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In a recent Log thread on words meaning ‘foreigner,’ Iranianist Martin Schwartz (see this LH post) said:

Indeed, the late Beekes’ seeing xénos as Pre-Greek is rendered untenable by the existence of a cognate in Avestan, however Wiktionary gives no further info on this. It was I who provided that Avestan cognate (the articles may be found on the internet), first in 1982 (“The Indo-European Vocabulary of Exchange, Hospitality, and Intimacy“, Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 8), and, among other publications, in 2003, “Gathic Compositional History, Yasna 29, and Bovine Symbolism“, pp. 213-214, in which I reconstructed PIE *ksen-w-, this time with initial velar as against my earlier suggestion of a labio-velar, based on wrong comparison with Hittite kussan-. A further, very detailed account of the etymology and its role in Gathic poetics is […] awaiting publication in a Viennese festschrift. A takeaway is that the original meaning of the word, as evidenced clearly in Homer, is that xénos/xeînos was not ‘stranger, foreigner’, but someone who, as per the archaic gift-exchange institution, was one of two parties who were mutually tied by an ongoing relationship of hospitality etc.; in Avestan the cognate verb referred to reciprocity and provision of hospitality and further (like the archaic Greek) cultic relationship. For many years Calvert Watkins contested my etymology of the Greek word, himself favoring a connection a connection with PIE *ghosti-, another term of reciprocity, but he finally conceded in public that my etymology was to be accepted for phonological reasons.

(I added links for convenience.) That’s very interesting to me; I had always accepted the *ghosti- version, but I like this one. And Schwartz has a follow-up comment on Georgian (!) borrowings from Hebrew:

As for goy, goyim: An interesting deveopment is Georgian goimi, which seems to mean ‘an old fashioned, unstylish out-of-it person, a boor or yokel’, as I have learned from a Tbilisi native speaker. The word originated from ‘gentile’ among Georgian Jews, who apparently (like speakers of Judeo-Iranian languages) use the pl. form a a singular. It is noted online, inter alia in an entry “11 Georgian slang words to help you speak like a local” [and not like a yokel, M.S.]. The latter article also gives baiti for ‘living space’, which ultimately comes from Hebrew bayit (as the article indicates); I’m reminded of Viennese beisl ‘bistro, tavern, restaurant’, from the Ashkenazic pronunciation of the Heb. word, bayis.

Unrelated, but I just learned about the phrase “splice the mainbrace,” which I’d doubtless read without understanding:

“Splice the mainbrace” is an order given aboard naval vessels to issue the crew with an alcoholic drink. Originally an order for one of the most difficult emergency repair jobs aboard a sailing ship, it became a euphemism for authorized celebratory drinking afterward, and then the name of an order to grant the crew an extra ration of rum or grog.

If you were as ignorant as me, now we’re both gnorant.

Winston Churchill was a vainglorious bastard, but he was unquestionably eloquent, and I can’t resist posting this passage from his Thoughts and Adventures (1932; via Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):

‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.

It is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. A man once told me that he had read all the books that mattered. Cross-questioned, he appeared to have read a great many, but they seemed to have made only a slight impression. How many had he understood? How many had entered into his mental composition? How many had been hammered on the anvils of his mind and afterwards ranged in an armoury of bright weapons ready to hand?

It is a great pity to read a book too soon in life. The first impression is the one that counts; and if it is a slight one, it may be all that can be hoped for. A later and second perusal may recoil from a surface already hardened by premature contact. Young people should be careful in their reading, as old people in eating their food. They should not eat too much. They should chew it well.

Since change is an essential element in diversion of all kinds, it is naturally more restful and refreshing to read in a different language from that in which one’s ordinary daily work is done. To have a second language at your disposal, even if you only know it enough to read it with pleasure, is a sensible advantage. Our educationists are too often anxious to teach children so many different languages that they never get far enough in any one to derive any use or enjoyment from their study. The boy learns enough Latin to detest it; enough Greek to pass an examination; enough French to get from Calais to Paris; enough German to exhibit a diploma; enough Spanish or Italian to tell which is which; but not enough of any to secure the enormous boon of access to a second literature.

