languagehat.com

Gaelic Thesaurus of the Historic Environment launched:

A new Gaelic thesaurus which offers specialised terminology relating to the historic environment has been launched by Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on Ancient & Historic Monuments, with financial support from Bòrd na Gàidhlig.

The thesaurus contains more than 4,000 terms and is aimed at Gaelic speakers, learners and schools, as well as the general public. It provides terminology relating to areas such as architecture, archaeology and history as well as place-names for many historical sites.

As a thesaurus, it not only functions as an English-Gaelic, Gaelic-English dictionary of terminology but also provides the meaning of each term in both languages.

The Gaelic Thesaurus is online here. Thanks, Trevor!

Alex Foreman posted this video on Facebook, adding:

Me reading a poem by the Romani poet Lera Yanysheva, first in Xaladytka Romani, and then in my English translation.
This poem is based on real events. Since 2003, Romani neighborhoods in and on the outskirts of St. Petersburg have been repeatedly attacked by Neo-Nazi skinhead groups, with the reaction of the police and the public seldom rising above indifference.

It’s a powerful poem, and I find both his translation and his reading effective; you can see the Romani poem in Cyrillic with a Russian translation (which was helpful to me as I listened) here (scroll down about halfway, to “Петербу́рго”). Of course I was thrilled to hear Romani poetry read aloud, apart from all other considerations.

And if you’re curious about “Xaladytka Romani,” it’s in Wikipedia as Ruska Roma: “The Ruska Roma (Russian: Руска́ Рома́), also known as Russian Gypsies (Russian: Русские цыгане) or Xaladitka Roma (Russian: Халадытка Рома, […] i.e. ‘Roma-Soldiers’), are the largest subgroup of Romani people in Russia and Belarus.” They have a footnote for the translation “Roma-Soldiers” which leads here (scoll down to “Ruska Roma”): “Also called ‘Xaladitka Roma‘ (Gypsy soldiers).” But my Russian/Romani dictionary gives кэтана = kətana for солдат ‘soldier’ and doesn’t have a listing for халадытка [xaladytka], which looks like it should be a derivative of халавав [xalavav] ‘wash, rinse,’ past tense халадем [xaladem]. If anyone knows anything about this, please share.

From Peter Brown’s NYRB review (available in full here even to non-subscribers) of
Armenia! (an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 22, 2018–January 13, 2019) and its catalog Armenia: Art, Religion, and Trade in the Middle Ages, edited by Helen C. Evans:

Ancient Armenia was idiosyncratic, but it was far from insular. The Armenian plateau was not a mountain fastness like the Caucasus. Rather it was the meeting point of a series of ridges that stretched southward on either side, like strands of rope knotted in the middle, toward the west into Roman Anatolia, and, toward the east, along the Zagros range, into Iran and Mesopotamia. The roads from the highlands descended gently, most of the way, in a series of wide mountain valleys. For Armenians of the Middle Ages, before the drawing of modern borders, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean lay closer than one might think. Even within recent memory the two worlds would meet in the upland valleys of eastern Turkey. Scattered across the summer meadows, one could see the white felt yurts of the “cold desert” nomads of Central Asia mingling with the black camel-hair tents of the “hot desert” nomads of Syria and Mesopotamia, within view of the majestic white cone of Mount Ararat.

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was like the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century—an overbrimming reservoir of military manpower and skilled adventurers of every kind. As soldiers, Armenians fought with equal vigor in the armies of Eastern Rome and Iran. They were not only military men. In the fourth century, the Armenian Prohaeresius was a leading professor of rhetoric in Athens. In the tenth century the engineer Trdat, who reinforced the supports for the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was also an Armenian. The most remarkable evidence of this constant drift of a hardy and enterprising mountain people into the Mediterranean world was found on an Egyptian papyrus. It was a conversational handbook in which Greek phrases were transcribed into Armenian letters, so that the owner could discuss, in perfect Greek, the pithy sayings of Diogenes the Cynic, among others. [fn: See James Clackson, “A Greek Papyrus in Armenian Script,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Vol. 129 (2000).]

Anthony Bladon at the Log has a great list that starts:

• A verb walks into a bar, sees an attractive noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

Plenty more at the link, including the comments (which are, alas, marred by foolish carping about where to put periods in combination with quotation marks, as if anything about language was “logical”).
[Read more…]

JC sent me the link to “Constituent order in Maltese: A quantitative analysis,” by Slavomír Čéplö [in fact, his dissertation], with the comment “It’s not only well-written, it’s charming. And it trounces the Chomskyites good and proper, with much reference to Haspelmath. What’s not to like?” What indeed? (Slavo, of course, posts here as bulbul; if you do tweets, his are here.) Thanks, John!

Addendum. I should mention that all Hatters are thanked in the acknowledgments; see comment thread.

