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I’ve now read my second novel by Gaito Gazdanov, История одного путешествия [The story of a journey], and he’s starting to come a bit more into focus — when you’ve only read one novel by an author (or heard one piece of music by a composer, etc.), you don’t really have a sense of them. As I wrote here, “I reread Gaito Gazdanov’s Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], which I last read shortly after moving to NYC in 1981 (I checked it out of the much-missed Donnell, with its superb foreign-language collection); I don’t know why I didn’t post about it, but I enjoyed it even more than I had before.” Well, I think I know why I didn’t post about it; I didn’t know what to say about it. I’m still pretty uncertain, but I think I have enough of a hold on his style to flail around for the length of a post (with copious quotes); as I read more of him, I’ll probably have more focused things to say.

At any rate, a brief description might go: young émigré Volodya Rogachov travels from Constantinople to Paris (via Prague, Berlin, and Vienna), where his older brother Nikolai sells cars, and spends time with him and his wife Virginia and their friends while working on a novel before leaving Paris for the Levant (to sell cars for his brother). Many of the characters are non-Russians: the Englishman Arthur Thomson, who lived in Russia for a while and speaks perfect Russian; the Austrian Viktoria; and various French people, including Andrée, who doesn’t speak much Russian but lives with the painter Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, who won’t interact with anyone but her and Volodya. There are loving descriptions of Parisian neighborhoods and itineraries, name-checking famous hangouts like the Coupole and the Rotonde. It’s a lot of fun for anyone who loves Paris.

But there’s no plot. We get Volodya’s impressions of these people and their interconnections and memories, but nothing leads to anything else: he wanders around, talks to people, feels things, and eventually leaves town. This frustrates a lot of people and would once have frustrated me; fortunately, in recent years I’ve gotten much less interested in plot, having immersed myself in writers like Dorothy Richardson and Irina Polyanskaya, and all I really care about is good writing, which is what Gazdanov provides in full measure. Alas, reviewers of his day were more severe; they had appreciated his first novel, but this one disappointed them (though they continued to be ravished by his prose) — even the usually perceptive Khodasevich complained that any of the episodes could be omitted without harming the structure of the novel. And this was the last of his novels to receive any substantial criticism; WWII swept away the whole émigré literary scene, with its journals and critics, and he fell into obscurity for his final decades.

I’ll quote some passages from László Dienes’s Russian Literature in Exile: The Life and Work of Gajto Gazdanov, which while not especially impressive as criticism (note his snooty reference to “third-rate trash writers”) is valuable as the work of someone who’s read everything Gazdanov wrote and thus provides useful orientation, and then (as usual) quote some bits of linguistic interest. Here’s Dienes (the surname is apparently an archaic equivalent of Hungarian Dénes = Dennis):
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I ran across the information that Mafia was derived from a Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which surprised me and made me curious about further etymology. The OED (entry revised 2000) wasn’t much help — it just says “< Italian mafia (1865; also †maffia), probably back-formation < mafiuso, Italian regional (Sicily) mafiusu” — but the Wikipedia article has this fairly astonishing etymology section:

Mafia (English: /ˈmɑːfiə/; Italian: [ˈmaːfja]) derives from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which roughly translated means “swagger” but can also be translated as “boldness” or “bravado”. According to scholar Diego Gambetta, mafiusu (mafioso in Italian) in 19th-century Sicily, in reference to a man, signified “fearless”, “enterprising”, and “proud”. In reference to a woman, the feminine-form adjective mafiusa means “beautiful” or “attractive”. Because Sicily was under Islamic rule from 827 to 1091, Mafia may have come to Sicilian through Arabic, although the word’s origins are uncertain. Mafia in the Florentine dialect means “poverty” or “misery”, while a cognate word in Piedmontese is mafium, meaning “a little or petty person”. Possible Arabic roots of the word include:

■ maʿfī (معفي), meaning “exempted”. In Islamic law, jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands, and people who pay it are “exempted” from prosecution.
■ màha, meaning “quarry” or “cave”; the mafie were the caves in the region of Marsala that acted as hiding places for persecuted Muslims and later served other types of refugees, in particular Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts” after their embarkment on Sicily in 1860 in the struggle for Italian unification. According to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo [it], cave in Arabic literary writing is Maqtaa hagiar, while in popular Arabic it is pronounced as Mahias hagiar, and then “from Maqtaa (Mahias) = Mafia, that is cave, hence the name (ma)qotai, quarrymen, stone-cutters, that is, Mafia”.
■ mahyāṣ (مهياص), meaning “aggressive boasting” or “bragging”.
■ marfūḍ (مرفوض), meaning “rejected”, considered to be the most plausible derivation; marfūḍ developed into marpiuni (“swindler”) to marpiusu and finally mafiusu.
■ muʿāfā (معافى), meaning “safety” or “protection”.
■ maʿāfir (معافر), the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo. The local peasants imitated these Arabs and as a result the tribe’s name entered the popular lexicon. The word Mafia was then used to refer to the defenders of Palermo during the Sicilian Vespers against rule of the Capetian House of Anjou on 30 March 1282.
■ mafyaʾ (مفيء), meaning “place of shade”. Shade meaning refuge or derived from refuge. After the Normans destroyed the Saracen rule in Sicily in the 11th century, Sicily became feudalistic. Most Arab smallholders became serfs on new estates, with some escaping to “the Mafia”. It became a secret refuge.

Does anyone have any thoughts about that parade of possibles?

Sam Dolbear writes at the indispensable Public Domain Review:

Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied Yam, Marshmallow Bunny, to name but a few. As Daniel Harris points out in Cabinet magazine, paint names developed their own poetic style and, like a certain tradition of lyric poetry they make reference to nature to express mood or atmosphere. Likewise, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour (first published in 1814) constructs a system or taxonomy for the classification of colour with reference to things in the natural world, (rather than to objects of everyday artifice, as with the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel). And though the goal is to primarily enable a scientific structure of identification, rather than evoke mood, the end product can’t help but veer to the poetic.

The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colours so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner’s system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner’s colours Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of colour on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colours to bring the total to 110.

With Syme’s new reference categories there’s born a whole new world of relationships between disparate aspects of nature, encounters dictated solely by colour. For example, for “skimmed-milk white” we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral); for “lavender purple” we have “the light parts of spots of on the under wings of Peacock Butterfly” (animal), “dried lavender flowers” (vegetable), and “porcelain jasper” (mineral). Wonderfully odd monochrome tableaux are conjured: upon a crop of calamine a bed of straw in which sits a polar bear; or the style of an Orange Lily encrusted with Brazilian topaz and the eyes of the largest flesh fly.

Syme’s confidence in obscure references to the natural world came from an obsession with taxonomies at the time, a line developed from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin (who made use of Werner’s Nomenclature on the Beagle). Such people often relied on a network of collectors and explorers, those obsessed with ordering and categorizing, pinning down butterflies and stuffing birds. In an age of mass digital reproduction, the pinning down of colour is perhaps as difficult as ever. It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.

The link was sent me by the indispensable Trevor Joyce; thanks, Trevor! (Speaking of whom, check out his new project, Possession, which begins “well here goes nothing and it’s not funny at all” and continues with a series of six-line stanzas that capture our present moment as well as anything I’ve seen.)

I was excited to discover that the Centre for Expanded Poetics has an Archive section that presents the complete runs of Caterpillar (1967-1973), Sulfur (1981-2000), and transition (1927-1938). I don’t remember being aware of the first (which you can read about here: “Caterpillar was started by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by such writers as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, and Louis Zukofsky”), but the other two are very familiar; I was excited when Sulfur first came out (I’ve probably got the first few issues kicking around somewhere), and of course transition is known to every aficionado of English-language modernism. What a gift to the online world!

For those who don’t care about defunct little magazines, try sengi, which is really two different words, one meaning ‘elephant shrew’ (from Swahili sengi, probably from another Bantu language) and the other the name of a former monetary unit of Zaire, one hundredth of a likuta and one ten-thousandth of a zaire — you might think it was named after the little mammal, but no, it’s from Kongo sengi, senki, from French cinq (in the sense of five sous). The second is in the OED but not, so far, the first.

