languagehat.com

For those of you who are interested in the progress of my Russian reading (surely there are at least two of you), I thought I’d provide a brief account of recent activity. After Rasputin’s Живи и помни (Live and Remember; see this post), I read Sinyavsky/Tertz’s Прогулки с Пушкиным [Strolls with Pushkin], which portrays Pushkin as a quintessential outsider and as not taking anything very seriously except poetry; it was very controversial in exile community because they, like all Russians, took Pushkin very very seriously, but it’s a lot of fun and shows real insight. Then I read Georgi Vladimov’s Верный Руслан [Faithful Ruslan], in which Ruslan, deprived of his position as a guard dog when a Gulag camp is closed, finds new purpose in guarding a released prisoner in a nearby town and waiting for the camp to reopen; it’s brilliant and harrowing and deserves its fame and popularity. Then I read Trifonov’s Другая жизнь [Another Life], one of his complex morality tales of late-Soviet Moscow life which I’m still digesting. At that point I thought I’d retreat to Chekhov and finish his major stories; I read В овраге [In the Ravine] (very, very grim), Архиерей [The Bishop] (Bishop Pyotr remembers the past fondly but is tired of his wretched flock and wishes he could go abroad again), and Невеста [The Fiancée, also tr. Betrothed] (Nadya is supposed to marry the rich Andrei, but her dying friend Sasha urges her to “turn her life upside down” and she runs off to Petersburg to live freely), and while I was impressed by them all and glad I’d read them, I was also glad to shake the dust of the 19th century off my feet. I read Bunin’s 1914 Братья [Brothers] (set in Ceylon: a Colombo rickshaw driver despairs, and the Englishman he’s been driving around flees the island on a Russian ship) just to get back to Bunin, then returned to more recent times with Andrei Bitov’s series of autobiographical stories known (in one collection at least) as Улетающий Монахов [Monakhov flying away]. They’re in Bitov’s annoying pseudo-Salinger vein, with a young male protagonist ignoring his duties and his loving and concerned mother to moon after an older woman who keeps him dangling, but I enjoy his style anyway; the second story, Сад [The garden], happens to be set at the end of the year and have sections titled “December 29,” “December 30,” “December 31,” and “January 1,” so I’m reading them on the titular days.

For those interested in recent Russian literature, I present 100 главных русских книг XXI века [100 important Russian books of the 21st century]; needless to say, it’s as fallible as all such lists (it’s got outright errors, like saying Alexander Kabakov’s Всё поправимо came out in 2008 rather than 2004 and calling Senchin’s 2009 novel “Ёлтышевы” rather than Елтышевы, and strange omissions — nothing, for instance, by Lena Eltang, Leonid Girshovich, or Oleg Zaionchkovsky, all of whom are excellent writers who will be read after some of the politico-sociological analyses and printed-up Facebook posts listed are forgotten), but hey, half the fun of such lists is arguing with them, and I learned about some interesting books.

Meanwhile, my wife and I have finished Daniel Deronda (and watched the excellent BBC series based on it) and are reading Tessa Hadley’s Accidents in the Home (not as good as her later novels but still enjoyable reading); I am also (because I’m always reading half a dozen books at once) reading Lena Eltang’s Другие барабаны [Different drums (which refers to the Russian version of the famous Emerson quote about marching to the beat of a different drummer)], which is a lot of fun and just the kind of multicultural mix I enjoy: the protagonist has the Greek name Kostas Kairis but is from the ex-Soviet Union (he has youthful memories of Vilnius and Tartu) and is living in Lisbon, and there are all sorts of references to world culture. In fact, I’ll take the occasion to see if anyone can help me with a reference: at one point the narrator says “Гоpe душило меня, прочел я у Байрона несколько лет спустя, хотя страсть меня еще не терзала” [Grief suffocated me, I read in Byron some years later, though passion did not yet torment me], and I have had no luck finding Byron’s original English.

