languagehat.com

Mark Liberman’s recent Log post reports on the remarkable Bergamasco dialect of Italian:

According to “10 scioglilingua bergamaschi (con tanto di guida all’ascolto)“, Prima Bergamo 8/162018, the standard-Italian phrase sequence

Andate a vedere le api? Sono vive le api?
Go see the bees? Are the bees alive?

come out in Bergamasco as

“Ì a èt i àe?” “I è ìe i àe?”
[…]
For another example, Standard Italian

“Voi, dove andate?” “Io vado all’uva (alla vite). E voi?” “Io vado a vino.”

corresponds to Bergamasco:

“Ù, u if?” “A ó a öa. E ù?” “A ó a ì”

You can hear the sentences spoken by using the audio clips at the Log post.

Not worth its own post but too much fun to ignore: I recently noticed the odd Russian word леи [lei] ‘leather pads on riding breeches’ and wondered where it came from; turns out it’s from French lé ‘width, strip (e.g., of cloth),’ which is from Latin latus ‘wide.’ That was unexpected.

The early 2000s were the heyday of the blog; back in those days all the cool kids were starting one, and I often had the pleasure of saying “welcome to the blogosphere!” Those days are long gone — the cool kids are, for reasons that escape your humble servant, flocking to Facebook and Twitter and whatever the latest and greatest is — but knowledge lovers with good taste are still occasionally starting blogs, and I have been alerted to the existence of a terrific one, The Fate of Books (“Notes on Book Collecting, Bibliomania, and Libricide”). It opened its doors only last month, with the post Father Marko Pohlin Warns Against Bibliomania, which opens with definitions of bibliomania and a useful history:

Wikipedia attributes the word to the physician John Ferriar, who is supposed to have coined it in 1809. This is misleading; Ferriar might have introduced the present spelling into English, but the word itself had been around for some time. It had been used in French at least since 1734 as bibliomanie, and the Oxford English Dictionary records its first usage in English, with the French spelling, in 1750. At the same time, the word was used in Latin as bibliomania already in the 18th century, so Ferriar wouldn’t even have to modify the spelling.

It goes on to discuss the Augustinian monk Marko Pohlin and his bibliography of Slovenian writings (the blog is based in Slovenia):

[…] Pohlin not only lists the numerous Slovenian authors and their books, but indeed proceeds to construct an entire library. The “bibliotheca” in the title is literal, as books are ordered not by letters but by imaginary bookcases, with the first one named Alphitheca, followed by Bethitheca and so on, with the Quitheca and Ypsilontheca unfortunately remaining empty due to lack of Q- and Y-initialled writers. It is hard for a collector to leaf through the pages and not fantasize about assembling the collection in reality.

And he quotes Pohlin’s warnings against the disease of bibliomania: “He goes on to chafe at collectors who prioritize rarity over content and who praise curious old volumes that nobody would ever want to actually read. […] For Pohlin, the verdict is clear: a library where most books are seldom or never used is a worthless library.” He then writes:

Now that I’ve summed them up, how do I answer the good father’s warnings? With my enthusiasm for old and rare editions, uncut and signed copies, and curious works that have been forgotten by history, I appear almost a spitting image of Pohlin’s undesirable bibliomaniac. To this reproach, I suggest two answers. First, Pohlin lived at the dawn of the great age of paper, and in his day, books were still fairly expensive commodities. As a consequence, amassing books and not reading them felt uncharitable, equivalent to taking education from those who need it and hoarding it away. In the meantime, however, the world has been flooded with books. Nowadays there are more than enough books in existence for everyone to own a large and quality library, and since fewer and fewer people desire one, warehouses of second-hand sellers tend to be filled to the brim and tons of books end up recycled daily. In such a world, owning more books than one can hope to read feels like a venial sin at worst.

Hear, hear! And his latest post, Miran Ivan Knez, the Bukvarna, and the Quest to Ban Destruction of Books, is so well written and so fascinating I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just urge you to read it, and when you think you’ve reached the end, scroll past the bibliography (yes, he includes bibliographies) to find a mystery solved in a splendid little footnote. May this new resident of the blogosphere live long and prosper!

Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands, by Alexander Watson (Basic Books, 2020), and a couple of them have passages of obvious LH relevance. From Habsburg Landsturm: Alien Officers and ‘Army Slavic’:

The regional divide between III/Landsturm Infantry Regiment 18’s officers and other ranks raised practical problems of language. All the battalion’s officers, with the exception of the two from Galicia, had as their mother tongue Czech or German. Their men, by contrast, spoke Polish or Ukrainian. Occasionally, one came across a Yiddish-speaking Jew. Theoretically, this posed no great difficulty, for the Habsburg army had long experience of managing polyglot units. The army recognized three different types of languages. The “language of service,” which was German in most of the army, and Hungarian in Honvéd and Hungarian Landsturm units, was used for all communication above the company level. (The Magyar term for Landsturm was Népfelkelő.) More important for interaction between the officers and the men was the “language of command,” which was a list of eighty basic military words and phrases in either German or Hungarian, such as “March!,” “At Ease!,” and “Fire!” To cultivate deeper relations between ranks, all units also had one or more “regimental languages.” Any tongue spoken by at least one-fifth of the regiment’s personnel was so designated, and officers were obligated to learn every one of them in order to engage with their subordinates, bond with them, and exert influence over them.

In III/Landsturm Infantry Regiment 18, as in most wartime formations, such intricate arrangements were pipe dreams. For officers, a decent grasp of the German language was essential, as it was the medium for communication with the various levels of the Fortress Command and with other units. Within the battalion’s mess, German was also widely spoken, although, to annoy Major Zipser, the Czech officers made a special point of speaking their mother tongue to each other. Communication with the men was, kindly put, a challenge. Some officers may have gotten by with “Army Slavic,” a most peculiar military Esperanto blending Slavic grammar with German military terminology. Thus, for example, the battalion’s Poles could be ordered to antretować (from the German antreten—to form up) on parade, and would then narugować (nachrücken—to move up) to the front, before forming a szwarmlinia (Schwarmlinie—firing line). Others who spoke only German relied on the battalion’s few Jews to act as intermediaries. Still, even with goodwill, careful listening, and much imagination on all sides, frontline command of Landsturm troops was difficult.

And from Multiethnic Przemyśl in 1914:
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I’ve made several posts about the manuscripts and libraries of Timbuktu (put “Timbuktu” into the search box to find them), but I found some details in this story particularly interesting:

Just about 250,000 old manuscripts from the libraries of Timbuktu still survive in present-day Ethiopia. Also, thousands of documents from the medieval Sudanese empire of Makuria, written in at least eight different languages were dug out at the southern Egyptian site of Qasr Ibrim. Thousands of more old manuscripts have equally survived in the West African cities of Chinguetti, Walata, Oudane, Kano, and Agadez.

Upon the real and present dangers posed by fires, insects, and plundering, some one million manuscripts have since survived from the northern edges of Guinea and Ghana to the shores of the Mediterranean. National Geographic even estimates that 700,000 manuscripts have survived in the city of Timbuktu alone.

Ethiopia — that’s quite a journey! If I ever knew about Makuria (Greek Μακουρια, Arabic al-Muqurra), I’d forgotten. And how was “Chinguetti” derived from the Arabic name شنقيط‎ Šinqīṭ? (Thanks, Trevor!)

I finally, on a whim, read one of the most famous ghost stories in English, M. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad,” and was surprised to find two words new to me in the first few paragraphs:

‘I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James’s College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

‘Yes,’ he said; ‘my friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast—in point of fact to Burnstow—(I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow.’

‘Oh, Parkins,’ said his neighbour on the other side, ‘if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer.’

A preceptory is (per the OED, revised 2007) “A subordinate community of the Knights Templars; the provincial estate or manor supporting such a community; the buildings in which such a community was housed”; it’s from post-classical Latin praeceptoria, perhaps short for praeceptoria domus ‘preceptory house.’ And ontography, to my astonishment (I just assumed James had made the word up to provide an amusing fake scholarly specialty), is “A description of, or the branch of knowledge which deals with, the human response to the natural environment”; it is first attested in 1902, just two years before the story was published, and doesn’t seem to have been much used (“Chiefly with reference to the work of W. M. Davies”). The expresson “full term” was also new to me; it means “The full period of a term or session of a court, or the main part of a university term during which lectures are given (esp. with reference to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge)” (1886 Oxf. Univ. Cal. 51 “Full Term begins on the Sunday after the first Congregation, that is on the Sunday after the first day of Term”). And the story’s “Burnstow” represents the seaside town of Felixstowe, whose Felixstowe Ferry Golf Club “is amongst the oldest in the UK.” (Mild spoiler for the story below the cut.)
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As I said back in 2013, if you’re going to write an error-riddled book on Middle Eastern history, Robert Irwin is the last person you want reviewing it; Brian A. Catlos’s Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain doesn’t sound like a bad book in general, but Irwin has to school him on some literary history in his review (NYRB, March 21, 2019):

