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How have I never come across vājabāz (“musings on Persianate vocabulary”) before? Talk about LH material! It makes me want to resume my long-interrupted study of Persian. Take, for example, the entry ناز / nāz:

For a long time, I have been wondering how to define ‘Persianate’ cultural traits. If there is a distinct culture that has come to be known conveniently in academia as ‘Persianate’, how do we describe it? How do we define the Homo Persicus? As any effort of definition inevitably results in generalisation, the best way to explain ‘Persianate’ culture is through concrete cultural examples, such as the celebration of Nawrōz, self-deprecation as expression of (fake or genuine) politeness, love for banqueting and feasting followed by music, and so on and so forth. None of these, however, are as human and endearing as the word ناز/nāz, a social code that covers a range of behaviours in inter-personal relations.

‘Coquetry’, a word of French origin and the most common translation of ناز/nāz in English, is inexact in that it infuses the love game it represents with too much proactive flirtatiousness, whereas ناز/nāz does not have to be a proactive thing, nor does it have to be confined in love games; ‘affectation/affected airs’, an alternative translation, assumes too much deliberateness, interpreting the behaviour as an ‘act’ and therefore missing the point of ناز/nāz entirely, not to mention carrying a negative undertone as well. ‘Lackadaisical’ is a lovely translation, but too clumsy for the register of daily speech, and ناز/nāz is a word used in all registers. […]

The origin of ناز/nāz is mysterious, as no Indo-European etymology has been found (Cheung 2007). The earliest form we can trace it back to was also *nāz, which was present in the lexica of all Middle Iranian dialects across the Iranian cultural sphere comprising today’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, under different attested forms, independent or as a part of a compound, and with more or less the same combination of meanings. Among the meanings that Cheung (2007) gives for the verbal root *nāz-, we see, from an Anglophone point of view, faintly connected ones such as ‘to take pleasure in’, ‘to be proud’, ‘to be delicate’, ‘to triumph’, and the verbal noun nāzišn in Middle Persian is explained as both ‘boasting’ and ‘kindness’. This is exactly what ناز/nāz is – complex, ineffable, yet mundanely tangible.

The New Persian ناز/nāz is present in all Persianate languages, an ancient Iranian lexical and cultural heritage from Azerbaijan to Khotan, from Otrar to Delhi. However, the frequency of its daily, common use differs from language to language. The highest frequency, in my experience, is among speakers of Iranian languages and Persianate Turkic languages, who readily use the word to describe the behaviour it designates, and it is in these languages that verb collocations/derived verbs exist in common use, for example, ناز کردن/nāz kardan ‘to do nāz‘ (more of a temporally and spatially specific act) or ناز داشتن/nāz dāštan ‘to have nāz‘ (more of a general behavioural trait) in Persian, ناز کردن/naz kirdin ‘to do nāz’ in Sorani Kurdish, naz et– ‘to do nāz’ in Azerbaijani, noz qil– ‘to do nāz’ in Uzbek, and نازلان-/nazlan– ‘to act with nāz’ in Uyghur. Other Persianate languages may have the word ناز/nāz, but it belongs to an older or more literary parlance and contemporary speakers may not be universally aware of it or use it in everyday life, preferring to paraphrase it, as it is in the case of modern standard Turkish and Urdu. In these languages, however, even though ناز/nāz may not be used frequently as an independent word, its derivations have more currency than itself, such as nazlı ‘having/with nāz‘ in modern standard Turkish, and نازک/nāzuk ‘delicate’ in almost all Persianate languages.

Languages that have long been in contact with Persianate culture, especially Greek, Armenian, and Georgian, have picked up bits and pieces of ناز/nāz themselves. The Greeks have νάζι/nazi (collocates usually in the plural, νάζια/názia, with verb κάνω/káno ‘to do’) as a colloquial term to describe the exact same phenomenon, although having a much more negative implication, as it emphasises on the ‘affectation’ aspect of ناز/nāz and even describes the mischiefs of spoiled children acting up when things goes against their will. The Armenian understanding of ناز/nāz is closer to its meaning and implications in Persian, whereas in Georgian, under the form of ნაზი/nazi, the meaning of ‘delicate, soft, tender’ takes precedence.

