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Philip O’Leary reviews The Dregs of the Day, by Máirtín Ó Cadhain:

When the first published English translations of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille appeared in 2015 and 2016, readers of English were able to share what readers of Irish had long known – that Ó Cadhain had achieved world stature by drawing on his unparalleled mastery of his linguistic medium to express the life lived by the people of his own native Conamara Gaeltacht. Ó Cadhain himself was, however, never satisfied with that achievement, writing in his 1969 pamphlet Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca that having lived in Dublin longer than he had in the Gaeltacht he didn’t have the right “Baile Átha Cliath a fhágáil ina pháipéar bán”. The result of this guilty awareness was a series of groundbreaking stories of Irish urban life in the Irish language, of which the most important is the novella Fuíoll Fuine, here translated by Alan Titley as The Dregs of the Day, the final story in the final collection published in Ó Cadhain’s lifetime and thus an important indication of the direction in which his work might have gone had he not died in 1970. […]

So much for the novella itself, but what about the translation? In many ways, Titley, the finest writer of Irish prose since Ó Cadhain, is in his element with Fuíoll Fuíne, having shown in his early novel Stiall Fhial Fheola (1980) and in later short stories a kindred ability to create a Dublin that is both alien and weirdly like the “real” one. Moreover, he also shares Ó Cadhain’s extraordinary command of his linguistic medium and a sometimes anarchic willingness to expand his word hoard with borrowings, adaptations, puns, and outright creations. As a result, The Dregs of the Day reads very much like an original work, free of any touch of academic second thoughts or undue subservience to an esteemed original. The one aspect of the translation that may require comment involves the question of linguistic register. Titley’s English here is far slangier and raunchier than Ó Cadhain’s Irish. For example, in Fuíoll Fuine, the Little Sisters of the Poor will lay out a corpse “in aisce”, while in Dregs they will do it “for feck all”. Ó Cadhain’s “ag cur imní air” becomes Titley’s “bugging him”; “ar meisce” is translated “pisso blotto”; “céard ba chóir dhó a dhéanamh” as “what the fuck he should do”; “a dliteanas céileachais” as “her rightful amount of rumpy-pumpy”; “lucht na tuaithe” as “that bogger crowd”; “póilís” as ‘fuzz”; “lucht póite” as “piss artists from the boozers”; “duine dímheabhrach” as “total thicko”; “fear ab airde ná é” as “somebody higher up the food chain”; “an múnlach bréan móna seo” as “this fucking bogplace shithole here”; and “chuir sin scáth air” as “this put the shits on him”. And there is much more of the same.

Some of these earthier renderings are more successful than others, and there will doubtless be readers who know the original who will find some or many of them startling and/or objectionable. But that is just the point. In Páipéir Bhána agus Páipéir Bhreaca, Ó Cadhain recalls a conversation he overheard on a Dublin bus in which a man called him “a right galoot if ever there was one. A Joycean smutmonger.” What this man was shocked by was not Ó Cadhain’s language, for having developed largely free of the absurdities and excesses of Latinate classism and Victorian respectability, Gaeltacht Irish never needed to develop separate registers of acceptable and “dirty” words to denote body parts and their functions. The simple fact that a writer of Irish like Ó Cadhain wrote about – perhaps even knew about ‑ such things – was enough to scandalise more than a few committed “Gaels” for whom the Gaeltacht was more holy ground than a place where people actually lived. Thus the simple fact that Ó Cadhain wrote of that life so naturally and honestly lent his Irish a certain frisson in his own time. To give his readers that same jolt now a translator must up the voltage in his search for English equivalents for what seem to be neutral Irish words and expressions. (One thinks here, for example, of Paul Muldoon’s translations of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.) Titley must have had great fun coming up with his rumpy-pumpys, and to a great extent if they bother us that’s our problem. Besides, should anyone be surprised to find more than a few fucks in a story set in Dublin?

Thanks, Trevor!

It’s been a busy day, so I’ll just toss up this edifying quote from Jean de La Bruyère (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti):

Some people immoderately thirst after knowledge, and are unwilling to ignore any branch of it, so they study them all and master none; they are fonder of knowing much than of knowing some things well, and had rather be superficial smatterers in several sciences than be well and thoroughly acquainted with one. They everywhere meet with some person who enlightens and corrects them; they are deceived by their idle curiosity, and often, after very long and painful efforts, can but just extricate themselves from the grossest ignorance.