I’ve had Margaret Paxson’s Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village since 2011, and now (for whatever mysterious reason applies in such cases) I’ve finally gotten around to reading it — slowly, as with John Burnside (see this post), because it’s dense and provokes much thinking. I’ve gotten to chapter 5, “Wonders,” and I found this passage about words and otherworldly forces relevant enough to quote here (compare a couple of posts from 2003, Kazakh Word Magic and Translating Magic; “Solovyovo” is her pseudonym for the North Russian village where she did her anthropological research):

In Solovyovo’s stories, words—and sometimes simply thoughts—are uttered. Then, these words are perceived by the leshii, or domovoi, or some other unspecified set of actorless ears. Something is uttered—even in private—and that which is uttered is heard or received. This can happen because these beings, distinct and indistinct, are everywhere:

Anna Grigorievna: There is a host of the forest, a host in every [little] village. Of course. A host of the bathhouse. They are everywhere. […]

Fedor Sergeevich reminded me in several of his stories that “chto-to est’ (“there is something”). Some kind of force existed; the form was incidental: It could be God or it could be one of the khoziaeva [‘hosts’] or it could just be that amorphous force. […] There are two important points here: first, the supernatural world is a ready recipient for invocations (both intentional and otherwise); and second, The imagination of the chudesnoe [‘wondrous, miraculous’] little cares which ideology it springs from. The forces that fill it are form- and name-seeking, regardless of whether they fall into any given ideological taxonomy.

Readiness comes from the teeming supernatural world itself. But reactions—where forces come into being and act in the world—are set off by (among other things) words. Words are uttered, and things happen. Mikhail Alekseevich warned luliia when she cursed using reference to the devil, “all words will be remembered.” Curses such as, “The leshii take you away!”, were common in the village. Usually, I was told, they are uttered in moments of frustration, without thinking (“without behind-thought”). So, after one man spent a long day working and his calf would not walk where it should, he smacked the calf and let out a curse, and dedushka lesovoi [‘forest grandfather’] caused the cow to disappear […]

Stories in which curses were the operative words that awakened the attention of otherworldly powers were common. Yet other kinds of words were also ready to be heard. Just as a person can trigger the supernatural into action with misdirected curses, the correct attention to supernatural beings and forces — affectionate and respectful — can help a person, once lines have been crossed and magical space has been entered. When asking grandfather forest for permission to enter the woods, warm words must be used. The words should be, Anna Grigorievna told me, “totally affectionate — totally kind!” When she knew she would have to sleep in the forest alone at night, Anna Grigorievna herself would sometimes invoke not only grandfather forest, but “mother pine.” She would say, “Mother pine tree, sweet one. Allow me to sleep here. Save, guard me. Allow me.” [fn: Esli zabludish’sia i nado tam nochevat’, skazhi: ‘Mat’ elochka, milaia. Otpusti nochevat’. Spasi, sokhrani menia. Pustite.’] The tone of these words is warm and humble, and is sharply different from the sound of curses, such as “The leshii take you!”, which can cause great harm. Sweetness and affection, regardless of the words of address chosen, bring about protection and patronage. The lilt of the phrase is clearly no less important than its content. [fn: Every time I asked about the words of a particular spell, they changed a bit. The practice of magic does not seem to rely on getting all the words exactly “right,” but on the proper positioning of the invocation.]

I don’t believe in magic or forest spirits, but sweetness and affection are generally better bets than curses in all realms of life. (I do find it odd that Paxson doesn’t mention W. F. Ryan’s magisterial The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, which would seem to be right up her alley.)
[Read more…]

Reviewing Nature’s Embrace the other day reminded me that two books sent by the publisher, the excellent New York Review Books, have been sitting around for months waiting for me to get around to them; for one reason and another, even though I’m excited about them and am looking forward to reading them, I haven’t yet and probably won’t get to them for some time, so guilt is forcing me to at least let you know that they exist and are worth having.

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is the precursor to his great Life and Fate (which I wrote about here); it’s been translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, and you can read the publisher’s blurb and quotes from rave reviews here.

Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World, translated by Donald Rayfield, contains those Kolyma stories not included in the collection I raved about here; I’m sure everything I said there is applicable to this handsome volume, and it’s wonderful that these dense, sometimes unbearable masterpieces are available in full to the English-speaking reader.

My thanks go out as always to NYRB, which publishes great books and makes them available to a wide audience. Keep it up!

Another from the e-mail archives, Plautdietsch:

Welcome to this Plautdietsch Web Site. This site is intended to help preserve and promote the use of Plautdietsch as a spoken language. Most text in this web page will be in English but the audio/video resources available through this web site are primarily in the Plautdietsch language. It is hoped that people will be able to use these audio resources to listen to, and enjoy the sound of this ancient language being spoken.

