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Cedric Lizotte at The Airship writes about a subject dear to my heart:

Mastery of a second language (or third or fourth) is rather difficult, so writing a masterpiece in a language that is not one’s first is remarkable — and doing it repeatedly is even more astonishing. Yet there are quite a few famous novelists who wrote and continue to write in a language that is not their mother tongue. Joseph Conrad, who was raised speaking Polish, became known for his novels written in English and is perhaps the best known of these prolific polyglots, but there are many others. The list is long and, at times, truly surprising […]

Of course, most of the list will not surprise anyone who’s ever taken an interest in the topic: Brodsky, Nabokov, and Beckett all make their foreordained appearances, and Eva Hoffman and Agota Kristof have been in the cultural news a fair amount. I did not know, however, that Romain Gary “wrote many novels directly in English,” or that Jack Kerouac began On the Road in French, “then started over in English.” Needless to say, it is not an exhaustive list; the name that immediately occurred to me was that of Elsa Triolet (né Ella Yurievna Kagan), who wrote her first few novels in Russian, then switched to French (and was awarded the Prix Goncourt). Thanks, Trevor!

From the end of chapter 6 of Yuri Rytkheu’s Сон в начале тумана, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse as A Dream in Polar Fog (see my complaint about her version here):

Странно, те заклинания, которые до сих пор знал Орво, чаще всего были набором непонятных слов, похожих то на корякские, то на эскимосские и даже на эвенские… Обычный человек не мог понимать их, даже если эти заклинания принадлежали ему и были получены в полную собственность от какого-нибудь шамана. А тут шаманка говорит обыкновенными словами […]

Strange — the charms that Orvo had known up to now were mostly a collection of incomprehensible words, sometimes like Koryak, sometimes like Eskimo or even like Even… An ordinary person couldn’t understand them, even if the charms belonged to him and had been received as personal property from some shaman. But this shaman was speaking in ordinary [Chukchi] words […]

Incidentally, Rytkheu tells a good tale; I had thought it might be one of those ethnographic novels whose primary purpose is to introduce the reader to the life of some far-off people, with endless descriptions of how they build their dwellings and dress their meat, but I’m caught up in the story and will definitely finish it.

Ultach has posted at Reddit about an appalling situation:

The Scots language version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad. People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right. It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots. I’ve been broadly aware of this over the years and I’ve just chalked it up to inexperienced amateurs. But I’ve recently discovered it’s more or less all the work of one person. I happened onto a Scots Wikipedia page while googling for something and it was the usual fare – poorly spelled English with the odd Scots word thrown in haphazardly. I checked the edit history to see if anyone had ever tried to correct it, but it had only ever been edited by one person. Out of curiosity I clicked on their user page, and found that they had created and edited tens of thousands of other articles, and this on a Wiki with only 60,000 or so articles total! Every page they’d created was the same. Identical to the English version of the article but with some modified spelling here and there, and if you were really lucky maybe one Scots word thrown into the middle of it.

Even though their Wikipedia user page is public I don’t want to be accused of doxxing. I’ve included a redacted version of their profile here just so you know I’m telling the truth I’ll just say that if you click on the edit history of pretty much any article on the Scots version of Wikipedia, this person will probably have created it and have been the majority of the edits, and you’ll be able to view their user page from there. They are insanely prolific. They stopped updating their milestones in 2018 but at that time they had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits. That is over a third of all the content currently on the Scots Wikipedia directly attributable to them, and I expect it’d be much more than that if they had updated their milestones, as they continued to make edits and create articles between 2018 and 2020. If they had done this properly it would’ve been an incredible achievement. They’d been at this for nearly a decade, averaging about 9 articles a day. And on top of all that, they were the main administrator for the Scots language Wikipedia itself, and had been for about 7 years. All articles were written according to their standards.

The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences. […]

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own, all because they were exposed to a mangled rendering of English being called Scots by this person and by this person alone. They wrote such a massive volume of this pretend Scots that anyone writing in genuine Scots would have their work drowned out by rubbish. Or, even worse, edited to be more in line with said rubbish.

Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling language. Instead, it’s just become another source of ammunition for people wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as wanting to properly learn it.

