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A few months ago I raved about Valentin Rasputin’s Последний срок [Borrowed Time]; his 1972 Вниз и вверх по течению [Downstream and upstream, translated as Downstream] isn’t as good, but I enjoyed reading it — it’s basically a preparatory study for his famous Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora), which came out four years later (and which I’ll be reading and reporting on before long). It describes the writer/narrator Viktor’s return by riverboat to his native village, which has been moved because the river it was on has been enlarged to create a reservoir; its message is basically the time-honored You Can’t Go Home Again, but it’s padded out with excessive descriptions of nature (these are almost irresistible to Russian writers). I probably wouldn’t post about it except that I liked this passage, which is entirely extraneous to the story but clearly something Rasputin felt strongly about (you can read the original Russian here — scroll down to “До чего было просто раньше,” near the bottom of the page); Viktor finds himself unable to read in his cabin, and reflects on how reading has changed for him since he became a writer:

How easy it was before, and how hard it is now — as if you’re perpetually on duty and can’t help seeing how a misplaced word fidgets or even thrashes around in painful convulsions, how empty, useless sentences giggle or call out in the middle of a serious conversation because they have nothing to do there, how a positive hero lies, bursts into falsehood like a nightingale, rolling around in high-sounding, respectable words as if in soapsuds just when the author thinks he ought to be uttering the truth, the truth and only the truth, how the whole book is hitting out and kicking, demanding that you read it and howling about equal rights for books, when you won’t and can’t get any benefit from that kind of reading. You see, you understand, but you can’t interfere — you can’t help it, restrain it, or shame it. It would really be better not to see or understand. The whole point is that a good book and a bad one are created from the same material, the same words — placed, however, in a different order, sounding in a different intonation, and blessed by a different finger.

But a good book, thanks to the same professional fastidiousness, is also not easy to read. When a phrase as ordinary as “she began to moan” makes you shudder from the pain of that moaning, when the name of a painted color lets you clearly distinguish its shades and smell, when you hear with your own ears the sound of an apple falling from a tree in a book and cry about the meeting of two people invented by an author’s imagination, you try to understand how all this was achieved, with what living water it was sprinkled; you go over the words again and again, following them like the steps of an endless staircase, trying to penetrate the amazing secret that makes them sound, smell, shine, and agitate. And you see everything, because in a book it’s difficult to hide anything, the whole intricate weave of words, their music, indicated note by note, the joints between phrases and pauses between thoughts — you see it all and still don’t understand a thing. Desperate, you put down the book and impotently close your eyes, hating yourself for your helplessness and mediocrity and all the rest of it.

But you can’t do without books. And of course you read, but lord, what difficult, trying, and endless work it is!

That’s eloquent, but (ironically) also somewhat bloated — compare Babel’s famous “Никакое железо не может войти в человеческое сердце так леденяще, как точка, поставленная вовремя” [No iron can pierce the pierce heart as icily as a period in just the right place]. And I note, checking the translation by Valentina Brougher and Helen Poot (in the indispensable Contemporary Russian Prose edited by Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer [Ardis, 1982]), that they have mistranslated хихикают ‘giggle’ as “hiccup”; this is not nearly so bad, however, as their later rendering of штабеля леса ‘stacks of timber’ as “neat rows of trees.” And my jaw dropped when I noticed they’d simply omitted this sentence (about a little boy standing in the water to look at an arriving ship):

Зато после некоторого раздумья он приподнял свой открывшийся всему белому свету отросточек и, направив его в сторону теплохода, стал булькать в воду.

But after some hesitation, he lifted his little appendage, which was revealed to the whole wide world, and, directing it towards the ship, began to gurgle into the water.

They’re translating for Ardis, the publisher that provided the world with editions and translations of the most daring modern Russian literature, and they can’t bring themselves to include a little boy pissing in a river!
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Balashon’s latest post, bareket and emerald, is about a connection I had forgotten:

From Hebrew (or some other cognate Semitic language, like the Akkadian barraqtu), bareket entered into Greek as smaragdos, which Latin borrowed as smaragdus, eventually becoming esmaraldus in Medieval Latin, esmeraude in French, and then “emerald” in English.

