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I received in the mail a copy of one of the most delightful works of historical linguistics I’ve seen, James A. Matisoff’s The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus. As the blurb on that page says:

This pioneering book is the prototype of the etymological thesaurus that has been the goal of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987. It presents nearly 170 Proto-Tibeto-Burman etymologies in the semantic area of the reproductive system, along with discussions of possible Chinese cognates. Special attention is paid to patterns of semantic associations between the reproductive system and other areas of the lexicon.

As the LH reader who sent me the book said (thanks, Jack!), “I think it’s a tour-de-force: it illustrates his point that realistic language reconstruction depends on having some control of the underlying semantic field.” To quote the introduction:

In a sense the present work is a companion volume to the Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (HPTB; Matisoff 2003), where TB/ST roots were discussed, sorted, and analyzed according to their phonological shapes, regardless of their meanings. In the present volume, a group of phonologically disparate TB/ST etyma have been assembled according to their meanings, all of which have to do with the body’s reproductive system.²

And footnote 2 pleased me greatly:

My ultimate inspiration for a thesaurus-like approach to the proto-lexicon was Buck 1949 (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: a contribution to the history of ideas), a copy of which I purchased as a graduate student in the early 1960’s, at the then astronomical price of $40. In each section of this great work, arranged Roget-like into semantic categories and subcategories, Buck first lists the forms for each concept in 30-plus modern and ancient IE languages; then he assembles these synonymous forms into etymological groups. Each of these etyma is briefly discussed in terms of breadth of attestation, solidity of the reconstruction, and semantic connections with other areas of the lexicon.

I got my copy of Buck in October 1979 while I was working at Book Haven; the store had ordered two copies which sat around gathering dust (the price by then was an even more astronomical $60), and the owner was going to return them, but I decided to splurge on one for myself (the employee discount made it seem almost sensible), and I consult it to this day — it’s a wonderful work.

But I digress: if I’ve whetted your appetite for the Matisoff book, I have good news for you: it’s freely available online! And the STEDT website itself is a treasure trove, with many more publications available for free download (including Paul K. Benedict’s Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus) and an Electronic Etymologies section. What a wonderful world!

Back in 2006, I alluded to the existence of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, and frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t give it a post of its own, considering its groundbreaking nature and the fact that it combined two of my favorite topics, sf and language. Now, though, it’s been to some extent superseded by a free online resource, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction:

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower.

The About page explains the history and affiliations of the project. Click on an entry, e.g. actifan, and you get definition (“someone who is actively involved in fandom”), usage note (“Now rare.”), etymology [< active + fan], and citations (from 1942 H. Jenkins Jr. Letter in Super Science Stories May 136/2 “Thought-variant stories…draw popular acclaim as well as response from the actifan” to 1995 Dragoncon: FASFiC? or ComicCon? in rec.arts.sf.fandom 15 July “Most of those who vote are very probably actifen”), just like in the OED. Naturally enough, it has plenty of antedates and updates. But I said “to some extent” above because it unaccountably drops entries that were in the book, like anti-agathic “something (such as a drug) that prolongs life,” created by James Blish and with citations ranging from 1954 to 2004. Never mind the nitpicking, though — it’s a terrific thing to have, and I’m adding it to the sidebar.

And it turns out Jennifer Schuessler has a good NY Times piece about it; thanks, Eric! It includes an important qualification about coverage:

The citations lean toward so-called hard science fiction (defined as science fiction based on hard science, which does not violate known scientific laws), and origin dates thin out in recent decades. The most cited authors are Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov. But if an author is not represented, Sheidlower emphasized, that’s not a value judgment.

“The harder your science fiction, the more likely you are to be using terms other people are using,” he said. But writers of “soft science fiction” (defined in the dictionary as science fiction based on soft sciences like anthropology or sociology, or in which science plays a relatively small role), he said, may actually be more innovative in their language. He mentioned N.K. Jemisin, whose Broken Earth trilogy, published between 2015 and 2017, won three consecutive Hugo Awards. “She’s not, for the most part, using words everyone is using.” he said. “The fact that she’s not in here doesn’t mean she’s unimportant. It can actually mean the opposite.”

A year ago I quoted from an article by Anne Lounsbery about the odd uniformity of “the provinces” (provintsiia) in Russian literature; now that I am enthusiastically reading her book Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 I want to quote the start of chapter 3, “Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or ‘Everything is Barbarous and Horrid’ (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others)” (pp. 54ff.), which explains the origin of that view:

“The provincial ball has been described a thousand times”: by 1840, when Alexander Herzen writes “Notes of a Young Man” (sketches based on his experience in exile in the Russian provinces), he feels obliged to assume that his reader already knows what to expect from any description of “provincial” mores. The same assumption will be implicit in his 1846 novel Who Is to Blame?, which has its origins in the sketches. Here Herzen claims there is no need to specify the location of the town where the action takes place (it “resembles all the others”), though he nonetheless enters into a fairly detailed account of daily life in the unnamed gubernskii gorod. From the 1830s through the 1850s, many writers followed this pattern: they rehearsed what they themselves repeatedly acknowledged to be clichés of provincial life, trotting out the same topoi even as they insisted that everybody already knew all about what they were describing, even to the point that insisting on the banality of the trope became part of the trope itself—and they did this despite the fact that this way of conceiving provintsiia was in fact quite new.

