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Back in 2008 I wrote about how Fyodor Teternikov changed his name to the aristocratic Sollogub when he became a writer, “but one of the ls was removed in an attempt (unavailing, as it turned out) to avoid confusion with Count Vladimir Sollogub.” Now that I’m reading Curzio Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, translated for NYR Books by Jenny McPhee, I’ve run across a glaring example of such confusion. On p. 28 we find:

“He is the devil,” said Madame Budyonny, wife of Marshal Budyonny, but her meaning of the word devil was not the same as Sollogub’s, the author of Wayward Devil, nor was it that of Ilyusha in The Brothers Karamozov.

Not to cavil, but there are four errors in this single sentence. Karamozov for Karamazov is presumably a typo, but whether it went wrong in the English version or already in the Italian is anybody’s guess (though of course a copyeditor should have caught it in either case). Ilyusha for Ivan Alyosha is probably Malaparte’s mental slip (he never finished the book, and some characters occur with more than one name) a foolish error in the translation [see Biscia’s comment quoting the Italian original] — the only Ilyusha in Karamazov is the little boy who bit Alyosha’s finger and whose funeral ends the book. Wayward Devil for The Petty Demon (the standard English rendering of «Мелкий бес») is bizarre, and I can only guess it’s an artifact of translation from Italian, where the title is Il demone meschino. (Incidentally, the Italian Wikipedia article on Sologub is an absurdly brief stub.) Finally, of course, the author’s name is spelled Sollogub rather than Sologub; to add insult to injury, the footnote reads:

Sollogub’s: Count Vladimir Alexandrovich Sollogub (1813–1882) was a minor Russian writer of novellas and plays who hosted a well-known literary and musical salon in St. Petersburg.

This is on a par with the errors in annotation I complained about here (Karakhan confused with Kamenev, Rostov the Great with Rostov-na-Donu), and I’d dearly love to know who to blame for it. (I’m ignoring the pointless “minor” slur.) Does anyone have access to Ballo al Kremlino? Apart from that, however, I’m greatly enjoying the book — Malaparte is a close observer and a pleasingly cynical writer.

Unrelated, but this Laudator Temporis Acti post has a joke by Aristophanes that would have been hilarious to his original audience, and links to a typically energetic and offensive Fugs song. Also, I’ll be getting my second vaccination (Moderna, if you’re curious) in a couple of hours; I’m hoping I won’t be as knocked out as some people are (*knock wood*), but if I am, there might not be a post tomorrow. You will, I am sure, consider that an acceptable tradeoff for my not getting Covid.

Mridula Nath Chakraborty of Monash University writes for The Conversation about the lately vexed issue of translation, taking off from the unfortunate situation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld feeling obliged to withdraw as translator of Amanda Gorman’s forthcoming collection because of controversies around cultural appropriation:

Usually invisible and taken-for-granted, acts of translation take place around us all the time. But in the field of literary translation, questions of authorial voice and speaking position matter. […]

The task of literary translation entails grappling with profound difference, in terms of language, imagination, context, traditions, worldviews.

None of this would enter our quotidian consciousness but for the translators who step into uncharted waters because they have fallen in love with another tongue, another world.

Her essay will be annoying to people who do not thrill to terms like “resistance,” “domination,” and “post-colonial sensitivity,” but, as Bathrobe (who sent me the link) says, some of the links are interesting: “Familiar topics like the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, the Indo-Persian translation movement, the deliberate mistranslation of the Treaty of Waitangi, to name just a couple.” And I like the conclusion:

The act and the art of translation requires the permission to transcend borders, the permission to make mistakes, and the permission to be repeated, by anyone who feels the tempestuous tug, and the clarion call, of the unfamiliar.

To rein in such liberty through categories and compartments that imprison our creativity is a disservice to the human imagination.

So let a thousand translations bloom: that would be a start and not an end to translation as we know it now.

Kevin Riordan posts at M/m about the history of that signal of modernity, the Kodak camera, with many glorious illustrations, mostly ads. The post begins:

In 1888, the George Eastman Company put the first film-roll camera on the market. The new “Kodak” put photographic practice into the hands of many amateurs and hobbyists for the first time. This camera had immediate cultural effect, shaping how people saw and recorded things—even when they didn’t have a Kodak with them. In 1890, for example, the American journalist Nellie Bly had few regrets about her record-breaking trip around the world, except that in her “hasty departure [she] forgot to take a Kodak.” Five years later, when H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller reached an astonishing future, he echoed the sentiment: “If only I had thought of a Kodak!” Despite advertising campaigns urging travelers to not forget their cameras, many didn’t learn the lesson. In Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), St. John Hirst reproaches himself in South America: “What an ass I was not to bring my Kodak!” Portable cameras and personal photography became ubiquitous, but everyone kept forgetting their Kodaks (figs. 1–2).