Choose well, choose wisely, and choose one. Concentrate upon that one. Do not be content until you find yourself reading in it with real enjoyment. The process of reading for pleasure in another language rests the mental muscles; it enlivens the mind by a different sequence and emphasis of ideas. The mere form of speech excites the activity of separate brain-cells, relieving in the most effective manner the fatigue of those in hackneyed use. One may imagine that a man who blew the trumpet for his living would be glad to play the violin for his amusement. So it is with reading in another language than your own.

I disagree about reading good books when young — I think such reading lays down good, fertile soil for later growth rather than hardening the surface — but I nodded my head vigorously to most of it, especially the final paragraph.

I’m reading another of Valentin Kataev’s fictionalized memoirs of childhood, Кубик (Little Cube: “because it has six faces in three dimensions, or because it’s the name of a dog, or just because”), and he uses the word бильбоке (Wikipedia; stress on the final syllable), which is borrowed from French bilboquet, which has also been borrowed into English as bilboquet \ˌbilbəˈket\, also known as cup and ball. I checked the OED (entry from 1887), and was highly amused by the indignant bracketed remark after the definition:

2. The plaything called Cup-and-ball; the game played with it, which consists in catching the ball either on the cup or spike end of the stick.
[A typical example of popular etymology is afforded by the corruption of -quet = ket, to ketch, catch, so as to associate it with the action of the game; in Bilbao catch we have the more deliberate perversion of pseudo-scholarship.]

Here are the citations, which show a pleasing variety of forms:

1743 H. Walpole Let. 4 Apr. in Lett. to H. Mann I. 265 To set up the noble game of bilboquet.
1801 M. Edgeworth Good French Governess in Moral Tales V. 26 Bilboquets, battledores, and shuttlecocks.
1808 J. Austen Let. 24 Oct. 150 Bilbocatch, at which George is indefatigable.
1812 Monthly Mag. 33 26 He made great use of a bilbao-catch (note, said to have come hither from Bilbao, in Spain, and thence to have its name) or ivory cup and spike.
1832 W. Hone Year Bk. 1297 To the hautboy succeeded the bilbo-catch, or bilver-ketch.
1875 W. D. Parish Dict. Sussex Dial.   Bibler-catch.

Every week Lev Oborin posts a roundup of recent literary news, and I read them faithfully; this week’s brought to my attention the Petersburg poet Alla Gorbunova (Russian Wikipedia), who’s written a couple of books of prose — the brand-new one, «Конец света, моя любовь» [The end of the world, my love], sounded so good (Galina Yuzefovich in her review said it might be the book of the year) that I promptly bought an electronic copy and loved the title story (the first in the collection), in which the narrator describes her childish fear that the world would end and says that when she got older she realized the worst thing is that everything stays the same: мир обманул меня и оказался твердым, совсем твердым…. счастье — ето ожидание конца света [the world deceived me and turned out to be solid, completely solid…. happiness is waiting for the end of the world].

Her first book of prose, Вещи и ущи, a collection of very short pieces, came out in 2017; I’ll translate the title “Things and mings,” which will be explained by my translation of the title piece (you can read the original here, near the bottom of the page):

Mings

Things made from mind are distinguished from things made from matter by their history. The history of things made from matter is the history of material and master, machine and shelf. The history of things made from mind is the history of imagination. These two histories flow in parallel, but sometimes come together. For convenience we will call things made from matter “things,” and things made from mind “mings” [ущи, a combination of вещи ‘things’ and ум ‘mind’]. In each thing there is always some ming, even if only a little. The history of matter always includes the history of imagination. Most people have never seen pure mings, but I have. I love the history of things, but it may be that one day we will be living in a world consisting of mings. Sometimes I can’t tell immediately whether what’s before me is a thing or a ming, because at first glance they look identical. Then I begin to investigate the history of the object, and right away it becomes clear whether it’s a thing or a ming. But here too it’s possible to make a mistake and attribute the history of a thing to a ming or vice versa. There are people who interact perfectly well with things but on the plane of mings are completely helpless, and there are great masters of mings who are like little children when it comes to things. There’s no doubt that I have a certain talent for mings; in the first place, I can see them, and in the second place, I can perform various actions with them and even create them at will. As for things, the more ming there is in them, the easier it is for me to deal with them. Some things have very little ming in them. They say there is a dark sea in which mings cannot be born, and I fear that one day I will drown in it.

I have a weakness for the prose of poets, and I like that kind of thing a lot.