Isn’t that great? I have to stop myself from quoting the whole thing, and there’s lots more where that came from. (For more on Persian as a lingua franca, see this 2013 post.) Thanks, Trevor!

The first poem in my handy one-volume collection of Pasternak is “Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать!” (you can hear Sergei Narovchatov read it or Russian-born Regina Spektor sing the first stanza halfway through “Après Moi”); it’s perennially popular, and for good reason — it’s a splendid showcase for the virtues of early Pasternak. I fell in love with it immediately (especially, for some reason, the phrase “обугленные груши” [carbonized pears]), and on this first day of the month it occurred to me to see if there were any translations out there. Here are three.

Translated by A.Z. Foreman (“A language nerd obsessed with literary translation and anthropology, and an incurable addiction to historical phonology”):

February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it. Sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.

Six grivnas for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where rain pours down
Louder than any ink or tears

Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.

A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.

(There’s a footnote “Grivna: a unit of currency”; specifically, a grivna was ten kopecks.) It’s lively, but perhaps too lively for its own good (it loses much of the poetry), and I don’t like “(Write/Rhyming) the heart out.” Also, грачи are rooks, not blackbirds.
[Read more…]

In Muireann Maguire’s Facebook feed I found a link to Maxim D. Shrayer’s memoir of his father, David Shrayer-Petrov, for Tablet, A Russian Typewriter Longs for Her Master. It’s long and full of good stuff; here’s a passage on language (the family emigrated to the US in 1987):

My father’s deep knowledge of popular and peasant speech amazes me still today. He used to be able to place a person by region and province of Russia. In January 1998 I accompanied my father on his first trip back to Russia (I had already been back a few times). After a reading not far from Arbat Street, where in February 1987 my mother stood amid a small group of protesters facing plainclothes KGB thugs, father and I hitched a cab. Punctuating his mellifluous speech with undulations of his right hand, the driver delivered his opening tirade about the intolerable Moscow traffic.

“You must be from Smolensk,” my father said to the driver.

“Right you are, a smolyak,” the driver smiled broadly. “How did you know?”

“I have my ways.”

“You must be good with languages.”

My father just nodded, without saying “yes” or “no,” and the driver from the Smolensk province pried on.

“You look like a military man,” he said. “Oh, I think I know. You teach at the Military Interpreters School.”

My father beamed and fired off: “You’re right, I’m a Translator General.”

The driver loved it so much that he didn’t want to charge us.

Later, he writes:

Growing up in postwar Leningrad, my father heard several tongues. Yiddish, the private domain of his grandparents’ home, reminded him of his roots. Soviet newspeak taught him to discern threads of truth amid publicly spoken untruths. A richly polyphonic Russian was both the language of street culture and high culture.

And of course there’s a fair amount about typewriters; at one point he recalls being given “a portable Sarajevo-made UNIS tbm de Luxe,” and I was suspicious that the odd-looking “tbm” was a typo — but no, it’s a thing. (It allegedly stands for tvornica biro mašina, translated as “office machine factory,” but I’m suspicious, since if you google the phrase you get only references to the typewriter, and I don’t think a sequence of three nouns in the nominative works in Serbo-Croatian.) There’s a reference to “Jewish refuseniks who had returned their tickets to Soviet paradise,” which of course is an allusion to Dostoevsky (see this post). And the sentence “In the final cut, you hear the ringing of bells, the staccato of keys, and you see a close-up of the top of the page with the emerging story” links to a video I’m glad I clicked on, because after Dan Rather interviews the Shrayers he talks with Anatoly Rybakov about his then-unpublished blockbuster novel Children of the Arbat (Дети Арбата; see this post), and you see the stack of typed pages of the manuscript. The whole thing is good reading, and now I’m interested in the elder Shrayer’s refusenik novels.

Leon Aslanov writes for the Ajam Media Collective about the “long history of exchange and dialogue [which means] that Armenians and Azerbaijanis share more than they might like to imagine”:

Music is a witness to this fact. It is an important carrier of cultural memory that can overcome the forced forgetting of the last century and remind us how closely bound these communities really are. Armenians and Azerbaijanis share not only instruments like duduk, zurna, and tar but even rhythms and melodies, like the classic Sari Aghjik/Sarı Gəlin. In this article, I explore Eastern Armenian and Azerbaijani folk music traditions that host a variety of shared songs, tales, and cultural features revealing just how intertwined these cultures are.

