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A stern statement by Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.14-15) on what it takes to appreciate Vergil:

Has it been proved to you that Vergil cannot be understood by someone who is ignorant of the sound of Latin and is equally distant to one who has not drunk Greek learning deep with the fullest thirst? If I did not fear making you antsy, I could fill huge volumes with the material he translated from the most obscure Greek teachings. But these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed.

probatumne vobis est Vergilium, ut ab eo intellegi non potest qui sonum Latinae vocis ignorat, ita nec ab eo posse qui Graecam non hauserit extrema satietate doctrinam? nam si fastidium facere non timerem, ingentia poteram volumina de his quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset implere: sed ad fidem rei propositae relata sufficient.

Yes, “these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed” would get him an F in a logic class. But he’s right — you can’t appreciate great poetry without the necessary background, although you can enjoy some pleasant sounds and noble thoughts. (Also, I like “make you antsy” for fastidium facere.)

Andrew Coletti writes for Gastro Obscura about Why Italy Fell Out of Love With Cilantro; the culinary history is interesting (in a nutshell, “when a distinct Italian culinary identity emerged with the unification of the modern nation in the 19th century, long-abandoned coriander was not revived, but left behind”), but what brings it to LH are these passages:

Native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, coriander has a long and widespread history of human cultivation. Latin coriandrum, the source of many modern names for the plant, was borrowed from the Ancient Greek koriandron or koriadnon. The Romans developed a taste for the ingredient through the extensive Greek influence on their cuisine.
[…]

Coriander leaf was already mostly absent from Italian cuisine by the Renaissance, but the seeds continued to be used as a spice. They were also coated in sugar to make confetti, or “comfits” in English. These were chewed at banquets as an after-dinner mouth freshener and digestive, similar to mukhwas, the mixture of sweetened whole spices chewed in South Asia today for the same purpose. At festive celebrations, coriander comfits were thrown and scattered, giving rise to the English word “confetti” for the paper particles that later replaced them. In modern Italy, paper confetti is still called coriandoli, meaning “coriander seeds,” while confetti usually refers to a different kind of comfit, the sugared almonds given out at weddings and communions.

I had no idea about the origin of confetti! (That last link goes to Italian False Friends by Ronnie Ferguson, which looks like a useful book; we discussed coriander/cilantro back in 2004.)

This is another of those questions so niche I can’t even believe I’m asking it, but Hatters have come up with some pretty recherché answers before, so here goes. I was looking up the credits for Raymond Pellegrin (who’s in Le deuxième souffle, which I recently watched as part of my Melville mania) when I noticed a weird entry: “Dtàt lìam pét (1971).” Of course I had to find out more, so I googled it and discovered it’s a Thailand/Hong Kong coproduction also known as H-Bomb and Scramble Operation Alpha. (Christopher Mitchum’s Wikipedia page, which IDs it as H-Bomb, also says 1971, but IMDb says it’s from 1976 and this site says 1977!) I think the title Dtàt lìam pét is Thai, but I have no idea what it means and no way of finding out, since that transliteration only gets me the movie and I don’t have it in the Thai alphabet. And Thai Wikipedia (Google translate) calls it “Diamond cut” (and says it’s from 1975)! I don’t expect anyone to be able to clarify the dating, but if anyone knows Thai and can tell me what the title actually means, I’ll be grateful.

I was reading Blake Morrison’s LRB review (archived) of a couple of books by recent Nobelist Jon Fosse when I noticed that his translator, Damion Searls, renders the name of the Norwegian city Bergen as Bjørgvin, presumably reproducing the form in the original text. The Wikipedia article explains:

The Old Norse forms of the name were Bergvin [ˈberɡˌwin] and Bjǫrgvin [ˈbjɔrɡˌwin] (and in Icelandic and Faroese the city is still called Björgvin). The first element is berg (n.) or bjǫrg (n.), which translates as ‘mountain(s)’. The last element is vin (f.), which means a new settlement where there used to be a pasture or meadow. […] In 1918, there was a campaign to reintroduce the Norse form Bjørgvin as the name of the city. This was turned down – but as a compromise, the name of the diocese was changed to Bjørgvin bispedømme.