And with that, I wish you all the very best of new years (it’s got to be better than 2020, surely…)!

Stan Carey, of Sentence first, has a piece in the Irish Times, ‘Wasn’t it herself told me?’: Which bit of Ireland would that phrase be from? (abridged from the text published in The Stinging Fly, winter 2020-21), that’s an excellent roundup of the distinctive features of Irish English:

In Eilís Dillon’s novel The Bitter Glass, set in west Co Galway during the Irish Civil War, there is a line of dialogue that is quietly extraordinary in showing some of the turns the English language has taken in Ireland: “Wasn’t it herself told me ye were coming today . . .”

Few Irish people would bat an eyelid at this – or pause to deconstruct it, such is the story’s momentum. And it borders on cryptic for readers uninitiated in Irish English dialect; certainly its nuances and cadences are likely to be lost en route. So humour me while I marvel at some of its features.

1. Herself as an unbound reflexive pronoun […] 2. Clefting for topicalisation […] 3. Ye as second person plural […] 4. Subject contact clause. The relative pronoun (who or that) that we expect before told me is dropped, strengthening the colloquial effect. […]

Any local dialect on the island will have properties that mark it as Irish English, though their frequency and proportion will vary from one place or speaker to the next.

So it is with Galway. Its dialects are close to those spoken anywhere west of the Shannon, where Irish lingered longer and had more effect on the English that largely, and violently, supplanted it. But the county’s size and topographical range mean there are considerable differences in local speech as we travel from the towns and farmlands of the east – virtually the midlands – through the city and westward to Connemara and the islands, where in many households Irish prevails. […]

Irish is the source, for example, of the after-perfect, which uses after to form the perfect tense, usually in reporting something recent and of high informational value – hence its other name, the hot news perfect. Since Irish lacks a verb for have, a literal translation of the perfect tense (“I have eaten”) was not possible, so we transposed Irish phrases like tar éis and i ndiaidh to form “I’m after eating”. […]

What we did with habitual aspect is equally striking. The distinction between tá mé, “I am”, and bíonn mé, “I (habitually) am”, was so integral to native expression that our ancestors remoulded English multiple times to retain it, perhaps helped by convergence with Scots and English dialects. There is do be (“The people do be full of stories of all the cures she did” – Lady Gregory), do by itself (“I’m not so old as you do hear them say” – JM Synge), and the northern be’s (“But sure plenty dogs be’s that way” – Robert Bernen). Quintessentially Irish structures, but you’ll also hear them in Newfoundland, an imprint of emigration.

There’s much more at the link. Thanks, Trevor!

Chuck Smith at The Esperanto Language Blog presents 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole!; it begins:

Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist. Would you then believe that I’ve found a third generation native Esperanto speaker?! Nicole Klünder’s great-grandfather learned Esperanto, taught it natively to his kids, who taught it natively to his kids, who taught it natively to Nicole… awesome! It seems that it’s now becoming a tradition in this blog to interview another native Esperanto speaker every year. Last year, I interviewed an Esperanto DJ: DJ Leo Sakaguchi. The year before was second generation native speaker Rolf Fantom. Anyway, without further ado, let’s see what Nicole has to say! (She answered my questions in Esperanto, so you will find my translation in italics under his answers.)

How did you come to be a third generation native Esperanto speaker?

Mi naskiĝis tielmaniere. Miaj gepatroj instruis ĝin denaske al mi, kaj mia patro estis ankaŭ denaska. Parte certe ankaŭ estis kialo ke miaj gepatroj renkontiĝis per Esperanto, ekzemple mia patrino estis Polino.

I was born that way. My parents taught me it growing up, and my father was also a native speaker. This was certainly also partly since my parents met through Esperanto, for example my mother was Polish.

How did your great-grandfather first learn Esperanto and why? When was that?