This is via MeFi, and I’m just going to reproduce growabrain’s wording there because I can’t improve on it:

In Every Language collects images that different language versions of Wikipedia use to illustrate concepts. Refresh to see more.

It was created by Riley Walz. (wiki)

A couple to get you started: house, street. It’s interesting to see which articles use images from their own culture and which fetch them from elsewhere (e.g., the Japanese “street” image shows Wall Street).

Oh, and when I clicked on the Persian “street” article I chose the Google Translate option, and I thought I’d reproduce what it did with the etymology section:

Theology of the word

The word street is two parts of Khi and Aban Persian. The word “Khi” is one of the roots of two Persian words, chid and musk. ۳]

The word “wrough” in Middle Persian is (*xīg, *xēg, leather bag) of Mazandarani (xek). With the old Scandinavian kagi (Bashkeh) the doppelganger. And the word “worn” is from the root of the word Persian pig. ۴]

Jesse McKinley writes for the NY Times (archived) about a word that is apparently showing up all over the place:

With roots in the Renaissance and a long history of use by economists, tranche has been given new prominence in recent weeks as writers and pundits seek to describe the some three million pages released by the Justice Department in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier.

In the month since the Jan. 30 release, there have been tranches heard on the radio, on television, online and in print. There have been descriptions of “massive” and “enormous” tranches, “giant” and “voluminous” tranches, and — conversely — “small” tranches inside big tranches. There have been “recent” tranches and “new” tranches and “possibly last” tranches. There have been Spanish-language tranches (“tramo,” roughly) and, of course, French tranches, a natural outgrowth of its ancestry as a French verb, trancher, meaning to slice.

In English, tranche has made the leap from verb to noun, and is generally defined as a portion of a larger whole. […]

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Min Chen writes for Artnet about an exhibition at Yale Library (is that what they’re calling Sterling Memorial now?) I’d love to see:

James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses arrived in 1922—in a printing riddled with errors. There was an errant period on page 30, a missing comma on page 529, an extra dash on page 578, and typos on pages 39, 95, 519, 650, and many more in between. So numerous were these mistakes that they filled a seven-page errata slip included with later printings. Joyce, whose novel was rich with allusions and stylistic parodies that describe a slippery reality, brushed aside these flaws: “These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

The idea that the printed mistake could be beautiful—and illuminating—is behind the Yale Library’s new exhibition, which unpacks 500 years of errata, or sheets listing errors in books that were already printed. Titled “‘Beauties of My Style,’” it brings together about 30 artifacts from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, including inaccurate maps, book corrections, and religious texts with very grave typographic blunders.

The exhibition is curated by design professors Rachel Churner and Geoff Kaplan; as the publishers behind No Place Press, they fully understand how human error can make its way into print. Their research into errata at the Beinecke further revealed how these corrections slips could carry “unexpected poetry,” Churner told me over email.

There are glorious images, including of course the Wicked Bible (“Thou shalt commit adultery”) as well as an errata slip for the 2004 translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle admitting that “new authorized translation” should actually read “unauthorized.” The exhibit will be on view March 30–September 6, 2026; if you’re in the vicinity and happen to drop in, do report back.

It’s always nice to discover a blogging linguist I hadn’t known about [actually I had; see below]; Danny L. Bate (“Linguist, broadcaster, writer, cat fanatic”) has been doing it since June 9, 2020 (I like the way his introductory post lays out “the standard practice among linguists,” so that laypeople can follow along: single quotes for translations, italics for words in a given language, etc.), and his latest post, Vltava, Sázava, Mumlava: A Mumble of Voices Almost Lost, does a nice job of linking local river names to the great sea of Indo-European:

The chief of the rivers that flow through Krkonoše is the Elbe; I’ve previously written about that prince of waterways in great detail. My most recent visit instead inspired linguistic reflections about a considerably less famous river: the Mumlava.

Etymologically, it’s the mumbler (in older German: mummeln; in Czech: mumlat). It by no means ranks among the great rivers of Europe; the Mumlava rises just to the south of the source of the Elbe, mumbles its way for twelve kilometres, then spills out into the Jizera. It wouldn’t be known at all beyond the wardens and fans of Krkonoše, were it not for the Mumlava Waterfall, the largest in the country. […] Given the region’s historical inhabitants, it seems to have been on the basis of the German verb mummeln that the Mumlava was first christened the Mummel. Czech speakers then modelled their own name for it on that German original. This they achieved by adding the ending -ava.