The most prominent example of shared musical heritage between peoples of the South Caucasus is that of Sayat Nova, an 18th century Armenian bard (known as ashough in Armenian and aşıq in Azerbaijani) who composed songs in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian. His works in Azerbaijani are either unknown or hidden from the public. This is testament to the nationalisation of Sayat Nova, in which his legacy of multilingual artistic production has been written out and he is instead presented as a solely Armenian musician. His music and melodies were inspired by a range of folk musical traditions in the region. They were notated centuries after his death during an Armenian national musicological project — part of why he became to be seen as exclusively Armenian in the future.

Songs would be passed on from village to village, leaving behind little trace of where they came from or what the “original” version was. For instance, the Armenian song Mejlumi pes is said to have been composed by Sayat Nova; but there is an equivalent Azerbaijani folk song called Yar bizə qonaq gələcək with exactly the same melody. […]

There are many examples of such songs whose melodies are identical, but are performed in differing musical styles and sung with different lyrics and titles. In certain cases, the composer of the song is known in one or both of the languages. However, this does not represent sufficient proof as to who actually composed the melody. A musician living in an ethnically-mixed town or village or a bard who travels from region to region may pick up melodies and transpose them with lyrics in their mother tongue. […]

Despite the current animosity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, as this article makes clear there is a long history of musical collaboration. The possibilities for collaborations are endless thanks to the centuries-old development of musical traditions in constant contact with eachother. The last known collaboration between folk singers from both countries took place in a concert in Baku in 1987, a year before the initial clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh erupted. But more recently, musical commonalities have also been used as part of reconciliation efforts as documented in the following short film about the kamancha, an instrument common to both cultures.

The imagined contours of national heritage when it comes to music are broken when the similarities revealed. Debates around origins of songs and instruments become redundant when removed from nationalistic discourse. At that point, this shared musical heritage becomes something that brings us together instead of dividing us.

There are numerous images and musical clips. I love this kind of exploration of forgotten commonalities, and as always I wish nationalism would take a long walk on a short pier. (Thanks, Trevor!)

I’m editing a book on European history that mentions “magisterial reformers” in its section on the Reformation; I suspected this was a specialized sense, and sure enough there’s a Wikipedia article on the Magisterial Reformation:

The Magisterial Reformation is a phrase that “draws attention to the manner in which the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers related to secular authorities, such as princes, magistrates, or city councils”, i.e. “the magistracy”. While the Radical Reformation rejected any secular authority over the Church, the Magisterial Reformation argued for the interdependence of the church and secular authorities, i.e. “The magistrate had a right to authority within the church, just as the church could rely on the authority of the magistrate to enforce discipline, suppress heresy, or maintain order.”

What drives me to post is the shocking discovery that the OED ignores this sense; under “magisterial, n. and adj.” (entry updated March 2000) we get (I’ve included a few piquant citations):

1. Of, relating to, designating, or befitting a master, teacher, or other person qualified to speak with authority; masterly, authoritative, commanding. Also (occasionally) of a person: pedantic, arrogant, or dictatorial. Of an artistic work, performance, etc.: masterly, imposing.
[…]
1988 B. Chatwin Utz 34 The fruit of these researches..had culminated in his magisterial paper ‘The Mammoth and His Parasites’.
[…]
†2. Of, relating to, or displaying the skill of a master artist; (also) having the qualifications of a master. Obsolete.
[…]
3. Of, relating to, or befitting a magistrate or magistrates. Of a person: holding the office of a magistrate. Of an inquiry: conducted by a magistrate or magistrates.
[…]
1847 L. H. Kerr tr. L. von Ranke Hist. Servia 115 In the villages, Subasches appeared as executors of the judicial and magisterial power.
[…]
1957 Encycl. Brit. IV. 430/2 In the villages, the thugyis or headmen, chosen by the villagers and approved by the government, have limited magisterial powers and collect the revenue.
[…]
†4. Alchemy and Medicine. Relating to a magistery; (also) = magistral adj 2. [Of a remedy: compounded according to a physician’s own formula; not included in the pharmacopoeia]. Obsolete.
[…]
1722 J. Quincy Lexicon Physico-medicum (ed. 2) Magisterial Remedy, is yet sometimes retained in the Cant of Empiricks, more for its great Sound than any Significancy.

