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A reader writes:

I play a lot of word games like Scrabble and crosswords, and I was wondering whether word games are more or less popular in other languages. This then led into speculating about what language characteristics suit particular sorts of games, and are there word games in other languages that don’t work in English?

I assume that language using Chinese characters obviously support some very different forms of games, but was also wondering about languages that are closer in form to English.

That seemed like an interesting question, so I’m putting it out there.

I finished Valentin Rasputin’s Прощание с Матерой (Farewell to Matyora) several days ago, but it’s so dense and powerful a text that I had to let it settle for a while before trying to write about it. I’m very glad I read his earlier Borrowed Time (post), Downstream (post), and Live and Remember (post); I was a little afraid that they would diminish the impact of his most famous novel, but it was just the reverse — the background allowed me to appreciate it all the more. It’s so good, and so final, that it essentially put an end to the whole “village prose” movement.

The basic plot is set out in the first sentence: “И опять наступила весна, своя в своем нескончаемом ряду, но последняя для Матеры, для острова и деревни, носящих одно название.” Antonina Bouis translated it thus: “Once more spring had come, one more in the never-ending cycle, but for Matyora this spring would be the last, the last for both the island and the village that bore the same name”; I would venture something more like “And spring came again, taking its own place in its endless row, but it was the last for Matyora, for the island and village that shared the same name.” (I particularly dislike her “cycle,” which imposes a sense of recurrence that is not in the Russian — a ряд just goes on in a straight line.) A dam is being built downstream on the Angara (presumably the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station, though the name is never mentioned), and the reservoir it creates will flood the village that has flourished for three hundred years. Most discussions of the novel focus on this as the hook for a sociopolitical approach; the (pathetically stubby) Wikipedia article quotes Edward J. Brown on “Rasputin’s persistent theme, the tragic impact of industrial progress and unbridled urbanization on a peasant community still rooted in the past,” and yes, that’s true, but it’s not what I care about. You could write a terrible novel on that basis, and many have, but Rasputin has written a great one.

If you were going to write a bad novel, you would start by creating a whole series of characters illustrating every aspect of the situation, each with his or her own point of view, and present endless debates between them, clarifying the positive and negative results of the flooding; in the end everyone would move to the new village on the mainland and we would see them settling in in their various ways. Rasputin does not do this. He has one central character, Darya Pinigina, who is over eighty years old and has no conception of or interest in life beyond her village — it is impossible to imagine her outside it. There are a couple of other old women, her neighbors and friends, and a half-wild man nicknamed “Bogodul” (from a word for ‘blasphemer’) because he speaks mainly in curses. There are Darya’s son Pavel, who feels sorry for the village and for his mother but realizes the inevitability of change, and his son Andrei, who is completely committed to the new world of triumphant socialism and has no patience for nostalgia (he plays a very small role). But Darya, with her memories and lamentations, carries the novel, and one of the things I like about Rasputin is his focusing on old women in some of his most important works — most male novelists feature young or middle-aged men, whose travails are presumably more compelling to the imagined (male) reader.
[Read more…]

Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) has a post about his love for the veterinary memoirs of James Herriot (most famous in their filmed versions as All Creatures Great and Small) and his discomfiture on discovering that he preferred the Russian translation he’d read in his childhood to the original English. He goes on to say:

You might say that’s a silly thing to dwell on, of course a text in your native language is easier and closer to you. Maybe so. But I’ve been living outside of Russian-speaking countries for almost thirty years, and for at least the last twenty of them I’ve read in English more than in Russian. I read scientific books, nonfiction, belles-lettres, fanfic, and pretty much everything else in English. I very much love the English language and English literature, it causes me no difficulty to read complex literary texts — only pleasure! — and I always, always prefer to read a book in the original and not in translation if I can. I have absolutely no sense of being defective or lacking understanding when I read in English… and all those fine words dissolve, vanish into thin air, when I directly compare one and the same text by Herriot, very well written in both languages.

