based on the author’s first-hand experience of London during and immediately after World War Two, it might seem surprising—shocking even—that Crnjanski’s work remained unpublished in English for so long. Yet all too often that is the fate of even the most important literature from small languages and small countries.

This belated English version appears half a century after the original, largely as a result of the personal endeavours of Will Firth, one of the pre-eminent translators of writing from the former Yugoslavia. I would love to say that it has been eagerly awaited. That may be true for the small number of Crnjanski scholars in the West, and for those members of the Serbian diaspora who already knew the novel. However, in the twelve months since its publication by the New Orleans-based publisher Diálogos, Crnjanski’s masterpiece has, so far as I know, yet to be mentioned on the pages of a literary review, let alone properly reviewed, barring a piece from the novel’s translator in the Los Angeles Review of Books. […]

As a prolific novelist and poet, in Serbia, and in the former Yugoslavia, Crnjanski has enjoyed—with a brief exception in the mid-twentieth century when he was in exile and out of favour with the post-war communist government—the status of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot combined. Lines from his poetry and prose are so widely known that they are quoted casually in everyday conversations. Yet, beyond ex-Yugoslavia, he remains little known and even less translated. The only other book by Crnjanski to have appeared in English was Michael Henry Heim’s translation of the first of the two volumes of Crnjanski’s novel Migrations, published in 1994 by Harvill (his name in that edition was transliterated, French-style, as Tsernianski).

In his excellent essay, “Filling the Gaps: On Translating Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel of London,” published on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, Will Firth recounts the hustling involved in his role not just as a translator but also as a posthumous agent struggling to generate interest in the project. Notwithstanding a pledge of funding from the Serbian Ministry of Culture, he searched in vain for a publisher in the UK—a natural home given the novel’s setting—before finally finding an outlet for A Novel of London in Louisiana.

I can almost see a wry smile on Crnjanski’s face. If he could but hear about this saga, it would confirm every prejudice he bore towards the British. “So sorry,” they keep saying in A Novel of London, “So, so sorry.” […]

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Pompeiisites.org reports on an interesting find:

Mummified remains, along with the hair and bones of an individual buried in an ancient tomb have been found at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, to the east of the ancient urban centre of Pompeii. On a marble slab located on the pediment of the tomb, a commemorative inscription to the owner Marcus Venerius Secundio makes reference, extraordinarily, to performances at Pompeii that were conducted in Greek, direct evidence of which has never before been found. […]

The figure of Marcus Venerius Secundio – who also appears in the wax tablet archive of the Pompeian banker Cecilius Giocondus, owner of the domus of the same name on Via Vesuvio – was a public slave and custodian of the Temple of Venus. Upon being freed, he reached a certain social and economic status, as can be understood from the rather monumental tomb, and the inscription: in addition to joining the ranks of the Augustales, or the college of priests dedicated to the Imperial Cult, as the epigraph recalls he “gave Greek and Latin ludi for the duration of four days”.

“Ludi graeci are to be understood as performances in the Greek language”, – observes the Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel – “It is the first clear evidence of performances at Pompeii in the Greek language, which had previously been hypothesised on the basis of indirect indicators. Here we have another tessera of a large mosaic, namely the multi-ethnic Pompeii of the early Imperial Age, where Greek, the then lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, is indicated alongside Latin. That performances in Greek were organised is evidence of the lively and open cultural climate which characterised ancient Pompeii, similar to how the special exhibition of Isabelle Huppert, held in French at the Large Theatre a few weeks ago, showed that culture has no borders.”

Hurray for multicultural cities, say I.

Stan at Sentence first has a post about a gap in the (official) lexicon:

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech. […]

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense. […]

Disambiguate is also useful, being more specific than synonyms like clarify and resolve. Disambiguate is a relatively new and specialized term, but it’s established enough to appear in major dictionaries […] The OED has citations for disambiguate from 1960, generally in linguistic and philosophical contexts, and the word’s usage has risen steadily since then […] The noun disambiguation has been in use since at least 1827; it has become more familiar this century from its common appearance at the top of Wikipedia pages […]

As it turns out, ambiguate exists in the lexicon, but only barely – not enough for lexicographers to include it. […] Ambiguate is not even in the OED, that great historical cabinet whose vast shelves swell with obscure Latinate vocabulary. Instead of the verb you’d expect – even if labelled archaic or obsolete ­– nestled in among ambigual, ambigue (n.), ambigue (adj.), ambiguity, ambiguous, ambiguously, and ambiguousness, there is a lacuna where ambiguate might go. […]

When I mentioned ambiguate on Twitter a while back, I suggested that if you ever need to use the word, do. Its meaning should be transparent enough in context, and with more usage it will gain in familiarity and acceptability. Whether it will gain enough to ever show up in major dictionaries, or even in language corpora, is an open question.

