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I don’t usually link to either Twitter or single visual jokes, but I couldn’t resist this (sent me by Michael Hendry), tweeted by Amro Ali (@amroali) and labeled “The ‘happy’ Arabic language family and that one rebellious son (via Moroccan nat. memes, fb)”. Do your homework and straighten up, Darija!

Yury Bit-Yunan and Robert Chandler have a long and convincing LARB article refuting the idea that the great Vasily Grossman, author of Life and Fate (which I reviewed here), was a dissident persecuted by Stalin. It’s detailed and hard to summarize; here are a few paragraphs to give the idea:

Once again, however, we find the writers of memoirs invoking Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman. In 1966, Ilya Ehrenburg published the third volume of his influential memoir People, Years, Life. In it he wrote, “The star under which Grossman was born was a star of misfortune. […] I was told that it was Stalin himself who deleted his story The People Immortal from the list of books nominated for the prize.” And he goes on to say that Stalin must have hated Grossman for “his love of Lenin, for his genuine internationalism.”

And in 1980, in a memoir published in Paris, Natalya Roskina, a younger friend of Grossman, both disagreed with Ehrenburg and repeated his central assertion. “It was certainly not love for Lenin,” she writes, “that was the reason for Grossman being constantly in disgrace. It was exclusively the fact that Grossman never sought Stalin’s love.” She continues, “It was Stalin who deleted the novel from the list of laureates.”

Roskina does not say who told her this; it is likely, though, that she has borrowed from Ehrenburg, just as Taratuta borrowed from Lipkin. And this helps us to see that it is Ehrenburg’s memoir that lies at the origin of this myth of Stalin’s personal animosity toward Grossman. Ehrenburg was the first memoirist to claim that Stalin hated Grossman — and he almost certainly did this with the best of motives. By asserting that Grossman loved Lenin and was hated by Stalin, he could have been hoping to pave the way for an eventual Soviet publication of Life and Fate — if only in a bowdlerized version; Ehrenburg was politically shrewd and he rarely acted without some ulterior motive. And in 1986, 20 years after Ehrenburg, Lipkin resuscitated the idea of Stalin’s personal hostility toward Grossman — though in connection with Kolchugin rather than The People Immortal. He too was doing what he could to further Grossman’s reputation. Ehrenburg, however, was trying to salvage Grossman’s standing in the Soviet Union, while Lipkin was trying to promote his reputation abroad. And so, whereas Ehrenburg writes about Grossman’s love of Lenin, Lipkin makes out that Kolchugin was seen as a “Menshevik,” i.e., dissident and anti-Stalinist, novel.

Incidentally, in the course of reading the essay and looking things up, I learned that Glück Auf, the title of Grossman’s first novel, is (Wikipedia)

the traditional German miners’ greeting. It describes the hope of the miners: “es mögen sich Erzgänge auftun” (“may lodes [of ore] be opened”) which is short for “Ich wünsche Dir Glück, tu einen neuen Gang auf” (“I wish you luck; open a new lode!”).

I never would have guessed!

Samuel Tafresh writes for the Ajam Media Collective about a fascinating subject:

Reading Hamlet in Persian or seeing the play on the Iranian stage, one is struck by how little the characters resemble the 16th century Englishmen most audiences are familiar with. Hamlet and Ophelia might be called Siyavash and Mahtab, while Denmark might resemble Tehran. Over the last 129 years in Iran, Shakespeare and his characters have undergone a startling transformation in the process of translation and adaptation, one affected at each step by the movements of Iranian politics and the identities of the translators. […]

Shakespeare’s works have cultivated such a variety of interpretations partially because his works were not introduced in a single, authoritative form. When the plays reached Iran they were written in Arabic and French as well as English. If one wanted to read a Shakespeare play in 19th century Iran, Arabic or French was much more accessible than English. Prior to the existence of any Persian translation of Shakespeare, Azerbaijani and Armenian-language productions took place in Tabriz. Iranian tourists saw Shakespeare performed on Russian stages and wrote about productions in their travelogues and diaries. As a result of this multitude of influences, the English text didn’t possess an authority Iranian translators and directors were beholden to. Instead, Persian renditions of Shakespeare reflected translators’ relative freedom of interpretation and demonstrated the plays’ flexibility, allowing Hamlet to become Siyavash and many other unexpected transformations to occur.