But nothing that would enable you to decipher a sentence about magisterial reformers rebelling against the Catholic Church. If you can’t go to the OED for obscure senses, where can you go? (Yes, yes, the internet, I know, but my point stands.)

Alison Flood writes for the Grauniad about the latest commatic contretemps (actually, commatic doesn’t mean ‘relating to commas,’ it means ‘having short clauses or sentences; brief; concise,’ but I couldn’t resist):

Three million coins bearing the slogan “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations” are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union.

However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation. “The ‘Brexit’ 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,” wrote the novelist on Twitter, while Times Literary Supplement editor Stig Abell wrote that, while it was “not perhaps the only objection” to the Brexit-celebrating coin, “the lack of a comma after ‘prosperity’ is killing me”.

The hyper-pedantic reactions are of course absurd — it doesn’t matter a damn whether there’s a comma there or not, it really doesn’t — but the piece is worth it for the other problematic coins it cites:

The criticism of the new coins follows the Bank of England’s decision to use a quote on its Jane Austen bank note about the joys of reading – apparently unaware that the character who utters the words has no interest in reading. Ireland’s Central Bank, meanwhile, misquoted Ulysses on a commemorative coin intended to honour James Joyce.

Vet those proposed inscriptions, ye bureaucrats! (Thanks, Trevor.)

1) Beastly (from John Burnet, Ignorance [OUP, 1923]):

When I was at school we certainly thought it ‘beastly’, as we called it, that we should have to learn such things as irregular verbs by heart. On the other hand, it was not particularly laborious for us at that age, and we could more or less see the use of it. It was clearly the way to get the power of reading Homer and Virgil without constant interruption, and I honestly believe that most of us enjoyed that. Of course we should not have dreamed of confessing it to one another, and still less of admitting it to ‘old so-and-so’, our master, who was doing the best he could for us with scant hope of reward and no expectation of gratitude. To do so would have violated that mysterious schoolboy code, which is not only a beneficent provision of nature to protect society from juvenile prigs, but springs from a native instinct of the young Soul to preserve the solitude so needful for the growth of its inner life. Of course the time came later when we were ready to admit, very shyly at first, to one another that we did like Homer and Virgil, but at first we were quite content to learn our irregular verbs. There is no great mystery in that. Mere memorizing comes natural to the young, and it does not matter at all whether they understand what they memorize or not. Children have always invented things—counting-out rhymes and the like—the main purpose of which is to be memorized. Think of the undying popularity of The House that Jack Built. We may say, indeed, that they have a passion for rigmarole, and small boys retain a great deal of this. One would think that our educational system would take advantage of that, and so it does in matters of absolute necessity like the multiplication table.

[…]

For the grown man, of course, grammar may be one of the most dangerously fascinating studies, but for the boy it is just what I have called the sediment of dead knowledge, to be acquired as speedily as may be for the sake of its results and not for itself. This is quite understood in many other branches of training. It is really a good deal easier to read Homer than it is to play the piano, and yet the proportion of people who learn to play the piano, at least to their own satisfaction, is far greater than that of those who learn to read Homer. In this case every one can see that the first thing to be done is to acquire the necessary automatism, and the methods of acquiring it have been more or less systematized. If you had to think of every chord, you would never play anything. On the other hand, no one imagines that the traditional scales and exercises are music. They are simply practice, directed to the acquisition of automatic power, and that is how grammar should be treated at school. It is an historical fact that, when this method was followed, a large number of people did acquire the power of reading Homer, and that a very considerable number continued to read him all their days.

2) How Long Does it Take to Make a Mummy? (from W. Jackson Bate, “The Crisis in English Studies,” Harvard Magazine 85.1 [1982]:

If you took a Ph.D. here in English as late as the 1930s, you were suddenly shoved — with grammars written in German — into Anglo-Saxon, and Middle Scots, plus Old Norse (Icelandic), Gothic, Old French, and so on. I used to sympathize with the Japanese and Chinese students who had come here to study literature struggling with a German grammar to translate Gothic into English! William Allan Neilson, the famous president of Smith College, had been a professor of English here for years. Forgiveably, he stated that the Egyptians took only five weeks to make a mummy, but the Harvard English Department took five years.

