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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.

Mark J. Pallen, Andrea Telatin, and Aharon Oren have a paper in Trends in Microbiology (2020) called “The Next Million Names for Archaea and Bacteria“; here’s the opening Highlights section:

Microbiology has entered a golden era of discovery, with exponential growth in the identification of new species, genera, and high-level taxa through culturomics, genomics, and metagenomics. This creates an urgent unmet need for new taxonomic names for Archaea and Bacteria.

Currently, creation of well-formed names relies on time-consuming nomenclatorial quality control by a dwindling pool of experts conversant with classical languages and the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes. These problems are compounded by the custom of creating names on an as-needed, just-in-time-fashion.

Here, we outline a novel approach with three features: creation of names en masse before they are tied to taxa; combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek, drawing on stocks of roots with relevant meanings; computerised automation of the creation of new names.

Latin binomials, popularised in the 18th century by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, have stood the test of time in providing a stable, clear, and memorable system of nomenclature across biology. However, relentless and ever-deeper exploration and analysis of the microbial world has created an urgent need for huge numbers of new names for Archaea and Bacteria. Manual creation of such names remains difficult and slow and typically relies on expert-driven nomenclatural quality control. Keen to ensure that the legacy of Linnaeus lives on in the age of microbial genomics and metagenomics, we propose an automated approach, employing combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek to create linguistically correct names for genera and species that can be used off the shelf as needed. As proof of principle, we document over a million new names for Bacteria and Archaea. We are confident that our approach provides a road map for how to create new names for decades to come.

I enjoyed this section:

Another pressing problem is that most microbiologists follow Shakespeare in possessing, at best, ‘small Latin, less Greek’ and so are poorly equipped for creating well-formed binomials that comply with the rules of Latin grammar and are presented with clear, plausible etymological justifications (Box 1). Despite the publication of several ‘how-to’ guides, this skills gap has led to propagation of numerous erroneous malformations – a high-profile example is the species epithet pyloridis, which even passed validation in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology before it had to be corrected, according to the rules of Latin grammar, to pylori.

Don’t miss that Box 1 link, with its parade of horribles: “Common problems include trying to use poorly Latinised English words (e.g., geesorum instead of anserum for a species associated with geese) or making up nonsensical etymologies.” (Related: Abra cadabra, from 2004.) Thanks, Kobi!

From Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?, translated by Michael R. Katz (the original from Кто виноват? follows); the context is that a “philanthropic privy counselor” is passing through town on his way to Moscow, and the principal of the gymnasium (high school) seizes the opportunity of having him visit the school:

Then one of the pupils stepped forward, and the French teacher asked, “Didn’t he have something to say on the occasion of this grand visit to their ‘garden of learning’?” At once the pupil began a speech in a strange Franco-ecclesiastical dialect: “Coman puvonn nu pover anfan remersier lilustre visiter?” [“How can we poor children show our gratitude to our illustrious visitor?”]. As the patron looked around during this Celto-Slavonic speech, he was somehow attracted by Mitya’s sickly and delicate appearance; he called the boy over, spoke to him, and showed him kindness.

Затем один из учеников вышел вперед, и учитель французского языка спросил его: «Не имеет ли он им что-нибудь сказать по поводу высокого посещения рассадника наук?» Ученик тотчас же начал на каком-то франко-церковном наречии: «Коман пувонн ну поверь анфан ремерсиерь лилюстръ визитеръ». Глядя по сторонам во время этой кельто-славянской речи, меценат обратил как-то внимание на болезненный и нежный вид Мити, подозвал его к себе, поговорил, приласкал.

(Cited in Anne Lounsbery’s Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917 to show how the provinces were portrayed as appropriating culture from elsewhere in hopelessly garbled form; I presume the “Celto-” refers to nos ancêtres les gaulois.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Nicholas Evans, Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us, p. 208:

The Kusunda are a little-known group of hunter-gatherers who may help us understand the pre-Hindu civilization in India. This tiny people somehow managed to hold onto their distinctiveness in the remote jungles of Nepal: their language is unrelated to any other. First mentioned in 1848, when a British envoy wrote that “amid the dense forests . . . dwell, in scanty numbers . . . two broken tribes having no apparent affinity with the civilized races . . . and seeming like fragments of an earlier population,” by the late twentieth century the language was being declared extinct, disappearing almost without record. But Nepalese officials recently intensified efforts to locate speakers. In 2000 they discovered a man who could remember some of his parents’ speech, and in 2004 they found a couple more Kusunda and brought them to Kathmandu to give them citizenship papers. One, Kamala (center) is only 30, and still speaks the language with her monolingual mother, who was too old to make the journey to Kathmandu. Her 60-something cousin Gyani Maiya (left) is also fluent, although she had not used the language for 20 years; the two knew of one another but had not met until both came out to Kathmandu. And these speakers know of a couple more, six days’ walk into the jungles. Yogendra Prasad Yadav, David Watters, and Madhav Prasad Pokhrei have now been able to record and analyze a good part of the language. Amazingly for hunter-gatherers, this language has native words for domestic animals (horse, cow, sheep, goat, chicken), for 15 different castes of tribal groups, for king, police, gold, and money. All these words are completely unrelated to those found in other languages of the region. This suggests that the Kusunda, against first expectations, have not always been hunter-gatherers, but were once the bearers of a much more sophisticated civilization, predating the Indo-Aryans of Vedic times, from which they had to retreat into a marginalized hunter-gathering existence once more powerful groups encroached.

There’s more on the language at Wikipedia:

Watters (2005) published a mid-sized grammatical description of the language, plus vocabulary, although there has been further work since. Watters argued that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically, and phonologically distinct from its neighbors. This would imply that Kusunda is a remnant of the languages spoken in northern India before the influx of Tibeto-Burman- and Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples; however, it is not classified as a Munda or a Dravidian language. It thus joins Burushaski, Nihali and (potentially) the substrate of the Vedda language in the list of South Asian languages that do not fall into the main categories of Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic.

And Wiktionary has a Kusunda word list. In my younger days I would have felt a strong urge to start studying it; there’s something compelling about language isolates.

Another post swiped from Far Outliers, this time a quote from Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith:

Meanwhile the wave of anger over Britain’s annexation of the Transvaal spread further afield to the Boer communities of the Orange Free State and the Cape Colony, stimulating old grievances. […]

In the Cape, it gave a huge boost to a nascent cultural and political movement led by Boer intellectuals calling themselves Afrikaners. In Paarl, a small market town thirty-five miles from Cape Town, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, Stephanus du Toit, joined several associates in 1875 to found a society named Die Genootskap Van Regte Afrikaners – the Fellowship of True Afrikaners – dedicated to promoting the use of Afrikaans, a colloquial language commonly used in Boer farming communities throughout southern Africa. It had diverged from Dutch over the years, changing vowel sounds, adopting simplified syntax and incorporating loan words from languages that were spoken by slaves in the Cape in the seventeenth century – Malay, Portuguese creole and Khoikhoi. It was the language used between masters and servants and amongst the poorer sections of the Boer community. Upper and middle-class Boers, particularly those living in the western Cape, spoke ‘High Dutch’, the language of the church and the Bible, and regarded the Zuid-Afrikaansche taal with disdain, dismissing it as Hotnotstaal, a ‘Hottentot’ language, or a kombuistaal – a kitchen language. They also used English to a considerable extent, the only official language of the Colony and thus the language of commerce, law, administration and – increasingly – culture.

What Du Toit and his colleagues feared and resented most was the growing cultural domination of the British colonial regime, aided and abetted by Boers themselves. In a lecture given in 1876, the chief justice, Sir Henry de Villiers, described Afrikaans as being ‘poor in the number of its words, weak in its inflections, wanting in accuracy of meaning and incapable of expressing ideas connected with the higher spheres of thought’. The energy of colonists, he said, would be far better spent in appropriating English, ‘that rich and glorious language’, that ultimately would become ‘the language of South Africa’. Du Toit argued that a mother tongue was a person’s most precious possession: ‘The language of a nation expresses the character of that nation. Deprive a nation of the vehicle of its thoughts and you deprive it of the wisdom of its ancestors.’ He wanted to develop Afrikaans as a landstaal – a national language.