Fig. 2, a 1923 Parisian example, has N’oubliez pas votre “Kodak.” The whole story is worth reading, and of course don’t miss the ads, but I’m posting it mainly for the linguistic bits:

Eastman squabbled with other pioneers over terminology. When a competitor sought to patent the “combination” camera, Eastman protested that, if one could trademark “combination,” one may as well “prevent your fellow citizens from using the English language.” He realized that words, like cameras, do things, and a new photographic world required a new vocabulary. So in the 1888 patent Eastman coined “Kodak,” a peculiar word, the ks affording near-palindromic symmetry (fig. 6). Eastman believed Kodak could be easily pronounced across languages, and he particularly liked its consonants, which he called “strong and incisive . . . firm and unyielding” (cited in Brayer, George Eastman, 63). Kodak soon became not just a product name but a portable idea, an imagined accessory, and a perceptual prosthesis. In the marketing and in colloquial parlance, the name became an adjective (the “Kodak girl”), a verb (“Let the children Kodak”), and a component for other nouns (“Kodakery”) (figs. 7–8).

I just recently read the Russian equivalent in Dombrovsky’s Факультет ненужных вещей (post): “А скоро у него появился ещё фотоаппарат «кодак» и пистолет «монтекристо»” [Soon he also displayed his Kodak camera and Montecristo pistol]; the first example in the corpus is from 1901 (earlier hits are for Kodak Fortress): “В магазине фотографических принадлежностей фирмы Кодак некий Девисон похитил несколько тысяч фотографических карточек и скрылся” [A certain Davison stole several thousand photographic cards from the Kodak camera store and disappeared]. (Hat tip to Jonathan Morse for the link.)

Back in 2011 I posted about “an enjoyable and useful vocabulary test that gives you a bunch of words, asks you to check whether you know them, and extrapolates your total vocabulary size” that attracted quite a bit of interest (results here); now Ghent University has put online a similar test, introducing it thus:

In this test you get 100 letter sequences, some of which are existing English words (American spelling) and some of which are made-up nonwords. Indicate for each letter sequence whether it is a word you know or not by pressing the F or J key. […] The test takes about 4 minutes and you can repeat the test as often as you want (you will get new letter sequences each time).

If you take part, you consent to your data being used for scientific analysis of word knowledge.

Advice! Do not say yes to words you do not know, because yes-responses to nonwords are penalized heavily!

Advice! The test works best in Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

My results:

You said yes to 83% of the existing words.

You said yes to 0% of the nonwords.

This gives you a corrected score of 83% – 0% = 83%.

You are at the top level!

Theoretically, I could have done better, since I said “no” to a number of items that I thought could very well be words and turned out to be, but I didn’t want to risk yes-responses to nonwords (“penalized heavily!”), and the words were so obscure (“a rare name for the hyrax”) that I don’t feel bad about not knowing them. Enjoy! (A tip of the Languagehat hat to Trevor Joyce, who sent me the link — and who got 96% with no false positives, the bum.)

Update (Sept. 2024). The original test has vanished from the online world, but this AskMeFi question (“What happened to the U Ghent’s online vocabulary test?”) led me to the Randomized Checklist Vocabulary Size Test and Test Your Vocab. The latter wants you to know definitions and doesn’t have fake words; you stop whenever you get bored, and when I got “Right now we think you know about 210,000 words (between 84,000 and 200,000)” I figured I’d quit while I was ahead.

In the Facebook Historical Linguistics & Etymology group, Gary Rawding asks:·

Kulthum… as in Um Kulthum (ام كلثوم) ??
Wikipedia gives ‘from elephant’ but no source.
I don’t find kulthum in Lane or Wehr. Maybe it is Persian or Turkish ? Can somebody help me ?

I’ve long been familiar with Umm Kulthum and had wondered about her name, so I read the thread eagerly. After some unsourced speculation (“Kulthum means cheek in Arabic. So a woman who is an ‘um Kulthum’ is a woman with a face that has a big fleshy cheek”), Nane Limon Dada wrote:

It is unlikely that the name Kulthum would be Arabic in origin because of its rare morphological stem and because it is untraceable to any Proto-Semitic root. Another meaning to add what the respondents suggested above is “elephant”. This is suggestive to a Indo-Iranian root as the animal fauna indicates a potential geographical candidate. However, I couldn’t locate any cognate in the comprehensive dictionary of Indo-Iranian languages on University of Chicago’s webpage. We find in a work, a modern onomistics miscellany some interesting suggestions, Sijill Asma al-Arab, v.4., p. 2245. The cognate is proposed as كلتوم “kultuum” too hence invoking an idea for a historical defricitization in pre-classical-Arabic as the name goes back to one of the poets of the Pre-Islamic poetry that was listed in the Seven Hanged Poems, Amr Ibn Kulthum. If so, the transition must have been realized earlier. In the Sijill, كلتوم گلبهار (kultum gholbahar) is proposed as an attestation of its example. However the كلتوم is not analyzed, at all. This may inspire for another consideration for a compound phrase and a lexical search within the Indo-Iranian background, though. Also, it is proposed in line with zoological “elephant” association that the meaning can be cognate with a Latin root كلريوس (Cellarius?) well-known an “lizard”. [Google Books link] The feminine beauty in the Classical Arabic was represented through the natural fauna as well as flora like the premature born (lamb) Khadija etc. The selectivity of the motifs could be explained in their perception of the world consistently and in an ideal beauty given the semiotics of the meaning, that of course presupposes an intertextual reading effort. Therefore, the modern audience should avoid the modern metaphorical esthetization of femininity for its interpretation not to be misled.

I don’t have enough background to know how much sense any of that makes, and I welcome the thoughts of the assembled Hatters.

Unrelated except that it involves Egypt, Slavo/bulbul has alerted me to “Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish,” by Felix Höflmayer, Haggai Misgav, Lyndelle Webster, and Katharina Streit. Looks intriguing.

My wife was checking to see if we had a good supply of garbanzo beans when she asked me where the word was from (she knows how to keep me occupied). I thought the answer would be simple, but once you go beyond Spanish it’s a morass. Wiktionary:

From Spanish garbanzo, initially borrowed as garvance in the 17th c. and anglicized as calavance (“chickpea; any kind of bean or pulse”). The original garbanzo was re-established in the 19th c., primarily via American Spanish. The Spanish garbanzo is from Early Modern Spanish garbanços, from Old Spanish arvanço, which is of uncertain origin, presumably influenced by garroba (“carob fruit”) and galbana (“small pea; a variety of pea”), which is borrowed from Arabic جلبان‎ (“peas”). Other theories for the origin of garbanzo include the Basque compound garau (“seed”) +‎ antzu (“dry”) and the Ancient Greek ἐρέβινθος (erébinthos).

I got excited when I went to the OED and discovered that their entry was updated in June 2020, but alas, for the etymology they say “< Spanish garbanzo chickpea (see calavance n.),” and the calavance entry (with its label “Perhaps Obsolete”!) is from 1888. For what it’s worth, here’s that antique version:

Etymology: Originally garvance, caravance, < Spanish garbanzo chick-pea, according to Larramendi < Basque garbantzu, < garau seed, corn + antzu dry. (Diez says the question of derivation < Greek ἐρέβινθος chick-pea is not worth consideration; though the Portuguese form ervanço suggests connection with the Greek) Calavance appears to have come into English through some foreign language which changed r into l.

The AHD has a fresh take, bringing in the Goths:

Spanish, from Old Spanish garbanço, perhaps alteration (perhaps influenced by Old Spanish garroba, carob) of Old Spanish arvanço (compare Portuguese ervanço, chickpea), perhaps from Gothic *arwaits; akin to Dutch erwt and Old High German araweiz, pea, both from Proto-Germanic *arwait-, *arwīt-, pea, pulse, probably from the same same European substrate source as Greek erebinthos, chickpea, and Greek orobos and Latin ervum, bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), a vetch once widely cultivated in the Mediterranean region as a pulse and as fodder for livestock.]

At any rate, I like the older form calavance, and I like very much this OED citation:

1997 Church Times 14 Mar. 10/5 Chickpeas, or more excitingly, garbanzos, are one of the best pulses.

Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts write for the MIT Press Reader about a phenomenon that turns out to be not as spooky as the lede makes it seem:

On September 6, 1941, the German-occupied city of Oslo was attacked by the British Royal Air Force. The frightened citizens caught in the open frantically sought refuge from the falling bombs. One of the casualties of the air raid was a 30-year-old woman named Astrid, who was hit by shrapnel as she ran toward a shelter. She was seriously wounded on the left side of her head. Hospital staff feared she would not survive. After a few days, however, she regained consciousness and was found to have paralysis on the right side of her body. She was also unable to speak.

Over time her paralysis receded, and she gradually recovered her ability to talk. Her speech, however, had changed, and people who heard her detected a pronounced German-like accent. This was a serious problem in Norway, where the military occupation had created intense antipathy toward anything German, and her speech caused shopkeepers to refuse to assist her. Clearly she had no desire to speak as she did. Even more mysteriously, she had never lived outside Norway, nor had she interacted with foreigners.

Two years after her injury, Astrid’s strange case came to the attention of Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn. He was a professor of neurology at the University of Oslo and had a particular interest in language disorders. He was also struck by Astrid’s distinctly foreign accent and initially thought that she must be German or French.

