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cormullion’s blog has a deep dive into the history of the asterisk which is lots of fun (and educational too!):

The asterisk has a long history. The first appearance of this simple mark was probably on a cave wall somewhere, but we like to assign inventions to known individuals, so the inventor of the asterisk was: Aristarchus of Samothrace, in about 200 BCE.

I was disappointed that this wasn’t the other Aristarchus, Aristarchus of Samos, the famous mathematician with an interest in astronomy, because ἀστερίσκος means “little star”. The man from Samothrace howrver was a librarian, scholar, critic, and proofreader, who liked to make numerous marks (*) [marginal note: * Like this.] in the margin of texts and manuscripts, like notes, queries, and critical comments.

If you have a long memory or are into typography, you may be thinking “Isn’t there a Keith Hou­s­ton post about this?” There is, but:

Keith Hou­s­ton’s excellent book Shady Characters covers the history of most of the punctuation marks in great detail. But his chapter on the asterisk concentrates entirely on the asterisk’s use as a footnote indicator, and ends more or less here.

There’s a great deal about multiplication at the link, as well as glorious illustrations.

Oliver Morgan writes at OUPblog about an interesting problem of covid-era communication, when “more than three people try to chat informally via Zoom”:

The kind of interaction that would be relatively straightforward in person becomes torturously difficult. Everything takes longer. Everything requires more effort. Without careful attention to what linguists call “turn-taking,” things quickly descend into chaos.

Why this should be the case is not immediately obvious. If we can hear and see our interlocutors, if the connection is good and the lag minimal, why is it so much harder to string together rapid sequences of talk? The best way to answer that question is to turn it on its head. Properly understood, even the simplest conversation is an astonishing feat of interpersonal coordination. The remarkable thing is not that turn-taking so frequently goes wrong on Zoom, but that it ever goes right at all.

It is an observable fact that speakers are able to coordinate transitions between turns at talk to within a fraction of a second. Average response time in conversation is around 200 milliseconds. This is surprising because language production is comparatively slow—some 600 milliseconds from conception to articulation, even for a single word. Somehow the other participants appear to know in advance exactly when the current speaker will stop, what she will have said when she does so, and which of them should speak next.

To explain how this is possible, conversation analysts have come up with an awkwardly-named but brilliantly useful concept. A “transition-relevance place” is any point at which the current speaker might plausibly have finished. The end of a sentence, obviously, or some other less emphatic point of syntactical completion. But also, potentially, the punchline of a joke—or even just the moment, part way through a turn, at which the sense of the whole becomes clear. Two things matter about transition relevance places. The first is that they are projectable: it is possible to hear them coming. The second is that they are optional: the occurrence of a transition-relevance place does not necessitate a change of speaker any more than the occurrence of an exit necessitates that I come off the motorway. As the exit approaches, the possibility of my coming off becomes relevant (hence the name) but I can still choose not to take it.

A single turn may thus contain a series of transition-relevance places at which no transition occurs. Unlike a letter, or a WhatsApp message, the turn at talk is telescopic. Its length is the product of a fragile process of incremental expansion that might have stopped when it didn’t and needn’t have stopped when it did. And clustered around these potential stopping points is a series of micro-negotiations about whether this next exit is the one we will finally take. It is possible, of course, to make such things explicit: “I’ll stop there and hand over to Mike.” Most of the time, however, the exchange of turns is negotiated in ways that are largely subconscious. Intonation, gaze-direction, gesture, and facial expression, all play a part. An intake of breath or a tilt of the head can be enough to suggest that a new speaker is ready to launch. A glance upward can be enough to show that the current speaker is not yet done.

What Zoom does is to filter out much of this layer of subconscious communication. We cannot tell who anyone else is looking at, nor sense the tiny adjustments of body and face that would ordinarily help us to coordinate the exchange of turns. If you combine that with even a tiny lag, the whole exquisitely calibrated system begins malfunction.

I find that extraordinarily interesting. (We discussed “turn-taking” back in 2016.)

I had thought of waiting for an obituary to link to, but several people have already sent me e-mails about it today, and I can’t bring myself to post filler while this is all I can think about, so I’ll just go ahead and share the bare news: Jeremy Hawker, known in these parts as AJP Crown, died suddenly on Monday. I don’t know any details yet, but he’d had heart trouble for a long time. He was a longstanding and much-loved part of this community, and it’s a heavy blow; my deepest condolences go out to his wife Dyveke and daughter Alma, as I’m sure yours do as well. He was a wonderfully good-hearted and generous person, and I can’t believe there won’t be any more comments or e-mails from him. I’ll add more details when they’re available. Hvil i fred, old friend.

