languagehat.com

Molly Harris writes for BBC Travel about an unusual language:

The Sarine River skirts the edge of Basse-Ville (lower town), dividing both the canton of Fribourg and the city of Fribourg into two sectors: German-speaking and French-speaking. The city of around 40,000 people is clearly one of duality: street signs are all in two languages; residents can choose whether their children will use French or German in primary school; and the university even offers a bilingual curriculum.

However, head to medieval Basse-Ville, caught between the German- and French-speaking divisions of Fribourg, and you’ll find yourself in a no-man’s land where the two languages have become one: le Bolze. […] While the exact origins of the language are unknown, many believe that Bolze was created during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, when people began to migrate from the countryside into cities as jobs became available during the industrial boom. As a city bordering both French- and Swiss German-speaking countryside villages, Fribourg grew and expanded into a bilingual, cultural and industrial hub for the poor seeking work. […] These workers needed a way to understand one another and work together. So they merged their mother tongues to create a new language.

Bolze is a conversational melding of Swiss German and French, using the two languages to create a completely new version. Passed from generation to generation orally, and only found in the Basse-Ville of Fribourg, the few remaining Bolze speakers only speak it to one another in order to continue their cultural heritage along the shore of the river and within the stone walls that border their neighbourhood. […]

“This is a part of the history of Fribourg,” Sulger explained. “The Bolze culture is made of people who are perfectly bilingual. This is really rare in Fribourg, because usually we speak one language or the other better. Those who speak Bolze can really speak both, and can do this mixture.” “It makes Bolze speakers special because it is spoken only by so few people,” he added. […]

As of April 2019, thanks to an influx of immigrants, at least 160 nationalities live in the canton of Fribourg, and more people in Switzerland speak Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and Portuguese in Switzerland than Bolze. Though older generations may still speak Bolze in their homes and to one another on the street, the younger generations can only learn it at home ­– just as Swiss German is learned within the family – or by listening to and learning from those who are fluent. It is not taught in schools, nor are there any official language classes.

If you read German, there’s a decade-old piece by Isabelle Eichenberger called “Nei, dasch zvüu, tu me connais!” [No, that’s too much, you know me!], and there’s a film Ruelle des Bolzes (not, alas, on YouTube), but I can’t find an etymology for Bolze (I assume it’s pronounced à l’allemande). Thanks, jack!

I ran across a reference to a “bastable” that perplexed me; it turns out there’s a fuller form “bastable oven,” and the OED has an entry from 2019:

1. attributive. Especially in Ireland: designating an earthenware or (in later use) cast-iron pot with three short legs and a lid, used for baking over a fire; esp. in bastable oven, bastable pot.

2. Especially in Ireland: an earthenware or (in later use) cast-iron pot with three short legs and a lid, used for baking over a fire.

The etymology is interesting:

Variant of Barnstaple (in Barnstaple oven n.; compare forms at that entry), with simplification of the consonant cluster to rst and assimilatory loss of r before s.
Among forms attested for the place name Barnstaple are Barstaple (a1484), Barstable (1549), Bastable (1675).

The entry for Barnstaple oven, also from 2019, explains that “Barnstaple was formerly known for the manufacture of pottery, especially (from the end of the 16th cent.) prefabricated unglazed cloam ovens, which enjoyed considerable commercial success in the West Country, Ireland, and the North American colonies.” The first citation is:

1716 A. Hill Ess. for December iii. 35 The Barnstaple Ovens of Devonshire..being first form’d of common Potters Clay, in one entire Piece, are not only cleaner, and cheaper than any other Ovens, but bake with more Evenness, and Certainty.

You can see a photo at this Bread in Ireland page (which explains the history of soda bread: “The concept of leavening bread with acid and baking soda had been long in use by the American Indians (who used ashes) and had been used for some time by Europeans in North America. This quick, very simple method of making bread suited the poorly equipped Irish household, and also worked with the low gluten flour available in Ireland”), and more photos and descriptions here (where it’s spelled “bastible,” just another in a parade of historical variants).

My wife and I are almost finished with Rachel Cusk’s Outline (our latest bedtime reading), and we’ve just gotten to the passage Stan Carey quoted recently at Sentence first (a woman is describing her feelings about being hired to teach English in Athens):

She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

Stan says “Some of this rings true for me,” and it does for me as well; as I said here (and I think elsewhere, but I can’t find any specific posts), “Like many people capable of such interactions, I feel very different when speaking different languages.”

