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Andrea Moro, Professor of General Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Study in Pavia, writes for the MIT Press Reader about an interesting experiment:

At least since the pioneering work of Nobel Prize-winning electrophysiologist Lord Edgar Adrian we have known that no physical signal is ever completely lost when it reaches the brain. What we’ve more recently discovered is surprising: Apparently electric waves preserve the shape of their corresponding sound waves in non-acoustic areas of the brain, such as in the Broca’s area, the part of the brain responsible for speech production.

These findings shed important light on the relationship between sound waves and electric waves in the brain, but almost all of them rely on one aspect of the neuropsychological processes related to language: namely, sound emission decoding. Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read (as what we are most probably experiencing at this very moment) or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity.

This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound? […]

Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered. The two families of waves where language lives physically are then closely related — so closely in fact that the two overlap independently of the presence of sound. The acoustic information is not implanted later, when a person needs to communicate with someone else; it is part of the code from the beginning, or at least before the production of sound takes place. It also excludes that the sensation of exploiting sound representation while reading or thinking with words is just an illusory artifact based on a remembrance of the overt speech.

The discovery that these two independent families of waves of which language is physically made strictly correlate with each other — even in non-acoustic areas and whether or not the linguistic structures are actually uttered or remain within the mind of an individual — indicates that sound plays a much more central role in language processing than was previously thought. It is as if this unexpected correlation provided us with the missing piece of a “Rosetta stone” in which two known codes — the sound waves and the electric waves generated by sound — could be exploited to decipher a third one: the electric code generated in the absence of sound, which in turn could hopefully lead to the discovery of the “fingerprint” of human language.

Intriguing, certainly, but the MIT imprint inspires a certain skepticism, and I don’t know enough about this stuff to have a sensible opinion. All thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series, a tradition which I am honored by and enjoy shamelessly. This year I discuss David Graeber’s Debt, Charles Portis’s Norwood, Yuri Trifonov and Vladimir Tendryakov, and the two Trevor Joyce collections I wrote about here. I could have added Tessa Hadley and George Eliot, both of whom I’ve been reading to my wife at night (we’re almost finished with Daniel Deronda), but the piece was long enough already, and neither author is in particular need of my publicity. Dum spiro, lego!

1) Shocking Blunders:

Mark Thakkar, “Duces caecorum: On Two Recent Translations of Wyclif,” Vivarium 58 (2020) 357-383, is a review of Stephen Penn, John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), and Stephen Lahey, Wyclif, Trialogus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Some of the errors Thakkar exposes are quite shocking. I select two (both from Penn’s translation) as exhibits for my gallery of howlers.

Thakkar, p. 367:

Jesus’s famous aphorism that “many are called, but few are chosen” (multi sunt vocati, pauci vero electi) is jaw-droppingly mistranslated as “many of the elect are called poor” (p. 292).

Id., p. 368:

… both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed contain professions of belief in the Catholic church (‘credo ecclesiam catholicam’ dicit utrumque simbolum), which Penn translates as: “the words ‘I believe in the Catholic church’ represent a symbol everywhere!” (p. 173).

Thakkar concludes his review with this observation (pp. 382-383, footnotes omitted):

[I]n countries like the UK and the US, where secondary-school Latin has collapsed outside the private sector, where few medievalists have an undergraduate background in Classics, and where lecturers would be embarrassed to sit in on language classes, most medievalists are only ever taught Latin while they are graduate students. What’s more, we have already reached the stage where, in some universities, medieval Latin is taught from scratch to graduate students by people who were taught it from scratch when they were graduate students. This is not necessarily unsustainable, but it can only be sustainable if the language is taught seriously and intensively as a major component of graduate study, which it almost never is. And of course the problems we are storing up here are not confined to Wyclif: they will affect almost all areas of medieval studies. If, therefore, we do not drastically improve the level of graduate training in medieval Latin, hopeless misunderstandings of medieval sources will increasingly come to scar the scholarly landscape. In the meantime, it is evidently worth reminding translators and reviewers alike, as Wyclif used to remind his contemporaries, that “if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.”

The post title is part of the Latin version of the final quote, from Matthew 15:14.