Казалось бы, нашел о чем думать, конечно же, текст на родном языке проще и ближе. Может, так и есть, не о чем думать. Но я живу за пределами русскоязычных стран уже скоро тридцать лет, и последние двадцать из них, как минимум, я читаю по-английски больше и чаще, чем по-русски. Я читаю по-английски научные книги, нонфикшн и худло и фанфики и что только не. Я очень люблю английский язык и английскую литературу, мне не составляет никакой сложности читать сложные литературные тексты – только удовольствие! – и я всегда, всегда предпочитаю прочитать книгу в оригинале, если могу, а не в переводе. У меня абсолютно нет ощущения какой-то своей ущербности и недопонимания, когда я читаю по-английски – и все эти прекрасные слова растворяются, улетучиваются в никуда, когда я напрямую сравниваю один и тот же текст Хэрриота, очень хорошо написанный на обоих языках.

I find this fascinating, and it reminds me of a Facebook post by Irina Mashinsky some years ago (I have no idea how to retrieve old FB posts) about how she still desperately loved the translation of Pnin she read as a young woman in Russia, even though she’s long since come to value Nabokov’s style in English. I’m trying to think of a similar instance in my own reading; the first thing that comes to mind is the famous poem by Archilochus whose translation I quote in this 2007 post (a discussion of Catullus and Virgil which I am glad to have the occasion to reread). I presume those of you who splash around in more than one language have experienced such things as well.

Janis Krumins writes with a description of a tool he’s created:

It converts IPA symbols to English word(s). Familiarity with the International Phonetic Alphabet is required, but in return, it offers far more flexibility than a regular rhyming dictionary. Using wildcard symbols (any, consonant, vowel), you can find a wide variety of similar-sounding words – rhymes, consonances, assonances, alliterations, pararhymes, and more.

The Phonetic Word Search is here; enjoy!

Marie-Lucie Tarpent, who used to comment frequently here (come back, Marie-Lucie!), gave a lecture for the Sealaska Heritage Institute called The Tsimshianic Language Family, its Ancestry, and Distant Relatives (YouTube; there doesn’t appear to be a transcript, alas). You can read a brief description here, and of course there’s a Wikipedia article. It’s fun to hear her voice and to hear the Tsimshian spoken.

Courtesy of Sci-News:

Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) form some of the most cooperative groups in the animal kingdom, living in multigenerational colonies under the control of a single breeding queen. Little is known about how individuals within these colonies navigate the many interactions that must occur in such a complex cooperative group. A new study shows that calls emitted by individuals, in particular the common ‘chirp’ call, convey information about group membership, creating distinctive colony dialects; what’s more, these dialects are culturally transmitted across generations, supporting the idea that social complexity evolved concurrently with vocal complexity.

[…] To investigate the role of vocal communication in mole-rat society, Professor Lewin and his colleagues recorded a total of 36,190 chirps made by 166 individuals from seven naked mole-rat colonies held in labs in Germany and South Africa. They then applied machine learning techniques to analyze the acoustic properties of these vocalizations. “We wanted to find out whether these vocalizations have a social function for the animals, who live together in an ordered colony with a strict division of labor,” he said.

The researchers found that naked mole-rats have distinctive soft chirps, unique to an animal’s group, and that this dialect is determined by a colony’s queen and is learned by mole-rat pups early in life. However, these dialects are not fixed; they change when a colony’s queen dies and is replaced, and young pups fostered in foreign colonies learn the dialect of their adoptive groups. This suggests that individual colony dialects, including their transmission from generation to generation, is cultural rather than genetic.

“We established that each colony has its own dialect,” said first author Dr. Alison Barker, also from the Department of Neuroscience at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine. “The development of a shared dialect strengthens cohesion and a sense of belonging among the naked mole-rats of a specific colony.”

“Human beings and naked mole-rats seem to have much more in common that [sic] anyone might have previously thought,” Professor Lewin said. […] “The next step is to find out what mechanisms in the animals’ brains support this culture, because that could give us important insight into how human culture evolved.”

I’m generally skeptical of animal-language stories, but this seems reasonably plausible, though I don’t know about “insight into how human culture evolved.” Thanks, Jonathan!

