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I first featured Justin B Rye at LH in 2005 (his Primer In SF Xenolinguistics); now, thanks to a comment by January First-of-May, I learn that he’s got a post called Fantastic Statistics in which he analyzes his extensive sf collection:

In the twenty‐first century I decided I didn’t want a paper collection anyway – what I want is a story collection. If I switched to ebooks then apart from a few sentimental‐value volumes of Teach Yourself Sumerian and the like the physical copies could go to the charity shop on the corner. This proved a fortunate idea given the number of times I’ve needed to move house recently, but electronic texts have other advantages too […]. For a start, I always convert my ebooks into a consistent HTML format so they’ll work in any browser (including my throwback of a mobile phone); but the part that got me writing this page is that once I’ve done that I can also carry out all sorts of basic text analysis from the command‐line. And thanks to all the old magazines that are out of copyright, it’s getting easier and easier to end up with a moderately comprehensive collection of the big‐name SF award‐winners of the twentieth century (and even quite a few of the ones I might actually want to re‐read). So here are some interesting facts, or at any rate facts, about my virtual bookshelf.

There are all sorts of tidbits, like Most‐Used Title (“the title that shows up most often is The End”), Famous Titles First Published Together (“the all‐time best value for money still has to be Dangerous Visions” — I still haven’t gotten over my copy, signed by many of the authors, getting lost in the mail years ago), Title Length (shortest is We, longest is the Connie Willis short story “‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective”), word frequencies, and the like. I will single out for special mention the section I was gladdest to see there, The Bechdel Test:
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A couple of weeks ago I posted about my discovery of Victor Pelevin and my enjoyment of his Затворник и Шестипалый (Hermit and Six-Toes); I’ve now read several more of his pointed and funny satires, including the one I’m about to describe, Принц Госплана (translated by Andrew Bromfield as Prince of Gosplan, available in the good collection of his early work A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories). The interesting thing is that the story I read afterwards, Makanin’s Лаз (translated by Mary Ann Szporluk as Escape Hatch, available along with The Long Road Ahead in this collection), has enough in common with it that the following summary can be applied to both: a member of what we might call the petty intelligentsia, not a creator but a guy who likes to read and think about things, has to accomplish a series of tasks that involve making his way through areas where dangerous enemies unpredictably appear; from time to time he drops down to a lower level to refresh himself and enjoy a bit of thoughtful conversation before returning to his tasks.

In the Pelevin, this guy is engineer Sasha Lapin, whose boss wants him to get some documents signed. The thing is that they’re all in a world of computer games, and while going to another building to meet the higher-up whose signature is needed, Sasha is concurrently making his way to higher levels of the video game Prince of Persia, which was quite new when the story was written. (The higher-up works in Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, hence the title.) But not everyone is playing the same game, so he has to help his boss figure out Abrams Battle Tank, and a tank from that game will later serve him as quick transportation. He makes his way along corridors and up stairs, occasionally confronting turbaned guards armed with swords and defeating them in battle; never having played video games myself, I was greatly aided in visualizing all this by discovering a playthrough video of Prince of Persia (thanks, internet!). At one point one of the guards knocks him out but doesn’t kill him, because he happens to be carrying a copy of The Sufi Orders in Islam, by J. Spencer Trimingham (1971) — a very influential book (available at Archive.org) that Bromfield may have thought was fictional, since he screws up both the author’s name and the title, calling it “John Spencer Trimmingham’s Sufic Orders in Islam.” At any rate, the guard assumes that anyone carrying such a book must be a spiritual man, so he spares his life, introducing himself as Abbas, and they have a conversation about Afghanistan (Abbas addresses him as shuravi, the Perso-Afghan term for ‘Soviet’), among other matters. I’ve just mentioned a few plot points, but the whole thing is so varied and inventive that I think almost everyone would enjoy it, and the translation seems fine (despite the confusion about the book). And to respond to D.O.’s comment in the earlier thread (“I like Pelevin, but I am surprised you care for his characters. For me, he is an ideas author and characters are more of an embodiment of ideas.”): they’re not characters in the high-literary Tolstoyevsky sense, with elaborate backgrounds and psychologies, but they’re characters in the pulp-fiction (sf/detective) sense, essentially blanks for the reader to identify with and share in the adventure. You don’t finish a Pelevin story emotionally drained and filled with deep thoughts about the human condition, but your mind has been turned in unexpected directions that may make you think about life differently and that provide many delights. I’d compare him to an sf writer like the brilliant Ted Chiang. And that’s an excellent thing in itself.
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Bret Devereaux, “a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular” and “a lifetime fan of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction more generally,” runs the excellent blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (which I don’t seem to have linked here before, oddly); his latest post is called So You Want To Go To Grad School (in the Academic Humanities)?, and I had to stop reading before long because it was bringing up too many bad memories (I think PTSD after four decades is not unusual for the grad-school experience). I did, however, read far enough to pass along this LH-relevant passage:

Years 1-4: Coursework (we’ll talk about course load in a moment). Note that this coursework will mostly be in your specialist field; you are assumed to have all of the generalist knowledge already from your undergraduate degree. If there are primary languages you need to know (like Greek and Latin for ancient history or Russian for Russian history, etc) you will be expected to already have at least several years of instruction before starting graduate coursework (at least in my field). If you are in a discipline that doesn’t require foreign languages, the rest of us are going to make fun of you, but don’t worry, we’ll do it in languages you don’t know.³

The footnote:

3. As an ancient history [student], the general expectation was that I’d have at least a couple of years of Greek and several more of Latin before beginning graduate study. I learned to read (badly) French and German during my graduate career; single semester crash courses ‘for reading knowledge’ so that you can read scholarship (but not your main sources) in other languages are a common fixture in graduate school. That standard Classics-package (often with the admixture of Italian or Spanish) is, to my knowledge, one of the heavier language-learning-loads (reflecting the origin of Classics in language-study (philology)), but there are sub-fields of history where the language demands are also fearsome.

My advice to the titular question is “Don’t,” but I’m a bitter ABD, so pay me no mind.

Nathan Scott McNamara interviews Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac for the LARB about her new novel Mona (translated by Adam Morris):

Where did the story for Mona begin? What was the first piece, and what was the process that followed?

I began writing Mona when I had just moved to San Francisco. Like most immigrants coming in the US, I had this feeling that my life was beginning anew, this time for “real,” so I thought what the hell I’m writing in English now. I’d written articles on politics in English in The New York Times and elsewhere, but never fiction. I was hooked instantly. Writing in English felt very playful, like putting on this fancy dress that is not exactly you, but you love it anyway, you love it even more, and you start acting (writing) in the spirit of the dress. I wrote the first four chapters in a spell. Then I left the English draft marinating for a while, my American baby was born (my anchor baby!), and when I came back to the book, I realized that something was lacking: I needed the force and the delirium of Spanish. So, I translated what I had into Spanish and found a different voice, more restrained than my previous books, with a different humor — a in a way, it was all about the humor — and that voice became my guide. Even if it was in Spanish, it had the controlled aroma and a certain coyness of the English, which felt very inspiring for building the thriller aspects and the thought process of Mona the character. I liked the idea of faking an autofiction, to write as if part of that genre, which to me it’s very American because I’d read first it in English.
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I can’t resist passing on this AP story from the Santa Cruz [Cal.] Evening News (Mar. 29, 1930):

Joan London Malamuth, daughter of the late Jack London, was sued for divorce here today by Charles Malamuth, Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages at the University of California.

Malamuth’s principal complaint was his wife preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps, writing, to cooking meals.

There’s something odd about the structure of that last sentence (and I don’t mean the omission of “that” after “was,” which is perfectly normal colloquial English). Thanks, Mike!

From Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

The entire future, as far as the end of the world, was merging for me too into the vague crai of the peasants, with its implications of futile endurance, remote from history and time. How deceiving are the contradictions of language! In this timeless land the dialect was richer in words with which to measure time than any other language; beyond the motionless and everlasting crai every day in the future had a name of its own. Crai meant tomorrow and forever; the day after tomorrow was prescrai [sic; should be pescrai — see update] and the day after that pescrille; then came pescruflo, maruflo, maruflone; the seventh day was maruflicchio. But these precise terms had an undertone of irony. They were used less often to indicate this or that day than they were said all together in a string, one after the other; their very sound was grotesque and they were like a reflection of the futility of trying to make anything clear out of the cloudiness of crai. I, too, began to lose hope that anything new might come forth from maruflo or maruflone or maruflicchio.

Crai is presumably from Latin crās.

Ronald D. LeBlanc, the Russianist I mentioned back in 2012 when I was reading Narezhny’s Российский Жилблаз (A Russian Gil Blas: 1, 2), has been working for years on a translation of Boris Pilnyak’s 1932 О’кэй. Американский роман, which he renders O’kei: An American Novel. He has, most admirably, put both annotated and (for those who just want to read it undistracted by notes) non-annotated versions online and made them freely available; the links are at this University of Washington press release. The novel is a modernist (fragmented and poeticized) account of a trip Pilnyak took in 1931, from New York to Hollywood by train and back to New York (via the South and Detroit) by car, in a Ford Pilnyak couldn’t resist buying (and shipping back to the USSR); I’ll pass along some language-related passages from his extraordinarily interesting and informative introduction, which is worth reading on its own:

Perhaps the most favorable and easily the most detailed scholarly study devoted to Pilnyak’s travelogue-novel thus far, however, is Milla Fedorova’s ambitious Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception (2013). Unlike other American travelogues in the genre, Fedorova observes, “Pilnyak’s narration ignores his actual trajectory and follows, instead, unfolding recurrent motifs and the development of the narrator’s thoughts.” And although readers of Pilnyak’s travelogue-novel will find traditional descriptions of such iconic American landmarks as Coney Island, the Ford factory in Detroit, the Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls, they will also be struck by the “absence of a traditional, cohesive narrative.”