Update. Tatyana Korolyova has a review of «Конец света, моя любовь» that Gorbunova herself likes and recommends. Also, I got a hard copy of the book because I was enjoying it so much and was tired of reading it on my iPhone, and I have ordered a copy of «Вещи и ущи».

Update (June 2023). «Конец света, моя любовь» has now been translated by Elina Alter as It’s the End of the World, My Love, and Sarah Gear reviews it for the TLS (June 2, 2023):

Near the beginning of It’s the End of the World, My Love, Alla Gorbunova describes a point in her early adolescence when she understood that the world could be divided into material, astral and spiritual planes. Among the inhabitants of the astral plane she lists “egregores”, a collective consciousness belonging to the ancient Karelian forest rooted in this novel’s heart. Gorbunova’s opening concerns her youth in 1990s Saint Petersburg, but it isn’t long before the astral plane begins to seep into the material one. The author shifts between autofiction and dark, Lyudmila Petrushevskayalike fables, her rich Russian prose beautifully captured by Elina Alter’s translation.

Gorbunova’s stories span a time of intense change both in her own life and in the world around her. Her journey from childhood to adulthood parallels Russia’s transition from Communism to post-1991 economic chaos, to a new form of stability at the end of the millennium. These seismic shifts represent the end of the world of the novel’s title, bringing into question the very fabric of post-Soviet reality.

The gateway between this material reality and the astral plane is the Motor Bar, which sits at the edge of the Karelian forest. A beautiful woman, dead and maggot-infested, visits the bar every Saturday night, reminding its patrons of their forgotten link to the “dark Russian homeland”. The ancient woods are a place to commune with the dead. Talking swans live there, as do carnivorous trees and magical lovers who appear in mirrors. A boy gets lost and turns into a tree, and the folkloric figure Joulupukki hunts for naughty children to eat. A young woman, perhaps the author herself, is trapped in the woods following a trauma, now only half remembered. She is resurrected and self-aware for one day every summer. On this day her adult self sits beside her, detached from her past and unaware of her presence, though later the two commune in their dreams.

For Gorbunova the woods represent a kind of Eden. Along with the collective consciousness of the astral, they house the “Divine Spark” of the spiritual plane, where individual consciousness, love, fear and trauma reside. They represent sanctuary and danger, and the possibility of redemption. Immutable and deadly, the magical forest is the only “real” world, experienced by children and the dying; it is forgotten by adults at their peril.

Update (Nov. 2025). «Вещи и ущи» has been translated, again by Elina Alter, as (Th)ings and (Th)oughts. I think that’s a brilliant Englishing of the title, and I doff my cap to Alter.

Cardiff University student creates Welsh scientific words (BBC):

A Cardiff University student carrying out research into fatal diseases found many of the medical terms did not exist in his mother tongue. But far from being dissuaded, Bedwyr Ab Ion Thomas decided to make up Welsh words to explain his studies. The 23-year-old now hopes to have made a mini dictionary of new terms to help others by the time he finishes his PhD. “I hope that I can contribute not only to science but also to the Welsh language,” he said.

The medicinal chemistry student from Cardiff is attempting to develop treatments for rare diseases, such as mad cow disease, kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), for which there are currently no cures. But carrying out his research in Welsh has brought up some “extra challenges”, with many of the scientific terms used only existing in English or Latin. One example is a binding pocket – where a drug would bind in a protein – which he translates as “poced feindio”. “These inconsistencies emphasise the need for scientific terms in Welsh to be standardised to avoid confusion,” he said. […]

Professor Simon Ward, director at the university’s Medicines Discovery Institute, said it was “important” to show you could study any topic in Welsh. “You don’t just have to be studying Welsh poetry in the Middle Ages – you can also do cutting-edge scientific research,” he said.

Of course a lot of people will say it’s a waste of time, but if the Welsh want to talk about mad cow disease in Welsh, more power to them, say I. (Thanks, Trevor!)

Also, I’ve recommended the delightful 1941 comedy Ball of Fire more than once (2011, 2013, 2016), but my wife and I watched it again last night and I feel compelled to do so again. Not only does it star Gary Cooper as a linguist and Barbara Stanwyck as the tough dame who provides the slang he needs for his encyclopedia, it’s full of great dialogue like “It’s as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore.” Don’t miss it if you can, in the immortal (alleged) words of Sam Goldwyn.