The conclusion is over-the-top — Scots is spoken by lots of people and will survive a bad Wikipedia site — but the situation is genuinely lousy, and someone at Wikipedia should step in. There is more discussion at this MeFi post, where I got the link.

Update. I am pleased to report that the situation is being addressed; see this discussion, with contributions from the editor being complained about, who has realized the error of his ways:

Honestly, I don’t mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, and ban me from the wiki for good. I’ve already found out that my “contributions” have angered countless people, and to me that’s all the devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and yes, obsessively editing, I have OCD). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older.

And here’s a thoughtful comment from the MetaFilter thread I linked to above:

I can see how this kind of thing starts, given his age back then. Up until I was 12 or so I assumed languages were like my (basic) understanding of secret codes – all the letters are swapped around, so you just need to know which letters to replace with which other letters and you can translate into another language. People who could speak fluently were just able to do that really, really quickly.

When I then started learning a foreign language I realised it was different, but initially I assumed it was whole words, not individual letters, that were different – you’d just swap each English word for the foreign language equivalent and there was your translation. A few lessons in and I realised there was a bit more to it.

So I can see how someone young could start off “translating” things, with the back up of an online dictionary, and assume they’re doing a good job. And then if no one tells them otherwise, they continue. And continue, and continue. By the time they get some occasional criticism it’s outweighed by the thousands and thousands of edits they’ve made that haven’t been criticised, so it’s probably seen as a minor issue – they’ve done all this “successful” work on something as high profile as Wikipedia, so they must be doing something right!

I’d hope the doubts would appear before doing quite so much work, but I can see how it gets going.

posted by fabius at 5:12 AM on August 26

I posted about Wikitongues back in 2013, but it was pretty new then, and I wasn’t especially impressed. Seven years later, it’s clearly a going concern and has a much wider variety of videos and speakers, and I’m considerably more impressed. Their About page says “Around the world, people from hundreds of cultures are finding ways to amplify their voices, defying the assumption that globalization can’t be inclusive”; you can start digging into their videos here — the Texas German one sounds mighty Texan! (Via misteraitch’s MeFi post.)

Also, Victor Mair at the Log posted an eight-minute video by “Josh” (apparently Joshua Rudder) on how we know (some of) what what he calls Middle Chinese and Mair calls Middle Sinitic sounded like — nothing especially new to anyone who knows anything about the subject, but it’s fun to see the old rhyme tables and have the various elements explained. There’s more in the comments, where David Marjanović links to Wikipedia’s useful Reconstructions of Old Chinese article.

Occasionally I pull a book at random from my shelves and open it to a random page just for the hell of it; today it was my paperback copy of Sologub’s Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon; see this post), and when I opened it my eye fell on the word дряква [dryakva]. I couldn’t remember what it meant, so I looked it up, and it turned out to mean ‘cyclamen.’ The normal Russian word for that pleasant plant is цикламен [tsiklamen], and in fact дряква is so rare it only turns up in three entries in the Национальный корпус русского языка (National Corpus of the Russian Language) — I found a 2013 blog post by plantarum that regrets its desuetude:

Но до чего же русское название этого растения мне нравится. Дряква. Прелесть, да?
Повторять и повторять. Дряква… дряква… Ну что ж ты дряква у меня такая…

But the Russian name of this plant truly pleases me. Dryakva. Delightful, isn’t it?
You can say it over and over. Dryakva… dryakva… You’re my sweet dryakva…

At any rate, I wondered where it came from, so I looked it up in Vasmer, and found:

дря́ква, дрия́ква – растение “Cyclamen europaeum, цикламен”. Заимств. через польск. dryakiew, род. п. -kwi “териак”, перенесено также на лекарственные растения из ср.-лат. thēriacum, греч. θηριακὸν (ἀντίδοτον), буквально “противоядие, средство против звериного яда”; см. Бернекер 1, 232; Лопацинский, PF 4, 765; Брюкнер 99.

So it’s from an obsolete Polish word dryakiew meaning ‘theriac, antidote to poison.’ Which means it’s etymologically the same word as English treacle. Talk about semantic divergence!

