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
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
[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
Varlam Shalamov’s Sketches of the Criminal World
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!
I had occasion to consult the Russian Wikipedia page for Lake Imandra (the stress is on the first syllable), and I was confused by the first sentence, which said it was “14-е в России по площади водного зеркала” [14th in Russia by surface of the water mirror]. I figured водное зеркало, literally ‘water mirror,’ must mean something else, and sure enough Wikipedia says “Водное зеркало — водная поверхность поверхностных открытых водоёмов или подземных ненапорных вод” [Water mirror — the water surface of open bodies of surface water or underground waters not under pressure (? — I am not a hydrographer)], which makes sense, though I don’t know why they wouldn’t just say “14-е в России по поверхности.” But! My large Russian-English dictionary defines водное зеркало as “water table,” which is entirely different (Wikipedia: “The water table is the upper surface of the zone of saturation”). Furthermore, the translations in Reverso Context use “water table.” That’s presumably not valid for the Imandra sentence, but the murky situation makes me itchy, and if anyone can clear it up I’ll be grateful. (Is водное зеркало a phrase most Russians are familiar with?)
Patrick Wang kindly offered to send me his new book, Nature’s Embrace: The Poetry of Ivan Bunin
That peaceful gaze, the way a doe will gaze,
And all that I had loved in it so dearly,
I still had not forgotten in my grieving,
But nowadays your image is a haze.And there will come a day—when grief will lessen,
When all the reminiscing fades to blue,
Where there is neither happiness nor gloom,
And there will only be forgiving distance.
And here’s a lovely bit from “Lucifer” [Люцифер]:
Here’s Eden, Lebanon. The dawn burns crimson.
The snowy peaks — like silk. On slopes the herds
Flow through the caves.
I wish more people would take time off from being economists and movie directors to translate Russian poetry!
I just finished one of the two great samizdat hits of 1970, Yuz Aleshkovsky‘s Николай Николаевич [Nikolai Nikolaevich]. It was passed around and eagerly copied by people with typewriters, even memorized and endlessly quoted; finally, in 1980, after the author emigrated to the US, it was published by Ardis (which rescued so much Russian literature from official oblivion). I had previously revered Aleshkovsky for his immortal song about the Gulag “Товарищ Сталин, вы большой ученый” (“Comrade Stalin, you are a great scholar”; the text is here, and you can read Boris Dralyuk’s lively translation, as well as hear Aleshkovsky sing it, here); of course, I was immediately grabbed by the second line, “В языкознаньи знаете Вы толк” [you know linguistics well]. I had wanted to read his famous first novel for a long time, but it’s a good thing I didn’t try back in the pre-internet days, because I wouldn’t have been able to make my way through its astonishing prose, so dense with idiom, slang, and profanity that even now I have to google something in every paragraph that you won’t find in dictionaries. Andrei Bitov wrote about it here; he describes the new language that arose after the Revolution, used by writers like Zoshchenko and Dobychin but driven underground by Stalin, who separated literature from the living language. He says Aleshkovsky used this living language first in his songs and then in the novel: “советский язык прошел свое литературное развитие от песни до рыцарского романа, и советская литература наконец родилась!” [the Soviet language passed through its literary development from song to chivalric romance, and Soviet literature at last was born!].
So what’s it about? The titular Nikolai, a young pickpocket who has done time and is now working the tram and trolley lines of Moscow, is warned by his aunt that Beria is raising the penalties drastically, so he’d better take up some other line of work. She gets him a job in a biological institute, where after he refuses to push brooms around he is given work as a sperm donor, and once the researcher who hired him, Kimza, realizes the superhuman power of his sperm he starts living the good life (he naturally demands an increase in pay and regular vodka rations). He also falls in love with the lab assistant Vlada; unfortunately, Kimza is also in love with her, and she is married to a third man. Then the Lysenkoists stage a coup, firing the director and destroying the experiments as anti-Soviet (they are accused of “Morganism,” which Nikolai thinks involves necrophilia in a morgue), and things look pretty dicey, but they turn out well after Stalin dies. It’s short and delightful, and there’s an English translation by Duffield White (available in Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels
A couple of random things I enjoyed: the международный урка [international hoodlum] who serves as a mentor to Nikolai is said to know “три языка […] и четыре ‘фени’: польский, немецкий и финляндский” [three languages and four criminal jargons: Polish, German, and Finnish], and at one point Nikolai masturbates while reading Далеко от Москвы (Far from Moscow), a well-known “production novel” from 1948 in which conflicts are artificial, “the most important technological ideas always occur to the various characters simultaneously,” and Gulag labor is presented as free workers’ heroic sacrifices for the building of communism. Also, I should warn the prospective reader that there is a new “upgrade” edition of the novel Aleshkovsky produced a few years ago that is apparently completely rewritten; I read the original, which is also the basis for the translation.
Next I’ll be reading the other great samizdat hit of 1970, a true classic of Russian literature, Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki. I first read it over two decades ago, and it bowled me over (as it does everyone); there was a lot that zipped right by me then, and I’m looking forward to re-experiencing it now that I have a lot more Russian and Russian literature under my belt (it’s full of literary allusions). The two books have a good bit in common, featuring a young man on the fringes of society madly in love and drinking heavily, but Aleshkovsky’s book is a comedy and Erofeev’s a tragedy (furthermore, as best I can remember, it doesn’t have any actual curse words in it, though a lot of cursing is implied). I plan to read it in tandem with the acclaimed new critical biography Венедикт Ерофеев: посторонний (Venedikt Erofeev: The outsider; see this post of Lizok’s), and I expect I will report on it when I’m done.
Again going through my unread-mail file, I discovered that years ago longtime LH commenter Paul Treuthardt sent me a link to A Middle English Vocabulary, Designed for use with Sisam’s Fourteenth Century by J. R. R. Tolkien, adding “This is the opening of his introductury Note (admirable, I think)”:
This glossary does not aim at completeness, and it is not primarily a glossary of rare or ‘hard’ words. A good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the possession of an abstruse vocabulary than on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression — with the precise forms and meanings that common words may assume; with the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions of and for; with idiomatic phrases, some fresh-minted and some worn thin, but all likely to recur again and again in an age whose authors took no pains to avoid usual or hackneyed turns of expression. These are the features of the older language which an English reader is predisposed to pass over, satisfied with a half-recognition: and space seldom permits of their adequate treatment in a compendious general dictionary or the word-list to a single text. So in making a glossary for use with a book itself designed to be a preparation for the reading of complete texts, I have given exceptionally full treatment to what may rightly be called the backbone of the language.
Admirable indeed; alas, I have just discovered that Paul died in 2017. Hard to believe I’m just finding out; I miss him already.
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