Also also, Dmitry Pruss would like to know about any authoritative scholarly work in German about Russian patronymics; a marriage application (not his) is being rejected by German authorities because the birth certificate lists the prospective groom with a patronymic, but his Western IDs don’t have any middle name. Dmitry says:

I believe that a letter in German Legalese or faux Legalese, citing scholarly work about what a Russian patronymic is and why it isn’t a middle name (or indeed any part of an English name) may suffice in his quest. But I don’t know how to find the relevant work in German 🙂

Thanks in advance for any help!

Y sent me a link to Matt’s 2017 post New Approaches to Ethno-Linguistic Maps at the linguistics blog Humans Who Read Grammars, calling it “neat,” and I felt the same way when I clicked the link:

One major issue with most modern maps of languages is that they often consist of just a single point for each language – this is the approach that WALS and glottolog take. This works pretty well for global-scale analyses, but simple points are quite uninformative for region scale studies of languages. Points also have a hard time spatially describing languages that have disjoint distributions, like English, or languages that overlap spatially. […] I believe that, thanks to greater computational efficiency offered by modern computers and new datasets available from social media, it is increasingly possible to develop better maps of language distributions using geotagged text data rather than an expert’s opinion. In this blog, I’ll cover two projects I’ve done to map languages – one using data from Twitter in the Philippines, and another using computationally-intensive algorithms to classify toponyms in West Africa.

Those maps are amazing! Then I thought “I should really investigate that blog,” and when I went to the main page I found a 2019 post by Annemarie Verkerk, Language family maps, that begins:

Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie’s (2017) chapter ‘The Languages of the World’ (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It’s a basic overview of the world’s language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments.

It’s a very useful resource, as is the entire blog (here’s the About page). Thanks, Y!

You know, this blog has always been a comfort to me, first when I was working for Hideous Soulless Corporation and then when I had left the familiar environs of New York City and was trying to establish myself as a freelancer, but in these pestiferous times it’s more important to me than ever. I hardly see anyone but my wife from week to week, but I have all you good folks to keep me company and carry on lively conversations (many of which I can only understand scraps of, but that’s good for me). It no longer seems quite so amazing LH is still around — one does get accustomed to things — but it’s even harder to imagine giving it up. My deepest appreciation to all of you; thanks for hanging around and chatting so companionably!

A quick update on my literary adventures: I had been reading Tessa Hadley novels to my wife at night (I particularly recommend The Past), but we’re taking a break to read something both of us, George Eliot fans that we are, have been wanting to try, Daniel Deronda. So far it’s a delight (and reminds me of Russian novels set in German spas where gamblers congregate). In Russian, I read a bunch of Andrei Bitov stories (recommended: «Большой шар” [The big balloon], about a little girl who falls in love with a big red balloon, and «Инфантьев» [Infantyev], about a guy mourning his wife); then I went back to the 19th century and read Chekhov’s famous «Палата № 6» (“Ward No. 6”), which is very good indeed, and Leskov’s 1893 «Загон» (The cattle pen), which is frustrating in the same way so much Leskov is frustrating: the writing is excellent, the individual anecdotes are often hilarious, but the thing doesn’t hang together. Leskov had no sense of form — it starts with stories of Russian peasants refusing to accept Western improvements in farming and ends with stories about thievery, fakery, and Baltic churches, all supposed to be somehow connected with the idea of Russia as a cattle pen walled off from the world. Now I’m going to return to the 20th century and read my first Trifonov, the 1969 «Обмен» [The Exchange].
[Read more…]

Rosy Carrick, a “poet, playwright, performer and translator” who “has a PhD on the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and has released two books of his work in translation,” has put online her version of Mayakovsky’s Что ни страница — то слон, то львица [On every page a lion or an elephant], and it’s an admirable presentation, with a large image of each original page with an illustration by Kirill Zdanevich (brother of Il’ia — see this LH post) followed by her translation. She hasn’t tried to rhyme her lines, which is probably a wise decision, but that makes it hard to understand why she renders председатель ‘chairman’ by “Party Leader” on the first page (chairmanship had nothing to do with Party membership) and omits Америки ‘America’ on the last (replacing it with the vague “hotter climes”). But never mind, it’s a nice thing to have online and I hope there are many more such webpages.

For those who read Russian, Lev Oborin’s wonderful Polka site (see this LH post) has put up an awe-inspiring roster of 77 Russian travel accounts, from the medieval (Афанасий Никитин. Хождение за три моря, 1469–1474) to the very modern (Эдуард Лимонов. Старик путешествует, 2020). I applaud their ongoing efforts to document and promulgate the history of Russian literature.