As for the novel — which made quite a splash when it came out — we’re enjoying it but probably won’t feel impelled to read the follow-ups (it’s the first of a trilogy); the structure (a series of interactions in which interlocutors and their experiences are carefully described but the narrator is left mostly a blank) is interesting, but not so interesting that we can’t tear ourselves away, and none of the characters have distinctive voices — they all sound like the narrator. I imagine we’ll return to the wonderful Tessa Hadley.

And if you’re wondering why this is Language Barrier II, I used the title for a 2004 post about a poem by Valerie Bloom.

Back in 2018 the Paris Review published a piece by Anthony Madrid called Guy Davenport’s Translation of Mao that’s so irresistible I can barely resist quoting the whole thing. But I am strong, so I will just quote the start:

In 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle. He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons.

Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part.

They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were always trying to get away with something.

Zoom in on Davenport. Let me ask you: How much Chinese do you suppose he knew? I think the smart money is on “very little.” He probably knew about as much as I do—which is to say, as much as can be learned from one semester of study, augmented by the eager observation of one or two native speakers reciting a handful of classic poems.

But a supreme crank knows how to exploit every little drop of whatever he or she knows. […] Armed with this thought, he did a translation of a famous poem by Mao Zedong. The form of his translation is unique in American letters: The text is set up as quatrains (that’s normal enough), but the individual lines have only three syllables each. Davenport knew that this did not accurately reflect the original Chinese, but—and this is where the brilliance comes in—it does get across (like nothing else available in English) the collapsed syntax and staccato pacing of classical shi poetry.

And here’s the start of the poem:

West wind keen,
[Up] steep sky
Wild geese cry
For dawn moon.

I’m skipping over the hilarious setting of the translation (a deadpan account of Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China) and the original poem (not a shi but a ci) and two other translations of the same poem and leaving you to visit the link for them; here’s one last snippet:

But there’s the pity of it, Iago! Davenport’s version is misleading, damnably misleading, if our object is to “work towards the Chairman” and his particular poem. But! If we want to be led to a more general truth about what most Chinese poems were bound to sound like, both to Nixon and to Davenport as native speakers of English, then “West wind keen, / Up steep sky / Wild geese cry / For dawn moon” blows the other translations out of the water.

And I am forced to add that I made the mistake of clicking on the link for Madrid’s name and finding this page of his contributions to the Review, and they’re all just as delightful. Here he investigates the origin of the famous saying “Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” (“‘In what ancient text does that passage appear?’ Answer: it appears nowhere”), and here he raves about “Russia’s Dr. Seuss,” Kornei Chukovsky, throwing in a caricature by Mayakovsky and a clip of Chukovsky reading his own “Telephone” (1926). He also quotes the first stanza of “Putanitsa” (“The Muddle”), adding the Google Translate version:

The kittens were crocked:
“I’m tired of meowing!
We want, like a pig,
Grunt!”

“The line ‘We want, like a pig, grunt!’—especially if performed with a strong Russian accent—has great charm and authority, and has indeed acquired, in my household, the status of a classic line, like something out of Virgil.”

OK, I’m off to spend the rest of the day investigating his past contributions and cackling. Enjoy!

I’m back to reading Norwood (see this post), and I just ran across a sentence that made me happier than it had any right to: “It’s pure d. meanness is what is it.” (I’m not sure whether “what is it” is an error for “what it is,” which sounds far more natural to me, or whether it’s a regional form I’m not familiar with.) I had never seen or heard the term “pure d” except from my late friend Mike (thegrowlingwolf), a dyed-in-the-wool Texan who would say things like “That’s pure-d crazy”; the meaning was obvious and the sound of it irresistible, but I would never have dreamed of using it myself — it would have felt like swiping his boots. Naturally I wondered what the origin was, and how to spell it (I think Mike may have written “pure-dee” in his blog). Now seeing it there in print, with a period after the d., made me realize it must be short for “damn”: what a thrill! So of course I googled it, and found this Wordwizard page (I hadn’t known about Wordwizard) which investigates the question; Ken Greenwald cites the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE):

PUREDEE adjective, adverb. Also PURE-D, PURE DEE OLD, PURE O.D., PURE OLDEE, PURE-T [[all forms in lower case]] [Probably originally euphemism for pure damn(ed)] chiefly South and South Midland, U.S.: Genuine, real, just plain; very, really, completely.