Since Manchester and Mancunians came up here recently, I thought it would be a good time to repost this from Laudator Temporis Acti, quoting John Hines, “The Roman Name for Manchester,” in G.D.B. Jones, Roman Manchester (1974), pp. 159-163 (at 160, notes omitted):

The name MAMUCIUM has found its way into the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain, and (as the received version) into such authoritative works as Crawford and Richmond’s ‘The British Section of the Ravenna Cosmography’, and Rivet and Jackson’s ‘The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary’, which came out in 1949 and 1970 respectively.

The form MAMUCIUM, then, has as strong manuscript support as has MANCUNIUM, although popular tradition still holds to the latter. When one considers what the popular mind is capable of making of names (‘Manchester’ was in Camden’s day locally supposed to be the ‘city of Men’, or of the ‘good burghers and true’ who fought back the Danes) this particular consideration gives the received form no real advantage. Those who accept the form MAMUCIUM as the original Latinised Celtic name have the problem of finding a satisfactory derivation. Indeed this did not prove too difficult, since the word MANS, MAMM, is to hand. This means in Irish or Welsh ‘breast’, ‘mother’ or ‘womb’. To the specialist scholar, then, the name means ‘breast-like hill’ and is compared to CICUTIO, a place-name with similar meaning of a fort sited in Wales (Y Gaer).

You can (I hope) read Hines’ further discussion at Google Books; I suppose it’s unlikely that “Mamucian” is going to replace “Mancunian” in popular use, however weighty the scholarly arguments.

Back in 2016, Frank Jacobs wrote about a culturally important phenomenon I had not been aware of:

The general synopsis at midday: High west Sole 1028 expected east Sole 1019 by midday tomorrow. Low southern Portugal 1010 losing its identity. The area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire: Northwesterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 at first. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

The Shipping Forecast is quite possibly the most British thing ever. It’s quirkier than cricket, defiantly old-fashioned and ceremonial, and as reassuringly regular as Big Ben (1). Produced by the UK’s Meteorological Office, it’s broadcast four times a day by BBC Radio Four. […]

Listing the weather conditions in 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles, the Shipping Forecast is read out at 5.20 am, 12.01 pm, 5.54 pm and 00.48 am. The first and last broadcasts of the day also include reports from additional weather stations and inshore waters forecasts. The last one also includes an outlook for next-day weather across the UK itself. […]

Much of the Forecast’s charm derives from the – literally – outlandish names of the sea areas listed in the bulletin. The names derive from sandbanks (e.g. Dogger, Bailey), estuaries (Forth, Thames, Shannon), islands or islets (Wight, Rockall, Utsire), towns (Dover), or other geographic features (e.g. Malin Head, Ireland’s northernmost point). […]

One is named FitzRoy, after the captain of HMS Beagle, Britain’s first professional weatherman and the founder of the Met Office. The southernmost region, Trafalgar is only mentioned standard in the last forecast of the day. The regions are always listed in the same order, starting north with Viking, between Scotland and Norway, and then proceeding in a roughly clockwise direction:

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland. […]

The gap between Radio Four’s last programme of the day and the final Shipping Forecast, at 48 minutes past midnight, is plugged with as much as necessary of ‘Sailing By’, an orchestral piece by Ronald Binge, otherwise famous for his arrangements for Mantovani. The repetitive waltz helps sailors find the right frequency. For the many landlubbers tuning in to the last Shipping Forecast of the day, the cozy number signals that it’s almost time to turn in for the night. […]

The Shipping Forecast has made a huge mark on music, literature and the wider culture. It inspired songs by Jethro Tull, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Wire, Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, British Sea Power, Beck and the Prodigy, among others, and it was used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

Nobel-prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney wrote a sonnet called ‘The Shipping Forecast’, and British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy mentions “the radio’s prayer” in one of her poems. The programme is used in books, films, tv series, and has been parodied countless times (once as ‘The Shopping Forecast’, listing UK supermarkets instead of sea regions).