The current chapter considers not only how a new image of the Russian provinces took shape in literary texts, but also how these texts insisted that the image was old: by the 1830s, not only is it assumed that the provinces epitomize all that is grimly familiar; it is further assumed that such has always been the case, and that everyone has always known it. In the texts analyzed here, the supposedly timeless, ahistorical nature of provintsiia becomes both a stereotype and a preoccupation. And in a slightly later period, this is the image of provintsiia that will come to serve as a static non-modernity against which other forms of time and historicalness take on value.

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I just heard a radio announcer pronounce Martha Graham’s surname as /græm/ (like “gram”); the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary, and the only one I remember hearing, is /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (“GRAY-um”). Is this a dialectal thing or his own idiosyncrasy? Also, looking it up I discovered that the surname is “derived from Grantham in Lincolnshire, England.” That’s some serious consonant reduction there.

Here in Hampshire County we got a weather advisory about “cold air advection”; the last word was new to me, and of course I dashed off to look it up: according to the Glossary of Meteorology, it’s “The process of transport of an atmospheric property solely by the mass motion (velocity field) of the atmosphere.” The OED, updated December 2011, has a somewhat more comprehensible definition, “The transfer of heat, energy, etc., by the (esp. horizontal) movement of air in the atmosphere; such movement itself.” The etymology:

< classical Latin advectiōn-, advectiō (of goods) transportation, carriage < advect-, past participial stem of advehere to bring (see advehent adj.) + -iō -ion suffix¹. In sense 2 after German Advektion (1896 or earlier in meteorological, 1898 or earlier in oceanographical use; 1871 (as †Advection) or earlier in general sense ‘transportation, carriage’).

Note that “sense 2” is the one I quoted, first attested in 1910; sense 1, which was not in the earlier editions of the OED, is:

1. Medicine. Growth (of new blood vessels) towards a stimulus; (also) transport (by blood vessels) towards a part of the body. rare. Now disused.

1896 Trans. Pathol. Soc. Philadelphia 17 49 It is possible, according to the views of Metchnikoff and of Leber, that the advection, if not the primary formation of new bloodvessels in the healing of wounds, is entirely under the influence of the chemotactic or a similar force.
1900 D. H. Goodsall & W. E. Miles Dis. Anus & Rectum I. iii. 59 In the interval between the receipt of the injury and the appearance of the abscess, some depressed condition of the constitution occurred, which permitted the advection, through the blood stream, of the infective agent to the damaged tissue.

Lexicography marches on!

I’m finally reading Boris Fishman’s novel A Replacement Life (see this 2017 post), and I thought this passage was postworthy (the viewpoint character, Slava, is the only one in his immigrant family who can read English, so the mail is turned over to him for interpretation: “Was this a letter from James Baker III alerting the Gelmans that a tragic mistake had been made and the family would have to return to the Soviet Union?”):

The letter was given to Slava. His fingers were small enough for the Bible font and onionskin pages of the brick dictionary they had procured from a curbside, somebody who had learned English already. As the adults shifted their feet, leaning against doorjambs and working their lips with their teeth, he carefully sliced open the envelope and unfolded the letter inside, his heart beating madly. He was all that stood between his family and expulsion by James Baker III. America was a country where you could have Roman numerals after your name, like a Caesar.

As the adults watched, Slava checked the unfamiliar words in the bricktionary. “Annual percentage rate.” “Layaway.” “Installment plan.” “One time only.” “For special customers like you.” The senior Gelmans waiting, Slava was embarrassed to discover himself mindlessly glued to certain words in the dictionary that had nothing to do with the task at hand. On the way to “credit card,” he had snagged on “cathedral,” its spires —t, h, d, l—like the ones the Gelmans had seen in Vienna. “Rebate” took him to “roly-poly,” which rolled around his mouth like a fat marble. “Venture rewards” led him to “zaftig,” a Russian baba’s breasts covering his eyes as she placed in front of him a bowl of morning farina. Eventually, he managed to verify enough to reassure the adults that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.

Slava remained with the bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock—was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.

Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha), kartoshka into kartoshechka (little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant.

