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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!

A paper by Matthias Weinreich:

The current paper is an invitation to a virtual journey to Gilgit-Baltistan (former Northern Areas), a high mountain region in the north of Pakistan, endowed with an amazing variety of languages spoken on its territory. The travel itinerary includes stops at Skardu (Baltistan), Gojal (upper Hunza valley), Karimabad (central Hunza valley), Taus (Yasin valley) and Gilgit town. At each destination the traveller is introduced to the languages used by its inhabitants: Balti, Wakhi, Burushaski, Domaakí, Pashto and Shina. Local personalities, scholars and a foreign researcher share key information about their language’s geographical distribution, speaker numbers and dialectal division. Special attention is given to expositions of the language attitude of the concerned speaker communities, as well as to the description of local efforts directed at creating language-specific alphabets and the promotion of mother tongue education. The interlocutors’ narratives are complemented by black-and-white photographs and references to recent academic publications dedicated to the languages and peoples of Gilgit-Baltistan.

This is the kind of thing we need more of. Thanks, Martin!

I ran across the little-used verb contemn “To regard or treat (a person or thing) with contempt” (little used, I presume, because it is fatally similar to the common condemn) and wondered about its etymology; fortunately the OED updated its entry last year:

Etymology: < (i) Anglo-Norman and Middle French contempner, Middle French contemner (French (now rare) contemner) to regard or treat (a person or thing) with contempt (c1350), to show contemptuous disregard for (an offer, order, request, etc.) (late 14th cent.), and its etymon (ii) classical Latin contempnere, contemnere to regard with contempt, to despise, to treat with contempt, to scorn, to disregard, to avoid < con- con- prefix + temnere to scorn, despise, of uncertain origin; perhaps < the same Indo-European base as ancient Greek τέμνειν to cut, Old Russian tjati to beat, Polish ciąć to cut, Lithuanian tinti to sharpen by hammering.

That “Old Russian tjati” is in Vasmer s.v. тять, which I’d never heard of:

тну, тять “бить”, стар.; укр. тну, тя́ти “резать, рубить, косить, бить, кусать”, блр. цяць, тну, др.-русск. тьну, тѧти “рубить, сечь, зарубить”, потѧти “убить” (тьметь у Мi. LР 1027 является опечаткой; см. Вондрак, Aksl. Gr. 365; Траутман, ВSW 324), словен. tẹ́ti, tnèm, др.-чеш. tieti, tnu, чеш. títi, tnu, слвц. t᾽аt᾽, польск. ciąć, tnę, в.-луж. ćeć, н.-луж. śěś. ‖ Праслав. *tьnǫ, *tęti родственно лит. tinù, tìnti “отбивать (косу)”, tìntuvaì мн. “инструмент для отбивания косы”, далее – греч. τέμνω “режу”, ион., дор. τάμνω, греч. τόμος м. “разрез, отрезок”, τομός “режущий”, ирл. tamnaim “уродую”, возм., также лат. aestimō “ценю” от *ais-temos “разрезающий слиток меди”, но едва ли лат. temnō, -еrе “презирать, пренебрегать, хулить”, (см. Эбель, KSchl. Beitr. 1, 271; П. Шмидт, Kritik 138; Траутман, ВSW 324; Буга, РФВ 66, 250; Соссюр, Мél. Наvеt 468; Вальде–Гофм. 1, 20; Зубатый, AfslPh 16, 418). Др. ступень чередования представлена в н.-луж. tоn м., toń ж. “вырубка в лесу, лесосека”.

Interestingly, тну appears to be the only word in Russian that starts tn- (and, being extremely marginal, it’s not in most dictionaries). As for the English verb, I was struck by this OED citation:

2006 J. Carey What Good are Arts? vi. 193 In Austen’s world some people..truly are contemptible, and it is right to contemn them.

If you feel a strong need to use the verb, it’s an excellent idea to use it in close proximity to the more common contemptible (or, of course, the basic noun contempt); it’s easily understandable in that context, and might add to your reader’s vocabulary.