There is much confusion between the meaning of Mennonite as a religion, and the association of the European origin Mennonites with the Plautdietsch language they evolved from the local Low Saxon language of the Vistula Valley in what was then Prussia, and the Pennsylvania Dutch that evolved in Switzerland and the closely surrounding areas of Germany. Many people are not aware that there are currently more non-European origin religious Mennonites around the world than there are the historical Mennonites that at one time or currently speak either Plautdietsch or Pennsylvania Dutch.

“Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, was originally a Low Prussian variety of East Low Saxon (German), with Dutch influence, that developed in the 16th and 17th Century in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia, today Polish territory. The word is etymologically cognate with Plattdeutsch, or Low German. Plaut is the same word as German platt or Dutch plat, meaning ‘Low’, but the name Dietsch = Dutch Diets, meaning ‘ordinary language, language of the people’; whereas Deitsch can only refer to German Deutsch.

The language (or groups of dialects of Low German) is spoken in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Belize, and Argentina by over 300,000 Mennonites. They are members of a religious group that originally fled from Holland and Belgium in the 1500s to escape persecution, and who eventually resettled in these areas. They introduced and developed their particular East Low German dialect, the so-called Weichselplatt, while they came to and lived in the Vistula delta area, beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. These colonists from the Low Countries were especially welcome there because of their experience with and knowledge of land reclaiming and making polders. As Mennonites they kept their own (primarily Dutch and Low-German) identity, using their Dutch/Low German language. Their East Low German dialect is still to be classified as Low Prussian, or simply Prussian.

Again, the fact that it’s a seven-year-old link is regrettable in terms of my ability to keep up with correspondence, but that the site has lasted so long is a recommendation. Thanks, Al!

Philip Ball writes for the Observer about the ever-popular question of extraterrestrial life, which is not an LH concern (for what it’s worth, my take is that I would be astonished if there were none, but surprised if we find any in the foreseeable future, and by “find” I mean find actual living beings, not “signs pointing unmistakably”). What is LH material is this odd linguistic suggestion:

[Stuart] Bartlett, working with astrobiologist Michael Wong of the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that we need to escape the straitjacket of Earth-based thinking about life. They propose introducing a broader category called “lyfe” (pronounced, in an oddly West Country fashion, as “loif”), of which life as we know it is just one variation. “Our proposal attempts to break free of some of the potential prejudices due to us being part of this one instantiation of lyfe,” says Bartlett.

They suggest four criteria for lyfe:

1. It draws on energy sources in its environment that keep it from becoming uniform and unchanging.

2. It grows exponentially (for example by replication).

3. It can regulate itself to stay stable in a changing environment.

4. It learns and remembers information about that environment. Darwinian evolution is an example of such learning over very long timescales: genes preserve useful adaptations to particular circumstances.

The two researchers say there are “sublyfe” systems that only meet some of these criteria, and also perhaps “superlyfe” that meets additional ones: lyfe forms that have capabilities beyond ours and that might look on us as we do on complex but non-living processes such as crystal growth.

“Our hope is that this definition frees our imaginations enough to not miss lyfe that might be hiding in plain sight,” says Bartlett. He and Wong suggest that some lyving organisms might use energy sources untapped here on Earth, such as magnetic fields or kinetic energy, the energy of motion. “There is no known life form that directly harnesses kinetic energy into its metabolism,” says Bartlett.

I rarely try to predict the future, but I will make a prediction about this: it will not catch on. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Going through my old unread e-mail file, I found the Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador:

The online Dialect Atlas of Newfoundland and Labrador was formally launched on October 23, 2013, to considerable media attention. More than a decade in the making, it documents regional differences in selected features of pronunciation, morphosyntax (grammar) and lexicon within the spoken English of the province. Its “structural” component – grounded in regional dialect data for traditional speakers in 69 coastal communities on the island of Newfoundland, assembled in the 1970s and 1980s by linguist Harold Paddock – expands the original project to include information on the geographical distribution of 31 features of pronunciation and 27 features of grammar. Its lexical (“words”) component documents responses to a 566-item questionnaire from 126 traditional speakers in twenty representative communities, in both the island and Labrador portions of the province. […]

One of the very few online dialect atlases in the English-speaking world, the Atlas is designed to appeal not simply to scholars, educators and students, but also to the public at large. An important component is the provision of thousands of illustrative audio clips for the Atlas’ pronunciation features, thereby enabling web users to hear the actual voices of Newfoundland speakers born as early as 1871. An “Activities” section provides site visitors with an opportunity to test their knowledge of – and increase their familiarity with – Newfoundland and Labrador English, in a dynamic and interactive environment. The Atlas also invites contributions and comments concerning current and observed usage of local features of English.

As Stan Carey, who sent it to me almost seven years ago, said: “This is a delight.” And it’s still there after all this time, so it’s no fly-by-night site. Belated thanks, Stan!