This might seem like a strange journey, particularly from bareket to smaragdos. But as this Philologos column explains (along with many other interesting linguistic details about the words we’ve discussed here and more) it’s reasonable when you look at how certain letters are exchanged in phonetic shifts.

Philologos actually promotes a different theory than what I’ve presented here. He says that the Hebrew baraket may have its origin in a Sanskrit word – marakata […]

Most of the sources I looked at, including Klein and the Online Etymology Dictionary say the Sanskrit word was borrowed from a Semitic source. (For further discussion see this page).

I say “had forgotten” because it turns out I wrote about it in 2004:

I enjoyed [Philologos’s] detailed investigation of the etymology of Yiddish shmergl ‘emery,’ which traces it back to Latin smericulum and Greek smaragdos ‘emerald’; I think the bald assertion that the latter is borrowed from Sanskrit marakata goes beyond the evidence, but this is, after all, a newspaper column, not a linguistic journal.

AHD fudges the details of the relationships with not one but two instances of “akin to”:

[Middle English emeraude, from Old French, from Medieval Latin esmeralda, esmeraldus, from Latin smaragdus, from Greek smaragdos; akin to Sanskrit marakatam, probably of Semitic origin; akin to Akkadian barraqtu and Hebrew bāreqet, a kind of gemstone (probably emerald); see brq in the Appendix of Semitic roots.]

Anybody know anything more about this tangle?

In this 700+-comment thread, which seems to have become a dumping-ground for all DNA-related commentary, Dmitry Pruss said mildly but convincingly:

An ob gripe, I don’t think that it’s the best idea to discuss “everything DNA” in this, already oversize, thread…

So I’m hereby opening this as a continuation. If you have thoughts about genomic components and Denisovan signatures, this is the place for them!

Jessica Vincent writes for Atlas Obscura about the kind of development that warms my heart:

Taller Leñateros is Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. Founded in 1975 by the Mexican-American poet Ambar Past, the workshop is dedicated to documenting and disseminating the endangered Tzotzil language, culture, and oral history. And it does so environmentally, using only recycled materials (leñateros alludes to those who get their firewood from deadwood, rather than felled trees).

The project began when Past, escaping an unhappy marriage, traveled to the rural highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. She wound up staying, and for the next 30 years lived among the indigenous women of San Cristobal’s surrounding villages. As she learned their language, she noticed that they spoke in couplets similar to those found in the Popul Vuh—the most famous and informative ancient Maya book yet discovered.

But none of these women could actually read or write Tzotzil. They used the historic, metaphor-riddled tongue in everyday conversation, but had never put their own words on paper. Inspired, Past got to work recording and translating their ancient Tzotzil poetry. Her hope was that, one day, they would publish the world’s first modern Maya book by the female indigenous community of Chiapas—and, in the process, grant us insight into both an ancient language and an ancient way of looking at the world.

Once 150 women agreed to let her record their poetry, Past bought property in San Cristobal. She set up a modest workshop there so that she and the women could collaborate. Past would transcribe and translate the recordings, and the women would produce the book using ancient Maya bookbinding techniques. […]

As Petra spoke, she turned the thick, grainy pages of Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women—the first book in over 400 years to be written, produced, and published by indigenous Mayas.

I’m guessing the “first in over 400 years” thing is an exaggeration, but still: great stuff. Thanks, Jack!

Today’s NY Times has a story about the tailors of Savile Row; my wife was reading it when she called me over and showed me this bit:

Both the tuxedo and the bowler hat were invented here, and when the suit emerged as the uniform of capitalism, the street set the gold standard for craft and durability. Its history and reputation are stellar enough that the name has found its way into at least one language. The Japanese word for “business suit” is sebiro. (Say it out loud.)

I raised my eyebrows and headed for the internet, where I found the Wiktionary entry for 背広 [sèbíró] ‘business suit’; the etymology says “Unknown, but thought to be related to English civil clothes, Savile Row, or Cheviot.” Sigh. I’ve long since stopped expecting, or even hoping, that newspapers will learn to double-check these enticing origin stories, but I still call them out when I get the chance.