And for lagniappe: Hats off!

A reader wrote me:

Didn’t see it mentioned anywhere, so I thought I’d pass along the Türik Bitig site. It’s got a lot to sink your teeth into:
1. Etho-Cultural Dictionary of Old Turkic
2. Uploads of most (all?) of the common Old Turkic inscriptions
3. Even a bit on learning to read Old Turkic

I’ve added the links; the site has a note:

The basic idea of creating the electronic historical and cultural fund was based on issue of The Oriental Studies Section of The Institute of Oriental Studies named after Suleimenov in 2005 under the govermental program “Cultural Heritage”: “Қазақстан тарихы туралы түркі деректемелері” сериясының 2-томы Н.Базылхан “Көне түрік бітіктастары мен ескерткіштері (Орхон, Енисей, Талас)” Алматы: Дайк-Пресс. 2005, 252 б. +144 бет жапсырма.

Thanks, Parry!

Update. As of Feb. 25, 2021, the site appears to have been infected with malware, so I have substituted archived links.

Drab title, I know; I was tempted to call the post “Why Provençal?” but I opted for the tediously factual one. Trust me, the link is fantastic and makes up for the drabness; the Monterey County Weekly had the brilliant idea of asking the Defense Language Institute for enrollment rates for each language of instruction from 1963 to the present, and Asaf Shalev’s article is the result:

The data first arrived from the DLI in a format that made it hard to use: computer printouts that were scanned and turned into digital images. With the help of optical character recognition and data extraction tools, the Weekly transformed the scanned printouts into a proper database, allowing for in-depth analysis of the history of foreign language education in the U.S. Department of Defense. It took more than three months to gather, analyze and visualize the data. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a project has ever been carried out. Even DLI itself doesn’t have a database of this sort and could not readily produce a similar analysis, according to former commandant Dino Pick.

They did a terrific job putting it in visual form; the first chart, “How the DLI’s focus shifts with world events,” makes the change from Eastern European languages (mainly Russian) to Middle Eastern languages (mainly Arabic) crystal clear, and the second, “Enrollment at Defense Language Institute 1963-2018,” is an exciting year-by-year race (just watch Chinese and Persian overtaking each other in recent years). There’s a “Searchable database of language enrollment at DLI” and “DLI language with highest enrollment 1965-2018,” and at the end comes “All the languages and dialects ever taught at DLI, in order from highest total enrollment to lowest,” from which we learn that a single person was taught Provençal in 1983. Why Provençal? At any rate, I highly recommend a visit to the link — thanks, Bathrobe!

Another tidbit from Irina Reyfman’s How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks (see this post): since her book has a great deal to say about the Table of Ranks, she provides a detailed version of it on pp. 188-90, and glancing over it, one of the first things I noticed was that in the 14th (lowest) class, under “Military ranks,” the first entry was “Warrant Officer (fendrik) in Infantry (1722-30). Fendrik! What a word! So I looked it up in Vasmer to see its origin, and it wasn’t there; it turns out that that’s because it’s not in Dahl, which is quite strange. But of course there’s a Russian Wikipedia article, which tells us it’s from German Fähnrich ‘color-bearer, standard-bearer,’ whose etymology is a bit confusing — German Wikipedia says “Das Wort „Fähnrich“ stammt vom althochdeutschen faneri, dem mittelhochdeutschen venre und dem frühneuhochdeutschen venrich ab und ist daher mit dem modernen Wort „Fahne“ im Sinn von Truppenfahne verwandt, die der Fähnrich einst zu tragen hatte.” So it’s from Fahne ‘flag,’ but I’m not sure what’s going on with those suffixes. Wiktionary adds the information that there’s an archaic form Fähndrich, which is presumably the ancestor of the Russian word.

I was also briefly perplexed by an entry in the 6th class, under “Court ranks,” where the first item is “Kammer-Fourrie (until 1884),” but it turns out the mysterious Fourrie is simply an error for fourrier ‘quartermaster’ (from Old French fuerre ‘fodder’; the two words are related). It’s probably a typo (though there are very few in the book), since on the next page she correctly has “Court Fourrier” under the 9th class.