languagehat.com

This nine-minute video features linguist Tom Scott on numbers and linguistics; Lars Mathiesen, who sent it to me, says it has “a good explanation of otteoghalvtreds. Also septemvigesimal gestural numbers.” Fun pull-quote: “Hindi is so irregular that for the numbers from 1 to 100 you essentially have a hundred different words.” Scott says “Danish is astonishing” and adduces the number Lars mentions, which represents 58 and where the halvtreds part represents “half thrice times twenty” = 3 – 1/2 x 20 = 50. He ends with a peroration that warmed my heart, about how sf writers — who he had assumed would blow his mind with their wild and crazy alien number systems — are tame compared to the number systems of, say, the South Pacific. And it’s worth having the captions on so you can enjoy things like “dot is the freebie action” = “that is the abbreviation.” Thanks, Lars! (Oh, and if you look at the frame of the video and think “That’s almost ten minutes, why does he call it a nine-minute video?”: the final minute is an ad for a hosting service, which you should feel free to skip. There is no bonus Easter egg at the end.)

Victor Mair has a Log post called “Onion” in Persian, Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu, Dungan (northwest Mandarin), and Indic whose title is admirably descriptive. He starts with “this interesting Uyghur word for “onion” that derives from Persian” and quotes Brian Spooner as follows:

It’s the normal Persian word for onion, which is a key ingredient in pretty much every Persian dinner dish, and (as I wrote in The Persianate Millennium) as Persian culture spread through Central Asia with the Persian language starting in the 9th century all the way to northern China, I wouldn’t be surprised to find piyaz in any Turkic language. I don’t remember whether the Ottomans bequeathed it to modern Turkish.

As Mehmet Olmez says, “In modern Turkish, the word piyaz is used for a special food prepared with onion, boiled eggs, and beans.” There is a list of words borrowed from the Persian at the Wiktionary page, and Mair adds “The same Persian word also worked its way into Sinitic, hence Dungan (Northwest Mandarin, written in Cyrillic): пиязы (pii͡azɨ, I-I-II)”

I love that kind of spread of culture words, but what I want to know is, where did the Persian word come from? Thomas Benfey says:

I will just add that I couldn’t find Middle Persian pyʾc/piyāz anywhere, whether in MacKenzie’s Zoroastrian Middle Persian dictionary, Skjærvø’s digitized ZMP corpus, or Durkin-Meisterernst’s dictionary of Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian. There aren’t all that many culinary discussions that survive in any of these corpora, so it could well be from Middle Persian but simply not attested. But unless the author of that Wiktionary entry is aware of something I’m not, the MP pyʾc/piyāz in the piyāz entry there should really come with an asterisk. That said, there are several cases of words from eastern Middle Iranian languages such as Sogdian and Bactrian making their way into the core vocabulary of New Persian. This is not too relevant to the etymology of Persian piyāz because of the final consonant, but for what it’s worth I did find a Sogdian pyʾk (piyāk) meaning “onion” in Gharib’s dictionary.

I don’t know, that Sogdian word seems suspiciously close… (Too bad MMcM never got around to onions in the late lamented Polyglot Vegetarian, though he did discuss garlic. For onions et alia allia previously at LH, see this post.)

I’ve had a beat-up copy of the famous symbolist novel Огненный ангел (The Fiery Angel) for a couple of decades now — it’s one of the many books I grabbed when the late lamented Donnell Branch was selling off its stock as fast as it could deaccession it — and it seemed the obvious follow-up to Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo, so I finally read it. As I read, I kept changing my mind about it.

Going in, I knew two things: that it was about philosophico-mystical goings-on in 16th-century Germany, and that it was a roman à clef about a love triangle (notorious at the time) between Bryusov, Andrei Bely, and the “Symbolist groupie” (as Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal called her) Nina Petrovskaya. The first interested me not at all, but I had read Khodasevich’s “brilliant book of memoirs,” Некрополь (Necropolis), with its heartfelt account of the affair — catastrophic for poor Nina (a friend of his for many years) — and I was curious to know how Bryusov treated it. And of course it took place immediately after Leonardo, and it also involved witches.