The first Persian translations of Shakespeare took place as Western-style theatre was being introduced to Iran by Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar. Nasir al-Din Shah visited Europe on diplomatic trips in 1873, 1878, and 1889. […] In 1882, Nasir al-Din Shah established a theatre hall at Dar al-Fonun University and in 1885 ordered the creation of a translation bureau at the royal court in hopes of bringing to Iran the theatre he’d enjoyed in Europe. Nasir al-Din Shah considered adapting local theatre for the Western stage, but at the time many felt that traditional Iranian theatre couldn’t easily be adapted to this format. […]

Hosseinqoli Mirza Saloor, the eldest son of the ruler of Hamadan and eventual ruler himself, was the first to translate Shakespeare into Persian in 1900 in his translation of The Taming of the Shrew (Majliseh Tamashakhan: Be Tarbiat Avardaneh Dokhtareh Tondkhuy). As a Qajar educated in France, Saloor translated from French rather than the original English. Shakespeare would not be translated from English until 1914 when Mirza Abolqasem Khan Qaragozlu, or Nasir al-Mulk, began his translation of Othello. […] It was only in Nasir al-Mulk’s retirement, when Ahmad Shah Qajar came of age and was able to rule, that he turned to Shakespeare translation. While Nasir al-Mulk’s role in government was by far the greatest of the early Shakespeare translators [sic: something seems to have gone wrong here — LH], the group is defined by politicians and diplomats who witnessed or participated in the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution that overthrew the Qajar monarch.

There’s much more at the link, including some great photos (not to mention a video clip of the Titowak Theater Group performing Ibrahim Poshtkuhi’s Hey! Macbeth, Only the First Dog Knows Why It Is Barking!). Thanks, Trevor!

I saw a reference to a “dado” in a description of a painting and realized that, although I’d seen the word occasionally, I had no idea what it meant; fortunately the OED updated its entry in March 2016, so I can present an up-to-date report for those who are as vague about it as I. The senses:

1. Architecture. A flat-faced plain block forming the portion of a pedestal between the base and the cornice; the face of such a block; = die n.1 4a. Now somewhat rare.
1664 J. Evelyn Acct. Archit. in tr. R. Fréart Parallel Antient Archit. 124 [The Pedestal] is likewise call’d Truncus the Trunk..also Abacus, Dado, Zocco, &c.
[…]

2. Architecture and Interior Decorating. Originally: wooden panelling running along the lower part of the wall of a room, made to resemble a continuous pedestal, and typically reaching up to waist height; spec. the flat surface of the panelling between the skirting and the cornice. In later use more generally: the lower part of the wall of a room, typically reaching up to waist height, when decorated differently from the upper part. Cf. wainscot n. 2.
1741 B. Langley & T. Langley Builder’s Jewel iv. 21 To proportion the Tuscan Cornice to a Room of any Height. Divide the Height, from the Floor or Dado, in 5, and the upper 1 in 5.
[…]
1995 K. McCloud Techniques of Decorating (1998) 18/3 The high dado of wooden panelling and the parquet-effect wood floor combine to make a cradle of colour.

3. North American. Woodworking and Joinery.
a. A tool used for cutting a channel or slot across the grain in the face of a piece of wood, esp. to allow for the insertion of another piece of wood. Now rare.
1825 Providence (Rhode Island) Patriot 19 Oct. (advt.) Joiners’ and Carpenters’ Tools… Dados.
[…]

b. A channel or slot cut across the grain in the face of a piece of wood, into which the edge of another piece is fixed; = housing n.1 5.
1875 J. D. Edwards Carpenter’s Man. 90 The groove itself is also called a dado.
[…]
2012 Joinery Tips & Techniques i. 8/2 Rabbets, grooves and dados can be ‘through’ (run entirely across the board..), or stopped at either of both ends.