You can hear “Sailing By” here (and I recommend the nostalgic comments) and read the Heaney sonnet here. Alas, there’s no point clicking on the audio link at the start of the article, because it’s just a robotic voice making its way through the text; you can hear actual Shipping Forecast recordings at the Wikipedia article (which also, of course, goes into detail about the history of the broadcast and the origin of the names; Utsire, being Norwegian, is pronounced /ʊtˈsiːrə/, not — as the robot has it — /juːtˈsaɪər/ [though the actual Norwegian pronunciation is [ˈʊ̀tsɪɾɑ]; see comments below]). Thanks, Trevor!

I’m still reading Lounsbery’s Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917, and I wanted to quote a passage about how provincials can shed their backwardness and then provide parallels I’ve been running into (synchronicity!). From the start of chap. 5 (“I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!”: Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste, pp. 100 ff.):

This chapter considers first Goncharov’s An Ordinary Story and then works by Belinsky in order to analyze what provinciality and the provinces signify for these writers, both of whom are concerned with how Russia might work to develop a coherent (literary) culture. Both pay close attention to the processes by which one goes from being provincial to being not provincial, an attention reflecting their shared belief that readers and other consumers of culture need to be trained. [She cites Balzac in Lost Illusions, where Lucien Chardon repudiates his “provincial ideas of life.”] The same holds true for Goncharov and Belinsky: to a great degree they, too, believe that becoming nonprovincial and thus modern depends on having access to a sufficient quantity of cultural artifacts and ideas.

Scale allows for comparing and choosing: “In the provinces there is no question of choice or comparison,” Balzac writes, whereas in Paris, “one learns, one compares.” With changes in scale (the “new proportions” to which Balzac refers) come changes in judgment, a fact reflected in an old Parisian’s sage advice to a newcomer—“I do beg of you, wait, and compare!” The result is a new level of discernment: Lost Illusions devotes long passages to the myriad subtle distinctions that life in the capital will require Lucien to master. The account of Lucien’s introduction to fashionable society, for instance, is structured entirely around his realization that he must learn to discriminate; words like “compare,” “different,” “distinctions,” and “subtle perception” recur over and over. This is what interests Goncharov and Belinsky—the incremental process by which provincials can lose their provinciality, and the circumstances under which such a transformation becomes possible.

Then I was reading Meghan Daum’s essay (expanded from the original version in the New Yorker of October 18, 1999; [archived]) about how she racked up massive debt as a provincial from New Jersey trying to achieve the cultural life of Manhattan as shown in Woody Allen movies when I hit the following passage, which perfectly exemplifies the process Lounsbery describes:

Though there were lots of different kinds of kids at Vassar, I immediately found the ones who had grown up in Manhattan, and I learned most of what I felt I needed to know by socializing with them. In this way, my education was primarily about becoming fully versed in a certain set of references that, individually, have very little to do with either a canon of knowledge as defined by academia or preparation for the job market. My education had mostly to do with speaking the language of the culturally sophisticated, with having a mastery over a number of points of cultural trivia ranging from the techniques of Caravaggio to the discography of The Velvet Underground. This meant being privy to the kind of information that is only learned from hours spent hanging out with friends in dorm rooms and is therefore unavailable to those buried in the library trying to keep their scholarships or working at Stereo World trying to pay the bills. It is to have heard rumors that Domino’s Pizza has ties to the pro-life movement, that Bob Dylan’s mother invented White-Out and that Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite. It is to never wear nude panty hose, never smoke menthol cigarettes, never refer to female friends as “girlfriends,” and never listen to Billy Joel in earnest. It is to know at least two people featured in the New York Times wedding pages on any given Sunday and to think nothing of putting $80 towards a bridal shower dinner at a chic restaurant for one of these people. It is to know that anyone who uses the word “chic” is anything but. It is to know arugula from iceberg lettuce, Calder from Klimt, Truffaut from Cassevetes. It is to be secure in one’s ability to grasp these comparisons and weigh one against the other within a fraction of a second, to know, as my Jewish Manhattanite friends put it, “from stuff”—to know from real estate, from contemporary fiction, from clothing designers and editors of glossy magazines and Shakespearean tragedies and skirt lengths.