The Cathal Ó Sándair website, which “aims to celebrate the life and work of Cathal O Sándair (1922-1996) and his characters,” has an essay by Peter Berresford Ellis first published in June 1988 in The Irish Democrat, What would Réics Carló do?, that introduced me to this apparently largely forgotten author:

IN ‘The Irish Post’ readers’ letters column, a contributor recently asked, in an aside, what would Réics Carló have done in a particular situation. As any reader of popular Irish literature (I mean popular literature in the Irish language) knows, Réics Carló is Ireland’s answer to Sexton Blake. The unexpected reference set me thinking about Reics and his creator, writer Cathal Ó Sándair. […]

Certainly, Réics Carló has been one of the most popular literary characters in Irish juvenile reading for four decades. The books are, indeed, the most popular Irish language books ever written. Sad that outside of Irish speakers, very few Irish peojrie would recognise Réics Carló in the same way that they would recognise the English Sexton Blake or the American Nick Carter. That is why I was particularly intrigued to see his name in a letter in ‘The Irish Post’. […]

Cathal was actually born in England in 1922 of an English father and an Irish mother. His mother was from Dublin and it was in Dublin that Cathal received most of his education before joining the Irish Civil Service, working in Customs and Excise. He began writing when he was still young and was only twenty-years-old when his first thriller Na Marbh a d’Fhill (The Dead Return, 1942) was published. It featured his detective hero Réics Carló who, as Cathal freely admits, was ‘an attempt to create an Irish Sexton Blake.’ […]

Cathal Ó Sandair created a popular literature for juveniles, providing them with the type of fare they wanted to devour and not the heavy pious tomes their elders thought they should read and which bored them out of their minds and added to their rejection of the Irish language. A certain well-known Irish author recently told me: ‘If we had all been raised on the stories of Cathal Ó Sándair as children then the Irish language might be in a more secure position today.’ […]

Once again, I emphasise that it is a sad comment that he had not received any higher literary acclaim in his own land. There is a particularly snobbish element, not confined to Ireland, that because a person writes ‘popular fiction’ it is not worthy of serious literary comment. What was Shakespeare doing but writing ‘popular fiction’? In Irish one is expected to turn out esoteric elitism and not something for the enjoyment of the majority of the people.

I recall the criticisms levelled at my illustrious fellow columnist, Donall Mac Amhlaigh, when his now classic book Dialann Deorai was published.

He was accused of using ‘rather colourless language’ which was unfavourably compared with the literary richness of Mairtln Ó Cadhain. Mac Amhlaigh was writing in the everyday language of the people and not in a bygone literary style. At least Eoghan Ó Tuairisc put his finger on matters when he recognised this fact and wrote: ‘Mac Amhlaigh, I see now, is one of the real revolutionaries!’

It is not the first time the critics have cavilled at writers changing from the archaic language of literary elitism to the language of everyday life. In happened in Ireland in the 17th Century when complaints were made that Bedell’s Irish translation of the Bible (1685) lacked ‘the purity of literacy Irish’ and was therefore a bad translation because it was written in the caint na ndaoine — the language of the people. That work actually marked the change from bardic literature to modern literature. Mac Amhlaigh’s work marked a similar change and so does the work of Ó Sandair.

The very brief Wikipedia article explains that he was born Charles Saunders and his family moved to Ireland when he was a child; for some reason it devotes one of its few sentences to this factoid: “His uncle was a professional boxer named Darky Saunders, who once fought Jimmy Wilde.” I wonder how the name Réics Carló comes across in Irish; it’s obviously foreign (I presume Réics = Rex and Carló is, well, Carlo), but what kind of connotations does it have? At any rate, my thanks to Trevor Joyce for sending me the link back in 2015!