It starts with a fake publisher’s preface of the sort commonly found in the works of playful authors, but this one is neither funny (as in Gogol) nor artistically significant (as in Nabokov) — it merely drops a bunch of names like Ulrich Zasius and Jean Bodin, which seems superfluous given that the novel itself is crammed full of them. Then we get a preface by the purported author of the “truthful tale,” Ruprecht, who drops a bunch more such names (the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villedieu, Lambertus de Monte’s Copulata [commentary] on Peter of Spain); all of this, it has to be said, is exceedingly dry and does not inspire eagerness in the reader who is not already hungry for such matter. But then we’re into the story itself: Ruprecht, recently returned from a successful spell as a mercenary for the Hapsburgs in New Spain, is returning to his childhood home in Losheim to show his parents that their runaway son amounted to something after all when he runs into Renata, the heroine, in a ramshackle country inn on the road to Neuss. It’s a 16th-century meet-cute: he’s trying to get some sleep when he hears what sounds like a woman being assaulted in the next room; full of knightly ardor, he grabs his sword and runs in, only to find a young woman disheveled but alone. It turns out she’s been fighting off demons, and she tells him a tangled tale of how she had loved the “fiery angel” Madiel since she was a child, how when she grew up and started having romantic feelings he had appeared to her as a gorgeous young man, Count Heinrich von Otterheim, with whom she ran away and lived in his castle on the Danube, and how he had suddenly rejected her and expelled her to wander penniless and undefended. This is shown to be a pack of lies the very next morning, when the landlady tells him, among other things, that the count actually lives not far south on the Rhine, but Ruprecht is smitten and swears eternal fealty, accompanying Renata to Cologne and fulfilling her every desire.

One of her desires is that he join her pact with the devil, for which purpose he smears himself with ointment and flies off to a witches’ sabbath, just as in Merezhkovsky; he wakes up in his room with no sign that he actually went anywhere, so he’s not sure what to believe. He also plunges into magical studies, buying book after book from a specialist in the field and finally meeting the great legal scholar and occultist Cornelius Agrippa. All of this is fairly tedious unless you’re as absorbed in such things as Bryusov was. But the description of Ruprecht’s tormented love for Renata, who alternately clings to him and rejects him, constantly rubbing her passionate love for Count Heinrich in his face (she makes him promise not only to help her get him back but to love him as much as she does), and eventually gives herself to him physically before once more violently rejecting him and running away, is very well done; anyone who has ever been in the clutches of such a passion will recognize the symptoms with a pang.

Once she leaves him for good, he decides he can’t stay in Cologne. As he’s taking his farewell tour of the city (where he’d attended the university a decade back), he is accosted by two men who ask him to show them around, since they’re new in town; these turn out to be Faust and Mephistopheles, which made me groan and wonder if we were going to be subjected to every famous person in the Germany of that time. The picture Bryusov draws of the two is amusing and enjoyable, but it’s basically a pointless diversion, like Merezhkovsky dragging in everyone from Raphael to the pope in his own heavily researched magnum opus. But just as I was deciding the book had gone to hell, there’s a brilliantly managed transition that brings Ruprecht face to face with Renata again — she has joined the nuns at a convent, where she is causing so much dissension (some say she’s a saint, others that she’s in league with the devil) that the Inquisition is called in. This, needless to say, upsets Ruprecht, who has to be restrained from suicidally intervening by a friendly nobleman who helps him concoct a deeply implausible rescue plot straight out of a boy’s-own adventure novel; he actually succeeds in getting into the dungeon where she’s being held, but she refuses to be rescued, calling him names and saying she wants to be cleansed in fire. When he tries to carry her out by force, she fights back, then has what he recognizes as a faint of death (!); she opens her eyes and has just enough strength to say “Dear Ruprecht, I’m so glad you’re with me” before expiring. What a load of hooey! Did people take it seriously in 1907?

At any rate, I’m glad I read it, and I guess the obvious follow-up is Sologub’s Мелкий бес (The Petty Demon), which came out around the same time and also involves the demonic. But I’ll take a breather before diving back in to those murky waters.

The Latest from Archipelago Books:

Dear readers and friends,

As a response to the pandemic, we would like to offer 30 ebooks FREE from March 19th until April 2nd! Simply click ‘purchase’ on the book page and you will be able to download the book free of charge. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to support world literature. We are grateful. Our free ebook library includes…

It’s an impressive and wide-ranging list, and I applaud both the generous offer (I snagged some great-sounding books) and their attempt to deal with the problem featured in this post. (Don’t forget to click the “e-book” circle; the paperbacks aren’t free!)

Also, the LRB is “featuring just one piece from our archive per day … for 24 hours”; check it out, there’s some good stuff.

Update. Melville House is offering e-book editions of their top ten bestselling novels at $1.99 for the next week. I grabbed Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone; they’ve got Raymond Radiguet, Irvine Welsh, Andrey Kurkov, and others on offer.