Laŭ mia scio, li lernis la lingvon en 1908 por pli bone scii kaj klarigi kial ĝi malbonas. Evidentiĝis, ke ĝi fakte plaĉegis al li.

As far as I know, he learned the language in 1908 to better know and explain why it’s bad. Later, he realized that he actually really liked it.

For those who don’t care about Esperanto or find that piece a bit lightweight, I’ll add a link that has nothing, strictly speaking, to do with LH but which I find extremely interesting, A hydromorphic reevaluation of the forgotten river civilizations of Central Asia, by Willem H. J. Toonen, Mark G. Macklin, Giles Dawkes, Julie A. Durcan, Max Leman, Yevgeniy Nikolayev, and Alexandr Yegorov (PNAS, December 14, 2020):

Our paper challenges the long-held view that the fall of Central Asia’s river civilizations was determined by warfare and the destruction of irrigation infrastructure during the Mongol invasion. An integration of radiometric dating of long-term river dynamics in the region with irrigation canal abandonment shows that periods of cultural decline correlate with drier conditions during multicentennial length periods when the North Atlantic Oscillation had mostly positive index values. There is no evidence that large-scale destruction of irrigation systems occurred during the Arab or Mongol invasion specifically. A more nuanced interpretation identifies chronic environmental challenges to floodwater farming over the last two millennia, punctuated by multicentennial-length periods with favorable hydromorphic and hydroclimatological conditions that enabled irrigation agriculturists to flourish.

I’ve been yammering to people about the destruction of irrigation infrastructure for decades now; I guess I should mail out retractions…

Stu Clayton sent me Margalit Fox’s NY Times obituary of a remarkable Latinist; it begins:

Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. His death was confirmed by the Vatican. He had tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks ago, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

A Roman Catholic priest who was considered the foremost Latinist in Rome and, quite possibly, the world, Father Foster was attached to the Office of Latin Letters of the Vatican Secretariat of State from 1969 until his retirement in 2009. By virtue of his longevity and his almost preternatural facility with the language, he was by the end of his tenure the de facto head of that office, which comprises a team of half a dozen translators.

If, having read this far, you are expecting a monastic ascetic, you will be blissfully disappointed. Father Foster was indeed a monk — a member of the Discalced Carmelite order — but he was a monk who looked like a stevedore, dressed like a janitor, swore like a sailor (usually in Latin) and spoke Latin with the riverine fluency of a Roman orator.

He served four popes — Paul VI, John Paul I and II, and Benedict XVI — composing original documents in Latin, which remains the Vatican’s official language, and translating their speeches and other writings into Latin from a series of papal languages. (He was also fluent in Italian, German and Greek.)

As you can see, the obit itself is pleasingly written; a couple more samples:
[Read more…]

Anatoly Vorobey sent me a link to his Russian-language Avva post and his Stack Exchange post on the same question; I quote the latter:

A recent tweet from Senator Chuck Schumer (quoted for linguistic purposes only) says

Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need

In this sentence, “needs” seems to be used in the sense of obligation or necessity and not personal need; Schumer is not saying that Trump’s interests require that he sign the bill, he’s saying that this is something necessary to do, that Trump should do it.

My question is: is this a relatively new meaning of the transitive verb “to need”? I seem to perceive it as recent and markedly conversational; is this intuition correct? (I’m not a native speaker).

For example, imagine a policeman saying to someone who’s agitating and panicking: “Sir, you need to calm down NOW”. This feels to me like a phrase that could be said within the last 30-40 years, say, but not in 1920.

I’m aware that “need” as a modal verb carries the meaning of impersonal obligation (“you need not do X”), but I’m asking specifically about the transitive verb.

To provide partial support, I see that the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition (1994) defines the transitive sense of “need” only as “To have need of; require”, whereas the current online AHD, 5th edition adds a meaning “2. To have an obligation (to do something): You need to clean up your room.”, which pinpoints exactly the meaning I’m referring to. Is this an omission in the 1994 edition or a real indication that this meaning is relatively new?