Astrid’s case is not unique: An occurrence of what is now called foreign accent syndrome (FAS) was described as early as 1907 by Pierre Marie in France, where a Parisian had acquired an “Alsatian” accent. Over the next century, physicians and language researchers reported dozens of similar cases. As the case studies piled up in the medical journals, scholars struggled to understand what was going on. […]

[Read more…]

The Göttingen University Press (Universitätsverlag Göttingen) has published Jens Wilkens’ Handwörterbuch des Altuigurischen: Altuigurisch – Deutsch – Türkisch:

The “Hand Dictionary of Old Uyghur” is the first inventory of the entire vocabulary of Old Uyghur texts (manuscripts, block prints, inscriptions) found in the oasis cities of the ancient Silk Road (Turfan, Dunhuang and others). Also included is the rich loan vocabulary of Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian texts. With the help of the dictionary, editions of all text genres (religious, medical, astrological and divinatory texts, letters, deeds, contracts, inscriptions) can now be used for the first time without further lexicographic aids. The “Handwörterbuch des Altuigurischen” (Dictionary of Old Uyghur) is particularly suitable for university teaching in the subject of Turkology, since even complex terms and collocations are covered. Because Old Uyghur is the best attested indigenous language of Central Asia in pre-Islamic times and at the same time the first extensively documented Turkic literary language, this variant of Old Turkic is of great importance not only for Turkology and general linguistics, but also for the diverse and still fascinating cultural history of the Silk Road.

You can pay 68 euros for the hardcover (929 pages)… or you can download the pdf for free (click “Online” at the link)! I highly approve of this trend of making texts freely available, and the dictionary is very clearly laid out and easy to use (if, of course, you know German and/or Turkish). Here are a couple of entries:

abipiray < TochA *abhiprāy / < TochB abhiprāy < Skt. abhiprāya Bedeutung, Kommentar || anlam, mana, izah

abita < Chin. 䱯彌䱰 a mi tuo (Spätmittelchin. ʔa mji tha) << Skt. amita (= amitābha ~ amitāyus) n. pr. (ein Buddha) || bir Buda’nın adı (s./bk. Khotansak. armätāya-) (s./bk. Mo. abida) (→amita)

Also, I recently ran into a couple of Russian culinary words that a translator would doubtless have trouble with: затируха [zatirukha] is a kind of thin flour-and-water soup or porridge and дрочена [drochona] can be a soft pie-like dish (see the illustration) or a potato pancake (if it has potatoes, which it doesn’t always). The Wikipedia article for the latter quotes M. Syrnikov as saying «вероятно, ни одно другое древнее блюдо не было позабыто единственно из-за неблагозвучности своего названия» [probably no other ancient dish has been forgotten exclusively because of the unpleasing sound of its name] — дрочить [drochít′] is “(vulgar, slang) to jerk off, to wank, to beat off (to masturbate).”

I’m reading Valentin Kataev’s Алмазный мой венец [My diamond crown (a Pushkin quote)], one of his many novelized memoirs or autobiographical novels or what have you (it’s the fifth I’ve read so far), and I’ve gotten to a point where his Odessite friend Eduard Bagritsky says to his wife “Бенимунис” [benimunis], said to be a “Jewish oath” meaning ‘I swear.’ This didn’t ring any bells, so I googled it and found this discussion (in Russian) by Valery Smirnov, which quotes various sources with various alternative spellings like бенимунес [benimunes], бенамунес [benamunes], бенемунес [benemunes], and бенымуныс [benymunys] but doesn’t explain its origin. Anybody know?

Claudia Geib writes for Hakai about a new dictionary project:

Sitting amid the bric-a-brac of generations of seafarers before him, fisherman and museum curator John Bhaba Jeaic Ó Confhaola of Galway, Ireland, tried to describe a word to interviewer Manchán Magan. The word, in the Irish language, was for a three-bladed knife on a long pole, used by generations of Galway fishermen to harvest kelp. Ó Confhaola dredged it from his memory: a scian coirlí.

“I don’t think I’ve said that word out loud for 50 years,” he told Magan.

It was a sentiment that Magan would hear again and again along Ireland’s west coast. This is a place shaped by proximity to the ocean: nothing stands between the sea and the country’s craggy, cliff-lined shores for roughly 3,000 kilometers, leaving it open to the raw breath of the North Atlantic. Many cities and towns here have roots as fishing villages and ports, and for generations, to speak Irish in them was to speak of the sea.

A sarcastic person might be described as tá sé mar a bheadh scadán i dtóin an bharraille (like a salted herring from the bottom of a barrel). To humble a braggart was an ghaoth a bhaint as seolta duine (to take the wind out of their sails). Each community developed its own vocabulary: words for every sort of wave, every tide, and every shift in weather; for the sea’s sounds, its plants, and its creatures; and for the tools and tricks a mariner used to make a living on the ocean’s surface.

[Read more…]