Matthew Wills at JStor Daily rehashes the tale of Milman Parry, who (as many Hatters doubtless know) “used textual analysis, anthropology, and field work to show that pre-literate or semi-literate peoples could, in fact, recite long poems.” I hadn’t known, however, about his mysterious demise in 1935:

But Parry’s untimely death from a gunshot wound seems to have sparked all sorts of urban legends—or what you might call oral traditions. Parry, in fact, had carried a gun in the rough terrain of Yugoslavia and took the weapon with him on a family trip to California. It evidently went off by accident while he was unpacking. That “evidently” has been the basis of much rumor since.

Classics professor Steve Reece explores the shooting and the mythology about Parry that arose in subsequent years. He’s been described as a working-class hero/chicken farmer who ran up against Harvard snobbery and killed himself in despair when he wasn’t given tenure. He was compared to Alexander the Great (also dead at thirty-three); T. E. Lawrence, who died in a senseless road accident just months before Parry; and even to Ajax, who “killed himself out of anger and dismay over not receiving the armor of Achilles.” Reece goes to the documentation to meticulously deconstruct the Parry-myths in the context of the fluidity of oral traditions. Though saturated in corporate narratives and televisual plots, we evidently still make up songs about heroes.

Reese’s article is “The Myth of Milman Parry: Ajax or Elpenor?” (Oral Tradition, 33/1 [2019]:115-142), and it’s available free in its entirety. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Recently I’ve run across a couple of omissions from the OED that mildly surprised me; they’re not common usages, but they’re established enough you’d think the grand repository of the English wordhoard, which embraces even absurd hapaxes like pancakewards (1867 Cornhill Mag. Mar. 362 Her allowance would not admit of..a surreptitious egg, might her desire pancakewards be never so strong), would have entries for them:

1) Entry fine. I encountered this as the definition for a prerevolutionary French term, which I forgetlods et ventes [thanks, Xerîb!]; it means “a payment due when a new customary tenant entered land” and is frequently used in books dealing with relevant topics (“to all transfers of land was the imposition of the entry fine”; “Both of these variants confirm the principle that the entry fine was the responsibility of the incoming tenant”; “the 24,000 marks possibly paid as a relief or entry fine to Philip II of France for Richard’s French lands”; etc. etc.). The OED, s.v. entry, has “2. Law. The action or an act of taking up occupation of a piece of land, property, etc., as a legal assertion of ownership; the action or right of entering upon possession of land, property, etc.,” and the phrase writ of entry “a writ for the recovery of land or property from one claiming legal possession of it,” but not entry fine (and the word fine does not occur in the entry for entry).

2) Turquet/torquetum. This one has its own Wikipedia entry (with splendid illustrations):

The torquetum or turquet is a medieval astronomical instrument designed to take and convert measurements made in three sets of coordinates: Horizon, equatorial, and ecliptic. It is said to be a combination of Ptolemy’s astrolabon and the plane astrolabe.

There’s a detailed description in The History of the Telescope, by Henry C. King (p. 10):

Nasir ed-din el-Tusi is believed to have introduced the turquet or torquetum (Fig. 5), an instrument that became very popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a kind of portable equatorial and altazimuth. To a base plate was hinged an inclinable plate which could be set in the plane of the celestial equator by adjusting the length of a graduated arm or stylus. At right angles to the inclinable plate was a polar axis carrying two circles. A movable alidade indicated declinations on the upper circle, while the equatorial circle, in the plane of the inclinable plate, indicated right ascensions. […] In any case, the torquetum appears to have been in regular use in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Torquetum occurs nowhere in the OED; turquet, amusingly, does… in two hapaxes with very different senses:

turquet, n.¹
Obsolete. rare^—1
A player dressed up to resemble a Turk.
1625 F. Bacon Ess. (new ed.) 225 Anti-masques..haue been commonly of Fooles, Satyres, Baboones, Wilde-Men, Antiques, Beasts, Sprites, Witches, Ethiopes, Pigmies, Turquets,..and the like.

turquet, n.²
Obsolete. rare^—1
? Spelt. […]
1725 R. Bradley Chomel’s Dictionaire Œconomique at Stone A Remedy for the Stone and Gravel is, to take the Herb Turquet or Storch-Corn [sic], dry it and reduce it to Powder.

I trust the good folks at Oxford will take note and do the right thing.

