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I finally, on a whim, read one of the most famous ghost stories in English, M. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad,” and was surprised to find two words new to me in the first few paragraphs:

‘I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James’s College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

‘Yes,’ he said; ‘my friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast—in point of fact to Burnstow—(I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow.’

‘Oh, Parkins,’ said his neighbour on the other side, ‘if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer.’

A preceptory is (per the OED, revised 2007) “A subordinate community of the Knights Templars; the provincial estate or manor supporting such a community; the buildings in which such a community was housed”; it’s from post-classical Latin praeceptoria, perhaps short for praeceptoria domus ‘preceptory house.’ And ontography, to my astonishment (I just assumed James had made the word up to provide an amusing fake scholarly specialty), is “A description of, or the branch of knowledge which deals with, the human response to the natural environment”; it is first attested in 1902, just two years before the story was published, and doesn’t seem to have been much used (“Chiefly with reference to the work of W. M. Davies”). The expresson “full term” was also new to me; it means “The full period of a term or session of a court, or the main part of a university term during which lectures are given (esp. with reference to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge)” (1886 Oxf. Univ. Cal. 51 “Full Term begins on the Sunday after the first Congregation, that is on the Sunday after the first day of Term”). And the story’s “Burnstow” represents the seaside town of Felixstowe, whose Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club “is amongst the oldest in the UK.” (Mild spoiler for the story below the cut.)
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As I said back in 2013, if you’re going to write an error-riddled book on Middle Eastern history, Robert Irwin is the last person you want reviewing it; Brian A. Catlos’s Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain doesn’t sound like a bad book in general, but Irwin has to school him on some literary history in his review (NYRB, March 21, 2019):

As the caliphate fell apart, what was left of Muslim Spain was divided among overlords who were known collectively as taifa kings, or party kings. Even in their own time they did not enjoy a good reputation. According to one contemporary poet, they were “like pussycats, who puffing themselves up, / Imagine they can roar like lions.” Catlos’s no less damning verdict is that the kings were “strongmen who were not even strong.” Yet the eleventh and twelfth centuries were a great age for philosophy, theology, and literature, and the political and military decline of the taifa principalities did not entail a cultural decline. Catlos’s account of Andalusian literary culture in this period is brisk and less surefooted than his coverage of politics and society. About the increasing influence of Arabic literature on the development of European literature from the thirteenth century onward, he writes:

Now Arabo-Islamic epics, romances and folktales—many of South Asian or Persian origin—were translated, adapted, or otherwise made their way into popular literature. These included the Kalila wa-dimna, a collection of fables; Sindibad, or Sendebar, the tales of Sinbad the Sailor; the epic of Alexander the Great; and tales from The Thousand and One Nights. Popular and didactic literature of the era, such as Ramon Llull’s Book of the Beasts (1280s) and The Tales of Count Lucanor, written in 1335 by Don Juan Manuel, a nephew of Alfonso X, were strongly influenced by these texts. In fact, Arabic literature transformed European fiction, both through the borrowing of narratives and through the appropriation of the literary device of the maqamat, or frame tale, the story-within-a-story—the same device used by Boccaccio in his Decameron and by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.

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A LIGHT BREATHER

The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs,
Still wet from its bud-sheath,
Slowly unfolding,
Turning in the light with its tendrils;
Plays as a minnow plays,
Tethered to a limp weed, swinging,
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A music in a hood,
A small thing,
Singing.

Theodore Roethke, from The Waking (1953; first in The Kenyon Review, Summer 1950).

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, Ancient Indo-European Grammars:

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

They’ve got Old Albanian, Classical Armenian, Avestan, Gothic… Check it out!

This is actually based on the Kaverin novel I posted about yesterday, but that post was long enough already, so I figured I’d let this stand on its own. At one point Liza is having coffee in the Rotonde with her husband Georgii and Kostya, the love of her life, who’s visiting from Russia; she and Kostya have a few precious moments alone when Georgii wanders off too far to hear, and they have the following exchange (Kostya speaks first):

— Он не умеет читать по губам?
— Нет. Кроме того, для нас с тобой угол падения не равен углу отражения.

“He doesn’t know how to read lips?”
“No. Besides, for us the angle of incidence isn’t equal to the angle of reflection.”

The line about the angles is repeated twice more in the course of the novel, so it’s not merely a passing remark (and it occurs to me that it’s probably not irrelevant to the titular mirror). It may seem a bit random to the reader unfamiliar with its antecedents, but it is part of a tradition — a meme, as we say nowadays — in Russian literature. The immediate source is Marina Tsvetaeva’s long essay on the painter Natalia Goncharova (both she and especially Tsvetaeva are characters in the novel); she writes that the world is reflected косвенно (‘indirectly, obliquely’) in Goncharova’s paintings, and continues:

То, что я как-то сказала о поэте, можно сказать о каждом творчестве: угол падения не равен углу отражения.

What I once said about a poet could be said about all creative work: the angle of incidence is not equal to the angle of reflection.