[Read more…]

Last year we discussed an overheated article about the imminent death of the Icelandic language; now Caitlin Hu has a Quartz piece (with linked video) on the same topic:

For centuries, the Icelandic language has held off influences from foreign lingua franca [sic; should be “lingua francas,” no italics — LH] like Danish and English. But today, there is a new threat: technologies that can only be operated in foreign languages, even at home. Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, for example, does not understand Icelandic (although Google Translate does, thanks to an Icelandic engineer who worked at the California-based company, according to legend). […]

The tiny country has a three-prong plan to save its language. By law, Icelandic must be taught in schools, and new citizens must pass a fluency test. The country’s Language Planning Department creates Icelandic words for new and foreign terms, with the aim of rendering borrowed words unnecessary. And the state plans to spend the equivalent of $20 million (link in Icelandic) over the next five years to support public and private initiatives to build Icelandic-language technologies.

The threat is real, and two of the three steps make sense, but the second one is stupid: borrowed words do not threaten the existence of a language. Obvious case in point: English, which is so full of loans you have to work to compose a sentence that’s free of them. If anything, trying to force people not to use the words that come naturally to them will decrease the likelihood the language will survive. Why is this crackpot idea so irresistible to politicians and other ignoramuses? Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, the linked video is interesting and only five minutes long; thanks, Bathrobe!

One of the people quoted in the video is Ross Perlin, a linguist who is Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance and who has featured at LH more than once (e.g., 2014, 2016); the Alliance has published a map of 637 languages of New York City. It’s got some odd entries (nobody speaks Old Church Slavonic or Koine Greek, even in NYC), but it’s fun to explore (use the + button). (Via MetaFilter.)

I’m reading the Strugatskys’ За миллиард лет до конца света [Definitely Maybe]; I’m enjoying it greatly, and one of the things I’m enjoying is being exposed to unexpected items of linguistic interest. It starts with our hero, Malyanov, sitting around his messy apartment trying to put off feeding his cat Kalyam; the doorbell rings and a guy delivers a package, which turns out to be an expensive collection of wine and food sent by his absent wife. Then a woman shows up with a letter of introduction from his wife, and they open a bottle of riesling and start talking, more and more animatedly. When the riesling runs out they open a bottle of “каберне” [kaberne], presumably cabernet sauvignon; when a neighbor shows up at the door, Malyanov (by now thoroughly drunk) invites him in and opens бутылку „Бычьей крови“ — a bottle of “Bull’s blood.” This rang a faint bell, but I had to look it up to learn that Эгерская бычья кровь is the wine known to English-speakers by its Hungarian name, Egri Bikavér, “Bull’s Blood of Eger.” Hung. bika ‘bull’ looks like it must be related to Russian бык [byk] ‘bull,’ but apparently not — the Hungarian word is from a Chuvash-type Turkic language and ultimately from Proto-Turkic *buka, while бык is from Proto-Slavic *bykъ, “likely of onomatopoeic origin.”

Furthermore, when the neighbor (a friend) shows up, Malyanov thinks “Огромный мужик, как гора. Седовласый Шат.” [A huge guy, like a mountain. Gray-haired Shat.] “Седовласый Шат” is a quote from the Lermontov poem Спор [The argument], in which Mount Kazbek and “Mount Shat” disagree about whether the East is a source of danger, and Lermontov says in a footnote that the latter is another name for Mount Elbrus. Since it’s in the Caucasus, that mountain has a variety of names; the English Wikipedia article has only Karachay-Balkar Минги тау, Miñi taw or Mın̨i taw [mɪˈŋːi taw]; Kabardian Ӏуащхьэмахуэ, ’Wāśhamāxwa or Ꜧuas̨hemaxue [ʔʷaːɕħamaːxʷa]; Adyghe Ӏуащхьэмафэ, ’Wāśhamāfa or Ꜧuas̨hemafe [ʔʷaːɕħamaːfa]; and Hakuchi Къӏуащхьэмафэ, Qʼuas̨hemafe [qʷʼaːɕħamaːfa], but the Russian one adds Turkic Джин-Падишах [Dzhin-Padishah ‘Ruler of Djinns], Abkhaz Орфи-туб [Orfi-tub ‘Mountain of the Blessed], Georgian იალბუზი [Ialbuzi ‘Mane of Snow’]… and Shat, possibly from Karachay-Balkar chat ‘gully.’ Just a sample of the onomastic complexity of the Caucasus!