I join him in urging the use of this occasionally useful word. (If you’re wondering about ambigue, it’s attested once as a noun, “An ambiguous statement or expression” [a1592 R. Greene Orpharion 48 What need these ambigues, this schollerisme, this foolery..? Canst thou not say flatly I am in loue.] and once as an adjective meaning ‘ambiguous’ [a1734 R. North Examen ii. v. ⁋19. 327 A clear Explication of running down, an ambigue Term of the Author’s]; I presume it’s pronounced /ˈæmbɪˌgjuː/.)

A good thing from UPenn:

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. MEAD preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv). Each body of data is also accompanied by a codebook. MEAD provides sweet, intoxicating data for your investigations of early North America and the Atlantic World.

I’m not sure why they call it a magazine (yes, the word used to mean ‘storehouse,’ but how many people know that?), but never mind, I’m glad it exists.

I have written about my love of old street names more than once (2007, 2020, 2021), and now that I’m reading Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (thanks, Keith!), I’ve come across a mother lode of them:

Sometimes the histories of streets are inscribed in
their names: Rue des Petites-Écuries because it once
contained small stables, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire
(Daughters of Calvary) after a religious order that once
was cloistered there, Rue du Télégraphe marking the
emplacement during the revolution of a long-distance
communication device that functioned through relays of
poles with semaphore extensions. Sometimes streets
named by long-ago committees take on a certain
swagger from their imposed labels: the once-lively,
nowadays flavorless Rue de Pâli-Kao given a touch of
the exotic (the name is that of a battle in the Second
Opium War, in 1860), the stark and drab (and once
extraordinarily bleak, owing to the presence of
enormous gas tanks) Rue de l’Évangile endowed with
the gravity of the Gospels, the already ancient Rue
Maître-Albert made to seem even more archaic in the
nineteenth century by being renamed after the medieval
alchemist Albertus Magnus, who once lived nearby.

Among the oldest thoroughfares in Paris are the
streets of the Grande and Petite Truanderie, which is to
say the Big and Little Vagrancy Streets. There is the
Street of Those Who Are Fasting (Rue des Jeûneurs),
the Street of the Two Balls, the Street of the Three
Crowns, the Street of the Four Winds, the Street of the
Five Diamonds, the Street of the White Coats, the Street
of the Pewter Dish, the Street of the Broken Loaf—one
of a whole complex of streets around Saint-Merri
church (near the Beaubourg center nowadays) that are
named after various aspects of the distribution of bread
to the poor. Many street names were cleaned up in the
early nineteenth century: Rue Tire-Boudin (literally
“pull sausage” but really meaning “yank penis”)
became Rue Marie-Stuart; Rue Trace-Putain (the
“Whore’s Track”) became Trousse-Nonnain (Truss a
Nun), then Transnonain, which doesn’t really mean
anything, and then became Rue Beaubourg. Many more
streets disappeared altogether, then or a few decades
later, during Haussmann’s mop-up: Shitty, Shitter,
Shitlet, Big Ass, Small Ass, Scratch Ass, Cunt Hair.
Some that were less earthy and more poetic also
disappeared: Street of Bad Words, Street of Lost Time,
Alley of Sighs, Impasse of the Three Faces. The Street
Paved with Chitterling Sausages (Rue Pavée-
d’Andouilles) became Rue Séguier; the Street of the
Headless Woman became Rue le Regrattier.

You can see more of the text, along with some wonderful old photos (the book is full of them), here. And if you’re curious, rue Maître-Albert was called, from the 14th century until 1844, rue Perdue (“Lost Street”).