Striving for a universal scale of social and historical analysis, its author chooses instead an impressionistic, fragmentary form. A modernist writer with a superimposed ideological task, Pilnyak tries to convey the essence of America by scattering personal observations, reports of seemingly random meetings and conversations, statistical data, newspaper articles, and surveys of historical events throughout the text.

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Michael Rosen writes in the Guardian (archived) in the form of a letter, “Dear Gavin Williamson, if Latin in schools is about levelling up, I have other ideas”:

Just as many of us are thinking ahead to winter and a possible next wave of Covid, worrying about whether schools have proper ventilation and what emergency measures you might have up your sleeve if a major outbreak occurs, you choose to put Latin at the top of your agenda. […] Let me lay out my cards about Latin: where there are the staff who can and want to teach it, I’m 100% in favour of Latin being offered as an option. But that option exists right now. This makes me ask, where are the teachers to teach it?

Then again, though I’m always delighted to hear of young people enthused by reading what and how people in ancient times thought, is there a big demand for it? […] For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be a great will among most young people to learn modern languages. Would it not be better to address that problem first? […]

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Ruqaiyah Zarook writes for the Jordan Russian Center:

The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin once said that for him, Kalidasa, the great classical Sanskrit playwright and dramatist, “is no less important than Homer.” The visionary Russian painter and philosopher Nicholas Roerich chose to live out his days in Naggar, India, leaving a broad and edifying artistic legacy. And perhaps most famously, Leo Tolstoy wrote to various revolutionary and literary Indian figures, from Mahatma Gandhi to Taraknath Das (to whom Tolstoy addressed his 1908 “Letter to a Hindu”) and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. These anecdotes reveal a deep historical relationship between India and Russia that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.

The historical links between Russia and India are numerous. The two countries have long enjoyed reciprocal artistic and cultural exchanges in literature, theater, and music. Beginning in the 1950s and until the end of the 1980s, the USSR dedicated significant funds to ensuring the availability of Russian texts in India — from children’s classics and philosophical tracts to science textbooks and works of socio-political theory.

During the tense and taxing Cold War years, the USSR and India were able to uphold friendly relations with a distinct focus on artistic and cultural exchange, allowing each to deploy a form of soft power potentially more powerful and diplomatically penetrating than explicit political games. Just as Russian classics by Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov flooded Indian literary markets, Bollywood movies quickly became popular in Soviet Russia. Well-known actors like Raj Kapoor appeared in Hindi movies dubbed into Russian, enjoying a fascinating popularity among Muscovites (meanwhile, Indian literature and Russian films did not experience the same reciprocal resonance in Russia and India, respectively).

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1) Greek ἄνθρωπος ‘man’ is of uncertain origin; Wiktionary says:

Scholars used to consider it to be a compound from ἀνήρ (anḗr, “man”) and ὤψ (ṓps, “face, appearance, look”): thus, “he who looks like a man”. […] Rosén defends this etymology […] Beekes argues that since no convincing Indo-European etymology has been found, the word is probably of Pre-Greek origin; he connects the word with the word δρώψ (drṓps, “man”) […] Garnier proposes a derivation from Proto-Indo-European *n̥dʰr-eh₃kʷ-ó-s (“that which is below”), hence “earthly, human”.

Now, via Laudator Temporis Acti, I learn of another suggestion: Gregory Nagy (Greek Mythology and Poetics, pp. 151-152, n. 30) connects it with anthrax and says he interprets it as “he who has the look of embers.” Sounds implausible, but Nagy is a respected scholar, and I’d be curious to see more details.

2) I was recently reminded of the word tesseract (when I were a lad I used to try to visualize them), and on looking it up in the OED (entry published 1986) I discover that it was invented by C. H. Hinton (an odd duck) in his 1888 New Era of Thought: “We call the figure it traces a Tessaract.” But wait, it’s got an -a- in that citation! Etymology: “< tessara- comb. form + Greek ἀκτίς ray.” The citations show a mixture of forms eventually settling on the current one with -e-:

1888 C. H. Hinton New Era of Thought ii. iii. 118 We call the figure it [sc. a cube] traces a Tessaract.
1919 R. T. Browne Mystery of Space v. 134 The hyper~cube or tesseract is described by moving the generating cube in the direction in which the fourth dimension extends.
1960 Electronic Engin. 32 347/1 Fig. 8..shows a four-dimensional ‘tessaract’ (the four-dimensional analogue of a cube).
1968 Listener 15 Feb. 201 He likes to see A gulping of tesseracts and Gondals in Our crazed search.
1974 S. Sheldon Other Side of Midnight xviii. 332 For Catherine time had lost its circadian rhythm; she had fallen into a tesseract of time, and day and night blended into one.

(God only knows what Sheldon thought he meant by “a tesseract of time.”) Greek had both τέσσαρα and τέσσερα (neuter plural and combining form of τέσσαρες, τέσσερες ‘four’). So why did tessaract get changed to tesseract?

3) Russian туз ‘ace’ is borrowed from Polish tuz which is “From Middle High German tūs, dūs (‘deuce’) (German Daus), from Old French dous (‘two’).” How did ‘deuce’ give ‘ace’?