languagehat.com

Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org investigates the origins of nerd; there are no firm answers, but it’s fun to see the various theories:

A nerd is a socially inept, often highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field— and otherwise thoroughly conventional person. The slang term makes its appearance in the United States during the early 1950s, but its origin is otherwise mysterious. We simply don’t know where it comes from.

The earliest known use in print is from an article on teen slang in the weekly (physical/paper) news magazine Newsweek from 8 October 1951:

Nerds and Scurves: In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve.

[…] Another early appearance is in a cartoon in Collier’s magazine from 2 February 1952. In the cartoon by John Norment, a radio announcer uses nerd in advertising copy for teen clothing:

You’ll get a large charge from Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. So get on the stick with these real fat, real cool, really crazy clothes. Don’t be a Party-Pooper or a nerd. Yes, everybody is bashing ears about Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. They’re Frampton. They’re pash-pie. They’re Most! […] The geetafrate is reasonable and we’ll make it Chili for you. Remember, don’t be an odd ball. The name is Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes.

We don’t know where nerd comes from, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hypotheses and speculations about its origin. One of the more plausible, but still probably wrong, ones is that nerd appears as a nonsense name for a strange creature in the 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel). The idea is that this nonsense word wormed its way into teen-age consciousness and was assigned its present meaning there. […]

But this hypothesis is questionable at best. Suess’s nerd has no semantic connection to the slang term. And given that the first print use is in the thoroughly conventional Newsweek a year later, it is likely that nerd had already been in oral use by teens for several years when Suess published this book. It is more likely that Seuss picked a word that he had heard the slang word in use and unconsciously registered it rather than that teens acquired it from his book—a book that most teens in 1950 hadn’t read as it was intended for much younger children. And even more likely is that Seuss’s use of nerd is entirely coincidental.

There are images and further hypotheses at the link; I particularly recommend reading the entire caption for the Norment cartoon which Dave excerpts. It’s pash-pie!

Cathy Kearney’s CBC News story about crow behavior is interesting in other respects, but its LH relevance is in the word “anting”:

To experts, anting is something of a mysterious behaviour where birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin. Some birds will sit still on an anthill and patiently allow the creatures to crawl freely through their feathers. At other times, they have been seen to pick the ants up with their beaks and rub themselves with the tiny insects. Sensing a threat, the ants shoot a spray of formic acid from their abdomens or anal glands, which is absorbed into the bird’s body and acts as a natural insecticide.

I love the English language’s relentless verbing, but I never would have thought of “ant” as a candidate. The OED has an anting entry:

The action of birds in rubbing on their plumage ants or other insects that secrete acrid juices; also, a similar action of birds with various other objects (see quot. 1959 for ant vb. at Derivatives).

1936 Jrnl. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 38 631 Dr. Stresemann suggests the use of a special term for this ‘rubbing in’ process..which may be translated into English..as ‘anting’,—e.g. a bird ants itself or its feathers, even when objects other than ants..are used in the process.
1944 Ibis July 404 Some birds..practise ‘anting’ more or less consistently, while others of related species do not ‘ant’ at all.

Derivatives

ant v. [as a back-formation] (trans. and intr.) to act in this way.
1944 [see main sense].

1959 Observer 1 Mar. 19/4 Starlings and rooks will ‘ant’, without ants, on smoking chimney-pots. Tame birds will ant with matches or cigarette ends.

The etymology is “< ant n.¹ + -ing suffix¹, after German einemsen (E. Stresemann 1935, in Ornith. Monatsber. XLIII. 138).” I wonder how other languages express the concept?

The National Library of Israel has digitized and put online its Kafka holdings (scroll down to see categories):

In 1921 and 1922, Kafka wrote two notes to Brod asking that all his manuscripts, paintings and letters be destroyed after his death. In defiance of this clear directive, from June 1924 Brod collected all of the materials from the various locations, examined them and began to publish what Kafka had stored away during his lifetime. The three unfinished novels The Trial, America ​​and The Castle are among the most well-known of these works. Brod took all of Kafka’s writings with him when he left his native Czechoslovakia for Mandatory Palestine in March 1939, just hours before the Nazis invaded the country. In the early 1960s, he returned most of them to Kafka’s heirs.

These materials are preserved today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, while hundreds of letters, a number of short manuscripts and even many of Kafka’s drawings remained in Brod’s possession, comprising a significant part of Kafka’s literary legacy. Between 2016 and 2019, Brod’s own extensive personal archive, along with Kafka’s items, was deposited in the National Library of Israel. A number of other original items of Kafka’s, including notebooks in which he practiced his Hebrew, are also preserved today at the National Library, and together these materials represent the third largest collection in the world of the great writer’s original material.

As an example, here are manuscript pages from The Castle. Another win for the internet!