To spell out this message, in 1876 Du Toit launched Di Afrikaanse Patriot, the first newspaper to use an early form of Afrikaans. The following year he was the main author of a history entitled Die Geskiedenis van Ons Land in die Taal van Ons Volk – The History of Our Land in the Language of Our People. It was the first book to treat all Afrikaners, dispersed as they were among British colonies and independent republics, as a distinct people, occupying a distinct fatherland; and it linked them to a common destiny endowed by God: to rule over southern Africa and civilise its heathen inhabitants.

The term kombuistaal ‘kitchen language’ led me to look up kombuis, which turns out to be closely related to the source of English caboose, which originally meant (OED) “‘The cook-room or kitchen of merchantmen on deck; a diminutive substitute for the galley of a man-of-war. It is generally furnished with cast-iron apparatus for cooking’ (Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk.).” It didn’t take on the sense “A van or car on a freight train used by workmen or the men in charge” until 1861 (H. Dawson Reminisc. Life Locomotive Engineer 90 Another midnight ride in the ‘Caboose’ of a freight train), and the OED qualifies that sense as “U.S.” The OED (entry from 1888) says “The original language was perhaps Low German; but the history and etymology are altogether obscure”; the much more up-to-date Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (2003-2009) agrees: “De verdere herkomst is onbekend.” Thanks, Bathrobe!

From Wikipedia:

The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, also referred to as the snail telegraph, was a contraption built to test the pseudo-scientific hypothesis that snails create a permanent telepathic link when they mate. The device was developed by French occultist Jacques-Toussaint Benoît (de l’Hérault) with the supposed assistance of an American colleague monsieur Biat-Chrétien in the 1850s.

Benoit claimed that when snails mate, a special type of fluid forms a permanent telepathic link between them. This fluid forms an invisible thread that keeps the snails in “sympathetic communication” by using animal magnetism similar to an electric current pulsating along it. They claimed that this method would work instantly, wirelessly, over any distance, and be more reliable than a telegraph. […]

During the 1871 uprising in the Paris Commune, the need to send and receive secured messages prompted a revival of the idea by Marquis Rochefort, president of the barricades commission. However, it proved to be as unreliable then, as it had originally been.

This is one of the greatest ideas humanity has ever come up with; alas, the experiment proved inconclusive. You can read about it at that link, you can read Jules Allix’s lengthy report here (“Ever since I have had the honor of announcing the discovery of Messrs. Jacques Toussaint Benoît[…] and Biat-Chrétien[…], my excitement about their new system for the universal and instantaneous communication of thought has not ceased to increase”), and you can watch a brief video with a visualization here; my concern, however, is linguistic, and since the word pasilalinic is (unaccountably) missing from the OED, I thought I’d render a public service by pointing out that it’s from Greek πᾶς ‘all, every, each’ + λαλέω ‘talk, chat, prattle.’ Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find some snails. I want to believe!

From The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, by Frederick Forsyth (via Joel’s Far Outliers):

Tangier in 1956 was an extraordinary place, my first taste of Africa and the world of Islam. Morocco had been, until very recently, a French colony, but Tangier was under tripartite administration between the British (the post office), the French (police and law courts), and the Spanish (general administration). […]

There was a British warship moored in the outer harbor on what is called a “flying the flag” mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of Marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish.

I tried to help and was promptly press-ganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate, or the Gorbals: about five feet tall and just as wide. The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. We moved from bar to bar as they spent their shore leave and accrued pay on pints of beer and triple-scotch chasers.

Bathrobe sent me links to two Facebook posts by Christopher Atwood; if you’re on FB you can read all the replies, but you can get the basic idea from the texts of the posts, which I will reproduce here:

1) Russian literature has had a big influence on modern Mongolian literature. In your opinion (and I’m specially interested in those who were educated in Mongolia), what are the three most important works of Russian literature that you need to know in order to understand Mongolian literature? In other words, which three works of Russian literature most influenced Mongolian literature?

2) Based on the great responses to my earlier post about Russian literature [here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mongolianstudies/permalink/2646748208950447/], I confirmed what I’d suspected, that while both English-speaking and Mongolian-speaking readers and authors read a lot of Russian literature, they read rather different literature.

Tolstoy and Chekhov are shared between the two. Pushkin is also shared, but he seems more significant in the Mongolian canon. I guess this is because as a poet, his work is harder to translate and many more Mongolian writers than English speaking writers are fluent enough in Russian to appreciate Russian poetry.