Other people have a master-key to all sciences, but never enter there; they spend their lives in trying to decipher the Eastern and Northern languages, those of both the Indies, of the two poles, nay, the language spoken in the moon itself. The most useless idioms, the oddest and most hieroglyphical-looking characters, are just those which awaken their passion and induce them to study; they pity those persons who ingenuously content themselves with knowing their own language, or, at most, the Greek and Latin tongues. Such men read all historians and know nothing of history; they run through all books, but are not the wiser for any; they are absolutely ignorant of all facts and principles, but they possess as abundant a store and garner-house of words and phrases as can well be imagined, which weighs them down, and with which they overload their memory, whilst their mind remains a blank.

Original French:

Quelques-uns, par une intempérance de savoir, et par ne pouvoir se résoudre à renoncer à aucune sorte de connaissance, les embrassent toutes et n’en possèdent aucune; ils aiment mieux savoir beaucoup que de savoir bien, et être faibles et superficiels dans diverses sciences que d’être sûrs et profonds dans une seule. Ils trouvent en toutes rencontres celui qui est leur maître et qui les redresse; ils sont les dupes de leur curiosité, et ne peuvent au plus, par de longs et pénibles efforts, que se tirer d’une ignorance crasse.

D’autres ont la clef des sciences, où ils n’entrent jamais; ils passent leur vie à déchiffrer les langues orientales et les langues du nord, celles des deux Indes, celles des deux pôles, et celle qui se parle dans la lune. Les idiomes les plus inutiles, avec les caractères les plus bizarres et les plus magiques, sont précisément ce qui réveille leur passion et qui excite leur travail; ils plaignent ceux qui se bornent ingénument à savoir leur langue, ou tout au plus la grecque et la latine. Ces gens lisent toutes les histoires et ignorent l’histoire; ils parcourent tous les livres, et ne profitent d’aucun; c’est en eux une stérilité de faits et de principes qui ne peut être plus grande, mais, à la vérité, la meilleure récolte et la richesse la plus abondante de mots et de paroles qui puisse s’imaginer: ils plient sous le faix; leur mémoire en est accablée, pendant que leur esprit demeure vide.

David Shariatmadari has a wonderful LitHub piece, actually an excerpt from his book Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language (see this LH post from last August) but well worth reading on its own. It begins:

Goya. A small word, but one that contains multitudes. It is one of those mythic beasts, the “untranslatables,” the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in English. Lists of them spread virally online. Someone may have shared one with you on social media: it might have included utepils, sgrìob and saudade—of which more later. But for now, let us examine goya.

Urdu speakers know the meaning of goya in their bones; for the rest of us it is a mystery. When a native son or daughter of Pakistan hears it, whole worlds are conjured—scenes of tales told around a fire as the smoke rises into the crisp air of the Hindu Kush, of being dandled on a grandmother’s knee, of being told a cautionary tale by a village elder as a child and remembering it for the rest of your days. “Goya,” as one breathless internet account has it, “is an Urdu word that refers to the transporting suspension of disbelief that happens when fantasy is so realistic that it temporarily becomes reality . . . usually associated with good, powerful storytelling.”

Goya. Almost a mystical experience in itself. But look it up in a dictionary and you’ll find “as if,” “as though” and “as it were.” One Urdu speaker I asked translated it as “as though”; another, “and so.” It’s used to make or clarify a point—the sentence might be structured as “and so (goya), as I was saying.” Based on this, it seems to function as a discourse marker, which the Cambridge A–Z of Spoken and Written Grammar defines as “words or phrases like ‘anyway,’ ‘right,’ ‘okay,’ ‘as I say,’ ‘to begin with.’ We use them to connect, organize and manage what we say or write or to express attitude.” That’s it. No mystical campfires here. No “transporting suspension of disbelief that happens when fantasy is so realistic that it temporarily becomes reality,” unless the Hindu Kush you’re thinking of is the strain of cannabis. Whoever came up with this translation even seems to have got the grammar wrong: their explanation suggests a (very) abstract noun, whereas goya is an adverb, formed on the stem of a Farsi verb meaning “to speak.” (In that language, the ultimate source of the Urdu word, gooya means “as it were,” “as you would say” or “apparently.”)