This, of course, is a poetic contradiction of the Law of Reflection (“the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection”; for detailed explanations, see this Stack Exchange thread), but why does she bring it up? Because it was in one of the most important Russian works about painting, Merezhkovsky’s Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи (Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci; see this LH post) — describing Leonardo’s ability to discuss frightful subjects calmly and dispassionately, Merezhkovsky writes:

Говоря о мертвых телах, которые сталкиваются в водоворотах, прибавил: «изображая эти удары и столкновения, не забывай закона механики, по которому угол падения равен углу отражения».

Speaking about dead bodies colliding in whirlpools, he added: “in depicting these blows and collisions, do not forget the mechanical law according to which the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.”

Again, this is repeated several times; for example, when Leonardo realizes that waves in water, sound waves, and light all obey the same laws, he exclaims:

«Единая воля и справедливость Твоя, Первый Двигатель: угол падения равен углу отражения!»

“Thy will and justice are one and indivisible, First Mover: the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection!”

(You can see the other occurrences at this National Corpus page.) But two decades earlier, Turgenev had used it in a very different way in one of his poems in prose, Истина и Правда [Scientific truth and real truth], where one person says scientific truth is vitally important and the other mocks him, asking if he can imagine someone running into a gathering and saying excitedly:

«Друзья мои, послушайте, что я узнал, какую истину! Угол падения равен углу отражения! Или вот еще: между двумя точками самый краткий путь — прямая линия!»

“Friends, listen to what I’ve just found out, what truth! The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection! Or this: the shortest path between two points is a straight line!”

Here it represents the height of banality, on the level of 2 × 2 = 4 (which of course has its own Russian literary history). Why did this law of physics become a meme in Russian and not in English? I speculate because the Russian words are normal, everyday words: падение, translated in this context as “incidence,” is the normal word for ‘fall(ing)’ (both physical and in the Fall of Man), so the law sounds like a popular saying.

Veniamin Kaverin is well known to Russians but largely unfamiliar to the English-speaking world; he started out writing adventure novels but devoted himself more and more to the art of literature (and the art of remaining a decent person — he bravely stood up for Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky when they were being persecuted). I had never read anything by him, and my ignorance might have continued unabated for years; his most famous novel is The Two Captains, but I don’t have much interest in adventure novels these days. However, when I got up to 1971 in my reading project I saw he’d published a novel called Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror] in that year which he himself thought contained his best prose, so I thought I might as well give it a shot. I finished it today, and I’m still trying to come back to my own reality; it’s one of those novels that grips you until you fully inhabit it. It was also quite a wild reading experience.

To tell the truth, I almost gave up on it early. It’s an epistolary novel, consisting mainly of letters from Liza Turaeva to Kostya Karnovsky, and the first few, dating from 1910-13, were not especially gripping — typical teenage-girl letters full of self-deprecation, exalted feelings, and intricate analysis of emotions. I admired the realism but wasn’t confident it was going anywhere interesting. I persevered, however, and got to a passage by an omniscient narrator about Kostya’s life in Kazan (I greatly enjoyed the detailed portrait of Kazan; see my 2013 complaint about the lack of such things in Russian literature) which added useful perspective, and once Liza got involved in painting, the novel took off. It has one of the most convincing portrayals of an artist’s development and way of looking at the world I’ve ever read, and the more she struggled to focus on her art and keep the practicalities of life from interfering with it, the more I rooted for her. It was somewhat reminiscent of Merezhkovsky’s novel about Leonardo (which is quoted at one point), except that we know Leonardo, whatever difficulties he encountered, got lucrative commissions and became a Great Artist, which of course is easier if you’re male, whereas there’s no guessing whether Liza is going to succeed or fail. I was a little dubious about the idea of a passionate, all-consuming love lasting for many years after the lovers have parted — it seemed more like something out of the troubadours, or Alexander Grin’s féerie Алые паруса (Scarlet Sails), than real life — but it worked in the novel, and that’s what mattered.
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Jean-Luc Fournet’s The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity looks like a very interesting book, but I’ll probably never read it (it’s expensive, and Coptic is far from the center of my interests); fortunately, Amazon allows me to see the start, and I’ll quote some of it here in case anybody is intrigued or has something to say on the topic:

It is a particular aspect of the relations between Egyptian and Greek that I would like to examine here: the way in which the Egyptian language, in the new form that it took on during Late Antiquity in Christian milieus, namely that of Coptic, developed and attempted to undermine the monopoly that the Greek language had held for centuries as the official language. What I will analyze, then, is a very specific domain of written culture. […]

I will focus in this book on documentary sources and, more specifically, on those produced within a context regulated by the law and the state […], which in Egypt had long been subject to the monopoly of Greek, namely legal texts that the ancients called dikaiōmata, as well as texts pertaining to the judicial and administrative domain. Our task will be to establish the chronology and mechanisms whereby Egyptian came to enter the domain of regulated writing, thus acquiring an official dimension and becoming an actor in public written culture, to the detriment of the monopoly that Greek had acquired for itself. […]