Unrelated: I just learned that diathesis, which I knew only as an imposing word for grammatical voice (from Greek διάθεσις ‘disposition, arrangement’), is also a medical term meaning “a hereditary or constitutional predisposition to a group of diseases, an allergy, or other disorder.” I’m sure a great many Hatters knew that already; is it in common use?

Addendum. I just ran across a bizarre usage in the latest New Yorker; Evan Osnos is writing about the change brought by the telegraph: “By the end of the century, readers were wading through a flood of cheap errata from afar—mostly of war, crime, fires, and floods.” As far as I know, errata can mean only ‘errors in writing or printing’; can anyone think how it might have come to be used for (presumably) ‘newspaper stories’? (Insert boilerplate rant on decline of copyediting standards at major publications.)

Further Addendum. Another from the latest New Yorker: in Merve Emre’s “Tricked Out” (retitled online as Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks), she says “The word ‘gimmick’ is believed to come from ‘gimac,’ an anagram of ‘magic.’” No it fucking isn’t; OED, AHD, and M-W all concur in the judgment “Origin unknown.” The OED has a 1936 citation from Words (Nov. 12/2):

The word gimac means ‘a gadget’. It is an anagram of the word magic, and is used by magicians the same way as others use the word ‘thing-a-ma-bob’.

That’s certainly suggestive, but it’s not an etymology. Stop it with the cute word-origin stories, people! They’re all lies, lies!

…And then Emre says this:

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” from 1935, a mother distracts her imprisoned son from counting the hours to his execution by describing the “marvelous gimmicks” of her childhood.

Argh, what a mess! Invitation to a Beheading (the New Yorker quirkily insists on putting the titles of novels in quotes) is a 1959 translation of Приглашение на казнь, which was published in the Paris journal Sovremennye zapiski in 1935-36 and as a book in 1938; “marvelous gimmicks” is, of course, quoted from the translation, and the original has “удивительные уловки” [astonishing/wonderful tricks]. Emre goes on to chew on these “gimmicks” at length:

The most shocking, she explains, was a trick mirror. When “shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things” were placed in front of the mirror, it would reflect perfectly sensible forms: flowers, fields, ships, people. When confronted with a human face or hand, the mirror would reflect a jumble of broken images. As the son listens to his mother describe her gimmick, he sees her eyes spark with terror and pity, “as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of this horrible life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining.” Behind the mirror lurks something monstrous—an idea of art as device, an object whose representational powers can distort and devalue just as easily as they can estrange and enchant.

Trick mirrors are gimmicks, but they are also metaphors for how gimmicks work, eliciting both charm and suspicion.

But all of this is bullshit, because it’s based on a translation; the original passage is in Russian and has nothing to do with the word “gimmick”! That’s not some esoteric quibble, and it’s perfectly evident if you give it a moment’s thought. But of course you’d have to know that Invitation to a Beheading is a translation, and I guess we can’t assume that knowledge on the part of the magazine’s authors or editors. We live in a fallen world.

…But wait, there’s more! She goes on to say:

Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world, favors “work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more bluntly, a gimmick.”

Adorno observed no such thing! She’s quoting from Aesthetic Theory, a 1995 English translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie. I don’t have an easy way of finding out what Adorno actually wrote, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “a gimmick.” So again, Adorno is irrelevant if you want to talk about gimmicks. And surely Emre is aware Adorno didn’t write in English.

I’m reading Yuri Trifonov’s third “Moscow novel,” Долгое прощание [The Long Goodbye], and I was brought up short by this passage (“he” is Grisha Rebrov, the rather pathetic boyfriend of the actress protagonist; the action is taking place in 1952):

Потом пошел в кафе «Националь» ужинать. Угнездившись за любимым столиком у окна, он пил кофе, жевал весь вечер один остывший шницель с сухим картофельным «паем», который умели по-настоящему делать только здесь, в «Национале», и выпил раза два по рюмке коньяку: подходили знакомые и угощали.

Then he went to the National cafe to have dinner. Nestled at his favorite table by the window, he drank coffee, spent the whole evening gnawing on a cold schnitzel with dry potato “pai,” which they only knew how to make properly here at the National, and drank a couple of glasses of brandy when acquaintances came by and treated him.