As the caliphate fell apart, what was left of Muslim Spain was divided among overlords who were known collectively as taifa kings, or party kings. Even in their own time they did not enjoy a good reputation. According to one contemporary poet, they were “like pussycats, who puffing themselves up, / Imagine they can roar like lions.” Catlos’s no less damning verdict is that the kings were “strongmen who were not even strong.” Yet the eleventh and twelfth centuries were a great age for philosophy, theology, and literature, and the political and military decline of the taifa principalities did not entail a cultural decline. Catlos’s account of Andalusian literary culture in this period is brisk and less surefooted than his coverage of politics and society. About the increasing influence of Arabic literature on the development of European literature from the thirteenth century onward, he writes:

Now Arabo-Islamic epics, romances and folktales—many of South Asian or Persian origin—were translated, adapted, or otherwise made their way into popular literature. These included the Kalila wa-dimna, a collection of fables; Sindibad, or Sendebar, the tales of Sinbad the Sailor; the epic of Alexander the Great; and tales from The Thousand and One Nights. Popular and didactic literature of the era, such as Ramon Llull’s Book of the Beasts (1280s) and The Tales of Count Lucanor, written in 1335 by Don Juan Manuel, a nephew of Alfonso X, were strongly influenced by these texts. In fact, Arabic literature transformed European fiction, both through the borrowing of narratives and through the appropriation of the literary device of the maqamat, or frame tale, the story-within-a-story—the same device used by Boccaccio in his Decameron and by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.

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A LIGHT BREATHER

The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
Stirs as a blossom stirs,
Still wet from its bud-sheath,
Slowly unfolding,
Turning in the light with its tendrils;
Plays as a minnow plays,
Tethered to a limp weed, swinging,
Tail around, nosing in and out of the current,
Its shadows loose, a watery finger;
Moves, like the snail,
Still inward,
Taking and embracing its surroundings,
Never wishing itself away,
Unafraid of what it is,
A music in a hood,
A small thing,
Singing.

Theodore Roethke, from The Waking (1953; first in The Kenyon Review, Summer 1950).

Via bulbul’s Facebook feed, Ancient Indo-European Grammars:

Indo-European Linguistics has produced a wealth of knowledge about the grammars of Ancient Indo-European languages, which has substantially advanced our understanding of the history of language and the human past in general. Since this knowledge is scattered over thousands of scientific publications of the past two centuries (and ongoing), access to these languages and their fascinating features and histories is reserved to specialists. The aim of this project is to help unearth this treasure and to present it to a wider audience in an easily accessible and up-to-date form. In line with this vision, a team of experts on Indo-European languages from all over the world offers courses introducing twelve of the most important Indo-European languages and their grammars.

They’ve got Old Albanian, Classical Armenian, Avestan, Gothic… Check it out!

This is actually based on the Kaverin novel I posted about yesterday, but that post was long enough already, so I figured I’d let this stand on its own. At one point Liza is having coffee in the Rotonde with her husband Georgii and Kostya, the love of her life, who’s visiting from Russia; she and Kostya have a few precious moments alone when Georgii wanders off too far to hear, and they have the following exchange (Kostya speaks first):

— Он не умеет читать по губам?
— Нет. Кроме того, для нас с тобой угол падения не равен углу отражения.

“He doesn’t know how to read lips?”
“No. Besides, for us the angle of incidence isn’t equal to the angle of reflection.”

The line about the angles is repeated twice more in the course of the novel, so it’s not merely a passing remark (and it occurs to me that it’s probably not irrelevant to the titular mirror). It may seem a bit random to the reader unfamiliar with its antecedents, but it is part of a tradition — a meme, as we say nowadays — in Russian literature. The immediate source is Marina Tsvetaeva’s long essay on the painter Natalia Goncharova (both she and especially Tsvetaeva are characters in the novel); she writes that the world is reflected косвенно (‘indirectly, obliquely’) in Goncharova’s paintings, and continues:

То, что я как-то сказала о поэте, можно сказать о каждом творчестве: угол падения не равен углу отражения.

