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The first decade of the twentieth century was a strange, largely forgotten time. Our minds tend to jump from the comfortable traditions of what we think of as the “Victorian Age” (even when we’re not talking about Britain) to the hectic anything-goes world that followed the Great War — from Trollope and Turgenev to Ulysses and Céline. But in between came a world of misty modernism that dealt in Symbols and Heavenly Ladies and was fascinated by Bergson and Scriabin and Nietzsche and the occult, all of which was blown away by the Guns of August; in Russian literature, Andrei Bely is still remembered, but the most popular prose writer of the period, Leonid Andreev, is not. That is largely, of course, because he wasn’t as great a writer as Bely, but it’s unfair to call him a purveyor of “hysterical melodrama” and a “footnote to Russian literary history” as Stephen Hutchings does; the History of Russian Literature I reviewed here is more to the point in calling him “the first fully accomplished existentialist writer in Russian literature.” He’s uneven — I’ve quit a couple of stories in the middle — but when he’s at his best, he’s well worth reading, and one novella I can recommend is the 1906 Губернатор [The governor, tr. by Maurice Magnus as His Excellency the Governor].

There is essentially no plot, just a situation: a governor-general is obsessed by his memories of ordering a mob of protesting workers to be fired on during the revolutionary year of 1905, and awaits the assassination he (and everyone in the city) knows is coming. He doesn’t try to avoid it; quite the reverse: he insists on going out without protection and follows the same path every day. It starts (I quote the Magnus translation) “Fifteen days had passed since that memorable occurrence, and yet it filled his mind — as though Time itself had lost its ascendancy over thought and things, or else had stopped like a broken clock” and continues with a description of “that memorable occurrence”:

The affair was simple enough of itself — though sad, of course. The workmen in a suburban factory, after a three weeks’ strike, had gathered — some thousand strong — together with their women and children, their old and disabled, and had appeared before him with demands which he as Governor could not grant. And they had carried themselves impudently and defiantly; had screamed; insulted the officials — and one woman, who seemed quite beside herself, had plucked at his sleeve till the seam gave way. Then when his staff had led him back on to the balcony (he still only wanted to speak with them and pacify them) the workmen had begun to throw stones, had broken a number of windows, and wounded the Chief of Police. Then his rage got the better of him and he gave the signal with his handkerchief!

The people were so turbulent that they had to be shot at a second time; and so there were dead — forty-seven according to the count; — among them nine women and three children, singularly enough all girls!… The number of the wounded was even greater.

At the end, of course, he is assassinated (on one of his walks). In between, he thinks and remembers and thinks some more. But it’s done in such a vivid way, with well-used repetition, that the reader doesn’t get bored, and what particularly struck me is that Andreev’s governor is an obvious model for Bely’s Apollon Apollonovich in Peterburg (see this post) — not only that, but the variations on “Детки все перемерли. Детки все перемерли. Детки-детки-детки все перемерли” (“The children are all dead! The children are all dead! The children… the children… the children have all died!”) that keep ringing in his head prefigure the brilliant repetitions of phrases and sound patterns in Bely (whose novel is also set in 1905). And I suspect there may also be an influence on Tynyanov’s Смерть Вазир-Мухтара [The death of the vazir-mukhtar] (see this post). I’ll be reading more Andreev (see this post for my earlier experience with him).

Oh, and one bit that amused me: at one point a couple of workers are boozing it up in a dive (and being observed by a government spy), and one of them says plaintively “Уважаешь ты меня, Ваня?” [Do you respect me, Vanya?]. One of the first cliches I learned about Russian men is that when they get drunk, at some point they wind up asking each other that, and it gave me quite a start, and a good laugh, to run across it in such an unexpected context.

As a public service announcement, I am posting the text of a letter published in the TLS of May 9, 2025:

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.

Many languages have a range of noun classifications and, while gender is among them, this has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity. Gender has the same root as genre and genus, so, in a grammatical context, refers to the category of a noun and is usually determined by its final syllable; hence, victima is “feminine” because it ends with an “a”. English-speakers, accustomed to a mother tongue without such noun classifications, may find it difficult to divorce the idea of gender from concepts of male/female, let alone avoid the temptation to find significance in a word’s gender. But many nouns belong to a gender category at complete variance with their meaning: the Spanish word for masculinity (la masculinidad) is feminine because -idad is a feminine ending. In contrast, el feminismo (feminism) is masculine because -ismo is a masculine ending. Nor is it only in Romance languages where such discrepancies occur; like its Spanish and French counterparts, the German word for “manliness” (die Männlichkeit) is feminine.