Oxford University Press is publishing a book that’s way overdue, Women in the History of Linguistics, edited by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson:

• Brings together ground-breaking work on the role of women in the history of linguistics
• Explores the contributions of women in a wide range of spheres, from the production of dictionaries and grammars to language teaching methods and language policy
• Looks beyond the European context, examining such diverse topics as women’s roles in the codification of Arabic, and the regulation and exploitation of women’s speech in Japan.

It has nineteen chapters, ranging from “Visible and invisible women in ancient linguistic culture” by Anneli Luhtala to “European women and the description and teaching of African languages” by Helma Pasch; I hope it makes an impact. When I was studying linguistics, we only learned about Great Men.

And for readers of Russian, Lev Oborin has a stimulating interview with Evgeniya Nekrasova and Oksana Vasyakina of the Школа литературных практик [School of Literary Practices] (associated with the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, known as “Shaninka” after its founder Teodor Shanin). Among the school’s aims, according to its website, is “способствовать появлению авторов, которые смогут рассказать о реальности настоящего, прошлого или будущего оригинальным и адекватным современности языком” [to contribute to the emergence of authors who can describe the reality of the present, past or future in original language adequate to the modern world]; Nekrasova says on this topic that Russian poetry is doing well today, but:

The language of the mainstream prose which has existed until recently doesn’t even come to us from the nineties but, I don’t know, from the seventies. That has always greatly surprised me; I never understood why it was like that. And we’re trying to somehow deal with it.

Мейнстримная проза, которая до последнего времени существовала, — она даже не из девяностых к нам приходит по языку, а, я не знаю, из семидесятых. Меня это очень сильно всегда удивляло, я никогда не понимала, почему это происходит. И мы, в частности, пытаемся с этим как-то справиться.

And Vasyakina says:

For me, one negative tendency is our fascination with the idea of ​​a “great Russian novel,” even though Vladimir Sorokin many years ago wrote his Roman [‘Novel,’ but also Roman, the name of the protagonist; among other things, it’s a catalogue of the clichés of the 19th-century Russian novel], which already ate, and slept, and died. Barthes killed everybody off a long time ago, but we still dream of writing the great Russian novel, and we’re all eternally waiting for it. It has to be narrative, it’s definitely about a new hero, it definitely has a large collection of minor characters. And as soon as we start writing a great novel, that framework begins to drag us [into itself]. But how can we create a different text, which will not be that “great novel,” but will tell us how life works [or ‘is constructed’ or ‘is arranged’]? And does it absolutely have to be great? Maybe it will be thirty pages long and nonlinear.

Для меня негативная тенденция — это заворожённость идеей «большого русского романа», хотя Владимир Сорокин сколько лет назад написал своего «Романа», который уже и поел, и поспал, и умер. Уже и Барт давно всех поубивал, а у нас до сих пор все мечтают написать большой русский роман, и мы все вечно его ждём. Он обязательно нарративный, он обязательно про нового героя, обязательно с большой системой второстепенных героев. И как только мы начинаем писать большой роман, эта рамка нас начинает тащить [в себя]. Но как создать другой текст, который не будет этим «великим романом», но расскажет, как устроена жизнь? И обязательно ли писать его большим? Может быть, он будет тридцатистраничным и нелинейным.

And to tie it in with the first part of the post, Oborin asks about the largely female staff; after naming a couple of male teachers, Vasyakina says:

But we’re trying to make female names and female practices as visible as possible. Feminist enthusiasm [or ‘ardor’ or ‘fervor’ or ‘spirit’] comes first with us, let’s say.

Но мы стараемся делать максимально видимыми женские имена и женские практики. Феминистский задор у нас на первом месте, скажем так.

Music to my ears, and as with the linguistics book, I hope it makes an impact.

Kristian Heal at Studia Syriaca has a stupendous roundup called Twenty Great Developments in Syriac Studies in the Last Twenty Years; it starts with gatherings of Syriac scholars and includes accounts of digital humanities projects, reprints and PDFs, translations, manuscripts, and much more. A couple of my favorite sections:

Dictionaries

The first edition of Carl Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum was published in 1895 when he was only 27. This dictionary was based on his broad and deep reading of the Syriac editions that were accumulating at this time, thanks in large part of the British Library acquisitions from Deir es-Surian. And it is clear that Brockelmann kept reading everything that was published, not only from the addenda added to the first edition, but also from the considerably enlarged second edition, which appeared just over thirty years later (1928). By that time, Brockelmann had competition in the form of Jessie Payne Smith’s brilliant Compendious Syriac Dictionary (1903). Despite the advantages of Brockelmann’s Lexicon, Payne Smith became the preferred, and then the only dictionary used by English speakers who did not have a command of Latin. That is until Michael Sokoloff’s corrected, expanded and updated translation of Brockelmann’s Lexicon appeared in 2009. This marked a massive advance in the lexicographical knowledge available to English speaking readers of classical Syriac texts.