He found the answers there unhelpful; I said “I agree with you that it feels recent, maybe in the last few decades, but of course introspection isn’t worth much in these matters.” So I’m posting it here in hopes that the Varied Reader can provide enlightenment.

Daniel Starza Smith writes for OUPBlog:

The Melford Hall Manuscript is a large, expensively bound manuscript volume containing previously unknown witnesses of nearly 140 poems by John Donne (1572-1631), one of the most outstandingly significant poets and preachers of the early modern period. Discovered by Gabriel Heaton of Sotheby’s during a routine survey of Melford Hall in Suffolk, and restored by sale by the prestigious Brockman binders, it sold in 2018 for £475,000 (£387,500 plus auctioneer’s premium). After a high-profile sale at auction, the UK government intervened to keep the manuscript in the country, in recognition of its enormous importance to the UK’s cultural history. In December 2020, the British Library announced that the volume now resides with them, shelfmarked as Egerton MS 3884. While it is being prepared for use by readers in 2021, it has in the meantime been published online here. What can this manuscript tell us about this prolific and brilliant writer and the literary and textual worlds in which he lived?

Donne’s daring and groundbreaking poetry was printed posthumously as Poems, by J. D. in 1633 (then again in 1635 and five other seventeenth-century printings), but many of its earliest readers would have encountered him in handwritten, privately circulated scribal copies. Donne was the most transcribed literary author of his day, and a true publishing phenomenon of the manuscript medium. […] The Melford MS is the second-largest known collection of Donne’s verse in manuscript, and its discovery calls for a major reconsideration of his early readership and reputation. Studying an artifact like Melford can tell us a huge amount about who Donne’s earliest “fans” were, which of Donne’s writings were available to them, and how they accessed, read, stored, shared, and valued it.

It’s an exciting time to be working on Donne’s texts and early readers. Just last year another manuscript was discovered at Westminster Abbey by Matthew Payne, the Abbey’s Keeper of the Muniments. Where Melford is a large bound volume of poetry, the Westminster Abbey MS was a small booklet containing an unusual prose satire. It’s likely that other texts remain to be found, so it’s important that we know as much as we can about this influential figure and his milieu.

It’s fascinating to me that important texts by one of the most famous English poets are still being discovered, and of course it still amazes me that such things are available to all almost instantly via the magic of the internet.

I’m about halfway through True Grit (see this post), which is even better than Norwood (David Eddyshaw will love the passage on Election), and I ran into this description of food for the trail:

Here is what he brought along for “grub”: a sack of salt and a sack of red pepper and a sack of taffy — all this in his jacket pockets — and then some ground coffee beans and a big slab of salt pork and one hundred and seventy corn dodgers. I could scarcely credit it. The “corn dodgers” were balls of what I would call hot-water cornbread.

I had never run across the term, though if you google it it’s clearly still widespread and there are lots of recipes online (e.g.); I like cornbread in any form, but what leads me to post is the “dodgers” part. There’s nothing useful in the OED, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang is currently unavailable (“The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.”); anybody have any ideas?

I also note that Mattie, the book’s narrator, refers to the “M. K. & T. Railroad,” which turns out to be the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railway, better known as “the Katy”; I well remember thegrowlingwolf reminiscing about it from his Texas days.

Also, incoming Christmas items of interest: the Songdog family gave me Jonathan Waterlow’s It’s Only A Joke, Comrade!: Humour, Trust and Everyday Life under Stalin (1928-1941), which looks wonderful, and bulbul gave me A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel and has gotten rave reviews — I can’t wait to dig in. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

Luke Fater writes for Atlas Obscura about an unexpected lexical goldmine:

British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. Orphaned in his late teens, Dampier set sail for the Caribbean and fell into a twentysomething job scramble. Seeing no future in logging or sugar plantations, he was sucked into the burgeoning realm of New World raiding, beginning what would be the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations. A prolific diarist, Dampier kept a journal wrapped in a wax-sealed bamboo tube throughout his journeys. During a year-long prison sentence in Spain in 1694, Dampier would convert these notes into a novel that became a bestseller and seminal travelogue.

