languagehat.com

A piquant description of a situation familiar to anyone who has studied various languages and has to toggle from one to the other, from The Amur River: Between Russia and China, by Colin Thubron (Harper, 2021), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers:

Next morning, the day before I cross to China, I lock myself in my hotel room and prepare to ease into the language that I learnt poorly more than thirty years ago, and have rarely spoken since. My Mandarin notes and textbooks, squashed into my rucksack, spill out like ancient scripts, still covered in my tutor’s red biro, and stained with the rings of coffee cups. Beyond my window, through an opening in the shoreline flat-blocks, a section of the Amur gleams, with Heihe lying beyond under a clouded sky. A Russian patrol boat is crossing the gap.

The only sounds in the room are my own. I return to my makeshift table. It’s a relief to leave behind the complexities of Russian grammar, the dual aspects of verbs, the exacting cases of nouns, the sheer length of words. Chinese, which lacks verbal tenses, genders, even the singular and plural, seems suddenly, radiantly simple. I shift my table to the light of the window and the glint of the Amur, and my exhilaration rises. The vocabulary flows back. Sometimes I have the illusion that I am not remembering, but learning anew. I anticipate the stark thrust of Mandarin replacing Russian wholesale. A change of language feels like a change of person. Sounds and structures dictate emotion. New concepts emerge, while others die. I have the illusion that I become more aggressive in Mandarin, and that my voice descends an octave. Perhaps I will need this. I have no idea what dialects may be coming my way. Yet for a long time I hear Mandarin returning, and imagine all will be well.

But as the hours go on, this happy remembrance stiffens. The unfamiliar structures start to weigh on me. There are words I have clean forgotten. Perhaps it is all too long ago. The blessed existence of Western borrowings (in Russian there are many) is all but absent. Mandarin is a tonal tongue – its words change meaning with their pitch – and the language turns, in my memory, to an echo of discordant gongs. I remember finding it easier to speak than to understand: the reverse of what I wish. Suddenly I miss the pliant beauty of Russian.

By evening a self-induced dementia has set in. When I go down to the hotel restaurant I mistakenly ask for the lavatory in Mandarin, then order a meal in Russian and chat to the bewildered waitress in a deranged mixture of both. Often my poor grasp of either leaves me suspended in mid-speech. I have no idea what is going to come out of my mouth.

Joel recounts his own similar experience involving Romanian and Chinese; I have had it happen with French and Spanish.

A nice eight-minute piece from PRI’s The World (for which I’ve had a soft spot ever since they interviewed me); here’s the setup:

How many times over the past 19 months have we all (mostly) said, “I’m hanging in there,” when asked the question, “How are you doing?” A lot. Marco Werman wanted to know how the answer is expressed in other parts of The World.

They get responses in Israeli Hebrew (יהיה בסדר yihyé be-séder), Mexican Spanish (allí), Mandarin Chinese (過得去 guò dé qù, 馬馬虎虎 mǎ ma hū hū [literally “horse horse tiger tiger”]), Farsi (explained as “this too shall pass”: too long to transcribe and seems to be particular to one family), and Brazilian Portuguese (song “A gente vai levando”). Alas, no Russian; the best I can come up with is держусь, but I’m sure there are more colorful expressions. Thanks, Songdog!

Ben Macaulay writes for Gizmodo:

It was a balmy day in Taiwan in November 2019, and I was rummaging through the Family Mart adjoined to the Qishan Bus Station. It was my last chance for 9V batteries and spicy tuna rice balls before taking a taxi into the mountains, where many of the remaining Indigenous languages of the island are spoken, the rest having been replaced by Chinese—the language of settlers from the Asian mainland who slowly took over the arable plainsland over the last few hundred years, as well as of the current ROC regime.

The 16 Indigenous languages still spoken in Taiwan today—the Formosan group—are tragically endangered, with three Formosan languages down to a single-digit number of speakers and a fourth rapidly encroaching. The languages are very well documented in some areas of their grammar and very poorly in others. The available documentation is the result of efforts by community members who create resources for their language’s revitalization movement and from local and foreign scholars.

