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A reader sent me a link to this post by André Barbosa from Portuguese Language Blog:

“Pois não” is an expression used by Brazilians as well as by the Portuguese and means “yes”, “of course”, “sure.” It’s curious, however, that this expression contains the adverb “não” (not) and means just the opposite.

“Pois não” comes from another expression: “Pois não haveria de (+ infinitive verb)”. Here’s an example on how to use it:

– João, você pode me emprestar o seu carro? (João, could you lend me your car?)

– Empresto Maria, pois não haveria de emprestar? (Yes Maria, for sure.)

“Pois não haveria de emprestar” (Wouldn’t I lend it? – literal meaning) means that João will lend his car to Pedro for sure. It’s like João assumed the obligation to do that and disapproved not doing it.

It is common in Brazil for salespeople to greet shoppers by saying “pois não?”

A curious expression; compare “yeah no.”

I have occasionally run across the weird and wonderful word zhuzh /ʒʊʒ/; it turns out the OED has entries for both noun (“Style, glamour; a stylish or glamorous appearance or effect”) and verb (“To smarten up (someone or something); to make (something) more stylish, attractive, or exciting”), both updated just last December. The latter has the full etymology, which is intriguing:

Etymology: Of uncertain origin. Perhaps ultimately an expressive formation (compare e.g. whoosh v., swish adj., and use in similar senses and constructions of e.g. zing v. and zap v.).

Compare from a similar date the related zhuzh n., zhuzhy adj., although the relative priority of the three words is unclear.

The etymology of this word, and of the related noun and adjective, is uncertain and disputed; a number of suggestions have been made, but none of them is entirely unproblematic or confirmed beyond doubt by the available evidence.

Derivation from a Romani verb in the sense ‘to clean’ or a corresponding adjective has been proposed (compare e.g. Hungarian Romani shuzo, British Romani yuzho clean, pure), but this presents both phonological and semantic difficulties, and supporting evidence appears to be lacking.

Dict. South African Eng. connects the present word and the corresponding noun and adjective with South African English slang terms for ‘excellent, smart, attractive’ derived from regional pronunciations of Jewish adj., which appear to have been motivated by the high reputation of Jewish tailors and tailoring (perhaps compare quot. 1968 at zhuzh n., apparently in the sense ‘clothing’). However, this is difficult to reconcile with the earliest documentation for zhuzh v. and related words, which suggests a British context, and no evidence has been found for a corresponding sense or pronunciation of Jewish adj. outside South Africa.

That early noun citation is:

1968 B. Took et al. in B. Took & M. Coward Best of ‘Round the Horne’ (2000) 4th Ser. Episode 4. 192/1 Julian. Let’s have a vada at his zhush. Mr. Horne. Clothing. That’s translator’s note.

The first verb cite is slightly later:

1970 P. Burton Lang. of their own: Polari, West End Homosexual Slang (typescript) (O.E.D. Archive) p. ii A zhooshy quean is a grand quean, to zhoosh up is to get ready.

As for the possible Romani derivation, my Цыганско-русский и русско-цыганский словарь (кэлдэрарский диалект) has vužó for ‘clean,’ which just goes to complicate things. And I posted on Polari way back in 2003.

Last year I posted about Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order; now Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts, and I thought this one was piquant enough to repost here:

In Europe, … where alphabetical order was used, in many cases it was considered not as a tool of reference but as one of recall, a way of imprinting a series of items onto the memory in a culture that continued to rely heavily on oral transmission. It may be for this reason that the second-century Sentences of Sextus, 123 maxims on how to live a philosophically good life, were arranged in alphabetical order. Or it may not have been: once again, all we have are later copies, which might well have been reordered. (And, in addition, the named author, Sextus the Pythagorean, is unlikely to be the actual author of the work.) We know this type of reordering was routine. Fables by an author named Babrius, some of which are today collected under a generic authorship as Aesop’s Fables, survive in copies that were organized by the first letter of the opening word of each fable. Yet an Oxyrhynchus fragment of the same fables, dating from the second century, shows that at least one earlier version was not in this order. The purpose of the reordering may well have been to help listeners remember the stories so that they, in turn, could retell them. For memory was a recurring component of alphabetization: the Greek grammarian Athenaeus listed eighty-one species of fish in first-letter alphabetical order, “in order that what is said may be easier for you to remember.”