It occurred to me I didn’t know where pedant was from, and it turns out I’m not the only one. OED (updated September 2005):

Etymology: < Middle French pedante, pedant, French pédant schoolmaster (1558), someone who shows off his learning, pedant (1561, 1653 as adjective) or its etymon Italian pedante teacher, schoolmaster (mid 15th cent.), pedant (1524), of uncertain origin, perhaps alteration of either pedagogo pedagogue n. or post-classical Latin paedagogant-, paedagogans, present participle of paedagogare to act as pedagogue, to teach (in an undated text in Du Cange), perhaps by association Italian †pedante foot-soldier, pedestrian (see pedanty n.2). Compare Spanish pedante schoolmaster (late 16th or early 17th cent.), pedant (first half of the 17th cent.).

It first meant ‘schoolmaster’ (a1586 Sir P. Sidney Arcadia iii. i. f. 247^v Unto Cupid that boy shall a Pedante be found?) but quickly developed the modern sense of “A person who excessively reveres or parades academic learning or technical knowledge, often without discrimination or practical judgement” (a1593 C. Marlowe Edward II sig. D3^v I am none of these common pedants I, That cannot speake without propterea quod). It’s one of those words you’d expect to have a clear etymology, but not so.

Alexis Moran and Jai McAllister report for ABC News:

Against the backdrop of early colonisation, on Sydney Harbour’s shoreline, an extraordinary exchange took place between a young Aboriginal woman and a First Fleet Lieutenant. This friendship serves as one of the earliest recorded cultural exchanges between Europeans and Aboriginal people, and the history and knowledge they documented together would be priceless.

Patyegarang, a young Gamaraigal woman who spoke the Gadigal language, would prove crucial to the survival of her Sydney-based native tongue. William Dawes, an English Lieutenant and astronomer, recorded the pair’s conversations, in what remains today the only known first-hand accounts of the Gadigal language. […]

Dawes’s notebooks clearly show that he and Patyegarang spent time in each other’s company and shared emotion, humour, intellectual discussions and mutual respect. Patyegarang became Dawes’s chief teacher of language, with the two sharing details of their daily lives. […] Patyegarang taught him words such as Putuwa, which means “to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to gently squeeze the fingers of another person”. Other notable phrases include: Tariadyaou (“I made a mistake in speaking”); Minyin bial naadyimi? (“Why don’t you sleep?”); and Minyin bial widadyemi (“Why did you not drink?”). […]

Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney, and proud Ngarigu woman, Professor Jakelin Troy has spent the three decades reconstructing Aboriginal languages of the Sydney area and says Patyegarang’s interactions with Dawes have proved vital to the survival of Sydney’s Gadigal language. “The work that Patyegarang did with William Dawes produced the first field notes for an Australian language that provides sufficient information to reconstruct something of the verbal morphology (indicating something of the grammar and syntax) and lexicon (vocabulary) for any of our languages,” she says. […]

Ms Jackson said although the Gadigal clan or family lived in the Sydney CBD, Patyegarang herself came from another part of the coastal region. “She most probably, and we can’t say anything for certain, came from what we now know as the North Shore which makes her Gamaraigal,” she said. “All of the clans of coastal Sydney spoke a language that they all understood, regardless of which clan they belonged to. “Wherever she comes from, her persistence and patience with Mr D (as she called Lieutenant William Dawes) in sharing language and culture is the reason why we now have, in this time of pride in Australian languages, a treasure trove of source material for reviving the language.”

Thanks, Trevor!

I’m about halfway through Bryusov’s novel Огненный ангел (The Fiery Angel) and am enjoying it despite my irritation with its overindulgence in the details of 16th-century magickal philosophy. In chapter 6 there’s a scene where our hero Ruprecht, hopelessly in love with the nutty Renata (who herself is hopelessly in love with Count Heinrich von Otterheim, who she thinks is the fiery angel Madiel in human form), goes to Bonn to consult with the man who is supposed to the age’s great expert on the occult, Cornelius Agrippa, and in Agrippa’s house he meets several boisterous young students, one of whom, Hans, is so meek and girlish “говорит ‘спутники’ вместо ‘панталоны'” [he says sputniki ‘fellow travelers, satellites’ instead of pantalony ‘pants’]. Bryusov’s footnote (he assiduously footnoted his own novel) says “‘Trabanter wie jene Jungfrau, die nicht gerne das Bruch nent, sagt’ — выражение XVI века [a 16th-century expression].”