Knowing from stuff is what it’s all about, and as a former provincial who spent years trying to absorb all the cultural knowledge I didn’t get growing up, I sympathize. Then, reading Boris Fishman’s wonderful novel A Replacement Life, I found this (an old Jewish Soviet emigré is speaking): “The capital likes to laugh at the provinces. Makes it feel like the capital.” And just now, watching the Words Without Borders symposium Young Russophone Writers (broadcast on YouTube; you can read a description here), I heard Olga Breininger talking about how Russia is only now catching up with feminism and other notions that have been common currency in the West for years. Once you start noticing it, it’s everywhere.

I guess I’ll take this opportunity to do a little nitpicking, as is my wont: Lounsbery refers to Turgenev’s “Hamlet of Shchigrov,” translating the title of one of the Sportsman’s Sketches, Гамлет Щигровского уезда [The Hamlet of the Shchigry district]. The adjective щигровский [shchigrovskii] means ‘of or pertaining to the town of Shchigry [Щигры]’; there is no such place as “Shchigrov.”

Brooke Jarvis’s NY Times Magazine article “What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?” is so fascinating I’m tempted to quote half of it just to boggle your minds (I read large chunks to my wife as she was trying to eat her breakfast), but since this is Languagehat and not Olfactionhat, I’ll only post the section directly related to language and urge you to read the whole thing if you have access to the Times. (OK, just one tidbit: a study “found that we can tell, just from sniffing a T-shirt another person has worn, whether that person’s immune system is similar to our own.[…] But here’s what’s really impressive: Our noses can also distinguish between two groups of mice that have different immune systems.”)

We may not be bad at smelling, but we are bad at putting what we smell into words. (Kant again: “Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense.”) With vision, we have a concrete vocabulary to lean on: red or blue, dark or bright. […] Even if we’re perceiving a color differently from the way someone else is — which is, in fact, pretty often the case — we still have a shared language that we can all lean on to discuss it. With smell, we find ourselves flailing. […]

Our descriptions of smell also lack resolution, [Joel] Mainland, the neuroscientist, notes: Though Pantone lists dozens of shades of blue, each of which can be quantified precisely in hue and saturation, we can really describe a banana scent only as banana-y. (If our experience of vision were as dissolute as smell, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has written, “the sky would go all birdish” when a bird flew by.) Yet the intensity of a smell can completely change the way we experience it. Mainland, who often asks volunteers to describe smells in his lab, told me that he has one vial that is perceived as grapefruit at low concentrations but rotten egg at high ones, and another that slides from black currant to cat pee. As Parma says: “With vision, we agree on where we stand. With odor, it’s like a kaleidoscope.”

That turns out to matter quite a lot. Being able to describe and discuss what we smell helps us smell it better. Think of sommeliers, who learn to pick out the distinct aromas of wine in large part by learning a language for them. Or consider, as the cognitive scientist and philosopher A.S. Barwich explains in her book “Smellosophy,” that beer experts have lots of descriptors for bitter flavors, which they prize, while wine drinkers, who consider bitterness a sign of a failed wine, have few.

Asifa Majid, who studies language and cognition at the University of York, has written about languages in Southeast Asia that have genuine lexicons for odors: sets of words that work much like color words, each describing something inherent in the experience of a smell rather than comparing it to other things. While Westerners trying to describe smells tend to hem and haw and squint into space, searching for descriptors, speakers of these languages are declarative and decisive. (Majid described, to The Atlantic, how her own ability to name smells looked in comparison: “Some kids were following me around and laughing. Like, ‘How can you be such a moron?’”) Huehuetla Tepehua, an Indigenous language in Mexico, likewise has at least 45 different words that express specific olfactory experiences. People who grow up in such cultures are better at detecting, discriminating and naming odors. One also doubts that they would require a scientific renaissance to tell them that smell matters.

We discussed Majid and Burenhult’s research with speakers of Jahai back in 2014 (and Kant in 2017).