So how did this happen? There is something deeply seductive about the idea that other languages contain codes that are impossible to crack, as I know from first-hand experience. When I was a kid, I used to sit in the hallway and listen to my dad speak Farsi on the phone to his relatives in Tehran. I had no idea what he was saying, and nor did my brother and sister. But we learned to recognize certain phrases, two in particular: tarjimmykonee and azbezutumkay. We used to repeat them, over and over. Like “abracadabra,” they seemed to be incantations. Dad was a magician. When, as an adult, I learned what these phrases actually were, I realized the extent to which we had filtered them through our English-attuned ears, distorting the sounds and syllables. And the meaning was more prosaic than I imagined, too. Tavajoh mikonee can be translated as “Are you paying attention?,” a conversational filler like “Do you see?” or “D’you know what I mean?” Arz be hozuretan ke is a polite stock phrase similar to “May I say, . . .”

I was a child, but adults should know better than to believe that other cultures speak in spells.

How I love that kind of demolition job! Go to the link for more (it’s worth it just for his taking Bill Bryson apart); the Persian verb he mentions is goftan (root gu; colloquial migam ‘I say’). Thanks, Ariel!

Anne Enright in the LRB (8 March 2018) discusses the malign effects of the usual understanding of the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden; she mentions language a fair amount, and here are a couple of such passages:

‘Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.’ The word ‘naked’ is a translation of the Hebrew erom, which is used to describe a state of being stripped or vulnerable, and is without sexual connotation. As for ‘no shame’, Jerome in his translation into the Vulgate Latin uses ‘et non erubescebant’ implying that Adam and Eve did not blush – and this is sweet, for Jerome. It suggests a moment of virginal self-consciousness, full of possibility. It also, perhaps, reflects Jerome’s skill as a linguist. The original word in Hebrew, bosh, comes from a primitive root ‘to pale’, and is here used reflexively – ‘and they were not ashamed before one another.’ In the rest of the Old Testament, bosh is used in contexts that involve feeling confounded or disgraced, but it is rarely linked to ideas of impurity and abomination (when it comes to sex, the Old Testament is mostly worried about marrying out). Other Latin translations settled on the stronger pudere, a term for shame which conveys bashfulness, as well as a sense of decency. Pudor contains the idea of being caught out, but it also had social and ethical implications. It was, for the Romans, a manly difficulty and not something a slave could experience. A woman’s honour was usually limited to sexual respectability, and this was referred to by the more limited form pudicitia. The concept conveyed by the word pudor suffered a narrowing of meaning over time, becoming more sexualised and specific. By the 17th century the root had yielded ‘pudenda’, meaning ‘genitals’, usually female. This is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck.

[…]

In the question and response we call ‘the temptation of Eve’, the snake repeats God’s and then Eve’s sentences, then distorts them with a question mark, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden” or a negative: “You will not certainly die”?’ Eve becomes enclosed in a circular exchange with her own words. In many medieval images, the serpent bears the face of Eve, acting as an enthralling, ghastly reflection. This phallic Eve reminds us of the less spooky but equally phallic rib, which has caused generations of children and philosophers to run a counting hand down their sides. The choice of bone is most likely a remnant from an earlier myth, that played on the double meaning of ti in Sumerian – the noun ‘rib’ and the verb ‘to make live’. The fact that we find the choice of bone both odd and satisfying could be used as another rule for writing enduring fiction: your story must contain the remnants of former drafts, whose original meaning is lost, but which now make an odd kind of sense.

I am particularly intrigued by that last bit, from which I have extracted the post title, which I hope will serve to attract our Sumerian expert, ə de vivre.

The estimable Los Angeles Review of Books presents Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Outer Fringes of Our Language: A Conversation with Werner Herzog; the conversation took place in February 2016, so I’m not sure why it’s just being published now, but never mind, it’s timeless, as is the maniacal Herzog. I’ll quote a few salient bits (Harrison’s questions in bold):

Could you share with us some of your thoughts about your relationship to reading books and the value of the literary?