Joe Gillard’s “14 Colonial-Era Slang Terms” is just another of those lists of fun words, but hey, they’re fun words, and I enjoy this stuff:

1. Kedge

What It Meant: Doing well

In you lived in a country town in Colonial-era New England and someone asked how you were doing, you might have replied, “I’m pretty kedge.” It’s a bizarre but wonderful term that essentially means in being in good health—but it also kind of sounds like something a teen in an ‘80s movie would say.

4. Scranch

What It Meant: To crack something between your teeth

Though this apparently “vulgar” term sounds like it was named after what it sounds like to crack something with your teeth, it supposedly comes from the Dutch word, schransen.

14. Circumbendibus

What It Meant: Roundabout

Of all the ways to describe something unnecessarily roundabout— like someone telling a rambling story or taking a weird road when driving somewhere—this word, which dates to 1681, might be the most delightful. It also shows how much we fun we had and still have with language, combining prefixes and suffixes to make new words.

Some of them don’t really seem to belong on the list (shaver was current in my youth, and I’ll bet there are still people who say it), but that last one is a magnificent example of the rumbustious grandiloquence that has always appealed to the American soul, and I’ll try to remember to start calling things “circumbendibus” myself. Thanks, jack!

Back in March (which seems like at least a year ago) I posted about a thought-provoking essay by Joel Christensen of Sententiae Antiquae called “On Not Reading Homer”; now he’s got a follow-up that’s even better, “On Reading Homer,” and I hope anyone who found the earlier post worthwhile will click through and read it. A few excerpts, as usual, to whet the appetite:

Advocates often imagine that the strongest argument for Homer is that Homer was influential in the “Western Canon” and that you need to be familiar with Homer to appreciate and understand everything that came after. I think that this argument sounds nice, but it overstates the existence of the “Western Canon” (which is relatively recent), ignores the motivations for enforcing it, and radically misunderstands the impact of Homeric epic in the development of European literatures.

[…]

The difference between what we actually have in the Homeric epics and what we find in later generations can help us unlearn what we think we know about literary traditions. This argument makes me nervous in general because it runs the risk of merely repeating the damaging “Greek Miracle” nonsense. But it is also an argumentum ex silentio. I don’t know that other works we lost were any less unique and different.

[…]

The Homeric epics are dialogic and aporetic and in these functions they teach us not what to do but how to think about what we do as communities. […] Homeric epic, like Platonic dialogue, invites its audiences to follow the folly and success of its characters and then to retrace them, to come to a deeper understanding of the conditions that put them in the position to fail. For Platonic dialogue, Laura Candiotto (2015) has argued that the state of aporia itself is transformative, that it forces us to “imagine an otherness” (242) but that this process requires shared or collective emotional and intellectual work. The shared work of interpreting epic with its characters is a kind of extended mind over time. When we read them and discuss them with others, we engage in the transformative process of creating community around the interrogation of the self. […] What makes Homer different from reading Game of Thrones together or spending semesters contemplating Marcel Proust’s associative sense of smell is the depth of interpretive traditions to add to the complexity of the community of meaning and the nature of epic poetry itself. Homeric ambiguity, interdeterminacy, and dialogism provides a capaciousness of time rare in any art form and the essential, irrefutable absence of the author provides the opportunity to think and rethink without that devils’ trap of authorial intention.

(Please, no complaints about technical terms like dialogic and aporetic; he’s not writing for the daily paper, and he defines them as he goes.) He links to various other material relevant to the topic, including Gregory Nagy’s Homer’s Text and Language (which I am eager to investigate), and in general provokes questions that make one think afresh. I have to say that the quote from Gladstone beginning “If the works of Homer are, to letters and to human learning, what the early books of Scripture are to the entire Bible and to the spiritual life of man; if in them lie the beginnings of the intellectual life of the world…” made me feel a little nauseated (though that may be the heat and humidity). I want to slap Gladstone around and tell him that spiritual life is not confined to inheritors of the Greco-Roman tradition; he didn’t have the excuse of not knowing any better, and still less do we. Homer is magnificent, but so are the classics of China, Persia, and other loci of civilization; the world is a big place, and none of us can absorb more than a tiny fraction of the available greatness.