In other literary news, Alison Flood reports for the Guardian: Authors to earn royalties on secondhand books for first time.

Oh, and if there’s a short (under 125 pages) piece of nineteenth-century Russian prose that you wish were available in English, let Erik McDonald know in the next week or so.

I’ve written about Nikolai Leskov frequently (e.g. The Sealed Angel, The Enchanted Wanderer), and now I’ve read the last of his major works, Заячий ремиз, written in 1894 but not published until 1917. Leskov sent it around to journals with a cover letter saying it dealt with some touchy issues but they were well disguised by madness and Ukrainian hijinks so it should pass the censors, but the 1890s were one of the more repressive periods in tsarist Russia, so nobody was willing to try to print it, and it languished in his drawer. Finally, over two decades after his death and after the February Revolution removed essentially all censorship, the magazine Niva published it in its September 16 issue. (Happily, that volume is online, and you can see the story’s original publication here.) You will notice I haven’t translated the title, and there’s a reason for that: it’s essentially untranslatable, because nobody knows what it means. It’s been translated as The Hare Park, The March Hare, The Rabbit Warren, and even The Rabbit Carriage, although ремиз does not mean ‘carriage’ in any variety of Russian (it normally means a penalty in a card game, but it can also mean ‘a place where wild animals live and breed’), so that seems to me a particularly silly suggestion, despite the arguments in its favor by Sperrle — see my discussion with Erik McDonald of XIX век here. As I wrote at the end of that thread:

You know, actually I think using “Remise” is brilliant — it restores the sense of mystery and avoids having to pin down the sense of the word. If I didn’t believe in entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (does the world really need yet another title for a fairly obscure Leskov story?), I’d go for it in a heartbeat. I might even overcome my purist urges regarding “rabbit” vs. “hare” because “The Rabbit Remise” sounds so great.

(There is a rare English remise meaning ‘coach house’; see this LH post.) Leskov had originally used the title for a different story, so there needn’t be any close connection with this one — he said he wanted something “sharp but unintelligible” (“то резким, то как будто мало понятным”). As for the plot, I’ll let Prince Mirsky describe it:
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It’s been a while since I posted a poem, and since I just bought Donald Hall’s White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (Kindle Edition on sale today for $1.99), I thought I’d share “The Farm”:

Standing on top of the hay
in a good sweat,
I felt the wind from the lake
dry on my back,
where the chaff
grew like the down on my face.

At night on the bare boards
of the kitchen,
we stood while the old man
in his nightshirt gummed
the stale crusts
of his bread and milk.

Up on the gray hill
behind the barn, the stones
had fallen away
where the Penacook marked
a way to go
south from the narrow river.

By the side of the lake
my dead uncle’s rowboat rots
in heavy bushes.
Slim pickerel glint
in the water. Black horned pout
doze on the bottom.

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The Transactions of the Royal Society have published a theme issue on Reconstructing prehistoric languages, compiled and edited by Antonio Benítez-Burraco and Ljiljana Progovac; some of the articles are free to download, others are behind a paywall. Here’s the description:

This theme issue brings together prominent experts in the field of human evolution to achieve a deeper, richer understanding of human prehistory and the nature of prehistoric languages. The contributions in the issue begin to outline a profile of the structures and uses of prehistoric languages, including the type of sounds; the nature of the earliest grammars (used e.g. for conversation, insult); the nature of the earliest vocabularies; and the role of some recently evolved brain circuits. By projecting some specific features of language and brain organization into prehistory, the contributions to this volume directly engage the genetic and the neuroscientific aspects of human evolution and cognition.

The sections are:

PART I: PREHISTORIC SOUNDS AND GESTURES
PART II: PREHISTORIC GRAMMAR AND THE LEXICON
PART III: PREHISTORIC BEHAVIOUR, COGNITION, AND THE BRAIN
PART IV: MODELLING PREHISTORIC LANGUAGES

Thanks, Hans!

I’m a sucker for discussions of translation that delve into the details, and Julia Sanches, translator of Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost, provides a good one:

Marguerite Duras as translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan writes that “translation is not a matter of the literal exactitude of a text, but perhaps we must go even further: and say that it is more of a musical approach, rigorously personal and even, if necessary, deviant.” I learned one day over lunch with Eva Baltasar’s editor that her only condition during edits was that the word in question be replaced with one that was similarly stressed or unstressed, as the case may be. What mattered was how each word affected the music of the sentence, what this music conveyed, and how the music delivered up the image to the reader. An example:

Catalan: Jo em sentia cada dia més empetitida, reduïda, a una cortineta de cuina al seu costat.
My translation: I felt smaller and smaller by the day, next to her nothing but a frilly kitchen curtain.