The goal of my PhD dissertation project is to investigate one of the most poorly documented aspects of language. And I’m going to use a secret weapon, which I bought at B&H. To record, I use a Sony PCM-M10 recorder and a Røde Videomic, which I bought in a $379 bundle marketed to aspiring YouTubers, which I am not. Thankfully, it’s a directional (or ‘shotgun’) microphone, which records whatever you point it at louder than sound coming from other directions. This has allowed me to record analyzable elusive data in a sawmill, during a military drill, and while surrounded by dogs. (Not at the same time, luckily!)

There are examples from English and a discussion of transcription and pitch-tracking systems that was a little too detailed for me, and then:
[Read more…]

The Conversation reports on a new dictionary:

It’s been in existence since the 1500s but the Kaaps language, synonymous with Cape Town in South Africa, has never had a dictionary until now. The Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps has been launched by a collective of academic and community stakeholders – the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape along with the hip hop-driven community NGO Heal the Hood Project. The dictionary – in Kaaps, English and Afrikaans – holds the promise of being a powerful democratic resource. Adam Haupt, director of the Centre for Film & Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, is involved in the project and tells us more.

(If you click on the dictionary link, you see an “About us” section, which on the Afrikaans side is designated “Oo ons.” I didn’t want anyone to miss that delightful phrase.) Here’s the first part of the interview:
[Read more…]

I’ve finished reading Victor Pelevin’s first novel (and the first book by him I heard of), Омон Ра, translated by Andrew Bromfield as Omon Ra. All I knew about it going in was that it’s about a Soviet astronaut, and that’s all you’re going to find out from me — the plot is too much fun to spoil it! Instead, I’ll explain the title (the hero, young Omon Krivomazov, thinks of himself as the Egyptian sun god Ra) and elucidate some of the allusions that the English-speaking reader will miss. You should definitely read the novel; Bromfield’s version is perfectly adequate, even if he skips some difficult bits and makes a couple of embarrassing gaffes.

Chapter 10 begins as follows (in Bromfield’s translation, followed by the original):

Another subject that appeared in our study timetable — “The General Theory of the Moon” — was classed as optional for everyone except Mitiok and me. The classes were given by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel of Philosophy, Ivan Evseievich Kondratiev. Somehow I didn’t take to him, although I had no real reason for disliking him and his lectures were quite interesting. I remember the unusual way he began his first class with us — he spent half an hour reciting various poems about the moon from pieces of paper; eventually he became so moved that he had to stop and wipe off his glasses. I still used to take notes then, and what I was left with from this class was a senseless accumulation of fragmentary quotations: “Like a golden drop of honey sweetly gleams the moon… Of the moon and hope and quiet glory…The moon, how rich the meaning of this word for every Russian ear…But the world has other regions, oppressed by the tormenting moon, to highest strength and supreme courage out of reach…But in the sky, schooled to endure all things, a senselessly distorted disc…He did control the flow of thought, but only by the moon…The cheerless liquid moonness…’ And so on for another page and a half. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Kondratiev grew more serious and began speaking in an official singsong voice:

“Dear friends! Let us recall the historic words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written in 1918 in a letter to Inessa Armand. ‘Of all the planets and heavenly bodies,’ Lenin wrote, ‘the most important for us is the moon.’ […] In this course we will study Lenin’s two major works on the moon—‘The Moon and Rebellion’ and ‘Advice from an Outsider’. […]”

[Read more…]

From Oretta Zanini De Vita, Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio, tr. Maureen B. Fant (University of California Press, 2013), courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti:

The same holds for pasta: poverty and imagination lay behind the proliferation of all the many types that changed name from town to town: the stracci of one become fregnacce of another, and the Sabine frascarelli differ little from the strozzapreti of the Ciociaria, the region’s southern hinterland. The popular imagination gave whimsical names to the simple paste of water and flour, and only rarely eggs, worked with the hands or with small tools. Thus we have cecamariti (husband blinders) and cordelle (ropes), curuli, fusilli (also called ciufulitti), frigulozzi, pencarelli, manfricoli, and sfusellati, as well as strozzapreti (priest stranglers), the lacchene of the town of Norma and the pizzicotti (pinches) of Bolsena, while the fieno (hay) of Canepina has, accompanied by paglia (straw), been absorbed into the repertory of the pan-Italian grande cucina. All these pastas were served with much the same sauce, plain tomato and basil, though on feast days, pork, lamb, or beef would be added.