I was baffled by the “potato pai“; the only пай I knew was the standard noun meaning ‘share’ (as in shareholder), which made no sense here. Of course it could be a borrowing of English pie, but that made no sense either: when I googled [картофельный пай] I got a bunch of pages like this, and you can see from that image it’s nothing like a pie — in fact, it looks like a heap of thin French fries. I asked my endlessly patient pal Alexander Anichkin; he wasn’t familiar with it, but asked a friend who said “картофельными паем называют хрустящую тонкую картофельную соломку, термин, как я понимаю, существует в России с дореволюционных времен” [it’s what they call thin crispy potato straws, a term that I believe has existed in Russia since before the Revolution]. So does anybody have any thoughts on what this pai might be?

Probably not of interest to many people, but I’m leaving the link here in case I want to find it again: Alexey Vdovin, who teaches at the School of Philology of HSE University, Moscow, wrote a two-part essay (1, 2) for the Jordan Center about a problem in Russian literary studies:
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Mark Liberman’s recent Log post reports on the remarkable Bergamasco dialect of Italian:

According to “10 scioglilingua bergamaschi (con tanto di guida all’ascolto)“, Prima Bergamo 8/162018, the standard-Italian phrase sequence

Andate a vedere le api? Sono vive le api?
Go see the bees? Are the bees alive?

come out in Bergamasco as

“Ì a èt i àe?” “I è ìe i àe?”
[…]
For another example, Standard Italian

“Voi, dove andate?” “Io vado all’uva (alla vite). E voi?” “Io vado a vino.”

corresponds to Bergamasco:

“Ù, u if?” “A ó a öa. E ù?” “A ó a ì”

You can hear the sentences spoken by using the audio clips at the Log post.

Not worth its own post but too much fun to ignore: I recently noticed the odd Russian word леи [lei] ‘leather pads on riding breeches’ and wondered where it came from; turns out it’s from French lé ‘width, strip (e.g., of cloth),’ which is from Latin latus ‘wide.’ That was unexpected.

The early 2000s were the heyday of the blog; back in those days all the cool kids were starting one, and I often had the pleasure of saying “welcome to the blogosphere!” Those days are long gone — the cool kids are, for reasons that escape your humble servant, flocking to Facebook and Twitter and whatever the latest and greatest is — but knowledge lovers with good taste are still occasionally starting blogs, and I have been alerted to the existence of a terrific one, The Fate of Books (“Notes on Book Collecting, Bibliomania, and Libricide”). It opened its doors only last month, with the post Father Marko Pohlin Warns Against Bibliomania, which opens with definitions of bibliomania and a useful history:

Wikipedia attributes the word to the physician John Ferriar, who is supposed to have coined it in 1809. This is misleading; Ferriar might have introduced the present spelling into English, but the word itself had been around for some time. It had been used in French at least since 1734 as bibliomanie, and the Oxford English Dictionary records its first usage in English, with the French spelling, in 1750. At the same time, the word was used in Latin as bibliomania already in the 18th century, so Ferriar wouldn’t even have to modify the spelling.

It goes on to discuss the Augustinian monk Marko Pohlin and his bibliography of Slovenian writings (the blog is based in Slovenia):

[…] Pohlin not only lists the numerous Slovenian authors and their books, but indeed proceeds to construct an entire library. The “bibliotheca” in the title is literal, as books are ordered not by letters but by imaginary bookcases, with the first one named Alphitheca, followed by Bethitheca and so on, with the Quitheca and Ypsilontheca unfortunately remaining empty due to lack of Q- and Y-initialled writers. It is hard for a collector to leaf through the pages and not fantasize about assembling the collection in reality.