(Why [w] for v in the Old Norse forms?) Oddly, there are both a Bjørgvin Prison and a Bergen Prison, right next to each other. This passage from the review is of Hattic interest:

Fosse writes in New Norwegian, Nynorsk, one of Norway’s two written forms (Bokmål is the other), most common in western Norway. The fidelity of Damion Searls’s translation is impossible for an outsider to judge but it reads very fluently; it seems Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell was to W.G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary. There’s such carry in the prose that you quickly stop noticing the lack of full stops, though if you pause to examine the resources Fosse uses to move things along from one observation to the next it’s striking to see the alternatives he finds to the ever dependable ‘and’ and ‘but’. On one page I counted ‘I think’ more than a dozen times and – perhaps with a nod to Molly Bloom – there’s many a ‘yes’, as in ‘yes, maybe yes, yes maybe it’s a distance, he thinks, and now he has to go pour himself a little drink’. Joyce had fun with sentencelessness and so more recently did Mike McCormack in Solar Bones and Lucy Ellmann in Ducks, Newburyport. But Fosse’s way with it is more inward and incantatory.

I’ve heard good things about Fosse, but eight hundred pages of “smallish print and narrow margins” with “no paragraphs or full stops” sounds daunting. Maybe in another lifetime.

Back in 2007 I noted the following development in lexicography:

It has long been a fixture of my mental furnishings that the longest entry in the OED was for the verb set. I don’t know how many times I’ve trotted out this bit of trivia, but I’ll have to try not to do it any more, because I learn from the Revisions page of the OED newsletter that it is no longer true, and has not been for some years: “For many years the verb to set has been cited as the longest entry in the OED. But a recheck shows that it has at last been toppled from this position. The longest entry in the revised matter is represented by the verb to make (published in June 2000).”

But that information has been rendered inoperative in its turn; David Crotty writes for The Scholarly Kitchen:

Pity the poor Oxford English Dictionary editor who was assigned to cover the word “run”. In the dictionary’s upcoming edition, run has some 645 use cases for the verb form alone, and its definitions run some 75 columns of type. According to Reader’s Digest, run alone took one lexicographer nine months of research to complete.

Interestingly, in the 1928 edition, the word with the most definitions was “set” (200 meanings and 32 pages). Perhaps the switch from set to run says something about changes in the pace of life over the last century.

There’s a video showing some of the varied uses of run. Thanks, Trevor!

Zahra Fatima reports for BBC News about the sort of contretemps that I can imagine myself falling victim to, should I ever take up a life of crime:

A would-be burglar in Rome was caught after stopping to read a book on Greek mythology in the middle of a robbery, Italian media report. The 38-year-old reportedly gained access to a flat in the Italian capital’s Prati district via the balcony but became distracted after picking up a book about Homer’s Iliad on a bedside table.

The 71-year-old homeowner is said to have awoken and confronted the alleged thief, who was engrossed in the book. News of the failed robbery attracted the attention of the book’s author, who told local media he wanted to send the man a copy so he could “finish” his read. […]

Giovanni Nucci, the author of The Gods at Six O’Clock, which explains the Iliad from the perspective of the gods, told Il Messaggero: “It’s fantastic.”

“I’d like to find the person caught red-handed and give him the book, because he’ll have been arrested halfway through reading it. I’d like him to be able to finish it. It’s a surreal story, but also full of humanity.”

Thanks, Bonnie!

Stan Carey at Sentence first has a post about the word coolth, which I’ve always liked and used; Stan starts by quoting a use by Edna O’Brien (“I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar”), then continues:

The word’s meaning is simple: ‘coolness’. Or, per Merriam-Webster, ‘the state or occasion of being cool’ – referring, like coolness, to temperature or style: mainly temperature. Its connotations are rangier: it’s labelled ‘chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous’ by the OED and ‘chiefly humorous’ and ‘usually facetious’ elsewhere.

Edna O’Brien’s lines clearly fall under the ‘literary’ label, but the word’s humorous/facetious side is more to the fore in other places, leading the Columbia Guide to Standard American English – rare among usage dictionaries in covering the word – to dismiss it as ‘tiresomely jocular’. 100 years ago J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that coolth ‘shows signs of losing its facetiousness, and may claim part of the territory of cool’.

Whatever about the first prediction, the latter has not occurred. Coolth has minimal currency and is omitted from most dictionaries – even online ones, which are far less concerned with space. That’s not a criticism. Editorial resources are finite and so cannot attend to all marginal words.