Mongolian- and English-speaking readers both read Gogol, but it seems Mongolians read “The Inspector-General” most and English-speakers read “Dead Souls” most.

One big difference is that for English-speakers Dostoevsky is up there with Tolstoy as one of two greatest Russian novelists, while very few in Mongolia mention his work as influential.

When it comes to the “Soviet” canon, there’s no almost common ground. As I have seen it, a Soviet canon for English-speaking writers might be Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita,” Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.” That for Mongolian writers’ canon is headed by Sholokhov’s “Tikhii Don,” with Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How Steel Was Tempered.” Gorky is probably the only shared author. This has to do with politics obviously — the English-speaking canon is pretty much all “dissident literature” while the ones well-known and loved to Mongolians are not.

I’m fascinated by the topic of which authors and books of a given national literature are read by people in other countries, and this is a nice exemplification.

And while we’re on the topic of Russian literature, a thousand thanks to whoever sent me a copy of Elena Kravchenko’s The Prose of Sasha Sokolov; not only is it a book I’m excited about in general (Sokolov published three novels, all of them considered classics, in the decade 1976-1985 and then went silent except for a few essays, and those novels are difficult enough that any and all help understanding them is welcome), but I’m up to 1976 in my reading and will be getting to Школа для дураков (A School for Fools), which Nabokov called “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book,” within the next few weeks, so it’s an exceedingly timely gift!

Breck Yunits has a nice little webpage:

This is a visualization of my MacBook Air’s keyboard. It has 127 symbols spread across 78 keys. I found an approximate date for every symbol. Most of these symbols are thousands of years old. Play around or read more here. […]

You can click each symbol to see the source where I pulled an approximate year. Pull requests are accepted as some may be off by hundreds of years, but the theme should hold.

If you want an “uppercase” element (e.g., ! or @) click on the upper part of the “key.”
There’s a slider that says:

Hide Symbols Older Than: 1,500 Years | 1,000 Years | 500 Years | 100 Years | 50 Years |

I’m sure there’s debatable stuff there, but it’s fun to play with.

I’ve long been curious about the idea that certain foreign writers, wittingly or otherwise, produce novels in language that has been slanted toward easy translation into English or excessively influenced by English style, and Masatsugu Ono’s Paris Review essay from last year addresses exactly that issue with some fascinating insights into Japanese literature:

The next time I encountered those books was after I moved to Tokyo for university. I came across a large stack of them right by the entrance of one of the city’s largest bookstores. They were the two parts of Haruki Murakami’s novel Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood). I was already familiar with him as a master of short essays. My landlady had the bad (or good?) habit of reading books in the bathroom, and Murakami’s essays were among her favorites. One day, she handed me a collection she had finished. In these essays, he writes about literature and music and even cooking in such a natural way that it feels as though he’s addressing the reader personally. Something delightful and friendly in his style fascinated me (it’s a shame that those early essays of his haven’t been published in English). I couldn’t say how exactly, but I immediately felt that his style was different from other contemporary Japanese writers I had read. Probably because one of my professors (who was from Belgium) had translated it into French, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of Murakami’s novels I read. And I soon found myself reading through them all.

In 1978, Murakami went to Jingu Baseball Stadium, located near the jazz bar he ran, to watch the opening game of the season. The moment the lead-off hitter slammed the first pitch cleanly into left field, a thought struck him: I think I can write a novel. […] Murakami describes this event—even in Japanese—using the English word epiphany. Late that night, he sat down at the kitchen table and began to write. Several months later, he finished a first draft. But it disappointed him. Murakami placed his Olivetti typewriter on the table and began to write again, this time in English.

The resulting English prose was, unsurprisingly, simple and unadorned. However, as he wrote, Murakami felt a distinctive rhythm begin to take shape:

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle.

It may seem paradoxical that his mother tongue prevented him from writing. But writing in a foreign language liberated him, and he finished the beginning of his novel in English before translating it into Japanese […] The style Murakami describes as “neutral” was deemed by some critics “translationese.” When Murakami became a success in the global literary market, Kojin Karatani—one of the most influential Japanese critics—attributed this success to the “non-Japaneseness” of Murakami’s style.

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