My wife asked me about the verb scotch, as in “to scotch a rumor”; I looked it up, and the history is so interesting I had to post about it. The OED entry (updated June 2011) explains it well:

1. a. transitive. To make an incision or incisions in (esp. the flesh); to cut, score, gash. Formerly also †intransitive. Now rare.
?c1425 (▸c1412) T. Hoccleve De Regimine Principum (Royal 17 D.vi) (1860) 134 Withe his nailes cracched he his face, And skocched [a1450 Harl. 4866 scocched] it withe knyves and torent.
[…]
1906 C. M. Doughty Dawn in Brit. IV. xvi. 217 Cruithni other bands Are named; for birds’ and beasts’ similitudes, Seen scotcht in their tough flesh, or prickt, with woad.
1921 J. Dos Passos Three Soldiers vi. iii. 402 ‘Say, is your face badly cut up, Al?’ ‘No, it’s just scotched, skin’s off; looks like beefsteak, I reckon.’

b. transitive. In conjunction with notch. Cf. out of all scotch and notch at scotch n.1 Phrases. Now rare.
Chiefly after or with reference to Shakespeare: see quot. a1616.
a1616 W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) iv. v. 191 He scotcht him, and notcht him like a Carbinado.
[…]
1976 M. Long Unnatural Scene iii. 61 The scotching, notching and broiling of Rome and its wars.

2. a. transitive. To render (something dangerous or undesirable) temporarily harmless or less harmful, without destroying it completely. Originally and frequently in the snake is scotched, but not killed and variants (see note).
After Theobald’s reading of Macbeth iii. ii. 13 (see quot. 1726). The word was previously rendered scorch’d, as it appears in the First Folio; subsequent (esp. 19th-cent.) editions of Shakespeare often use scotch’d, though modern scholars usually prefer scorch’d. Cf. scorch v.3
1726 L. Theobald Shakespeare Restored App. 186 If I am not deceiv’d therefore, our Poet certainly wrote thus; We have scotch’d the Snake, not kill’d it. She’ll close, and be her self.
1759 S. Fielding Hist. Countess of Dellwyn II. iv. ii. 158 The Snake was scotched, but not killed.
[…]
1996 Cycle Touring & Campaigning Apr. 25/4 So far, the snake has been scotched, not killed.

b. transitive. To crush, stamp out (something dangerous or undesirable).
1825 Q. Rev. 32 277 If we, in our own language, were to scotch the insidious forgetfulness, we might, perhaps, be accused of ‘coarse and insulting abuse’.
1880 A. H. Huth Life & Writings H. T. Buckle I. iii. 189 Attempting to scotch the pestiferous germs of heresy.
1908 Expositor Dec. 527 Fanaticism which constitutes a danger to mankind should be scotched.
[…]
1999 P. Gregory Virgin Earth 543 More particular were the thanks of the Quakers who came under his protection while he scotched the last of the royalist rebellions.

So a variant reading of a Shakespeare line wrenched a verb out of its semantic course and sent it off in a different direction; my Signet Classic edition of Macbeth has “scorched” and doesn’t even mention Theobald’s reading, but the Arden edition edited by Pamela Mason and Sandra Clark has this footnote:

scorched slashed or scored, as with a knife (OED scorch v.3). Theobald’s emendation ‘scotch’d’ has often been adopted, and Shakespeare does use ‘scotch’ as a verb elsewhere (e.g. Cor 4.5.189–90: ‘he scotched him and notched him’); but he also uses ‘scorch’ meaning gashed or slashed in CE 5.1.183: ‘to scorch your face and to disfigure you’. The snake is Duncan, who although dead lives on in his sons.

The etymology is “< Anglo-Norman escocher, eschocher to pierce (skin) (c1193) < escoche notch (c1190) < es- es- prefix + Old French coche notch (see cock v.4)”; AHD adds “(probably from Latin coccum, scarlet oak berry, from Greek kokkos).”

Trevor Joyce sent Samir Chopra’s The Allrounder essay “Linguistic Lenses” to me in 2014; it’s so old the link has rotted and I have to provide an archived one, but dammit, it’s still a good piece and I’m posting it!