(I have complained about fish names more than once, e.g. here.)

I’ve finished Veniamin Kaverin’s Скандалист [The troublemaker] (see this post), and I’m very glad I read it, even though it’s by no stretch of the imagination a great novel. It was, after all, an apprentice effort (he’d written a few shorter attempts at fiction), and the circumstances of its writing were not exactly Tostoyan (this is Kaverin’s own account in Richard Sheldon’s translation, from “Šklovskij, Gor’kij, and the Serapion Brothers” [Slavic and East European Journal 12.1 (Spring, 1968), pp. 1-13]; you can see the Russian here — scroll down to “Зимой 1928 года я встретился”):

During the winter of 1928, at Jurij Tynjanov’s place, I often met with a lively and clever writer then at the zenith of his powers and deeply convinced that he knew all the mysteries of the literature business. We spoke about the novel genre, and the writer observed that even Čexov could not cope with this genre, that it was not surprising that it was not succeeding in contemporary literature. I objected, and he, with the irony at which he was always unusually good, expressed doubts about my abilities in this complicated business. Infuriated, I said that I would launch a novel and that it would be a book about him — about a trouble-maker who conducted his whole life with an awareness of his literary role. He derided me — but to no avail. On the very next day, I began to write the novel The Troublemaker, or Evenings on Vasil’ev Island. Obviously, only youth is capable of such decisions, and only in youth could you so openly follow at the heels of your future character with a notebook. He laughed at me: “the utilitarian factory by the name of Kaverin.” I jotted even this down. He spouted jokes, made brilliant witticisms, sometimes unusually well directed and remembered for a lifetime — I blushed, but jotted them down. Probably, he was fully convinced that nothing would come of the novel; otherwise, he would have been more cautious in this unusual duel.

This “lively and clever writer” was Viktor Shklovsky, a fascinating figure whose writings, a blend of memoir and literary analysis, I’ve enjoyed for years; it was tremendously interesting to see him portrayed (very believably) as a character in a literary work. (He was known among the Serapion Brothers as Брат Скандалист [Brother Troublemaker].) He is shown as funny and argumentative, given to causing trouble for its own sake and then having to apologize later; his culminating deed is plucking the young Vera Barabanova away from Leningrad, where she was poised to marry an unsuitable man she didn’t love, and sweeping her off to Moscow with him on the train. (I’m guessing that her surname, ‘Drum,’ was suggested by the first futurist collection, the 1915 pamphlet Взял: Барабан футуристов [Took: Drum of the futurists].) Shklovsky, understandably, wasn’t pleased by the book (few people like seeing themselves from the outside), but it’s an affectionate as well as acerbic portrait (Kaverin was his student and friend), and on the whole he comes off well.

But beyond the overstuffed plot (two aged brothers reconnect after a quarter of a century, there are various academic intrigues, young Nogin — a stand-in for the author — can’t study because he’s desperately in love with Vera, etc. etc.), the novel is of interest as an example of the “documentary” writing so popular between the wars, not only in the Soviet Union (see this post on Mariengof’s Cynics) but elsewhere (Joyce, Dos Passos, Gide, Döblin, Reznikoff): writers felt the need to incorporate chunks of found reality into their work. Kaverin not only quotes and alludes to Shklovsky’s work repeatedly (mostly Zoo and Third Factory), he quotes chunks of a medieval Old Russian text Professor Lozhkin is trying to study between the various distractions of the plot — I actually found a version online, and I will insert the quoted passage as an image here:

Lozhkin decides that the Малкатушка or Малкатошва in the texts he’s comparing (Малкодушка in the one I found) must reflect a Hebrew Malkat-švo ‘Queen of Sheba,’ and he keeps wondering about the mysterious word кражма (here крыжма). Also, there’s a long and funny account of a lecture where the lecturer (Dragomanov) doesn’t show up but sends a flunky to read what turns out to be a deliberately foolish and insulting proposal that arouses indignation in the audience, which doesn’t enjoy being spoofed; this is scavenged from an event in the 1850s, in which Osip Senkovsky (who in the novel is studied by Nogin) pulls the same trick on a distinguished assembly (you can read an account here, beginning “С первых же страниц было видно, что положения”). And there are many bits that made me laugh, like “Сердце у него стучало, как метроном, как сердце” [His heart beat like a metronome, like a heart] and “Он вернулся домой мокрый и с таким лицом, что старуха, которая отворила ему дверь, растерявшись, заговорила с ним по-татарски” [He returned home wet and with such a face that the old lady who opened the door for him lost her head and started talking to him in Tatar].

But what really impressed me was that, even if it’s not a great novel, it’s a real one, with people who feel real struggling with what feels like life, however exaggerated. Shklovsky wrote no novels, and Tynyanov’s were lifeless attempts to exemplify his literary theories (see my review of Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the ambassador plenipotentiary]), but Kaverin is discovering that he is a real writer of fiction. And the plot element that felt most real to me and most moved me was Vera’s desperate attempts to paint despite the poverty and chaos of her life (she decided to marry the rich jerk in hopes that she might win the freedom to create art); it seemed a foreshadowing of his great 1971 novel Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror], which I wrote about last year. I look forward to reading more Kaverin.

Sophie Hardach has a very interesting piece for BBC Future about the problem of translating languages that don’t have large written corpora:

Imagine you come across a message that could contain life-saving information. But there’s a problem: you don’t understand a word. You’re not even sure which of the world’s thousands of languages it is written in. What do you do?

If the message is in French or Spanish, typing it into an automatic translation engine will instantly solve the mystery and produce a solid answer in English. But many other languages still defy machine translation, including languages spoken by millions of people, such as Wolof, Luganda, Twi and Ewe in Africa. That’s because the algorithms that power these engines learn from human translations – ideally, millions of words of translated text.

There is an abundance of such material for languages like English, French, Spanish and German […] No such data mountain exists, however, for languages that may be widely spoken but not as prolifically translated. They are known as low-resource languages. The fallback machine-training material for these languages consists of religious publications, including the much-translated Bible. But this amounts to a narrow dataset, and is not enough to train accurate, wide-ranging translation robots.

Google Translate currently offers the ability to communicate in around 108 different languages while Microsoft’s Bing Translator offers around 70 languages. Yet there are more than 7,000 spoken languages around the world, and at least 4,000 with a writing system. […] To break that barrier, IARPA is funding research to develop a system that can find, translate and summarise information from any low-resource language, whether it is in text or speech. […] To tackle the problem, each team is divided into smaller specialist groups that solve one aspect of the system. The main components are automatic search, speech recognition, translation and text summarisation technologies, all adapted to low-resource languages. Since the four-year project began in 2017, the teams have worked on eight different languages, including Swahili, Tagalog, Somali and Kazakh.

There are all sorts of fascinating details about how this works, but I’m going to quote the same passage Trevor Joyce quoted when he sent me the link:
[Read more…]

“Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” by Axel I. Palmér et al. (Indo-European Linguistics 2021) is an open-access paper that looks very interesting:

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for ‘fox’ in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE ‘fox’-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian ‘fox’-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ-suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ-suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names.

Introduction

The Indo-European languages attest several words for ‘fox’, e.g., Skt. lopāśá-, Gr. ἀλώπηξ, Arm. ałowēs, Lith. lãpė, Lat. volpēs, Alb. dhelpër, which are similar enough to have justified hypotheses of a common origin, despite the fact that not all of them show regular sound correspondences. Throughout the history of Indo-European etymological research, these words have either been lumped together under a single etymon (e.g., IEW: 1179) or split into several different roots (Schrijver 1998; De Vaan 2000). The aim of this article is to clarify the inner-Indo-European relationships between these stems, as well as their relationship to similar ‘fox’-words in the Uralic languages. After discussing the evidence for PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ in Section 1, in Section 2 we examine potential Uralic, North Germanic, and Iberian borrowings from an Indo-Iranian descendant of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ-. In Section 3, we reconstruct PIE *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’ based on Latin, Lithuanian, Persian, and Albanian evidence. Finally, in Section 4 we discuss the derivational history of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and attempt to explain the ablaut preserved directly or indirectly in the branches of Indo-European.