<1938 “It’s the Pure D truth.”—Guide Mississippi FWP [[?? Field Worker Proposal]]

<1941 Texas “‘Them folks are mean out there,’ Mrs. Clampett said. ‘Just pure dee mean.’”—Hold Autumn by Perry, page 203 >

<1952 “Kip’s lip curled at this slovenly practice, one which he has always called purdee shif’less.” Ibid “You’re puredee heller.”—Home is Upriver by Harwin (Hench College), page 8 and 187>

<1953 Ozarks “Pure dee . . . Genuine, indubitable. ‘No, them ain’t no chigger bites. That’s the pure dee seven-year itch!’”—Down in the Holler by Randolph & Wilson, page 275>

<1958 central Texas “It’s pure-dee hog-hunting weather.”—Meskin Hound by Lathham, page 53>

<1964 North Carolina “He loafed about his office playing patience in a white uniform and pure-T bare feet, which scared all his patients away.”—If Morning Ever Comes by Tyler, page 44>

<1968 Louisiana “ A dull and stupid person, Pure-d dumb”—DARE Question HH3, Louisiana informant 35>

<1970 Texas “Elliott . . . found a pair of nearly new overalls . . . dry socks and one of his father’s gray work shirts. ‘Lordy, lordy. You wouldn’t know me from a pure-dee old scissorbill, Grady said wryly with satisfaction.”—Harper’s Magazine, April, page 80>

<1972 New York City [Black] “So this one day Miss Moore rounds us all up at the mailbox and it’s PUREDEE hot and she’s knockin herself out about arithmetic.”—in Calling the Wind (1973) by Major, page 348>

<1982 Indiana “I have heard pure D. in Southern Indiana used as what seemed to me to be a negative intensifier—it almost always precedes a negative word, nonsense, mean, ornery, etc.; Mississippi “During my youth, I often heard the usage in question, always, or nearly always—as pure oldee; Louisiana “Around 1950, I heard and used the phrase ‘pure D. It was used pejoratively (e.g., in response to a tall story, ‘That’s a load of pure D horse shit!’)”; central eastern Texas “In this part of Texas, as well as in the Houston area where I grew up, we said ‘pure O.D. __________,’ but pure dee old (something).”—Newsletter of the American Dialect Society Letters>

<1986 central west Florida “Pure D hell—unqualified hell; they give you pure D hell; pure D plumb nasty—extremely nasty; central west Arkansas they give you Pure D old belly—just plain belly”—Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States Concordance>

<1995 “‘That catfish was puredee good.’ Pure D(amn) good.”—Signal Magazine, December>

Then I checked Jonathon Green, and for maybe the first time was disappointed: not only do his citations not go back before 1953, but he suggests d might be “short for dandy.” Damn, Jonathon, get serious! “Dandy” my ass.

From Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, pp. 8-9:

One sign that refugees as a category did not impinge on the European consciousness is the absence of a general term to designate them until the nineteenth century, the starting point for this study. Before this time, “refugees” almost exclusively denoted the Protestants driven from the French kingdom at the end of the seventeenth century. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1796, first marked a change: “refugees,” it said, was a term originally applied to the expelled French Protestants, but had since “been extended to all such as leave their country in times of distress, and hence, since the revolt of the British colonies in America, we have frequently heard of American refugees.” Yet there are few indications that the shift in usage noted in 1796 was widely adopted. Well into the 1800s, French and English dictionaries referred to “refugees” as the victims of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Those who quit France at the time of the French Revolution, the “joyous emigration” of monarchists loyal to Louis XVI, preferred the term “émigrés” and hardly considered their decision to leave France akin to the expulsion of the French Calvinists a century before. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century there was no mention of refugees in international treaties, and states made no distinction between those fleeing criminal prosecution and those escaping political repression. In German there was no term for refugees until well into the nineteenth century. German dictionaries included the French word “réfugiés,” repeating the generally understood definition applying to French Protestants. Flüchtling, the modern term for refugee, was noted in 1691 as designating a fugitive or a “flighty” person — “profugus, homo inconstans, fluctuans, vagus, instabilis.” Heimatlos or staatenlos began to designate certain categories of stateless refugees after 1870, but only following the First World War did the word Flüchtling denominate them all.