In a way, it has been something that is guiding me throughout my life. Beyond this auditorium, there are many more students at Stanford University, and many of them do not really read — including film students. They read a book about editing, but they haven’t read, let’s say, the dramas of Greek antiquity. And I keep saying to them you have to read. Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read. If you do not read, you will become a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will never make a really good film. And almost everyone that I know who has made very strong, very good substantial films are people who are reading all the time. […] And of course, I’ve written prose and some poetry. I am fairly certain that my written work will outlive my films. […]

I’m curious about the books that have become a part of you and your psyche. You mentioned, in A Guide for the Perplexed, that whenever you go on a film set, you bring two books with you, in particular. One is Luther’s translation of the Bible. You have to read the Book of Job for consolation —

It’s a 1546 edition in the original Lutheran language, which was an enormous cultural event. The German language somehow started with Martin Luther — the common language, Hochdeutsch, high German. Before that, there were only dialects. But Luther, yes, the Book of Job for consolation. Or the Psalms sometimes. I have it with me. I love to read it. […]

There’s a long discussion of “a relatively unknown masterpiece published in 1967 called The Peregrine, by an obscure British writer named J. A. Baker,” which they both love and which is apparently factually challenged:
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Eva Sandoval, an Italian-American writer based in Italy, writes for BBC Future about the vexed question of linguistic fluency; she starts with Pete Buttigieg’s “rumoured proficiency in seven languages” and continues:

This is not to deride Mayor Buttigieg. His perceived fluency interests me because I’m a former language teacher – having taught English for 11 years in Japan and Italy – and I am also a Cambridge English exam speaking examiner; a role which requires me to dissect variables in candidates’ second language production such as pronunciation, discourse management, and grammatical range. Buttigieg is clearly fascinated by languages, willing to learn, and is brave enough to practice with native speakers on television – qualities that would have made him the star of my classroom. But – like so many of my ex-students who expected to go from “beginner” to “native” proficiency in two months – Buttigieg may have underestimated what it means to “speak” a language.

I can relate all too well to overestimating one’s own abilities. A “heritage speaker” of Italian, I’d been living in Italy for two years when I overheard a receptionist refer me to me as “that foreigner who doesn’t speak Italian”. I was confused, then gutted. That one casual sentence launched a journey that resulted in my being forced to acknowledge that while I had grown up speaking Italian at home and was fluent, I was not by any means proficient.

What does the word “fluent” actually mean? In lay circles, this term has come to equal “native-level proficient”, with no grey area between the bumbling beginner and the mellifluous master. […] But Daniel Morgan, head of learning development at the Shenker Institutes of English – a popular chain of English schools in Italy – says that fluency actually refers to how “smoothly” and “efficiently” a second language (L2) speaker can speak on “a range of topics in real time”. While fluency may denote a degree of proficiency, it does not automatically imply accuracy – the ability to produce grammatically correct sentences – nor does it imply grammatical range. […]

Luckily, scales for measuring spoken fluency and overall proficiency exist. “Fluency is an abstract concept, so we assign observable variables,” explains Daniel Morgan. Two of the most reliable factors are “speech rate” and “utterance length”. Speech rate can be defined as how much (effective) language you’re producing over time, for example how many syllables per minute. Utterance length is, as an average, how much you can produce between disfluencies (e.g. a pause or hesitation). You could look at accuracy as being subsumed into fluency, in terms of grammatical accuracy, lexical choice, pronunciation, and precision.”

There’s much more detail at the link; it’s an interesting piece. (We had a good discussion on learning languages back in 2003, by the way.) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura writes in the NY Times about “a Brooklyn building that is home to about 50 speakers of Seke, one of the world’s most obscure languages”:

The apartment building, in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, is a hive of nationalities. A Pakistani woman entered the elevator on a recent afternoon with a big bag of groceries, flicking a dupatta over her shoulder as a Nepalese nurse and the janitor, a man from Jamaica there to mop up a spill, followed her in.

It was hardly an unusual scene in New York, one of the world’s most diverse cities. But this nondescript, seven-story brick building is also the improbable home to some of the last speakers of a rare, unwritten language from Nepal that linguists worry could disappear within a generation, if not sooner.