Addendum. I just had a good talk with Dyveke, and she told me (and said I could write about it here) that Jeremy died Monday morning in front of his computer (apparently instantaneously, of a massive heart attack), in the midst of composing a comment at LH (for the thread about Jesus’ language). She said this site meant a huge amount to him; his diabetes kept him from getting around much, and it was a perfect way for him to interact with people who said interesting things and appreciated him. We regretted that we’d never gotten to meet, and she mentioned the Hatters who had visited them in Norway — Trond and marie-lucie and Siganus, I think. As she said, they got to know Jeremy’s voice as well. Lucky them.

Update. Dyveke sent me an image of the notice she placed in the newspaper Aftenposten, which reads:

Jeremy Nicholas Hawker
Died suddenly 5.10.2020
Born 8.6.1953

Without you all streets would be one way — the other way
Adrian Henri (1967)
Without you

Ann E. Hawker – mother
Alma M. S. Hawker – daughter
Dyveke Sanne – wife
Friends and family

A planting ceremony will take place in our garden on Jeremy’s birthday.

If you send her (at dsanne@broadpark.no) the name of a plant, wild or tame, they can plant it in their garden in your name that day.

I’ve finally finished reading Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The outsider) by Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky, which is seemingly (and amazingly) the first biography of one of the most famous Russian writers of the last half-century. It took me longer than it might have because it’s a tough read — not on account of the writing, which is excellent, but because the story is such a sad one, especially towards the end. Most biographies of writers follow a predictable pattern: early attempts, first sales, growing mastery, acquaintance with other writers and cultural figures, fame, prizes, etc.; they tend to get boring in the latter parts because they feature dinner parties and arguments with publishers. This is very different; it’s at least as much the story of a drunk as of a writer, and the writer is known, essentially, for only one book. If Erofeev hadn’t written Moskva-Petushki (my review), no one but his friends would remember him, and there would be no biography. There’s nothing wrong with that — Cervantes, Proust, and Ellison are in much the same position — but it creates an overbalance of the life (which consisted mostly of quitting schools, getting fired from jobs, and endless drinking) at the expense of the works. The authors deal with the problem in part by interspersing chapters about the life with (brilliant, convincing) analytical chapters about the novel, but finally they run out of novel and there is nothing left but a slog towards an early grave; the sudden fame and recognition at the end of the 1980s came too late for him to get much enjoyment from them (the throat cancer that killed him was already forcing him to speak through a mechanical apparatus), and the brutally indifferent Soviet government refused to let him go abroad for treatment just as it had Blok almost six decades earlier.

That gives too bleak a picture; it’s what’s foremost in my mind, because I just finished reading it, but the book is full of good things, notably quotes from pretty much everyone who ever crossed his path. Here’s one from Sergei Ivanov, plucked pretty much at random:

«В 1973-м на филфаке МГУ самиздатную рукопись дал почитать однокурсник Андрей Зорин. В обмен на „Николая Николаевича“ Алешковского. Помню, в момент обмена (на „Большом Сачке“) подошла Наташа Нусинова и полюбопытствовала: „Что это у вас?“ На что Зорин одними губами произнес: „Forbidden!“»

“In 1973 at the philological faculty of Moscow State University my classmate Andrei Zorin gave me a samizdat manuscript [of Moskva-Petushki] to read, in exchange for Aleshkovsky’s Nikolai Nikolaevich [see this post]. I remember that at the moment of the exchange (at the ‘Big Goof-off’ [a place on the first floor of the First Humanitarian Building of the university where students hung out]) Natasha Nusinova came up and asked curiously ‘What’s that you’ve got?’ To which Zorin responded, just moving his lips, ‘Forbidden!’ [in English].”

Those few sentences give a vivid image of a certain aspect of student life at the time. I wish there was any prospect of a translation, but I’m afraid Erofeev is too little known in English-speaking lands; if Bykov’s superb biography of Pasternak hasn’t gotten one, this is probably a lost cause. But if you read Russian, it’s well worth your time.
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Eiichi Miyashiro writes for the Asahi Shimbun:

A manuscript of commentaries about Confucianism written apparently between the sixth and early seventh centuries in China was confirmed in Japan, a discovery one scholar described as “invaluable.” It is believed to be one of the oldest of any religious teaching written on paper, except for those of Buddhist scriptures, found in the country.