And he quotes Pohlin’s warnings against the disease of bibliomania: “He goes on to chafe at collectors who prioritize rarity over content and who praise curious old volumes that nobody would ever want to actually read. […] For Pohlin, the verdict is clear: a library where most books are seldom or never used is a worthless library.” He then writes:

Now that I’ve summed them up, how do I answer the good father’s warnings? With my enthusiasm for old and rare editions, uncut and signed copies, and curious works that have been forgotten by history, I appear almost a spitting image of Pohlin’s undesirable bibliomaniac. To this reproach, I suggest two answers. First, Pohlin lived at the dawn of the great age of paper, and in his day, books were still fairly expensive commodities. As a consequence, amassing books and not reading them felt uncharitable, equivalent to taking education from those who need it and hoarding it away. In the meantime, however, the world has been flooded with books. Nowadays there are more than enough books in existence for everyone to own a large and quality library, and since fewer and fewer people desire one, warehouses of second-hand sellers tend to be filled to the brim and tons of books end up recycled daily. In such a world, owning more books than one can hope to read feels like a venial sin at worst.

Hear, hear! And his latest post, Miran Ivan Knez, the Bukvarna, and the Quest to Ban Destruction of Books, is so well written and so fascinating I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just urge you to read it, and when you think you’ve reached the end, scroll past the bibliography (yes, he includes bibliographies) to find a mystery solved in a splendid little footnote. May this new resident of the blogosphere live long and prosper!

Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands, by Alexander Watson (Basic Books, 2020), and a couple of them have passages of obvious LH relevance. From Habsburg Landsturm: Alien Officers and ‘Army Slavic’:

The regional divide between III/Landsturm Infantry Regiment 18’s officers and other ranks raised practical problems of language. All the battalion’s officers, with the exception of the two from Galicia, had as their mother tongue Czech or German. Their men, by contrast, spoke Polish or Ukrainian. Occasionally, one came across a Yiddish-speaking Jew. Theoretically, this posed no great difficulty, for the Habsburg army had long experience of managing polyglot units. The army recognized three different types of languages. The “language of service,” which was German in most of the army, and Hungarian in Honvéd and Hungarian Landsturm units, was used for all communication above the company level. (The Magyar term for Landsturm was Népfelkelő.) More important for interaction between the officers and the men was the “language of command,” which was a list of eighty basic military words and phrases in either German or Hungarian, such as “March!,” “At Ease!,” and “Fire!” To cultivate deeper relations between ranks, all units also had one or more “regimental languages.” Any tongue spoken by at least one-fifth of the regiment’s personnel was so designated, and officers were obligated to learn every one of them in order to engage with their subordinates, bond with them, and exert influence over them.

In III/Landsturm Infantry Regiment 18, as in most wartime formations, such intricate arrangements were pipe dreams. For officers, a decent grasp of the German language was essential, as it was the medium for communication with the various levels of the Fortress Command and with other units. Within the battalion’s mess, German was also widely spoken, although, to annoy Major Zipser, the Czech officers made a special point of speaking their mother tongue to each other. Communication with the men was, kindly put, a challenge. Some officers may have gotten by with “Army Slavic,” a most peculiar military Esperanto blending Slavic grammar with German military terminology. Thus, for example, the battalion’s Poles could be ordered to antretować (from the German antreten—to form up) on parade, and would then narugować (nachrücken—to move up) to the front, before forming a szwarmlinia (Schwarmlinie—firing line). Others who spoke only German relied on the battalion’s few Jews to act as intermediaries. Still, even with goodwill, careful listening, and much imagination on all sides, frontline command of Landsturm troops was difficult.

And from Multiethnic Przemyśl in 1914:
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I’ve made several posts about the manuscripts and libraries of Timbuktu (put “Timbuktu” into the search box to find them), but I found some details in this story particularly interesting:

Just about 250,000 old manuscripts from the libraries of Timbuktu still survive in present-day Ethiopia. Also, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages were dug out at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim. Thousands of more old manuscripts have equally survived in the West African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez.

Upon the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering, some one million manuscripts have since survived from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean. National Geographic even estimates that 700,000 manuscripts have survived in the city of Timbuktu alone.

Ethiopia — that’s quite a journey! If I ever knew about Makuria (Greek Μακουρια, Arabic al-Muqurra), I’d forgotten. And how was “Chinguetti” derived from the Arabic name شنقيط‎ Šinqīṭ? (Thanks, Trevor!)