And from her Encyclopedia of Pasta (s.v. fregnacce):

The term fregnaccia in the dialect of Rome and Lazio means “pack of lies, silliness, trifle” and emphasizes the simplicity of the preparation. It comes from the dialect word fregna, meaning “female genitals.” It is curious to note how often popular terminology for pasta, an important dish in the everyday diet, makes reference to sexual organs: along with fregnacce, there are cazzellitti (see entry), pisarei (see entry), and others. All of them are in addition to the many pasta terms that refer to things, animals, or general words of disparagement.

As a lover of both words and pasta, I want to try them all.

Back in March, I was eagerly anticipating José Vergara’s All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, about how Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin have responded to Joyce’s fiction; having been sent a copy by the generous publisher, Northern Illinois University Press, I’ve spent the last month reading it. It wouldn’t normally take me that long to finish a 250-page book, but it kept sending me back to the novels it covers; I own all of them, and I’ve read almost all — Olesha’s Envy (LH post), Nabokov’s The Gift, Bitov’s Pushkin House (LH post), and Sokolov’s School for Fools (LH post) and Between Dog and Wolf (LH post), Shishkin’s Maidenhair being the exception — so I’d spend a few days immersed in Ulysses or The Gift (or checking out some of the books and articles referenced in his notes) before resuming consecutive reading. Now that I’m done, I heartily recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic.

Vergara, unlike too many academic critics, is interested more in elucidating the books he discusses than in using them as fodder for theory. He writes in a straightforward way, with a minimum of jargon, and he gives a real feel for what each book is like and what the author is trying to do. He says in his introduction:

This book explores the evolution of Joyce’s special impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s to the early 2020s through a series of principal case studies […]. In addition to including Joycean subtexts in their writings, these authors have each explicitly spoken or written about Joyce in interviews, essays, and other paratexts. They also offer a neat line of influence. Nabokov’s discriminating taste gave Olesha and Sokolov high marks, despite their technical status as Soviet writers, and both Bitov and Sokolov have expressed appreciation for their predecessors’ art. Shishkin, too, speaks movingly of the Russian Joyceans. All five belong to a tradition that can be traced back to Joyce and that keeps their art open to his aesthetics and ideas. Two writers come from the prewar period, two from the postwar era, and one from the post-Soviet age. Such chronological range helps illuminate the development of Joyce’s literary reception in Russia. Nabokov’s and Shishkin’s positions as émigré writers add a further nuance to this scheme.

It is very important to note that the presence of Joyce in these authors’ works, whether explicit or more hypothetical, does not erase what came before him or what was taking place around them. He was part of a broader landscape, both national and international, and his impact is not necessarily more definitive than that of other figures significant to these writers, such as the symbolist Andrei Bely (1880–1934) or the Russian formalists. Nonetheless, Joyce and his art stood as an important alternative both in literature and in life. The very criticism of his work could make a later Soviet writer curious. Joyce’s project to alter his past and his future through writing, as exemplified by his protagonist Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theories in Ulysses, appealed to them for numerous reasons.

He tells the story of Joyce’s reception in the Soviet Union (initial excitement followed by suppression and sub rosa reading until the flood of translations in the 1980s), describes how each author came to Joyce and how their work reflects their reading, and concludes with a marvelous chapter called “How Joyce Is Read in Russia” in which he canvases a bunch of living authors of various generations to get their takes, so that the reader is not left to depend on his own perspective. Along the way he says such sensible things as “To suggest that a text derives something from a precursor is not to imply a lack of originality, and anyone who argues so misses the point. It is simply in the nature of literary works to comment on themselves and others.” Here’s a taste of his style of reading, from the chapter on Nabokov:
[Read more…]

Elizabeth Manus has a charming blog called The Ys Have It; it’s a collection of words ending in Y, e.g. Governmentality (“Scholars are already familiar with this word. It is new to me.”):

As defined by Dr. Clare O’Farrell, “Foucault originally used the term ‘governmentality’ to describe a particular way of administering populations in modern European history within the context of the rise of the idea of the State. He later expanded his definition to encompass the techniques and procedures which are designed to govern the conduct of both individuals and populations at every level [sic] not just the administrative or political level.”

Check it out, especially if you like words ending in Y!