Researchers at Keio University and other institutions say the writing is also most likely the oldest among manuscripts of commentaries on the Confucian Analects that have been handed down at temples, shrines or homes. […] The manuscript is a compilation of commentaries, known as Lunyu Yishu (the elucidation of the meaning of the Confucian Analects), put together by Huang Kan, a Confucian scholar of Liang (502-557), during the Northern and Southern dynasties period. All manuscripts of Lunyu Yishu had been lost in China by around the 12th century, according to experts. […]

Researchers consider the books on the commentaries as part of the Confucian Analects in a broad sense. The manuscript discovered in Japan is expected to provide scholars with significant clues into the history of exchanges between Japan and China in philosophy and other realms. […] Based on the shape of the characters, the team concluded that the manuscript was most likely written between the Northern and Southern dynasties period and the Sui Dynasty (581-618). They also believe it was brought to Japan through Japanese missions sent to the Sui Dynasty and Tang Dynasty (618-907) in China. […]

Until the recent discovery, the world’s oldest manuscript of the Confucian Analects originated from the Song Dynasty between the end of the 12th century and early 13th century. The oldest one in Japan dated back to the latter part of the Kamakura Period (1185-1333).

It’s nice to know such things are still coming to light.

Jonathan Morse sent me Marcia Lynx Qualey’s Aljazeera roundup of newly translated medieval Arabic cookbooks; cookery, of course, is not an LH concern as such, but there’s some interesting stuff here:

In her introduction to Treasure Trove, [Nawal] Nasrallah tells us that meals would often begin with an array of small dishes that arrived on a beautiful large tray, called “sukurdan”. The word, she writes, is thought to be a combination of the Arabic ” sukr”, or “imbibing alcoholic drinks”, and the Persian “dan”, or “vessel”. […]

Nasrallah is a fan of sweet-and-sour pickled fennel, and has adapted a recipe on her website. She added over email that, “One of the reasons for the popularity of pickles, or ‘mukhallalat’ as they were called, was that they were believed to arouse the appetite and facilitate the digestion of dense foods.”

Hummus is one of those Thousand and One Nights-like dishes that has travelled widely in space and time. Versions appear in the 13th-century Scents and Flavors, and in, Winning the Beloved’s Heart with Delectable Dishes and Perfumes, by Aleppan historian Ibn al-‘Adeem (d. 1262), which has not yet appeared in English translation. Many hummus dishes also appear in the 14th-century Treasure Trove.

Yet after that, according to Nasrallah, there is a long period when hummus disappears from cookbooks. When it reappears in 1885, in, The Master Chef’s Culinary Memento for Housewives, by Lebanese author Khaleel Sarkees, the recipe uses ingredients we associate with contemporary hummus: chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini. And by the time “Hummus bi Tahina” appears in its first print cookbook in Iraq in 1946, the English-language, Recipes from Baghdad, it calls for tinned chickpeas, tinned lemon juice, and a tin of “crushed sesame”. […]

One of the wonderful aspects of medieval Arabic cookbooks are the titles of the individual recipes. There are three recipes for a dessert called “ma’muniyyah”. One is subtitled “The first recipe”, while the next is “The second recipe, better than the first”, and the third is “The third recipe, which is better than the second”. […]

“It is good manners to use toothpicks,” Treasure Trove informs us. “One needs to clean the teeth and remove the tiny pieces of meat between them. If meat stays in the mouth it rots, especially the solid particles.” People of all social strata were encouraged to avoid such a situation. The common folk could make “khilal ma’muni”, or toothpicks from esparto grass stems, while middle-class people could use Egyptian willow twigs for picking their teeth.

Thanks, Jonathan!

My reading copy is one of the smallest books I have; it’s no larger than my hand and fits easily into a pocket. When I first bought and read it, in March 1998, I carried it with me on my travels around New York (north to south, east to west, from end to end) and it never got damaged — it’s well-made, for all its cheap appearance and occasional misprints. I bought it at the instigation of a Russian woman I flew to Prague to hang out with and thought for a while I loved (I owe her a great deal — she also pointed me in the direction of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Sasha Sokolov, and in general got me back into Russian literature). I was so enthralled with the book that I wound up buying two other copies, an annotated edition (a hundred pages of text, almost 450 of commentary) and a large, gorgeously illustrated one I simply couldn’t resist. I’ve been reading it in tandem with the superb biography (by Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky) Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The outsider; see this post of Lizok’s), which I’ll be reporting on as soon as I’ve finished it — my wife, who’s used to seeing me shuttle between two books, felt compelled to ask why I had four in front of me, and I had to explain about the bio, the reading copy, and the annotated edition (the fourth, of course, was my faithful, beat-up Oxford dictionary). Now that I’ve finished it, I’m going to try to organize my thoughts; there will be plenty of spoilers, so if you want to read the book with your mind a blank slate (though plot is not really the point), you may wish to read no further.
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Trevor Joyce was reading this Guardian article by Ian Sample when his attention was caught by the following sentence:

Contaminated surfaces, such as doorknobs and light switches – “fomites”, to use the scientific terminology – may not be such a big deal, they claimed.