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In the Russian novel I’m reading, there’s a reminiscence of a squalid house in Kazan (around the time of the First World War) in which part of the description is “на окне в столовой стоял пенэкспеллер” [on the dining room window stood penexpeller]. The last word was obviously not Russian, and it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, but Google came to my aid (how did people figure these things out before the internet?) — it’s Pain Expeller, a nostrum from the late 19th and early 20th century. You can read about Friedrich Adolf Richter’s here (“By 1907, analytical pharmacists had determined that nondoctor Richter had created his Anchor Pain Expeller by ‘doctoring’ chili, black, and Guinea peppers with galangal root, astringent rhatany, and the oils of thyme, clove, rosemary, and lavender”; we discussed galangal back in 2005) and see a very classy-looking example of Loxol Pain-Expeller here. It’s interesting that it was known in Russia under that name, which must have sounded impressive.

In this 26-minute video clip, linguist Henry Lee Smith (it’s a shame there’s no Wikipedia article for him) demonstrates, with the help of a panel of people from different parts of the country (I particularly liked one guy’s old-fashioned Brooklyn accent), how American speech differs geographically. I learned the phrase “light bread” for what I (and everybody I know, and everyone on the panel) call simply “bread”; does anybody still say that? And I learned there’s an any/many/penny group in which many southerners use /ɪ/ for all three — I have it only in the first two (being only half a southerner). At 2:40 Smith is a bit confusing about merry/marry/Mary — he says “because we spell these words the same way we get the idea we ought to pronounce them the same way,” and my first reaction was “they’re spelled three different ways!” until I figured out that he meant we all spell each word the same, and don’t vary it according to how we say it. At any rate, it’s a lot of fun, if this is the kind of thing you consider fun. Thanks, Nick!

Addendum (Mar. 2024). Mark Liberman posted about Smith in 2022, providing a bunch of links and complaining that he “has no Wikipedia page, despite a notable career in science, public service, and the media.” (There still isn’t one.) In the comment thread, Sally Thomason said:

His friends called him Haxie. I recently read a letter from an older linguist who said that Haxie Smith helped support George Trager, in the sense of helping Trager have some kind of academic career. Apparently Trager was a sufficiently difficult person that, as one contemporary put it, he would’ve been thrown out of George Trager University.

Tristan Foster interviews translator Saudamini Deo for Asymptote about a new series of books; here’s the introduction:

An unfortunate reality is that every language has great writers who have faded from the collective memory; either they fell out of favour, or their writing spoke only to their time, or perhaps they practiced on the margins, and their work never made it beyond a small readership. Difficulties in categorising a writer’s work is especially likely to put them in peril—writing that doesn’t fit neatly into one particular genre or tradition is easier to overlook than to perpetually seek its niche. And when these writings are forgotten, a small miracle needs to occur for them to be rediscovered again.

For the first time, English language readers will have the opportunity to read forgotten Hindi writers thanks to a new and, arguably, miraculous series from Seagull Books, based in Kolkata. First to be published are short story collections by Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, names which may be unfamiliar to readers in their native India, let alone to readers beyond. Wolves and Other Short Stories by Bhuwaneshwar will be released in Fall 2020, and Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories by Rajkamal Chaudhary is due for release in early 2021.

To understand what was lost and what has been gained with these new translations, I asked translator Saudamini Deo why we should refresh the collective memory by reviving the work of Bhuvaneshwar and Rajkamal Chaudhary, and what it means for the English-speaking world to have access to their work for the first time.

I note that Bhuvaneshwar is also spelled Bhuwaneshwar in the same paragraph; I presume they’re equally valid representations of his name. I googled up this piece about him (he also wrote poetry in English) and found “Bhuwanershar” in the third paragraph, presumably a simple misprint. The interview is interesting, but Deo has a very different outlook on things than I do:

Lawrence Durrell writes that witnessing someone’s madness also shakes one’s hold on one’s own grasp of reality—we realize how precariously we manage. So, madness is not something far off from everyday life or something strange, all of us are much closer to it than we would like to admit. Then, of course, thinking about Bhuwaneshwar particularly, there is a detail of his life I came across recently that I did not know before: after he ran out of money, he started living with a friend and his brother in Lucknow. The friend moved to Delhi due to a job but kept sending money back to both of them. Then one evening Bhuwaneshwar’s friend’s brother ran out of the house screaming, and when he was found a few days later, he had to be shifted to a mental asylum in Agra where he spent the rest of his life. Soon after, Bhuwaneshwar started living on the streets and went mad, too. Why did both of them go mad at almost the same time? There is no answer to this, but I wonder about it. I think people we call mad know secrets we do not know. […]

I do not feel close to madness, and I strongly reject the idea that “people we call mad know secrets we do not know.” I have known mad people, and they were trapped in a sad round of obsessive thoughts that limited their ability to deal with the world and other people; if a few of them manage to get good writing out of their madness, great, but that doesn’t make it a privileged insight into deeper truths. That is, of course, only my opinion, but there it is. At any rate, I welcome the series; the more translations, the better. Thanks, Bathrobe!