2) Soiled Undergarments:
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When I started reading this passage from Jason Farago’s NYRB review of two books by Édouard Louis, History of Violence and Who Killed My Father, I thought I’d add it as a comment to my previous post, but as I read on I thought it was too much for a comment and would make a good post on its own. History of Violence is about Louis’ rape by a man he picked up late on Christmas Eve, 2012, and his ambivalence about his decision to report it to the police:

What elevates History of Violence beyond the limits of its social determinism is the marvelous structure of its narration. It is style, much more than characterization, that gives the novel its moral and political force. “Tell it in the order that it happened,” one police officer tells Édouard, but Louis does nothing of the sort. The novel begins after the crime, back in Picardy, where Édouard is staying with his sister Clara. We jump from there back to the morning after the rape, then forward to the police station, then months into the future. Édouard and Reda meet on page 45 but don’t get to the apartment until page 80. The novel’s climax is not the rape, which occurs about halfway through, but rather the argument over whether to go to the police. Fracturing the account this way does more than a hundred Bourdieu-parroting apothegms to establish the social stakes of the novel, and to demonstrate how violence stretches past the personal.

Much of this comes to us not through Édouard’s first-person narration but through quotations from Clara, whom Édouard eavesdrops on back in Picardy, “hidden on the other side of the door” while she recounts the crime to her husband, “her voice compounded, as always, of fury, resentment, irony too, and resignation.” It is not only that: Clara speaks in a demotic, regional French that flouts grammatical rules and brims with class markers. Far more than The End of Eddy, this book uses popular speech as a compositional tool; Édouard’s Christmas nightmare returns to him, and comes to us for the first time, in the French he abandoned along with his given name. Indeed, Louis often interrupts Clara’s working-class French with italicized asides in Édouard’s more formal language, the better to underscore their social distance.

This grinding between registers of French is the crucial trick of History of Violence. Hundreds of Clara’s sentences use a common colloquial form in which the subject of the sentence is followed by a redundant pronoun—for example, Reda il criait, literally “Reda he was shouting.” (This grammatical tic is called, in a coincidence some of Louis’s political opponents might appreciate, dislocation à gauche.) She uses nonstandard contractions like t’es or t’aurais, she uses the highly conversational quoi for emphasis, and she uses regional, lower-class pronunciations that Louis renders with misspellings (pis instead of puis, “then”). Multiple sentences are run together with commas or with no punctuation at all. As for Édouard’s own speech, more polished, more Parisian, Clara describes it as sounding “like some kind of politician” (“son vocabulaire de ministre”). Their father, in The End of Eddy, thought of such correct French as the language of “faggots.”

I found Louis’s rendering of Clara’s French winning in many places, hammy and overdrawn in a few. But the distinct linguistic registers disappear in Lorin Stein’s English translation, which makes almost no effort to reproduce them. A sentence of Clara’s like “L’usine elle embauche plus,” with both a redundant pronoun and a nonstandard negative, appears in English as the stiffly correct “They’ve stopped hiring at the factory.” “J’ai rien dit moi” becomes “I just kept my mouth shut.” Clara’s tumbling, unpunctuated run-on sentences get chopped up into bite-size morsels; conversational repetitions are omitted; colloquial ça’s and quoi’s get vaporized. All this makes the dozens of pages in which Clara, not Édouard, recounts what happened that Christmas Eve—at a personal, social, and linguistic remove—tonally indistinguishable from Édouard’s narration.

We discussed pis = puis earlier this year; I agree with Farago that the translator should have made some effort to bring across the difference in translation.

Kim Willsher reports for the Guardian on a new French law:

In France, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. When the prime minister, Jean Castex, opens his mouth, he is often accused of being “a bit rugby” – he comes from the south-west, where the sport is popular. Others with regional accents sound like “they should be reading the weather”.

Now the French have not only come up with a word for this kind of prejudice – glottophobie – but a new law banning it. The Assemblée Nationale has adopted legislation making linguistic discrimination an offence along with racism, sexism and other outlawed bigotry.

The legislation, approved by 98 votes to three, was the subject of acute debate in the house. Among those who voted against was Jean Lassalle, a former presidential candidate, the head of the Libertés et Territoires (Freedom and Land) party and a well-known orator.

“I’m not asking for charity. I’m not asking to be protected. I am who I am,” he said in a south-west accent with knife-blunting properties.

An earlier piece by Hugh Schofield for BBC News was written before the law was passed but has further details; it begins:

Imagine a well-known Westminster MP – a party leader – caught in a press scrum and being asked a question which is delivered in a thick Scottish accent.

He looks at the journalist in mocking incomprehension, and says: “Sorry I didn’t understand a word of that. Can someone ask me a question in proper English?” Unthinkable, right?

And yet in France more or less exactly that exchange was caught on camera between left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and a hapless woman reporter from French regional TV. Her offence: having a strong southern twang.