Let’s look at the words in detail, or rather in musical detail. Hopefully my highlights have helped to make clear what’s at play in this sentence. It may be odd to speak of a sentence being moved in a certain direction—we read from left to right in English, so what other direction could it possibly go?—and yet there is a definite sense here of being ushered forward by the end rhymes (ee-ah, ee-ah, ee-dah, ee-dah) of the first clause as they flow into the head rhymes of the second (coo, coo, coo), and come to a sudden and dry stop: costat.

The image is a bit odd, or at least odd enough that it puzzled the English editor. One thing she wanted to know was: What is a kitchen curtain? Though the simile seemed obvious to me—“it’s one of those ridiculously tiny curtains that are sheer and mostly decorative,” I wrote in the comments—one thing I have learned from translating is that when an image is obvious to the translator but opaque to everyone else, there is often something missing. The fact that the editor had been puzzled by the image also raised several questions for me, all of which took me back to the dedication and helped inform the rest of my draft: Is it possible that the image owed its existence entirely to the musicality of the (Catalan) words? Had that felicitous, musical connection between the words cortineta and cuina not existed, would the author have arrived at this image at all? If so, what should I prioritize? Does the image take precedence over the music, or do I do my my best to maintain both? To what do I owe my contentious fidelity?

[…] I’d like to zoom in on a small Durassian deviation: the word frilly. It may surprise you to find out there are no frills on the Catalan kitchen curtain. What “frilly” seeks to capture instead is a close reading of the simile, and especially a close reading of the diminutive, cortineta. As any Romance speaker knows intuitively, the diminutive inserts a variety of nuances into a word, ranging from smallness to tenderness, and to depreciation, not all of which can be captured by “little,” or “small,” or “wee.” The Catalan not only makes (a very natural) use of the diminutive, but also doubles down on the sense of demotion with the words “empetitida” and “reduïda.” I have tried to reflect this in the English version by creating a sense of progressive reduction in “smaller and smaller” and finally in the “nothing but” in order to give the reader the feeling—much like the sentence’s abrupt end with the word “costat”—that this is as small as our protagonist is able to feel in relation to the other character.

I think “frilly” is a brilliant addition, giving the necessary image to those unfamiliar with such curtains (I was surprised at the editor’s question, since I immediately knew what Sanches had in mind). And for the benefit of those with no Catalan, I should point out that unstressed o is /u/, so cortineta, cuina, and costat all start with the same syllable. Thanks, Trevor!

Almost exactly a decade ago I got Chingiz Aitmatov’s И дольше века длится день… (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years), as described in this post; now I’ve finally read it, and I’m afraid it turned out to be another disappointment, following my sad experience with Bitov’s Pushkin House (see this post). The disappointment was not as disappointing, though, since I had been expecting great things from Bitov; after my experience with Aitmatov’s earlier Белый пароход (The White Steamship) — as I said here, I found it almost unreadable and gave up after fifty pages — I was pleased simply to be able to read it with some enjoyment. It’s got good things in it, but as a novel, it’s a mess. Warning: what follows will contain spoilers.

I’ll start with the good stuff. One of Aitmatov’s favorite themes was the natural world, and he has some great descriptions here, especially of animals: the novel starts with a passage about a hungry fox searching along railroad tracks for food that might have been tossed from a passing train, and towards the end there’s a bravura description of a kite flying over the area where the action is taking place, eyeing from high above a camel, a bulldozer and tractor, some people, and especially a dog who has tagged along on the expedition (happily, he does not swoop down and attack the dog, which I had been expecting). There’s even a bit seen from the point of view of a rare sturgeon the protagonist, Edigei, has caught in the Aral Sea (and one of the themes of the book is the diminishment of the sea, caused by human action). There are very well written episodes like the train ride of a prisoner passing through the village he has been living in, looking eagerly through the barred window in hopes of seeing his wife and children. And above all there are the mankurts, Aitmatov’s brilliant creation (I just had to change the Wikipedia article, which claimed it was an actual Central Asian tradition); nobody who reads the novel ever forgets the image of people turned by torture into slaves deprived of memory. Dmitry Bykov, in his article on the book, calls it a metaphor for the suppression of the horrors of the Soviet past; referring to that scene at the end, when Edigei leads a small group to the traditional cemetery to bury an old friend and is turned away because the burial site is part of the secret cosmodrome area (based on Baikonur), Bykov writes:

The cemetery surrounded by barbed wire was one of the most frightful symbols of the late Soviet empire. Memory was behind barbed wire, one was not allowed to remember what was frightening, the main thing. A generation of mankurts grew up.

Обнесённое колючей проволокой кладбище было одним из самых страшных символов поздней советской империи. Память была за колючей проволокой, нельзя было упоминать о страшном, о главном. Выросло поколение манкуртов.