Etymologically, all versions of the word victim derive from the Latin victima and originally referred to a living creature offered in sacrifice to a deity. While meaning and usage have broadened over time to signify someone hurt by another in some way, conflating the word victim with concepts of the feminine risks presenting women as passive and powerless.

Rory McDowall Clark
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

Of course, the Spanish word víctima should have an accent mark, but never mind — Clark does an excellent job of spelling out what should be obvious but doesn’t seem to be. I’m sick of seeing the kind of idiotic pop-linguistic analysis typified by “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine” and am glad to see it skewered.

I was reading along in Kathryn Schulz’s (absolutely fascinating) New Yorker piece “When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas” (archived) when I was taken aback by the following:

There was Israel Zangwill, a name that I, like Cockerell, had never heard before, even though he was once the most famous Jew in the Anglophone world—a novelist whose popularity was frequently compared with that of Dickens, until the craft of fiction became less important to him than the cause of Zionism.

Zangwill forgotten? I mean, I knew he wasn’t famous any more — not up there with Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer — but I would have thought he had lingered at least faintly in cultural memory. But I read him in the ’60s, when he did still linger, and the world has moved on. And yet Abraham Caplan could write in 1918 in The American Jewish Chronicle (Vol. 4, p. 728) “Zangwill’s name was a name that somehow thrilled.”

Zangwill’s name… What the hell kind of a name is Zangwill, anyway? It wasn’t in any of my reference books, and Wikipedia says only “His father, Moses Zangwill, was from what is now Latvia.” I was briefly excited to find a reference to “The Name Zangwill: A Study in Lexicography” (American Hebrew, March 16, 1900, p. 577), but it’s described as “Satirical,” so it probably wouldn’t be much help even if I could find it online, which I can’t. However, I did find this Google Groups discussion about “how Shmuel becomes Zanvil in Yiddish,” wherein George Jochnowitz writes:

I assume the surname of Israel Zangwill is related to Zanvil. I have heard
the pronuciations Zanvil and Zaynvil (YIVO spelling), reflecting the
familiar dialect variations in Yiddish.

And Dr. Avraham Ben-Rahamiėl Qanaļ responds: “The name Zangwill is probably derived from Zanwil with confusion with the Hebrew/Aramaic word Zangevil [ginger].” Which I guess is plausible, but I’m wondering if any Hatters have further information.

I’m not usually one to joke about opaque scientific terminology — there’s usually a good reason for it, and it’s not written for the lay public anyway — but I can’t resist this:

Pattern runs on matter: The free monad monad as a module over the cofree comonad comonad

I got the link from Anatoly Vorobei, who adds: “нет, я не знаю, что это значит, и не собираюсь разбираться, если честно. Просто забавно” [No, I don’t know what it means, and I’m not about to try to figure it out, to be honest. It’s just funny]. But if you want to crack your brains on it, the paper is open access. (Oh, and the comment thread at Avva is very funny, if you read Russian.)

Jaison Jeevan Sequeira, Swathy Krishna, George van Driem, Mohammed Shafiul Mustak, and Ranajit Das have an article (in preprint, open access) called “Novel 4,400-year-old ancestral component in a tribe speaking a Dravidian language“:

Abstract

Research has shown that the present-day population on the Indian subcontinent derives its ancestry from at least three components identified with pre-Indo-Iranian agriculturalists once inhabiting the Iranian plateau, pastoralists originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and ancient hunter-gatherer related to the Andamanese Islanders. The present-day Indian gene pool represents a gradient of mixtures from these three sources. However, with more sequences of ancient and modern genomes and fine structure analyses, we can expect a more complex picture of ancestry to emerge. In this study, we focus on Dravidian linguistic groups to propose a fourth putative source which may have branched out from the basal Middle Eastern component that gave rise to the Iranian plateau farmer related ancestry. The Elamo-Dravidian theory and the linguistic phylogeny of the Dravidian family tree provide chronological fits for the genetic findings presented here. Our findings show a correlation between the linguistic and genetic lineages in language communities speaking Dravidian languages when they are modelled together. We suggest that this source, which we shall call ‘Proto-Dravidian’ ancestry, emerged around the dawn of the Indus Valley civilisation. This ancestry is distinct from all other sources described so far, and its plausible origin not later than 4,400 years ago on the region between the Iranian plateau and the Indus valley supports a Dravidian heartland before the arrival of Indo-European languages on the Indian subcontinent. Admixture analysis shows that this Proto-Dravidian ancestry is still carried by most modern inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent other than the tribal populations. This momentous finding underscores the importance of population-specific fine structure studies. We also recommend informed sampling strategies for biobanks and to avoid oversimplification of ancestral reconstruction. Achieving this requires interdisciplinary collaboration.