Piotr Gąsiorowski on FB called it “A wonderful piece of etymological analysis!” and that’s all the recommendation I need.

JSTOR Daily has a post on the British soldier-poet Edward Thomas, killed in action in 1917; it consists mainly of scans of his poetry in MS form, which is interesting in its own right, but I was stopped by this passing observation: “In the army, Thomas wanted to hide from other soldiers the fact that he was writing poetry, so he wrote straight across the page, using commas to signal line breaks.” It reminded me of Dmitry Bykov’s point that when Valentin Kataev quoted poetry in his novelized memoirs, he did so without line breaks in order to partially efface the boundary between poetry and prose. (Thanks, Bathrobe!)

I was reading Adam Leith Gollner’s GQ article “The Secrets of the World’s Greatest Jailbreak Artist” (and if you like jailbreak stories, this one’s a corker) when the following passage leaped out at me:

Investigators will later note that the prison staff seem completely stupefied. The descriptor employed by the ministry of justice in its subsequent audit is sidération, an archaic word that refers to the state of being “planet-struck.”

The noun may be archaic (it’s only in my very largest French-English dictionary, the Larousse Unabridged), but the related sidérer ‘to dumbfound, flummox’ and sidérant, which the Larousse defines as ‘staggering, amazing, stunning’ (“C’est sidérant! “it’s mind-blowing!”), are not; the Trésor de la langue française informatisé gives the etymology as “Empr. au lat.sideratio « action funeste des astres; insolation ».”

So much for French, but when I said sidération was in the big Larousse, I didn’t give the English equivalent provided there, which is sideration. I had been unaware of the existence of this word, for which the OED has the following entry (updated March 2016):
[Read more…]

I always assumed burnoose was from Arabic, and so it is: “From French burnous, from Arabic بُرْنُس‎ (burnus).” But where is that from? Aha:

Via some Aramaic form (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic בורס‎, Classical Syriac ܒܢܪܘܢܐ‎) from Byzantine Greek βίρρος (bírrhos), from Latin birrus, from Gaulish, from Proto-Celtic *birros (“short”). Doublet of بِرْنِيطَة‎ (birnīṭa).

(That last transcription should read birrīṭa; someone who can edit Wiktionary should fix it. Also, Proto-Celtic *birros gives Welsh byr ‘short,’ as DE will be the first to tell you.)

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, who sent me the link, said “now that’s a well travelled word,” and I can’t disagree.

Alison Killilea writes:

A number of weeks ago, I got it into my head to start translating Beowulf after my good friend and colleague, Victoria Koivisto-Kokko, mentioned something about editions. I remembered my eternal desire to produce one in Cork slang, and thought, sure jaysus why not, and alas, Boyo-wulf (name courtesy of Ciarán Kavanagh) was conceived.

While this is first and foremost a translation with a humorous intention, as someone who has studied translation theory and translations of Beowulf for four years, there is an element of seriousness to it. I am translating this from the Old English itself (generally using Klaeber’s edition for line numbers), and looking to R.D. Fulk’s and Kevin Kiernan’s editions for backup. […]

I have decided on a prose translation because, in short, it is quite loose in some places in order that it reflect the purity of the daycent Cork slang.

It begins:

C’mere to me! Well we’ve all heard of those pure daycent kings of the Spear-Danes from donkeys’ years, and how the mad yokes of princes did alright for themselves. Sure half the time Scyld Scefing was off among a rake of enemies, pulling the mead-seats out from under their arses, scaring the shit out of the boss-men, ever since he was found skint as a young fella.

He then found joy, good man himself, did just mighty beneath the heavens, lapped up fierce respect ’til all the bais across the whale-road had to obey him and cough up a bit of moola – That was some class king, like.

There’s another paragraph at the link, and more in later posts (ll. 53-85, ll. 371-389a); you can hear it read in genuine Corkonian “by the pure class feen Panda Terry” here. Thanks, Trevor!