The OED Third Edition (entry updated September 2009) has the following early uses of the more general sense, which do not contradict Marrus’s point (for which his Britannica quote is proof enough) but provide interesting context:

1692 W. Sherlock Let. to Friend conc. French Invasion 17 He [sc. James II] wanted nothing but Power to make himself Absolute, and to make us all Papists, or Martyrs, or Refugees.
1702 True Acct. Eng. Flying Squadron 21 Those..Deserters..were not forc’d to fly their Native Country, and become Refugees in Foreign parts, for the Security of their Lives.
1725 T. Lewis Origines Hebrææ III. vi. vi. 156 Whilst the Temple of Jerusalem stood, the Eastern Refugees sent their Presents to Jerusalem, and came thither from Time to Time, to pay their Devotions.
1771 H. Husbands Fan for Fanning Introd. p. vi Hence it was, that refugees from the western Governments, and from Connecticut, found a safe retreat in North-Carolina.

And a couple of citations for the American usage (“During the American Revolutionary War: a member of a group of guerrilla fighters active in support of the British cause, esp. in New York, and nominally affiliated with the Tories”):

1780 J. André (title) Cow-Chace, in Three Cantos published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s attack of the Refugees Block-House on Hudson’s River.
1781 J. Adams in J. Adams & A. Adams Familiar Lett. (1876) 403 I expect all the rancor of the refugees will be poured out upon Cornwallis for it.

Poemas del río Wang has a doozy of a post about the fabled city of Novgorod and its long and contentious history; it’s probably superfluous to say it has many splendid illustrations, since that’s the spécialité de la maison. The main focus of the post is icons, and there are fascinating details like this:

The half-figure icon [of St. George], which has been in the Uspensky Cathedral in Moscow since 1570, was probably ordered by Prince Yuri Bogolyubsky after his patron saint. In 1174, he left the city for Georgia, to marry Queen Tamar: this indicates the ante quem of the icon’s preparation. It is very interesting, that the most popular and much-copied icon in Georgia, a half-figure icon of St. George, exhibited today in the Svaneti National Museum, which resembles very much the Novgorod St. George icon, albeit with some folk features, was prepared and popularized shortly after the arrival of the prince to Georgia.

But near the start there’s an account of the birch bark letters (discussed here in 2011 and elsewhere), with this clearly LH-relevant passage:

Another interesting thing emerges from the birch bark texts: that the peculiar dialect of Novgorod is not due to a change in the way of speaking of the Eastern Slavs who emigrated to the isolated north, but rather to the fact that the accent of the Slavs from somewhere else was assimilated to that of the Eastern Slavs. “From somewhere else” roughly means the place where I am writing this now: the area around Berlin, the eastern part of present-day Germany and the western part of Poland, which was a Slavic region at that time, before the medieval German Drang nach Osten. From here came the two Slavic tribes, the Slovenes and the Krivichs, which, together with the Finno-Ugric Chuds, founded Novgorod and invited the Viking Rus.

Go and enjoy!

Trevor Joyce alerted me to the passing of author and cartographer Tim Robinson a couple of weeks ago, but what with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to posting about it; now per incuriam has reminded me and linked to a fine tribute by Fintan O’Toole:

The word “geography” means in its origins “the writing of lands”. Ireland was blessed to have had, for almost 50 years, the loving attention of one of the greatest writers of lands. Tim Robinson, who has died a fortnight after he lost his beloved wife, Máiréad (the M evoked in so many of his works) was a Yorkshire man who came to know, as they have never been known before or since, three Irish landscapes: the Burren, the Aran Islands and Connemara.

Generations of tourists have been guided and enthralled by his marvellous maps of these radiant places. But it is his astonishing books, the two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy, that will stand as timeless monuments to a genius who combined the linguistic brilliance of a poet with the precision of the mathematician he once was. […]

Perhaps only an English outsider could have given this project such care. “Among the historical roots of Ireland’s carelessness of place,” he wrote, “is the retreat of its language and the accompanying anglicization of its placenames, which have been defaced, rendered dumb and sometimes reduced to the ridiculous. To undo a little of this damage has been for me, an Englishman, a work of reparation.” […]

He paid attention to the people who lived in and worked the land as much as to the landscape itself. “A rush of talk like the whirl of starlings coming to roost” – a lot of it talk in Irish – lies beneath his writings, in the stories he gathered, the old (and sometimes not so old) place-names he recorded.