I’ll be interested to see what knowledgeable Hatters think about this. Thanks, Dinesh!

I would be remiss if I did not bring to your attention Ander Louis’s Bogan version of War and Peace:

Book 1 of 16 (Complete and unabridged) The greatest epic of all time, now translated into Bogan Australian. Early 1800s Russia wouldn’t be all that bad a place to live, if it weren’t for all the social protocol and that bloody Napoleon bastard, trying to invade the place. In this new translation, Ander Louis has faithfully reconstructed Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece, line for line, in a style the modern reader can understand. Finally, after 150 years, War & Peace is available in Bogan Australian. Book 1 contains the first 28 chapters of War & Peace (approx. 50,000 words)

However, at MetaFilter, where I got the link, the natives are restless:

It’s wrong from the very first word. No bogan is ever going to say “Bloody hell” when “Fuck” would do. […] Vasíli would instantly become Vaz. Prince is his title, not his name, and no bogan would ever use it. This isn’t snark, I’m genuinely cringing. Bogan isn’t a language, it’s a culture, and if this translator took this project at all seriously he’d be doing far more with the source material than plaster cliche export-grade Australianisms all over it. What he’s made here is a literary analogue of blackface. It’s just fundamentally disrespectful to Tolstoy and bogans.
posted by flabdablet

I’m with flabdablet. If your whole project is about putting a famous work in another voice, you’ve gotta get that voice right. “Fucken oath, Vaz, Genoa and Luca are Nappie’s fucken holiday homes now… I’m tellin’ ya, if you still reckon he’s orright – if you don’t reckon he wants a fight – if you still rate that mad bastard, when he’s a total cunt… Well, you can fuck off – we’re done. But yeah, nah – come in, I’m just messing with ya. Siddown, mate. Anyway… how are ya?”
posted by rory

It all makes me want to see War and Peace made over into every variety of English around. (Not Brothers K, though — I don’t want a Bogan Father Zosima, however accurate the dialect.)

This is a great project:

Arrernte people have always had names for places, hills, rivers and other features of the landscape within Arrernte Country. The names tell the ayeye altyerre (creation stories) and link apmere (country) to Arrernte language, people, and culture.

Some Mparntwe (Alice Springs) streets were named after Arrernte plants and
animals, however at the time they street signs were created the Arrernte language written system was not agreed by Arrernte people, so street names were written in a way that didn’t fully capture the language sounds. Since that time, the Central and Eastern Arrernte to English Dictionary has been compiled using the agreed standardised Arrernte spelling system, and this is the system we are using for this project.

This project Angkentye-yerrtye ileme mpwarele loosely translates to ‘Bringing back the right names’. It offers the correct pronunciations and spellings of our street signs using the Central and Eastern Arrernte agreed standard spelling. It is important to the future of the Arrernte language that we use consistent spelling. The QR Codes on the signs link to more information about the meaning of the Arrernte names and how to say them properly.

We have discussed this street sign project with different stakeholders, and everyone has expressed support. Stakeholders can see the opportunity created for local residence and visitors to learn about the local Aboriginal language. The street signs are visually different and are not intended to replace existing street signs, they offer an opportunity for people to engage with Arrernte culture in a respectful way.

If you scroll down, you see a list of place names with pronunciations, maps, and explanations in both Arrernte and English; e.g., Ankerre Park:
[Read more…]

I’m rereading Sorokin’s Норма (The Norm; see this post) more slowly and carefully than the first time, when I skipped over a lot of difficulties in my eagerness to see where it was going, and I’ve been brought up short by a sentence that I simply don’t understand — not because my Russian is insufficient but because I don’t know enough about firearms. In Part 3, the story about Anton revisiting his childhood home, he’s remembering the long-ago days when he went hunting with his father, and we get this sentence:

Воcемнадцатилетний Антон cидел в углу, зажав меж колен cтаpинное шомпольное pужье и тщетно cтаpаяcь оттянуть от полки запавший куpок.