I’m reading Michael Hofmann’s NYRB review (Dec. 20, 2018) of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (it’s not very favorable, first complaining about the book’s length and exclusion of some excellent poems, then proceeding to rubbish the translations), and I thought I’d canvass the German-speaking Hatters about this passage:

Brecht has a knack of writing ordinary German and meaning it that makes him extraordinarily difficult to translate—maybe (surprisingly) the hardest of all the twentieth-century Germans. Of Rilke the similes survive, even if they baffle as they dazzle; of Trakl something gaudy and barbarous; of Celan the twist of an opaque pain; of Benn the human Mutter. In Brecht, simple words (kalt, fahl, früh, böse) and plain statements are asked to bear an awful lot of weight. The great poem “An die Nachgeborenen,” written in 1938, a confession of inadequacy to coming generations, has a stanza that goes:

Die Kräfte waren gering. Das Ziel
Lag in großer Ferne
Es war deutlich sichtbar, wenn auch für mich
Kaum zu erreichen.
So verging meine Zeit
Die auf Erden mir gegeben war.

Not one word sticks out, sounds pretentious or hollow, even though the plural Erden is archaic. Abstraction and concreteness, the personal and impersonal, are held in exquisite balance. The whole thing has a gravity and stateliness of centuries. The stanza, in Tom Kuhn’s English version, “To those born after,” goes:

Our powers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

Here, there’s just one odd- or offsounding word after another: “powers” (what powers be these? magic powers? dark powers? height of his powers?), “feeble,” “goal” (though perhaps the fault is with the article), “thus” (always a little high-smelling in English), “granted.” The poem, which in German sounds universal, sounds in English equivocal, vague, even a little coquettish. […] The Manheim/Willett translation (it’s. unsigned, and hence collaborative) goes:

Our forces were slight. Our goal
Lay far in the distance.
It was clearly visible, though I myself
Was unlikely to reach it
So passed my time
Which had been given to me on earth.

This seems preferable to me all over. A lot of translating is the avoiding of weakness, or the needless display of weakness; hence no “the goal” and no “thus”; the active construction in the middle with the emphatic “I myself” followed by the (very English!) understatement of “was unlikely” is cleverly done; and “time” and “given” are better than the more portentous “days” and “Granted.” The last line has altogether more force and purpose.

(I don’t understand his objection to “the goal,” but we all have our idiosyncratic preferences.) I find it odd that he ignores the translation by H.R. Hays, which I have in the ancient but handy (and bilingual) Selected Poems:

Men’s strength was little. The goal
Lay far in the distance,
Easy to see if for me
Scarcely attainable.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

That’s my favorite of the bunch. Incidentally, Hays was a poet himself, and a good one; you can see some of his work in this affectionate reminiscence by Sandy McIntosh (“The Assassins” is particularly Brechtian), and here’s an interview (shortly before his death) by Jonathan Cohen — I was struck by this passage about Dudley Fitts’ 1942 Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry:

Did you work with Fitts on this project?

I never worked with Dudley Fitts. I was hired to do all the biographies in the back of the book, which I did. I took part in some of the translating — I did a poem of Neruda’s — but Fitts was such a schoolmaster: he docked everybody 50¢ for every mistake. Now really, isn’t that childish? It was an “omnibus” anthology all right. Somebody once said that Fitts included everybody in Latin America who had ever written a poem!

Childish indeed! (Incidentally, it saddens me that Hays doesn’t have his own Wikipedia article; he was certainly more notable than some of these people.)

Sara Goudarzi, a Brooklyn writer, has a wonderful NY Times piece called We All Speak a Language That Will Go Extinct that starts with a striking anecdote:

“We can’t play tennis because you don’t have a net.”

I was standing on a quiet, suburban street in Bristol, Conn., when Eric, the boy next door, said that to me. Two rackets in hand, I felt my face ablaze. Then anger spread through my slight 10-year-old frame and my mouth erupted.

“I don’t have net?” I yelled. “I don’t have net?” I repeated for effect. “You don’t have net. Your father doesn’t have net. Your mom doesn’t have net,” I continued, bombarding him with what I thought were insults. I wanted to hit him where it hurt — his family — a common tactic among my people, Iranians. I just had to make my playmate understand that I had plenty of net.