So he did a little searching and sent me the following splendid bit of Wikipedia etymology:

The Italian scholar and physician Girolamo Fracastoro appears to have first used the Latin word fomes, meaning “tinder”, in this sense in his essay on contagion, De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis, published in 1546: “By fomes I mean clothes, wooden objects, and things of that sort, which though not themselves corrupted can, nevertheless, preserve the original germs of the contagion and infect by means of these”.

English usage of fomes, pronounced /ˈfoʊmiːz/, is documented since 1658. The English word fomite, which has been in use since 1859, is a back-formation from the plural fomites (originally borrowed from the Latin plural fōmĭtēs [ˈfoːmɪteːs] of fōmĕs [ˈfoːmɛs]). Over time, the English-language pronunciation of the plural fomites changed from /ˈfoʊmɪtiːz/) to /ˈfoʊmaɪts/, which led to the creation of a new singular fomite, pronounced /ˈfoʊmaɪt/. The French fomite, Italian fomite, Spanish fómite and Portuguese fómite or fômite, however, are derived directly from the Latin accusative singular fōmĭtēm, as usually happens with Latin common nouns.

What a hoot! I’m just glad I’ll probably never have occasion to say the word out loud. (A fomite, in case you were wondering, is “any inanimate object that, when contaminated with or exposed to infectious agents (such as pathogenic bacteria, viruses or fungi), can transfer disease to a new host.”)

Victor Mair has a Log post about the French idiom autant pour moi ‘my mistake’; it begins with a quote from Elizabeth Dreyer:

Ah! Autant pour moi, as the French say for “I stand corrected”: As much for me. So much for me? … I’ve just looked up the origin of this expression and in fact it’s rather fascinating. People write “autant pour moi” but that is a corruption, a miswriting of “au temps pour moi”. “Au temps!” is the order given in the military when one has to repeat a movement from the beginning because of an error. I have absolutely never seen “au temps pour moi” in print and have seen “autant pour moi” many times.

There is much discussion of the complicated nature of French apologies, but none of the prima facie absurdity of the idea that the idiom is a “corruption” of “au temps pour moi,” which is ipso facto the “correct” form. This idiocy (supported, of course, by the Académie: “Toutefois, pour l’Académie française, rien ne justifie l’usage de « autant »”) arises from the need to find logical explanations for illogical idioms; the supposed “au temps pour moi” may, in fact, exist only as a “logical” rewriting of the idiom (I am unable to find examples of its actual use in its supposed original sense), but it’s “logical,” and the French (if you will forgive the generalization, which I learned from actual Frenchpersons) are especially fond of that virtue. Once again, even the most basic elementary education in the science of language would save people from twisting themselves into these pretzels and trying to impose them on others.

Also, for those who might be interested, an online course on East Caucasian languages is coming up:

In the fall of 2020, the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory (HSE University, Moscow) organizes a course dedicated to East Caucasian (alias Nakh-Daghestanian) languages. The course will consist of 13 lectures by some of the leading researchers of this language family. […]

The course will be open to anyone interested in East Caucasian. Its target audience are students of linguistics at any level and researchers who would like to learn more about these languages and the area where they are spoken. The course does not have a rigid structure, you can choose to follow the whole course or attend a particular lecture you are interested in.

Lectures will be held on Wednesdays 19:00-20:30 Moscow time (UTC+3), starting from October 14. Johanna Nichols’s lecture will take place on Friday, October 16.

Registration form at the link.

I’m rereading Venedikt Erofeev’s immortal Moskva-Petushki, and at one point he refers to “четвертый позвонок” [the fourth vertebra], which turns out to be the name of a novel by the Finnish writer Martti Larni. He’s not in any of my reference books, but of course the internet knows of him, and he has his own Wikipedia article. I was more struck, though, by this brief paragraph about him in A History of Finnish Literature by Jaakko Ahokas (American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1973):

Martti Larni (b. 1909), who has worked for newspapers and publishers, lived a few years after World War II in Wisconsin. He wrote a satire on contemporary life, especially in the United States, Neljäs nikama (‘The Fourth Vertebra,’ 1957), which, although unremarkable, was noticed by the Russians, who translated it and adapted it for the stage. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union, which the author did not expect. Like Talvi, Larni has written a number of uninteresting works.

“Like Talvi, Larni has written a number of uninteresting works” — ouch! And Larni was still alive to see that contemptuous summary. As for the novel, there’s a brief account here:

The protagonist is Jeremias Suomalainen, a teacher and journalist, who becomes in the United States the assistant of the chiropractic Isaac Rivers and later “Professor” Jerry Finn, a citizen of the world. Rivers has a theory: all backaches come from the fourth vertebra. Larni mocks quick marriages and quick divorces, miracle doctors, Hollywood, self-contentedness, ignorance of other cultures, and advertising. In one scene Jerry peddles books; he has an abridged edition – 102 pages – of Anatole France’s collected works.

Sounds kind of like Babbitt.