And The Local.fr has more material on the topic. Thanks, Lars and Bathrobe!

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim (great name) has a NY Times review of Martin Puchner’s The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate, which begins:

When Martin Puchner was growing up in a rowhouse in Nuremberg in the early 1970s, strangers would show up at the door asking for food. His mother served them water and sandwiches, standing in the doorway while the visitors made conversation in a language the boy could not understand, even though the words were mostly German. Later, his uncle pointed out to him what it was that drew these strangers to the house: Carved into the foundation stone was the sign of a cross inside a circle. To those in the know, it signified that the house’s occupants would give you food.

Those in the know were all manner of vagrants: tinkers, knife grinders, peddlers, journeymen — people without a fixed abode. The pictograms they carved into fence posts or chalked on houses were called zinken, after the Latin signum, for sign. The language they spoke was Rotwelsch, a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew and repurposed German that had been used for centuries by members of the itinerant underground. Puchner’s father called them “people eternally on the road, escaping to nowhere.” […]

Both Puchner’s father and uncle were drawn to Rotwelsch and sprinkled words from it into their speech. As a boy, Puchner delighted in zesty phrases like “making a rabbit,” which meant making a quick escape. On hikes, his father taught him to spot zinken on roadsides and farmhouses. Though his parents were solidly middle class, Puchner writes, “I grew up feeling that I had a special connection to the road and the itinerant underground.” In his family, he felt, “Rotwelsch became our special possession, our secret.”

Puchner became a professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard and decided to investigate this icon of his childhood:
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My wife and I have been watching TCM’s Women Make Film series (schedule) for the last few months; I haven’t posted about it because this isn’t Moviehat, but we’ve seen a lot of good movies we’d never have gotten the chance to see (as well as some not-so-good ones, but that’s life in this imperfect world), and if you like movies I suggest investigating that schedule. I’m here, though, to tell you about the one we saw last night, 27 Missing Kisses (Georgian: 27 დაკარგული კოცნა); as I wrote my brother just now, it’s one of the weirdest movies we’ve ever seen (of course, Georgian movies tend to be weird). It’s full of stunning images (here’s a brief clip — without subtitles, but the TCM version had them), and has one of the funniest (and simultaneously most shocking) scenes in any movie I know. And it’s mostly in Russian and Georgian, though Captain Nemo speaks French; how often do you get to see movies in Georgian?

To my American readers: happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy it as best you can in this strange year, and we’ll hope for less social distancing in 2021.

We have a fairly capacious mailbox, and the mail usually fits with little problem, so I was surprised when I saw the mailman walking up the driveway to the garage, where he deposited a hefty stack that included several packages. Two were Russian books I had ordered, but the largest and heaviest was completely unexpected, and came complete with a customs declaration; it turned out to be from Trevor Joyce, and contained two of his collections of poetry, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold: A Body of Work 1966/2000 and What’s in Store (Poems 2000-2007). I was bowled over — I’d been wanting to read more of Joyce since I got his Fastness in 2017 (see this post). His ear for English and his ability to deploy it in unexpected ways excited me, and now I can dive in to a much wider range of his work. The very first piece in the first collection, a version of Buile Suibne he did in his young youth, starts out with an easy confidence that puts most modern retellings to shame: “It’s no secret how Sweeny, king of Dal Araidhe and scion of noble though disputed stock, wandered deranged from battle.” After that come “The Moon as Other Than a Green Cheese” (“Tonight/ a phosphorescence is toddling along the night/ having the form/ of a silver apple, walking pome”), “River Tolka and Botanical Gardens” (“Eggshells of white hoar crackled underfoot”), and other exagminations of the world around him; I particularly like the title “Surd Blab.” Naturally I turned to “Tocharian Music” as soon as I saw the title; here’s the end of the finely restrained little poem:

Eleven thousand
died in the reprisal
and the city laid waste
the airs dispersed
only the names survive

Time slipped out of their tablature
and without stopping
fled
fugitive amongst those sands