And for the linguistically oriented, there are some bits of a Turkic language (I don’t know whether it’s Kazakh or Aitmatov’s native Kirghiz).
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Zui at The Language Closet (“anything and everything about languages”) posts about a language hitherto unknown to me, Wymysorys:

Spoken in the region of Wilamowice, Poland (Wymysoü), this language is also quite an interesting anomaly. […] Wymysorys, Vilamovian or Wymysiöeryś is the Germanic language spoken in that small Polish town, between Silesia and Lesser-Poland. Considered the most endangered Germanic language today, it has experienced a significant decline since the 19th century. From the phasing out of Wymysorys in local schools in favour of Polish in 1875, to the banning of its use in the communist period until 1956, many have stopped speaking Wymysorys, instead turning to Polish, or for those who left Poland for Germany, German.

Mutually unintelligible with German, along with all of its dialects, Wymysorys features a rather Germanic sound system, with borrowed sounds in Polish loanwords. The language has had major influences from Polish, even incorporating its orthography in literary works by the author Florian Besik. However, this has since been standardised, as a distinct Wymysorys alphabet. Polish influences include the letter “ł”, which represents the sound /w/ but way closer to the Polish articulation than what you might hear in Germanic languages. […] Literary works are also rather few and far between, since the first author known to publish Wymysorys literature did so in the 19th century, around when the language started to decline. […] However, in the 21st century, there have been movements to revitalise the declining language.

Zui links to a more detailed Culture.pl article by Mikołaj Gliński, who studied classics at Humboldt University in Berlin and cultural studies at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Polish Culture:
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My wife and I watched one of my favorite movies, Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande Illusion; it’s also one of the best war movies ever made, precisely because it doesn’t show any of the war itself, just its destructive effects on humanity. (As I’ve said elsewhere, even movies intended as anti-war tend to promote war simply because the battle scenes, however grueling, are also exciting.) The acting is excellent and the filmmaking superb; Renoir gets important ideas across simply and without pounding them in. (Alas, the commentary track by film historian Peter Cowie on the Criterion release, while acute about filmic virtues, is larded with historical errors verging on idiocy — Cowie thinks the Battle of Tannenberg was fought in Flanders and that the Bolshevik government could have been sending packages to Russian captives in 1916. I was reminded of Simon Winchester.)

But I’m not here to talk about filmic virtues, I’m here to talk about languages, which play a role here second only to the wild multilingualism of Godard’s Contempt (see this 2003 LH post). Renoir made the decision — unusual then as now — to have everyone talk in their own languages, and the interplay, especially of French and German, is an important plot element. When the main heroes of the movie, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay), are shot down near the beginning of the movie by Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), Rauffenstein apologizes in good though accented French for the inconvenience he’s caused them; then he and Boëldieu exchange reminiscences in English, a language only the two of them understand. Throughout the movie there is that tension between the shared nationality of the Frenchmen and the shared class background and interests of the aristocrats; Rauffenstein can’t understand why Boëldieu feels any fraternity with his low-class fellow officers (when he asks Boëldieu for his word of honor about something, the latter asks why he doesn’t do the same with the other officers, and Rauffenstein, with inimitable hauteur, says “The word of honor of a Rosenthal and a Maréchal?!”). And when Maréchal finds it strange that Boëldieu still uses vous rather than the informal tu with him after they’ve been cooped up together for weeks, the monocled Boëldieu says calmly “Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme” [I use vous with my mother and with my wife]. Different worlds…

When the French officers are transferred to another camp, they want to tell the incoming English prisoners about an escape tunnel they’ve been digging, but when Maréchal daringly defies the guards and dashes over to warn them, he can’t get the message across because he doesn’t speak English and the blitheringly genial Englishman he’s so urgently talking to doesn’t understand French (“Yes, thank you, my good chap…”). And there’s even a bit of Russian: when a large box arrives from Petrograd (marked with a large А for Александра, the Empress Alexandra — not Л for Lenin, Cowie!), everyone assumes it will contain luxury foodstuffs and vodka, so the Russians invite the Frenchmen to share the feast, but when opened its contents prove to be unexpectedly high-minded. “Книги!” [Books!] the appalled Russians shout, and set the box on fire to express their disgust.

When (spoiler!) Maréchal and Rosenthal make their escape, they wind up staying in the isolated house of a widowed German woman who treats them kindly and does not give them away when soldiers come knocking; Rosenthal, it turns out, speaks German, so he can communicate with her while Maréchal has to have her remarks translated — though he quickly comes to understand some words and phrases, having (as he says) more incentive than he had with the prison guards. And the very last line of the movie is in German: just as they are about to make it out of Germany, a patrol sees them and begins shooting, but then the officer in charge says to stop, because the fugitives have crossed over into neutral Switzerland — “Desto besser für sie” [So much the better for them]. A great ending to a great movie.