I heard cricket in many accents.

In Indian English, the language of the cities and metropolis: the clipped middle-class intonations of All India Radio commentators like Ashish Ray and Narottam Puri, the dry drawl of the Nawab of Pataudi, the slight lilt of Dicky Rutnagur. There was the Hindi commentary of Sushil Doshi and Jasdev Singh; I did not understand every one of their flowery Sanskritized descriptions, but I could sense their excitement, well-practiced in their stints at hockey games.

When I discovered the BBC and Test Match Special on my short-wave radio, a new host of accents entertained me: I did not then know I was listening to distinctive regional variations of the English language in its homeland. On the far-end of the short-wave dial was Radio Australia and Australian accents: sometimes broader and tangier, reflecting a country background, sometimes the flatter urban varietal, closer to the English accent but still bearing unmistakable traces of the Strine.

[Read more…]

You can read Christoph Harbsmeier’s “The Rhetoric of Premodern Chinese Prose Style” in a draft version (pdf) or in its final form as a chapter in Victor Mair (ed.), Columbia History of Chinese Literature (Academia.edu); either way, it’s a very interesting take on an ancient tradition, with suggestive comparisons to the classical West. Some excerpts:

Confucius maintained that when words get their message across, one should stop (Analects 15.41). What was admired in Confucius was his flair for wei yen (subtle speech), which, without being yin (hidden, arcane, riddle-like), achieved that peculiar subtle variety of ming (translucence, perspicuousness) which became so essential to the classical Chinese aesthetic. It was of the essence of this translucent, limpid effect that it was preferably achieved with an austere economy of stylistic means, an apparent sparseness of effort, a naturalness, the elegant light touch.

This ideal of translucence and perspicuousness, then, is not an intellectual clarity brought about by elaborate explicitness, definiteness of meaning. The text is designed to inspire in the reader the congenial but active and even creative production of artistic sense. The texts do not impose meaning, they are designed to inspire the creation of sense. […]

[Read more…]

Alison Flood at the Graun provides extracts from The Madman’s Library by Edward Brooke-Hitching; they’re all pretty amazing (The Triangular Book of Count St Germain is “an encoded French occult work which boasts the secret to extending life”; Pátria Amada by Vinicius Leôncio is a 7.5-ton compendium of every Brazilian tax code in one volume), but I particularly commend to your attention these:

Book 17th of Notes – Travels in 1818 by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1818)

In 1818, the French natural historian Rafinesque travelled to Kentucky to visit fellow naturalist John James Audubon. Rafinesque became such an irritating house guest that Audubon started to make up local animals to make fun of him, which the Frenchman faithfully recorded and sketched without question. Here there are four fake fish: the “Flatnose Doublefin”, the “Bigmouth Sturgeon”, the “Buffalo Carp Sucker” and the bulletproof “Devil-Jack Diamond fish”.

Poissons, ecrevisses et crab[e]s by Louis Renard (1719)

In the 18th century, Europeans knew very little of Indonesian wildlife. Renard knew even less, but that didn’t stop this Dutch bookseller from confidently producing this vibrant two-volume collection. Thirty years in the making, the 100 plates carry 460 illustrations of marine biology. In the second volume, however, scientific accuracy swiftly becomes a casualty of artistic licence. Many of the fish have distinctly avian and even human features, as well as decorations of sun, moon, star and even top-hat motifs. Highlights include the spiny lobster, Panulirus ornatus, reported to favour a mountain habitat and possessing a penchant for climbing trees and laying red-spotted eggs “as large as those of a pigeon”. The Crabbe-Criarde, we are told, mews like a cat. Or the four-legged fish, the Loop-visch or Poisson courant (Running Fish) of Ambon, of which the writer notes: “I trapped it on the beach and kept it alive for three days in my house, where it followed me around like a very friendly little dog.”

Needless to say, the illustrations are impressive. Thanks, Trevor!