I have to admit I was familiar with Trabant only as the name of a famously terrible East German car, but I looked it up and discovered it means ‘satellite’ or ‘companion,’ just like Russian спутник (and in fact I learn from that Wikipedia article that “The car’s name was inspired by the Soviet Sputnik satellite”). But where is it from? Wiktionary says “From Middle High German drabant (‘Hussite foot soldier’), of unclear origin”; Lutz Mackensen says the MHG word is borrowed from Czech drabant with the same meaning, though folk etymology connects it with the verb traben; the OED (entry not fully updated since 1913) says “< German trabant a life-guard, an armed attendant, a satellite (also in Astron.), in Italian trabante, French traban, Bohemian drabanti; of Turkish (originally Persian) origin: see drabant n.” and at drabant (“A halberdier; spec. a soldier of the body-guard of the kings of Sweden”) says “< Swedish drabant attendant, satellite: in German trabant, Italian trabante, French traban, draban, Bohemian drabanti, Magyar darabant, Romanian doroban, < Turkish (originally Persian) darbān porter, guard.” All of which leaves me confused and wondering whether any progress has been made in etymologizing this Wanderwort.

I almost forgot to mention that when I looked up Trabant in my huge Harper-Collins Unabridged, I was half amused and half appalled to find the following pair of entries:

Trabant m (a) (Astron) satellite. (b) (Hist) bodyguard; (fig) satellite. (c) usu pl. (dated inf) kiddie-wink (inf).

Trabbi m -s, -s (inf) East German car

They leave the “car” sense out of the main entry (while including “kiddie-wink,” whatever the fuck that is) and then for Trabbi (isn’t it usually Trabi?) they just say “East German car” without mentioning what it’s short for! Tsk.

Update. See also this 2013 XIX век post, which I totally forgot I’d commented on, giving the same Persian-Turkish etymology. Tsk.

Terena Bell writes for The Outline about a situation that has bothered me:

When it comes to literary translation, American publishers have a pipeline problem. But not in the way that tech companies use the phrase — saying they don’t hire diverse array of job candidates because there aren’t enough female and minority applicants. Publishing’s problem isn’t one of supply — real or imagined. This pipeline problem comes from flaws in the industry’s acquisitions system that make it nearly impossible for non-Western authors and U.S. publishers to connect.

In 2018, for the second year in a row, American publishers released fewer translated titles: 609 books were published, down from 650 in 2017 and the industry high in 2016 of 666. These books were largely translated from European languages, with roughly 42 percent originally written in Spanish, German, or French. In comparison, only one book was translated from Bosnian. Some languages, like Somali and Burmese, had no representation at all. […] Why do some countries’ books get over-translated for the U.S. market and others not at all?

It’s definitely not because Americans don’t want to read their stories. Statistically, American Literary Translators Association Executive Director Elisabeth Jaquette told me publishers actually make more money per translated title than they do from books originally in English. […] Less than three percent of U.S. titles are works in translation, but the category accounts for seven to eight percent of sales. […]

Publishing is an old business replete with tradition: To publish, authors must first find an agent; that agent convinces an editor to acquire the book; the editor then convinces colleagues; each decision made in a fairly subjective way. Even at Amazon, a tech company that runs on algorithms, AmazonCrossing Editorial Director Gabriella Page-Fort said acquisition decisions are human-made. Typically, a “yes” is linked to a book’s potential to make money, the same as in any business. In publishing, that comes down to writing quality, past success with comparable titles (or “comps”), and what agents call “platform” — an author’s personal marketing reach. […]

For non-English writers, the process isn’t that different. Instead of selling a book to a publisher in their country, though, an agent sells foreign publishing rights to a U.S. company, working personal connections to make the deal or finding buyers at international book fairs, the most popular held annually in London, England and Frankfurt, Germany. Jaquette said you won’t see much Arabic-language writing at these fairs, or Farsi either — but not because books aren’t written in those languages. […]

For cultures falling outside the pipeline, publishers have to make a concerted effort. At AmazonCrossing, this means attending lesser-known fairs in the Middle East and looking at sales statistics from Amazon stores in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, and Japan. If a book sells well in one country, AmazonCrossing is more likely to translate it for the others. Page-Fort’s team has also designed a request page for translators who read a book in the original language, loved it, and now want to translate it into English. This upload form is available in 14 languages. Despite these efforts, Amazon’s stats still linguistically adhere to norms. […] “Think about how many people and decision makers exist between a book and reader,” [Page-Fort] said. “It’s convincing each and every one of those decision points to make a new decision today that breaks the rule they made up about the past.”

It’s one of those infuriating situations that it’s not easy to see how to fix. Thanks, Jack!