“Time slipped out of their tablature”: that has the same kind of phonetic/rhythmic authority that captured me in early Pasternak; I don’t care what the lines mean as long as they sound that good, and it’s a quality sadly missing from most poetry these days. And Joyce has kept it up for decades; the recent poems in What’s in Store are just as convincing. Here’s the start of one of “the thirty-six word poems scattered throughout this volume”:

the sheets
of wheat
are rolled
back

gone
that blonde
hay
your pillow

I’ll quote another of them in full; how can I not, given that it leads with a fedora?
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To quote the start of Justin Weinberg’s Daily Nous obit, “Judith Jarvis Thomson, professor emerita of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most influential moral philosophers of the past 50 years, has died.” I don’t normally commemorate philosophers at LH (though I’ve actually read or skimmed a couple of her articles), but there were some things in Claudia Mills‘ introduction of Thomson at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in 2009 (quoted at the link) that resonated enough with me that I wanted to quote them:

I was asked to give this introduction because I knew Judith Jarvis Thomson not only as a brilliant thinker, but as a brilliant teacher. When I was an undergraduate at Wellesley, I took courses with Prof. Thomson through the Wellesley-MIT exchange. Here is my notebook from the first one: 24.231. (At MIT, departments don’t have names, they have numbers, so 24 is Philosophy – I soon learned from my classmates that it was an error to refer to the course as PHIL 24.231 – PHIL was redundant, as 24 already WAS Phil.) […]

Here is the paper assignment for our second paper for the class, due April 7, 1975. “Is there a variety of utilitarianism which is true? If so, which? And why? If not, why not?” One student put up his hand right away: “What do you mean, ‘is true’?” Without a word, Prof. Thomson turned to the chalkboard and wrote: “S” is true just in case S. That was all. Asked for further guidelines to assist us in writing the paper, she gave us this one: “No eloquence!” I felt as if she was addressing that pithy piece of advice directly to me.

Judy Thomson taught me even more about how to write than she taught me about how to do philosophy. For one paper, she commented on my tendency to switch terminology: I’d talk about “duties” for a while, and then, to add some interest, I’d vary my vocabulary a bit and start talking about “obligations.” She taught me not to do that, that the reader was going to become alarmed: wait, a new term has been introduced, why? She taught me that the point of writing was actually to SAY SOMETHING. On another paper, when I had underlined one particular point for emphasis, she told me: “You think that if you say it loudly enough, people won’t hear how false it is.” I finally wrote a paper that began with a sentence that pleased her. I still remember the sentence. It was: “Two things seem to me to be true.” She brightened upon reading it. “You just like it because it’s short,” I told her, as I knew she had disliked my long, flowery, dare I say eloquent, sentences. “I don’t just like its length,” she told me. “I like IT!” That was a wonderful moment that I’ve carried with me for thirty-four years. I wrote a sentence that Judith Jarvis Thomson admired.

Just the thought of having to deal with “S” is true just in case S terrifies me, and I have even more respect for my wife for having done grad work in philosophy (though she sensibly didn’t try to make a career of it). But I’m tickled by the fact that MIT departments don’t have names, they have numbers (but of course!), and I love the insistence on eschewing elegant variation (see my rant about one form of it here). And “No eloquence!” is a widely (though not universally) applicable admonition.

Continuing the Raj theme, herewith Maya Jasanoff’s 2008 LRB review [archived] of Hartly House, Calcutta, an epistolary novel allegedly by Phebe Gibbes (see below) and first published in 1789. I’ll quote some bits of LH relevance:

Telling Arabella about the imminent departure of ‘our Governor’, Sophia gushes about [Warren] Hastings’s merits:

The Company … will, by this event, be deprived of a faithful and able servant; the poor, of a compassionate and generous friend; the genteel circles, of their best ornament … Nor possibly can a successor be transmitted, of equal information and abilities. For, Arabella, he has made himself master of the Persian language, that key to the knowledge of all that ought to constitute the British conduct in India.

[…]
The other danger that Sophia skirts lies in an equally common fate for British women in India: marriage. Condemning the ostentatious new wealth of Anglo-Indian ‘nabobs’, and the women who travel to India to marry them, Sophia vows repeatedly ‘never to marry in Indostan’: ‘I will not violate to be a nabobess.’ Her will is tested by the constant stream of male attention she receives (and coquettishly enjoys receiving), and by her guardian Mrs Hartly, who ‘thinks matrimony the duty of every young woman, who meets with an offer she cannot disapprove’. Yet even when she meets the captivating Edmund Doyly, ‘the best male companion I have met with at Calcutta, the Governor and Mr Hartly excepted’, Sophia sticks to her guns: ‘if nabobism was not the stumbling block of my ambition … there is no saying what might happen.’ […]

This must be the only book currently on sale that carries a blurb by Mary Wollstonecraft on its jacket. Reviewing Hartly House, Calcutta in the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft praised the novel’s ‘entertaining account of Calcutta … apparently sketched by a person who had been forcibly impressed by the scenes described. Probably the groundwork of the correspondence was actually written on the spot.’ For Wollstonecraft, as for other reviewers, the primary virtue of the novel lay in its informative account of Indian life – an account that many took to be based on personal experience.