The eighteen-year-old Anton was sitting in the corner, holding an old-fashioned muzzleloader between his knees and trying in vain to pull the ?? from the ?.

The ?? represents “запавший куpок”: запавший literally means ‘fallen’ but I think can also mean ‘stuck’ (клавиши западают means ‘the piano keys are sticking’); куpок is ‘cock, cocking piece (hammer of a firearm trigger mechanism),’ but colloquially (and “incorrectly,” as Russian Wiktionary puts it) it can be used to mean ‘trigger.’ The final question mark is for “полки”; полка means ‘shelf’ but in the context of a firearm means ‘(flash) pan.’ The problem is that not having had anything to do with firearms I can’t visualize what’s going on here and have no way to judge what a correct translation would be. (I don’t even know if this is a rifle or a shotgun, though I presume in the preceding scene they were using shotguns to hunt grouse — see the 2020 discussion beginning here.) Any and all enlightenment is welcome!

Ann Gibbons at Science reports on how “Researchers use ancient DNA and proteins to read the biology of books”:

Behind locked doors in one of the oldest libraries in Europe, two dozen scholars mill around a conference table where rare medieval manuscripts perch on lecterns, illuminated by natural light streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Most scholars simply look at these precious books while librarians turn the pages for them. But evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges, wearing gray rubber gloves, approaches one book with a mini–cotton swab. He gently dabs the circumference of a hole in the original white leather binding of a rare 12th century copy of the Gospel of Luke. Then, he inserts a tiny gum brush—the kind teenagers use to clean their braces—into another hole to swab its edges. His goal? “To collect bookworm excrement for ancient DNA analysis,” says Hedges, who works at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

As Hedges magnifies the holes with a lens on his iPhone, book conservator Andrew Honey of the University of Oxford notices that the holes extend all the way back to the oak boards beneath the binding. Honey suggests that furniture beetles laid eggs in the oak before the bookmaker bound the wood in leather. The larvae lurked there for years before developing into adults that exited through the leather. That means it’s likely that “the holes were made by beetles 900 years ago … the oldest example of wormholes I’ve ever seen,” says Hedges, who uses DNA and the size of the holes to assess the type of beetle and so help identify where books were made; the DNA will also help him trace the evolution of the bookworms themselves. […]

At the symposium, Matthew Teasdale, a postdoc in Dan Bradley’s lab at Trinity College in Dublin, reported on the biology of another valuable text: the York Gospels, thought to have been written around 990 C.E. DNA from this book’s eraser shavings showed that, aside from some sheep, its pages were mostly calfskin—mainly from female calves, which was unexpected because cows were usually allowed to grow up to bear offspring. Historic records report that a cattle disease struck the area from 986–988 C.E., so perhaps many sick and stillborn calves were used for parchment, says zooarchaeologist Annelise Binois-Roman of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

The York Gospels also offer a rare record of the people of the book: Almost 20% of the DNA Teasdale extracted from its eraser shavings came from humans or microbes shed by humans, he announced at the symposium. This is the only surviving Gospel book to contain the oaths taken by U.K. clergymen between the 14th and 16th centuries, and it’s still used in ceremonies today. Pages containing oaths were read, kissed, and handled the most, and these pages were particularly rich in microbial DNA from humans, Teasdale reported.

It’s a great read, with sentences like “The book was comprised of skins from an estimated 8.5 calves, 10.5 sheep, and half a goat.” And its mention of quires led Trevor Joyce, who sent me the link (thanks, Trevor!), to say “it prompted me to try guessing the etymology of quire (I drew a blank).” It’s a nice etymology; to quote Wiktionary:

From Middle English quayer, from Anglo-Norman quaier and Old French quaer, from Latin quaternus (“fourfold”), from quater (“four times”). Doublet of cahier.

We discussed quires themselves back in 2004. And the mention of “Annelise Binois-Roman of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne” makes me grumpy: aren’t we allowed to just say “of the Sorbonne” any more?

I took it into my head to wonder about the history of the Mongolian word хот/hot ‘city,’ as seen in (e.g.) Hohhot “Blue City,” and I got increasingly grumpy as I searched unsuccessfully for resources on Mongolian etymology. I found a Wiktionary page, but it has no etymology section. This isn’t as glaring a gap as the lack of an Arabic etymological dictionary, but it’s annoying. Anyone know of anything? And even if there’s no general work, does anyone know the etymology of хот/hot/ᠬᠣᠲᠠ?