This Czechification of the name brought the Mumlava into line and rhyme with other rivers in the country; there’s the Sázava, the Jihlava, the Úhlava, the Otava, the Oskava, the Opava, the Morava and the Vltava. […] Their common -ava ending was bestowed on the Mumlava, a sort of hydronymic suffix to make it sound like a proper Czech river. The thing is, this ending is not part of Czech’s core of Slavic vocabulary – it’s not something the language has inherited from its prehistoric Slavic origins. Instead, naming rivers with -ava is a later practice that the Czechs-to-be extracted from names already in use when they first arrived in Bohemia and Moravia.

He goes on to describe how Germanic *ahwō ‘river’ “is behind the -ava part of the river’s name,” and how that probably derives from a Proto-Indo-European *akʷā. But “the door is also open to an instance of borrowing”:

This alternative explanation would envision a word, in a language local to central and southern Europe, that was adopted into the Indo-European family from outside. Such an external origin was considered by the scholar Robert S. P. Beekes, for one. In Beekes’ view, *akʷā belonged to the prehistoric language behind so many European river names. It acted as a ‘substratum’ that donated words to the ascendant Indo-European languages. Those words in time became all that remained of it.

I think he explains these things very well (while providing some lovely photos); thanks, Scopulus!

Herewith another Languagehat Poll combined with a Languagehat Gripe. I was reading the latest article about ibogaine, which may or may not be a wonder drug, when it occurred to me to wonder about the etymology and pronunciation. I had always mentally said /ˈaɪboˌgeɪn/ (EYE-bo-gain; I use /o/ because I don’t reduce it as far as /ə/), but I didn’t remember if I’d heard that somewhere or just invented it. So I looked around and discovered that the etymology was (per AHD):

[French ibogaïne, from New Latin (Tabernanthē) iboga, species name of shrub in whose root it is found, probably ultimately from Ghetsogho (Bantu language of Gabon) ibogha; akin to boghaga, to cure.]

So far so good, and it even had a derivation within Tsogo. But I was appalled to see that the pronunciation given was (ĭ-bō′gə-ēn′, -ĭn). Had I been flagrantly mispronouncing it for years? I checked OED: “/ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.” And M-W? “i-ˈbō-gə-ˌēn.” It wasn’t looking good — I was going to have to retrain my brain. But then I thought “let me check video clips and make sure,” and lo and behold, every one of them, even those with experts speaking, used my untutored version, EYE-bogain. So now I was pissed: the dictionaries were conspiring to hoodwink their users and try to get them to use their fake pronunciation! I turn to the Varied Reader — if you are familiar with the word, how do you say it? And have you heard anyone say it the dictionary-approved (and very unnatural) way (ih-BOH-guh-een)?

I expect DE will have something to say about this:

Kye Kye Kule is a call-and-response song performed in several African countries. The actions of this song are reminiscent of the American song Head Shoulder Knees and Toes. […] I asked a friend of mine, Dr. Sunu Doe, about the origins of this song.  Dr. Doe is an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Ghana specializing in preserving pre-colonial Ghanaian culture through music and music education.  He says Kye Kye Kule is an authentic song that Ghanaian school children learn.

Depending on the source, both on the internet and in print, the song can be found by searching Che Che Koolay or Kye Kye Kule. According to Dr. Doe, the correct way to spell the title is with Ky instead of ch. Ch doesn’t exist in the languages of Twi or Ewe and was unsure about the Fanti language. 

The song is made of meaningless sounds, just as many American songs are. The song has no language, and the use of the name Kofi is thrown in to make it relatable to children. He said other variations of the song use other day names. He surmises that using Kofi could be an alteration of k k sounds…

Thanks, Craig!

Unrelated, but I have to share this delightful bit of Edwardian slang I recently ran across: knut /kəˈnʌt/ (archaic, informal, Edwardian) An idle upper-class man about town.

Oh Hades! the Ladies who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert, the colonel of the knuts…