Or so Viorica Marian says in this Scientific American piece:

Psycholinguistics is a field at the intersection of psychology and linguistics, and one if its recent discoveries is that the languages we speak influence our eye movements. For example, English speakers who hear candle often look at a candy because the two words share their first syllable. Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.

Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at their onset.

The story doesn’t end there. Not only do the words we hear activate other, similar-sounding words—and not only do we look at objects whose names share sounds or letters even when no language is heard—but the translations of those names in other languages become activated as well in speakers of more than one language. For example, when Spanish-English bilinguals hear the word duck in English, they also look at a shovel, because the translations of duck and shovel—pato and pala, respectively—overlap in Spanish.

She goes on to describe similar findings for American Sign Language and finishes with suggested implications (“Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive with a high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in other domains such as vision, attention and cognitive control”). It’s all very cute, but I find it hard to believe; I can easily conceive that researchers get the results they’re looking for in such experiments. On the other hand, I am a known curmudgeon, and far too lazy to actually click through to the studies and evaluate them for myself, so I’m putting it out there for others to chew over. (Thanks, Trevor!)

No, not this Kitchener, but a common noun that stumped my wife and me when it came up in our nightly reading of March Moonlight (the last of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage series):

Everything in the brightly lit little interior, save only its inevitable kitchener, is pleasant to contemplate, each object exactly in place and bearing itself with an air of coquettish elegance; all unsightly detail contained, like the windows, with crisply starched cotton patterned with a small blue and white chequer.

Small, compact and brightly burnished, the little kitchener, the heart and meaning of the room, prevailing over its decorative surroundings, draws one’s eyes with its mystery, acquaintance wherewith places Amabel amongst the household women, shows her caught, for life, in a continuously revolving machinery, unable to give, to anything else, more than a permanently preoccupied attention.

It was not in the fat Cassell Concise dictionary I keep in the nightstand (which usually has even the most obscure UK terms), so I knew it had to be well past its sell-by date; I checked the OED and there it was:

kitchener, n.1
Pronunciation: /ˈkɪtʃɪnə/
Etymology: < kitchen n. + -er suffix¹.

1. One employed in a kitchen; esp. in a monastery, he who had charge of the kitchen.
c1440 Relig. Pieces fr. Thornton MS. 53 Penance sall be kychynnere.
1614 in W. H. Stevenson Rec. Borough Nottingham (1889) IV. 319 To the black gard the kitchinners vs.
1820 Scott Monastery II. ii*. 77 Two most important officers of the Convent, the Kitchener and Refectioner.
1884 19th Cent. Jan. 110 Capons, eggs, salmon, eels, herring, &c..passed to the account of the kitchener.

2. A cooking-range fitted with various appliances such as ovens, plate-warmers, water-heaters, etc.
1851 Official Descriptive & Illustr. Catal. Great Exhib. III. 596/2 This kitchener or cooking grate is remarkable for economy in fuel.
1867 Civil Serv. Gaz. 29 June 402/1 Improved London-made Kitcheners.
1884 Internat. Health Exhib. Official Catal. 68/1 Patent Kitchener with two low ovens, boiler, gas hob, &c.

It’s obviously definition 2 that’s used in the novel. The entry is from 1901, and I’m guessing the word went out of common use by WWI or not long after. Has anyone encountered this quaint word?

Another interesting passage from Simon Franklin’s The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (see this post); he says we tend to assume a book is equivalent to a work:

With regard to medieval manuscripts, this assumption is not valid. There is no regular one-to-one relationship between the book-as-object and the book-as-work. Nor, indeed, was there a consistent relationship between the contents of a book and its title. The contents of the book-as-object were generally determined by the function of the text for its intended users, not by considerations of authorial identity or integrity. […]