He lists other ­–th terms, adding: “Anyone who so chooses can still generate new words with –th: see the modern statistical term shorth.” But in the (very interesting) comment thread, mollymooly says:

Quibble: “shorth” is not “short” + “-th”, it’s from “shortest half”. (Not “shorter half” BTW; there are more than two ways to choose half of the available datapoints.)

Which is a very odd way to create a word, and makes me wonder: how do those who use it say it? Wiktionary doesn’t give a pronunciation.

I recently read Négar Djavadi’s much-praised novel Disoriental (translated by Tina Kover from the French Désorientale); I can see why people like it, but it didn’t work for me in my present literary mood — it’s an awkward combination of family saga, coming-of-age story, and history lesson (Djavadi clearly wants to educate ignorant westerners about the Iran her family escaped from). As I wrote Lizok:

It reminded me somewhat of Ulitskaya’s Веселые похороны, with its stifling atmosphere of winking complicity (“we all know people like this, don’t we, and we all do these wacky things?”). And the writing is so stodgy and earnest, with long lumbering passages about what people are like (and she seems to think all Japanese are the same, all Flemish people, all Parisians, etc. etc.). I have the feeling it’s heavily autobiographical, and the author doesn’t have nearly enough distance. I’m not sorry I read it, mind you, I learned about some parts of Paris I wasn’t familiar with (and learned that Parisians still call the place Léon Blum “place Voltaire,” even though that hasn’t been its name for decades, much like New Yorkers and Sixth Avenue) and got to familiarize myself a bit with Brussels, but still, not my favorite book.

But what brings it to LH are the footnotes. (Yes, that sentence reads poorly from the standpoint of school grammar, but it sounds right and that’s how I would say it.) Back in 2008 michael farris wrote:

I dislike footnotes in fiction, the wordier, more explanatory the worse.
That said, I’m less likely to find them intrusive if it’s for a US edition of a anglophone novel (sort of like quicombo for a brazilian reader).
But in translated fiction (or English fiction set in a non-English speaking environment) they rankle. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, but it is for me.

I don’t feel that way about footnotes in general, but in this case I am in total agreement. Here’s the first (there are quite a few scattered through the book):

¹ To make things easier for you and save you the trouble of looking it up on Wikipedia, here are a few facts: Mazandaran is a province in northern Iran, 9,151 square miles in area. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and surrounded by the Alborz mountain range, it is the only Persian region to have resisted Arab-Muslim hegemony and was, in fact, the last to become Muslim. To imagine it, you have to picture the lush landscapes of Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland—green, misty, rainy. Legend has it that when they first arrived in Mazandaran, the Muslims cried, “Oh! We have reached Paradise!”

I’m sorry, but that’s just lazy and (I can’t think of a better word) unprofessional. If the information is vital in context, work it into the text; if it’s not, let the interested reader look it up. That’s what Wikipedia is for!

We discussed the notorious Voynich Manuscript back in 2013 (at which time slawkenbergius pointed out that the theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in Manchu led to the digitization of Jerry Norman’s Concise Manchu-English Lexicon); now Ariel Sabar (who has been featured here a number of times, e.g. 2013) has a useful roundup in the Atlantic (archived) of the many crackpot theories about it, as well as the theoretically better-grounded recent work by medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis and those who have come out of hiding in her wake: linguist Claire Bowern, computer scientists at the University of Malta, etc. It makes for fascinating reading, but I still prefer the conclusion of the Batya Ungar-Sargon article I linked back in 2013: it was Voynich what done it. (Thanks, rozele!)

A discussion of literature by Jorge Mario Bergoglio (as was) includes this nice bit on his compatriot:

When I think of literature, I am reminded of what the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges used to tell his students, namely that the most important thing is simply to read, to enter into direct contact with literature, to immerse oneself in the living text in front of us, rather than to fixate on ideas and critical comments. Borges explained this idea to his students by saying that at first they may understand very little of what they are reading, but in any case they are hearing “another person’s voice”. This is a definition of literature that I like very much: listening to another person’s voice. We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us!

That resonates with me as well; I enjoy a good analysis of a literary text, but the primary pleasure and benefit is that of simply listening to it.