What I once said about a poet could be said about all creative work: the angle of incidence is not equal to the angle of reflection.

This, of course, is a poetic contradiction of the Law of Reflection (“the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection”; for detailed explanations, see this Stack Exchange thread), but why does she bring it up? Because it was in one of the most important Russian works about painting, Merezhkovsky’s Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи (Resurrected Gods: Leonardo da Vinci; see this LH post) — describing Leonardo’s ability to discuss frightful subjects calmly and dispassionately, Merezhkovsky writes:

Говоря о мертвых телах, которые сталкиваются в водоворотах, прибавил: «изображая эти удары и столкновения, не забывай закона механики, по которому угол падения равен углу отражения».

Speaking about dead bodies colliding in whirlpools, he added: “in depicting these blows and collisions, do not forget the mechanical law according to which the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.”

Again, this is repeated several times; for example, when Leonardo realizes that waves in water, sound waves, and light all obey the same laws, he exclaims:

«Единая воля и справедливость Твоя, Первый Двигатель: угол падения равен углу отражения!»

“Thy will and justice are one and indivisible, First Mover: the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection!”

(You can see the other occurrences at this National Corpus page.) But two decades earlier, Turgenev had used it in a very different way in one of his poems in prose, Истина и Правда [Scientific truth and real truth], where one person says scientific truth is vitally important and the other mocks him, asking if he can imagine someone running into a gathering and saying excitedly:

«Друзья мои, послушайте, что я узнал, какую истину! Угол падения равен углу отражения! Или вот еще: между двумя точками самый краткий путь — прямая линия!»

“Friends, listen to what I’ve just found out, what truth! The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection! Or this: the shortest path between two points is a straight line!”

Here it represents the height of banality, on the level of 2 × 2 = 4 (which of course has its own Russian literary history). Why did this law of physics become a meme in Russian and not in English? I speculate because the Russian words are normal, everyday words: падение, translated in this context as “incidence,” is the normal word for ‘fall(ing)’ (both physical and in the Fall of Man), so the law sounds like a popular saying.

Veniamin Kaverin is well known to Russians but largely unfamiliar to the English-speaking world; he started out writing adventure novels but devoted himself more and more to the art of literature (and the art of remaining a decent person — he bravely stood up for Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky when they were being persecuted). I had never read anything by him, and my ignorance might have continued unabated for years; his most famous novel is The Two Captains, but I don’t have much interest in adventure novels these days. However, when I got up to 1971 in my reading project I saw he’d published a novel called Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror] in that year which he himself thought contained his best prose, so I thought I might as well give it a shot. I finished it today, and I’m still trying to come back to my own reality; it’s one of those novels that grips you until you fully inhabit it. It was also quite a wild reading experience.

To tell the truth, I almost gave up on it early. It’s an epistolary novel, consisting mainly of letters from Liza Turaeva to Kostya Karnovsky, and the first few, dating from 1910-13, were not especially gripping — typical teenage-girl letters full of self-deprecation, exalted feelings, and intricate analysis of emotions. I admired the realism but wasn’t confident it was going anywhere interesting. I persevered, however, and got to a passage by an omniscient narrator about Kostya’s life in Kazan (I greatly enjoyed the detailed portrait of Kazan; see my 2013 complaint about the lack of such things in Russian literature) which added useful perspective, and once Liza got involved in painting, the novel took off. It has one of the most convincing portrayals of an artist’s development and way of looking at the world I’ve ever read, and the more she struggled to focus on her art and keep the practicalities of life from interfering with it, the more I rooted for her. It was somewhat reminiscent of Merezhkovsky’s novel about Leonardo (which is quoted at one point), except that we know Leonardo, whatever difficulties he encountered, got lucrative commissions and became a Great Artist, which of course is easier if you’re male, whereas there’s no guessing whether Liza is going to succeed or fail. I was a little dubious about the idea of a passionate, all-consuming love lasting for many years after the lovers have parted — it seemed more like something out of the troubadours, or Alexander Grin’s féerie Алые паруса (Scarlet Sails), than real life — but it worked in the novel, and that’s what mattered.
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