So who was behind this richly detailed narrative? Though Hartly House, Calcutta was published anonymously, Franklin attributes its authorship to Phebe Gibbes. More or less the only information we have about Gibbes consists of petitions she sent to the Royal Literary Fund in 1804. In them, she stated that she had published ‘22 sets’ of novels, but that her father-in-law’s profligacy and the death of her only son in India had left her and her two daughters destitute. Of the ‘22 sets’ Gibbes claimed, 14 have apparently been identified, though the author’s name appears in only one. Her career, in Franklin’s words, ‘presents a fascinating example of anonymous authorship’. So how have scholars come to identify her as the author of this book? The strongest circumstantial evidence Franklin cites – tucked away in a footnote – is a payment by her publisher James Dodsley to ‘G. 20 pounds for Hartly House, Calcutta’. There was also Gibbes’s known connection to India through her son. Frustratingly, Franklin never addresses this question directly. His jargon-heavy introduction reads far more like a specialist academic article than like the broadly contextualising essay many readers need.

The paucity of biographical evidence about Gibbes leaves a crucial point teasingly uncertain. Did the author of Hartly House, Calcutta ever go to India? Franklin thinks not: ‘it is doubtful that Gibbes herself ever made the passage to India.’ He supports this suggestion with an impressive excavation of contemporary printed sources on which Gibbes based some of her descriptions. Her discussion of the ‘five tribes’ (varnas) of Hindus, for instance, comes straight from a passage in Alexander Dow’s The History of Hindostan. A section on Mughal history draws on William Guthrie’s A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar of 1785. In writing of India’s sacred rivers, she paraphrases William Macintosh’s Remarks on a Tour through the Different Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa. In a nicely postmodern turn, Gibbes acknowledges her debt to such works by having Sophia warn Arabella ‘not to set me down for a plagiarist, though you should even stumble upon the likeness, verbatim, of my descriptions of the Eastern world in print; or once presume to consider such printed accounts as other than honourable testimonies of my faithful relations’.

But what were the sources for the novel’s descriptions of everyday habits, of the look and feel of the city and the way people lived in it? Consider Sophia’s remark that ‘the streets of Calcutta … are distinguished by the name of the beisars, or traders, by which they are occupied.’ Franklin observes that ‘Gibbes’s error’ in using the term beisar (‘bazaar’) to refer to tradesmen as opposed to markets ‘would seem another indication that her knowledge of India was second-hand’. Yet foreigners on the spot could routinely slip up on such linguistic niceties – and Gibbes’s phrasing is sufficiently unclear as to make both interpretations possible. In fact, the passage goes on to provide a strikingly accurate series of transliterated and translated Bengali words, and stands out as one of many remarkable examples of the rich local knowledge in which Hartly House, Calcutta abounds. Sophia writes not only about Calcutta’s major monuments and landmarks; she describes the kinds of garden statuary people prefer, the availability and price of different vegetables, what it is like to go to the theatre, the races, or just to have an evening nautch (‘dance’) at home.

I like the terms nabobess and nabobism, but was struck by the intransitive use of violate (“I will not violate to be a nabobess”), which is not in the OED entry (updated June 2014). Clearly it’s short for “violate my vow,” but it reads oddly to me; who knows how it read in 1789? [This turns out not to be the case; see Giacomo’s comment below.] I’m delighted by the Wollstonecraft blurb and I enjoyed the investigation of authorship (it must have been a thrill to find that record of payment) and sources (I wish she’d quoted that “series of transliterated and translated Bengali words”), but this passage from the last paragraph surprised and annoyed me:

One is also struck, reading this book more than two hundred years later, by how little enduring fiction emanated from British India, despite its commanding hold on the imperial imagination. With the exception of Kipling, many novels about colonial India have fallen between the cracks: who reads Meadows Taylor or Flora Annie Steel now? (More often, India glints in the background of British domestic fiction, as readers of Vanity Fair, The Moonstone and Sherlock Holmes know.)

What about Paul Scott’s magnificent Raj Quartet? Is Jasanoff implying that it’s on a level with Meadows Taylor and Flora Annie Steel, whoever they are? Or has she never read Scott? Either way, it’s her loss.