Two other publications deserve special attention. The first is Claudia Ciancaglini 2008 publication of Iranian Load [sic — LH] Words in Syriac. This important volume discusses and demonstrates the significant impact of Iranian languages on Syriac from the earliest period. The second is Sebastian Brock and George Kiraz’s Concise Syriac-English, English-Syriac dictionary, with its successor, the Gorgias Illustrated Learner’s Syriac-English, English-Syriac Dictionary. The concise dictionary draws upon centuries of lexicographical work, and also offers the first bi-lingual dictionary for English readers (Brockelmann’s first edition had a Latin-Syriac appendix, while the second dictionary only had a Latin index).

Teaching and Learning Syriac

It is now easier than ever to learn Syriac. Syriac is taught in many universities around the world. Summer courses at The Catholic University of America, the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Vrije University in Amsterdam, and Beth Mardutho also offer the chance for graduate students, and others, to start and advance in learning Syriac. The standard English language grammar, by Robinson, now fully revised and updated by Chip Coakley, is in its sixth edition (2013). Revised editions of Muraoka’s Classical Syriac (2005) and Classical Syriac for Hebraists (2013) have also appeared. John Healey’s First Studies in Syriac was published in 2005, adding to the established list an inductive grammar that can be gone through in a single semester, and that also has the advantage of recordings of the chrestomathy readings. Finally, George Kiraz has produced a splendidly accessible and effective Syriac Primer, now in a corrected third edition (2013). It is also now easy to supplement these teaching grammars with a copy of Nöldeke’s Compendious Syriac Grammar, thanks to the fine reprint published by Eisenbrauns (2001).

There are approximately a zillion links there; syri.ac, which I posted excitedly about in 2015, is but one of them. Enjoy!

I’ve been wanting to read Vladimir Makanin for years, mainly because of Lizok — back in 2011 she wrote “I’ve read quite a few books and stories by Vladimir Makanin and found more than enough to consider him a favorite” and in 2017 “I’m not sure I would have started writing this blog if it hadn’t been for the dearth of English-language information about his books,” so he was high on my list. I’m not quite sure why I started with Старые книги [Old books], except that I’d gotten up to 1976 and decided I wanted a breather before plunging into the Big Three of that year, Trifonov’s Дом на набережной [The House on the Embankment], Rasputin’s Прощание с Матёрой [Farewell to Matyora], and Sokolov’s Школа для дураков [A School for Fools]. Needless to say, I was attracted by the title, which turned out to be fully justified: the heroine, Svetik (an unusual diminutive for Svetlana), arrives in Moscow with the intention of making some money in the illegal book trade, and much of the story focuses on the details of how that trade worked (if you’re planning to travel via time machine to Moscow in the 1970s, you will definitely want to read it first — which reminds me, Russian readers will want to check out Техника выживания для случайно попавшего в СССР, about how to make a living if you unexpectedly find yourself back in 1980).

I enjoyed the story greatly, in part because I was coming off an Andrei Bitov binge, and while Bitov is a fine writer, I had gotten pretty tired of his solipsism — everything he writes, whether fiction or travel reportage (of which he did a lot), focuses almost entirely on a first-person viewpoint described in tireless, moment-by-moment philosophical detail (opening his book on Armenia at random I immediately see “I dream of living this moment. In this moment, by this moment alone. I would then be alive, harmonious, and happy…”; from his book on Georgia: “Time exists independently, we exist independently. Time is not understood…”) A little of that goes a long way, and I’d had a lot of it. What a relief it was to open Makanin and see (my translation):
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I just had a very odd realization. I was fiddling with the wood stove when I looked at the three implements underneath it and thought “The thing on the left is the poker, on the right is the scoop, but what’s that in the middle?” It’s a simple piece of iron about a foot long, with a ring at one end to hold it by and a curve at the other for grasping and pulling the lever that controls the stove damper. I’ve used it every winter day for the dozen years or so that we’ve had the wood stove (one of our most prized possessions), and yet it’s never occurred to me to wonder what it was called. It was just there, darkened and slightly warped at the business end (since it often gets shoved inside the stove to move wood around), but if it was missing and I had to ask my wife if she’d seen it, I’d have no idea what to say. I googled [fireplace tools] and [wood stove tools] and was quickly frustrated because you get lots of pretty pictures of tool sets but the individual tools are not named; finally I found this Etsy listing of something that serves the same purpose though it’s much more elaborate, and it’s labeled “Vintage Fireplace Manual Damper Pull Hook, Flue Hook, Flue Open Close Hook Tool, Fireplace Tool.” With those terms as search aids, I’ve decided “damper hook” is the closest I can come to an official term; it’s compact and expressive, and I’ll try to remember it. But it’s strange to realize you’ve been using something for years and had no name to call it by.