Eric was dumbfounded. He confessed that indeed, he and his family had neither a tennis court nor a net, but he seemed unable to make sense of my reaction to this shortcoming.

For reasons I still don’t understand, as a new arrival to the United States, armed with a limited palette of English words, I had presumed that “net” meant “manners.” Eric didn’t want to play with me because I lacked good manners. It was only after I stormed back into the house that my brother, who had been breathing American air for close to a decade, explained where I had gone wrong.

She goes on to talk about language and culture, and continues:

By the time I reached early adulthood, English had become my dominant language and made a sprawling home in my brain, forcing Farsi into a tiny corner, so much so it worried me at times. To lose that connection, or have it weaken, felt devastating. But as it turns out, a language doesn’t just slip out of your mind. In fact, in a 2014 study, researchers found that our mother tongue creates neural patterns on our infant brains that stay with us even if we don’t use the language. […]

[Read more…]

Now that I’m back to the twentieth century in my reading of Russian literature, I’ve reached the year 1970 (and it occurs to me that I began studying Russian right at that time, in 1969-70, which gives me an odd feeling, as if I’m retrospectively catching up to the contemporary literature of the day). That has given me the chance to experience two famous authors I’ve been looking forward to: Chingiz Aitmatov, whose 1980 novel И дольше века длится день (The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years) has fascinated me since I first read about it, and Valentin Rasputin, whose most famous work is the 1976 Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora). They both published short novels in 1970, and I began with Aitmatov’s Белый пароход (The White Steamship). Alas, I found it almost unreadable, and gave up after fifty pages — it’s written in the sort of sing-songy, repetitious, faux-naïf style that drives me up the wall:

The boy loved to talk with himself. But this time instead of himself he talked to the schoolbag: “Don’t listen to him, Grandfather isn’t like that. He’s not clever at all, and that’s why they laugh at him. Because he’s not clever at all. He’ll take you and me to school. You don’t know where the school is yet? It’s not so far. I’ll show you. We’ll look at it with the binoculars from Karaulnaya hill. And I’ll show you my white steamship. Only first we’ll run to the shed. That’s where I hide my binoculars. I’m supposed to watch over the calf, but every time I run to look at the white steamship.”

Etcetera. I am reminded of Dorothy Parker’s immortal review of A.A. Milne: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.” I will still give The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years a shot when I get to 1980, hoping that he will have developed a more adult style by then, but I no longer have that first keen anticipation.

So I moved on to Rasputin’s Последний срок, which was translated as Borrowed Time (I’ll get to the literal meaning of the title later). I was immediately drawn in; Rasputin begins with the aged Anna, the focus of his story, taking to her bed in anticipation of death and her son Mikhail (the only one of her children to have stayed in the village) sending telegrams to his brothers and sisters telling them to come, and then develops the consequences. The weepy Varvara, the standoffish city girl Lyusya, and the older brother Ilya arrive promptly, but Tanya, who lives in far-off Kiev, keeps not showing up, and this provides the main narrative tension of the novel. (Note to aspiring novelists: you don’t need ticking time bombs to provide tension.) The brothers buy a great deal of vodka in anticipation of the funeral and the need to provide food and drink for all the villagers, but when Anna doesn’t die right away, they start drinking it themselves (in the makeshift bathhouse, so as not to disturb their mother); Lyusya wanders off to get away from it all, climbs uphill to a remembered bird-cherry bush, and unexpectedly finds herself immersed in long-suppressed childhood memories from the hungry postwar period (a horse collapsed under her but her mother managed to get it back on its feet and keep it alive; a Vlasovite soldier escaped from a prison camp and tried to rape her). There is a tremendously effective account of a drunken binge (it reminded me of Malcolm Lowry’s devastating Under the Volcano), and the description of Anna’s preparations for death is poetic and convincing — at one point she moves from a memory of stepping into the river to try to keep sight of her son being taken off as a draftee to a much earlier memory of her feeling ecstatically free by the riverside as a still unmarried girl. After I finished and started looking for material about the book, I discovered that Kevin Windle, in his introduction to Money for Maria and Borrowed Time: Two Village Tales (Quartet Books, 1981), wrote:

In an interview in September 1976 Rasputin stated that his favourite writers were Dostoevsky and Ivan Bunin, a novelist and memoirist who spent most of his life in exile, but who has found favour with Soviet readers since the fifties. In a later interview, in answer to a question about the role of the writer, Rasputin quoted the words of Lev Tolstoi: “An artist is an artist only because he sees things not as he wishes to see them, but as they are.” […] Rasputin’s predilection for Dostoevsky and Bunin, however, seems to have less to do with matters of philosophy than with themes and technique. He confesses his admiration for Bunin as a stylist, and it may be that he is also drawn to Bunin as a meticulous memoirist, for Bunin, throughout his years in Paris, never forgot his youth in rural Russia, and wrote with penetrating accuracy about a way of life which was passing.

Dostoevsky and Bunin — what a great pair of influences! I’m as impressed with Rasputin as Soviet readers of the day were (the novel made him famous), and I’m very much looking forward to his later work.

Oh, and that title: it’s literally untranslatable. Russian срок [srok] is one of those maddening words which seems straightforward in its own language but which becomes slippery when you try to render it in English; my Oxford dictionary has “1. time, period, term; […] 2. date, term,” with various phrases to show you particular uses, such as крайний срок ‘closing date’ and срок аренды ‘term of lease,’ but when it comes to последний срок you’re at sea. The phrase occurs twice in the novel:

Старуха понимала, что Таньчора может приехать только сегодня, что это последний срок, который ей отпущен […]
The old woman understood that Tanchora [her nickname for Tanya] could come only today, that this was the final srok allotted to her […]

Но сегодня был последний срок: если до темноты Таньчора не приедет, значит, нечего больше и надеяться.
But today was the final srok: if Tanchora didn’t come before darkness, it meant there was no more hope.

In the first sentence you could say “this was the final time allotted to her” and in the second “today was the last chance,” but I don’t see how to use the same rendition in both contexts, and I don’t think you can make it work as a title. I think Borrowed Time is a good solution, since that’s what Anna is living on and it gives a similar sense of finality. And while I’m on the topic of language, the book is full of fine Siberian dialect words and colloquial expressions; apart from its novelistic essence, powerful and moving, it was a constant pleasure to read. I’m planning to do so again, and I recommend it to all and sundry; I haven’t seen the translation, but the review I found made it sound decent. I’m glad to have found another favorite author.

Back in 2015 I posted about Lameen Souag’s comparison of Berber and Korandjé, the language of Tabelbala, an oasis village in western Algeria; now he’s given a talk in the SOAS Linguistics Seminar Series, online here, about the odd situation of a Songhay language so far from the rest of the family, with details of its borrowings from Berber and Arabic and much else. It’s absolutely fascinating — I haven’t finished watching it yet, I have to keep stopping to read the slides carefully and think about them — and I wanted to share it here for those who don’t follow him on Facebook.

We’ve discussed the French of Québec before, but mostly in the context of its colorful swearing (tabarnak!); here are a couple of links about the language as a whole:

How to speak French like a Quebecker is an amusing introduction to the topic by the author of Le québécois en 10 leçons, with sample sentences and explanations:

J’peux-tu t’aider, mon gars?

This -tu may sound like the pronoun “you” but it’s actually a question particle, similar to the Mandarin ma, the Esperanto ĉu or the Japanese ka, except that it follows a subject-verb group. Note that mec is never used in Québec: we only use gars. […]

Pis, t’aimes-tu mon char? Si t’as frette, dis-moé-lé, gêne-toé pas!

In this sentence, pis is the equivalent of so, or alors. It can also replace et. In Québec, auto is much more common than voiture, and informally, people say char. Frette means froid. As you can see, the order of words in the imperative form is different (dis-moi-le instead of dis-le-moi), moi and toi are often pronounced moé and toé, and the object pronoun -le can be pronounced -lé. Since Québécois doesn’t use ne, the pronoun doesn’t move before the verb in gêne-toé pas.

And OffQc | Québécois French Guide (For lovers of French + diehard fans of all things québécois!) has been inactive since 2017, but there are 1,200 entries for your learning pleasure. Thanks, Ryan!