Parts of A New Voyage Around the World read like a 17th-century episode of No Reservations, with Dampier playing a high-stakes version of Anthony Bourdain. Aside from writing groundbreaking observations on previously un-researched subjects in meteorology, maritime navigation, and zoology, food was a constant throughout his work. […]

While you won’t find flamingos, penguins, or turtles on too many contemporary menus, several contributions from A New Voyage reshaped our modern English food vocabulary. In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavor, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind. […]

In the years following its publication, A New Voyage became an international bestseller, skyrocketing Dampier to wealth and fame. The first of its kind, the work generated a hunger among European audiences for travel writing, serving as an inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Charles Darwin brought a copy of A New Voyage with him aboard the Beagle’s voyage to South America, having cited the book as a “mine of information.” Noting his keen eye for wind and current mapping, the British Royal Navy consulted him on best practices, later extending him captainship of the HMS Roebuck, on which he was commissioned for an in-depth exploration of South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia.

Alas, his name became mud (“For generations, Dampier was taught throughout much of the Commonwealth as, first and only, a piratical figure.[…] Disgraced and indebted by court fines, Dampier died penniless”), but he led an interesting life and provided us with some delicious words. Thanks, Trevor!

Cade Metz wrote for the NY Times last month about a problem that’s been in the news lately:

Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk. But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. […]

On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, while researching a book on artificial intelligence, the computer scientist Robert Munro fed 100 English words into BERT: “jewelry,” “baby,” “horses,” “house,” “money,” “action.” In 99 cases out of 100, BERT was more likely to associate the words with men rather than women. The word “mom” was the outlier. […]

In a blog post this week, Dr. Munro also describes how he examined cloud-computing services from Google and Amazon Web Services that help other businesses add language skills into new applications. Both services failed to recognize the word “hers” as a pronoun, though they correctly identified “his.” […]

Researchers are only beginning to understand the effects of bias in systems like BERT. But as Dr. Munro showed, companies are already slow to notice even obvious bias in their systems. After Dr. Munro pointed out the problem, Amazon corrected it. Google said it was working to fix the issue.

Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the link, wrote:

AI models isn’t a typical matter of experience at LH but I need some grasp of the issues in the famous paper which led to the Google researcher firing, beyond the very basic explanations [in the Times story]. Maybe we can put the recent findings on the language model flaws to a discussion, and perhaps even learn something new / positive from it??

So: any thoughts?

My wife is making Norwegian meatballs today, as she does around this time every year, and as I walked through the kitchen my eye fell on a container of mace. “Hmm,” thought I, “where does that word come from?” So I went to the OED (entry updated March 2000) and found this:

Etymology: < Old French macis (although only attested slightly later than in Middle English) or its etymon post-classical Latin macis aril surrounding the nutmeg (12th cent.). The form macis was taken as a plural in Middle English and a new singular mace was formed from it.
Compare Old Occitan macis (14th cent.), Italian macis, †mace (14th cent.), Spanish macis (1525), Portuguese macis (14th cent.). It is uncertain whether there is any connection with classical Latin macir resin of an Indian tree (Pliny), Hellenistic Greek μάκιρ. There is no probable connection with classical Latin maccis, the name of an imaginary spice in Plautus.

So mace is from a singular reanalyzed as plural, like pea. Who knew?

If you’re wondering about aril (“aril surrounding the nutmeg”), it’s (OED again) “< modern Latin arillus (also in use; compare modern French arille), < medieval Latin arilli, Spanish arillos, raisins.” And mace reminds me of John Collier’s unforgettable short story “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It”; it’s the first story in this collection, if you want to experience it.