A good example is provided by the activities of the scribe Efrosin of the Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery in the late fifteenth century. Efrosin’s annotations have been identified in more than thirty manuscripts, but his most substantial output consists of six large volumes for which he was the principal scribe. Efrosin’s manuscripts are bulky, ranging from 421 to 638 leaves (that is, in modern terms, between 842 and 1276 pages). Two of them, including the longest (which Efrosin tells us he wrote out over the course of four years), consist of readings for monastic services. The other four, in smaller format, were probably for ‘cell’ reading. Together they include an enormous range of ‘works’, often described as encyclopedic. These are anthologies, florilegia. The full list of the titles of the works and extracts which they contain runs to more than 700 items, and the detailed scholarly description of their contents fills nearly 300 pages of a large-format, late-twentieth-century small-print journal. Many of these works are very brief, taking up no more than a leaf or three: individual prayers, homilies, extracts from canon law, accounts of miracles, advice. Some are substantial: thirteen leaves of the Tale of Drakula; fifty-eight leaves of the pilgrimage of the abbot Daniil to the Holy Land; 174 leaves of the novel of Alexander the Great.

Equivalent compilations are typical of monastic book production. […] With such compendia the line between scribe and compiler or editor, or even scholar, becomes somewhat blurred. Although most scribal production consisted of copying, few texts and compilations, especially in non-liturgical, non-scriptural functions, were fully stable. It is hard to define when a manuscript copy becomes a new ‘book’ in the compositional as well as the physical sense.

I’ve finished Kataev’s Растратчики (The Embezzlers — see this post), and once again I’m reminded of the vast difference between knowing about something and actually experiencing that thing. I had known of the book for decades as a famous NEP novel, a satire of Soviet bureaucracy in which two bozos steal money and travel, and that indeed is what it is, but that tells you nothing about the experience of reading the book, any more than knowing someone is a hockey fan who works at a coffee shop tells you anything about what it’s like hanging out with them. It starts out pretty much the way you expect (chief accountant Filipp Stepanovich Prokhorov goes to work, the messenger Nikita mentions a spate of recent embezzlements, Filipp Stepanovich and the cashier Vanechka go to the bank to get cash for the payroll, and the suspicious Nikita follows them to make sure he gets paid before they take off with the money), but then it descends into a maelstrom of drunkenness and madness. Filipp Stepanovich and Vanechka wind up on a train to Leningrad with a pair of adventuresome women (when I read “Здрасте, – ответила Изабелла, – с Новым годом! К Ленинграду подъезжаем” [“Hello,” answered Isabella, “Happy New Year! We’re going to Leningrad”] I immediately thought of Ирония судьбы [The Irony of Fate]) and wind up being fleeced in an increasingly wild series of venues, culminating in a club where actors and actresses playing imperial personages in a film about the downfall of Nicholas II pretend to be their characters for paying customers — the kicker is that many of them actually were the generals and courtiers they’re playing, and were initially afraid to get involved but were seduced by the high pay. This part was reminiscent of Двенадцать стульев [The Twelve Chairs] minus Ostap Bender, and as soon as that occurred to me I remembered that Kataev was the brother of Petrov (real name Evgeny Kataev) of Ilf and Petrov, the authors of that greatest of Soviet satirical-picaresque novels.

After they finally extricate themselves from the clutches of Isabella and Leningrad, they wind up getting off another train at the provincial town of Kalinov because Vanechka remembers the town he grew up in is near there (there’s a lyrical patch of reminiscence straight out of “Oblomov’s Dream”); it’s cold and there’s no vodka to be had in Kalinov, but they find a cabman who’s willing to drive them to Vanechka’s house where he’s sure they’ll find plenty of moonshine, which they do. At this point it swerves into a more and more nightmarish version of Gogol (who is namechecked in chapter 9), with touches of Dostoevsky (Vanechka tries to hang himself); they skip town just ahead of the police and wind up on yet another train, getting off at Kharkov because a fellow traveler tells them they should buy tickets there for the Caucasus. However, they discover they have barely enough to get them back to Moscow (and the increasingly befuddled and miserable Filipp Stepanovich has to sell his fur coat even to manage that); by this point I was thinking of a more recent and more hellish novel of alcoholic train travel, Venedikt Erofeev’s Москва — Петушки [Moscow-Petushki]. They even return to Moscow via Kursk Station.

It’s not a perfect novel — it lurches from one chronotope and style to another in a somewhat undisciplined manner — but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. I’m currently reading Leskov’s famous Левша [The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea]; after that, who knows? Maybe more Strugatskys (I hear good things about За миллиард лет до конца света [Definitely Maybe]). As always, I follow my nose.