Rhodes Murphy has a, well, overheated but informative Slate article on the term glory hole; here’s the premise:

For most of the culture, this terms refers very specifically to a public, quasi-anonymous sex act involving gay men, bathroom stalls, and a handily placed hole. For glass blowers, the glory hole is a high-powered furnace burning at over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit—hardly suitable for sex acts of any kind. So why do they call it that? Which glory hole came first?

The answer to the last question is simple: the glass-blowing term, by a century. Of course Murphy is more interested in the cultural stuff, but here at the Hattery we focus on the language, so here are the facts (just the facts, ma’am):

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of “glory hole” in English comes in 1825, when it was described as “a receptacle (as a drawer, room, etc,) in which things are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness.” Twenty years later the term made its slang debut, being used to describe “a filthy, stifling cell” or small room for “degraded beings,” such as prisoners. […] The first recorded use of “glory hole” in glass blowing appears in an 1849 text called Curiosities of Glass Making by English glassware manufacturer and politician Apsley Pellatt.

The best arrangements for annealing may be foiled, should the Glass-blower unnecessarily lose time after finishing the work; as the hotter the goods enter the arch, the better; on this account, the large goods receive a final reheating at the mouth of a pot heated by beech-wood, and called the Glory Hole.

As the glass manufacturing industry grew, so did the term’s usage. One reason for its adoption, according to the Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, may have been the visual phenomenon that the furnaces produced in glassmaking factories themselves; the surreal effect of light beaming from the 2100-degree furnaces, piercing the smoke-filled factory air and creating an “illusion not unlike that seen in paintings of saints and angles where ‘The Glory’ radiated from their heads.”

The OED’s entry is from 1900 and the citations can doubtless be antedated, but I have not been able to find anything earlier than 1849 for the glass one (there are, of course, hits that Google Books dates earlier, such as a 1931 bulletin they date 1831). They have this draft addition from March 2021:

A hole in a wall, typically the cubicle wall of a men’s public toilet or booth at a sex establishment, through which people can engage in sexual activity incognito.
Originally and chiefly with reference to sex between gay men.

1949 ‘Swasarnt Nerf’ et al. Gay Girl’s Guide 10 Glory-hole, phallic size hole in partition between toilet booths. Sometimes used also for a mere peep-hole.
1989 M. Rockland Bliss Case ii. 52 Sometimes I’d sneak off to a porno peep show and hang round the glory holes.
2005 Gay Times Dec. 150/2 It’s a contemporary take on a cruisy men’s bar… A stylish little den of iniquity, though rumour has it that the glory-holes have been removed from the toilets.

The glass and gay terms are entirely unrelated (Green’s treats them in separate entries), but of course anyone familiar with the sexual sense (which, pace Slate, is probably not “most of the culture”) will wonder about its relation to the earlier senses, so the linked article is performing a useful function (as indeed do glory holes).

Abe Opincar wrote on Facebook:

My FB pal, John Emerson, read that Bela Bartok’s mother was of “Bunjevcian descent but considered herself Hungarian.” Unfamiliar with the term, “Bunjevcian,” Emerson turned to Wikipedia for clarity. What he found was the sort of ethnological maze that overwhelms folks unfamiliar with the Balkans, and confuses even Balkans themselves…

Wikipedia says:

Bunjevci (Serbo-Croatian: Bunjevci / Буњевци, pronounced [bǔɲeːʋtsi, bǔː-]; singular masculine: Bunjevac / Буњевац, feminine: Bunjevka / Буњевка) are a South Slavic ethnic group living mostly in the Bačka region of Serbia (province of Vojvodina), southern Hungary (Bács-Kiskun County, particularly in the Baja region), and in Croatia (e.g. Senj and surroundings, East-Slavonia, West-Srijem: Ilok, Vukovar, Županja, Vinkovci). They presumably originate from western Herzegovina, whence they migrated to Dalmatia, and from there to Lika and Bačka in the 17th century. Bunjevci who remained in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as those in modern Croatia today maintain that designation chiefly as a regional identity, and declare as ethnic Croats. Those who emigrated to Hungary were largely assimilated, and assumed Hungarian or Croatian designation. Bunjevci are mainly Roman Catholic, and speak the Štokavian dialect of the Slavic language Serbo-Croatian (pluricentric language) with Ikavian pronunciation with certain archaic characteristics. In the 18th and 19th century they made up a significant part of the population of Northern Bačka, but the majority assimilated with other larger minority groups in the Balkan region. […]

[Read more…]