Robinson believed in bringing to bear every kind of knowledge and delighted in the way every place became richer and more complex the more you looked at it and the more you listened to its people. “Every tale,” as he writes at end of the Connemara trilogy, “entails the tale of its own making, generalities breed exceptions as soon as they are stated, and all the footnotes call for footnoting to the end of the world.”

As I told Trevor when he posted an image of Robinson’s work on Facebook:

That photo of all the books rang a bell, and I dug out my old “map and guide” to the Aran Islands from when I spent time there almost half a century ago now, and sure enough it was by Tim Robinson, and I remembered how impressed I had been with the drawing and writing.

I’m endlessly impressed with people who combine such varied skills and passions.

Luí fada gan faoilte air! Seacht n-aicíd déag agus fiche na hÁirce air! Calcadh fíodáin agus stopainn air! Camroillig agus goile treasna air! An ceas naon air! An Bhuí Chonaill air! Pláigh Lasaras air! Eagnach Job air! Calar na muc air! Snadhm ar bundún air! Galra trua, bios brún, péarsalaí, sioráin, maotháin agus magag air! Glogar Chaoláin ní Olltáirr ann! Galraí sean-aoise na Caillí Béara air! Dalladh gan aon léas air agus dalladh Oisín ina dhiaidh sin! Tochas Bhantracht an Fháidh air! An Galra glúiníneach air! Deargadh tiaraí air! Gath dreancaidí air!…
Cré na Cille, Máirtín Ó Cadhain,

May his lying be long and without relief! The thirty-seven diseases of the Ark on him! Hardening of the tubes and stoppage on him! Graveyard club-foot and crossed bowel on him! May the pangs of labour consume him! May the Yellow Plague consume him! May the Plague of Lazarus consume him! May the Lamentations of Job consume him! May swine-fever consume him! May his arse be knotted! May cattle-pine, bog lameness, warbles, wireworm, haw and staggers consume him! May the squelching of Keelin daughter of Olltár consume him! May the Hag of Beare’s diseases of old age consume him! Blinding without light on him, and the blinding of Ossian on top of that! May the itch of the Prophet’s women consume him! Swelling of knees on him! The red tracks of a tail-band on him! The sting of fleas on him!…
Cré na Cille/Graveyard Clay, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, trans: Mac Con Iomaire/Robinson

Via Neil Patrick Doherty‎’s Facebook feed; we discussed Cré na Cille in 2017 and this January. If you’re curious about “warbles,” the OED says it’s “Of uncertain origin; compare Middle Swedish varbulde boil” and means “A small hard tumour, caused by the pressure of the saddle on a horse’s back. Usually plural.”

A.Z. Foreman (to quote his blog profile) “is a translator and poet who has been obsessed with languages and literature since childhood”; you should check out his translation blog, with lots of poems accompanied by his translations (and sometimes audio files of him reading the original) in languages from Arabic to Yiddish. But right now I want to feature a post from his other blog, The bLogicarian (“essays, translations of prose, original poems and so forth”) — Six Degrees of Deuteronomy: the phonological journey of Biblical Hebrew. He takes Deuteronomy 32:1-6 and gives versions of it in six stages of Hebrew: Pre-Exilic, Roman Empire, Late Amoraic, Late Ge’onic, Babylonian, and Medieval Andalusi (ancestral to “every modern Hebrew liturgical dialect in current use outside of Yemen”). For each he gives a phonetic transcription and an audio file, along with a paragraph of explanation. As an example, for Popular Reading of Jews in the Roman Empire he writes:

Fast forward through the Exile and the Second Temple period to the 3rd century. Hebrew has ceased being anybody’s native language, though pretty recently. There are many people who can remember remember hearing Hebrew spoken by their grandparents. What you have here is the pronunciation recorded in Origen’s Hexapla except with even more reduction. The lingering nasal-weakening of /m/ after long vowels seemed like a proper touch, and supported by the transcriptions. Like a residual trace of Hebrew’s last stage as a native vernacular. Aramaic influence is pervasive, from phonology to morphology. Begedkefath spirantization has long ago kicked in. There is heavy vowel reduction, and the native speakers of Palestinian Aramaic using this pronunciation use a dorsal /r/. I went out on a limb to posit that the tetragrammaton in this type of reading gets realized with the Aramaicism /jahoː(h)/. Note that spirantization is a completely synchronic rule. The resyllabification caused by proclitic ו in ופתלתל ends up despirantizing the first ת.

I absolutely love this kind of thing, and listened to all the stages.