The language, Seke, is spoken in just five villages cloistered by craggy cliffs and caves in a part of Nepal called Mustang, a region close to the border with Tibet. There are just 700 or so Seke speakers left in the world, according to a recent study by the Endangered Language Alliance, a New York-based organization dedicated to preserving rare languages in the city. Of those, a little over 100 are in New York, and nearly half of them live in the building in Flatbush. […] The remaining Seke speakers live in another building in Flatbush or are scattered across Queens. […] Seke is one of 637 languages and dialects that the Endangered Language Alliance has identified as being spoken across the five boroughs of New York and in New Jersey, which also has a diverse, global population. […]

Another language, Wakhi, from eastern Iran as well as parts of Pakistan, China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is believed to be spoken by less than a handful of people in New York, according to the language alliance. One speaker, Husniya Khujamyorova, 31, who works as a linguist at the organization, is writing children’s books in Wakhi in the hopes of passing down the language, which is spoken by about 40,000 people worldwide. “People like me, they move at an early age from their country,” Ms. Khujamyorova said. “There is not enough material to pass their language to the new generation.” […]

In New York, young Nepalese, like Ms. Gurung’s cousins, speak very little Seke. She says she is the most fluent speaker among the diaspora’s younger members and has been helping the Endangered Language Alliance compile a Seke-English dictionary. […] Other factors are also causing Seke’s demise, said Mr. Gurung, the translator. In New York, native speakers tend to work long hours with little time to teach their children — and there are no cultural or language centers. There is also no real demand for Seke. Younger Seke speakers prefer learning far more common languages like Spanish or Mandarin. “They say, ‘What’s the purpose of learning the language when there is no use for it in the future?’” Mr. Gurung said. Instead, a new dialect called Ramaluk is developing among the Nepalese diaspora, Mr. Gurung said, which borrows and mixes words from English, Nepali, Hindi and some Seke. “It’s a new language,” he said.

There are photos and more stories at the link, along with a half-minute audio clip of a conversation in Seke over dinner. (Incidentally, I posted about Mustang back in 2003.) I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, and I particularly enjoyed the reference to Wakhi, with which I was inexplicably fascinated as a grad student in Indo-European (it’s one of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken in the mountainous, oddly shaped Wakhan District). Thanks, Eric and juha!

News from Illinois Computer Science:

Daniel Stelzer used a stylus to carefully form symbols in a piece of clay. The University of Illinois student was practicing writing the symbols in a class on Hittite, an ancient language that uses cuneiform, one of the oldest human writing systems. The U. of I. offered the class in Hittite for the first time this fall.

“I’m doing it partly because it’s so impractical. I think there should still be space at the university for studying things that are impractical, simply because they are interesting and open up a new world to your students,” said Ryan Shosted, a linguistics professor who is teaching the class.

Hittite is an extinct language – no one speaks it. It was used in the Bronze Age by people living in what is now Turkey. Hittite is an Indo-European language, from the same family as Russian, English, Irish and Hindi. The students in Shosted’s class study ancient texts and learn basic vocabulary and language structure, how to read and write Hittite in cuneiform as well as in the Roman alphabet, and about Hittite culture. They’ve translated texts about a priest floating a model boat down a river in order to cast away evil and about the ritual sacrifice of a sheep. […]

The class is a mix of 21st-century and Bronze Age technology. Many of the assignments are delivered online, but in class, the students work together on translation and grammatical exercises and they practice how to press cuneiform symbols into clay. They do some assignments in clay, take photos of them and upload them to an open-source learning platform.

“A hallmark feature of the class is giving students the opportunity to write in clay and have the Bronze Age experience to write how the Hittite scribes wrote,” Shosted said. “I think of it as half art class. I want them to make beautiful tablets, and I want it to look right.”

What a great idea! I took Hittite myself (almost half a century ago now), and I wish we’d had a chance to do that; all we did was the usual staring blearily at textbooks. (See this 2015 post for the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project.) Thanks, Maidhc!

1) I’m slowly making my way through Merezhkovsky’s «Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи» (The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci; see this LH post), and like most historical novelists he enjoys tossing in lots of archaic terms; one of them, адрагантовая камедь [adragantovaya kamedʹ], looked so bizarre I thought it might have a typo, but no, камедь ‘gum, resin’ is simply a word I wasn’t familiar with, and адрагантовый — not even in my largest dictionary — turned out to be equivalent to English adragant, equally obscure to me. I turned to the OED (entry updated December 2011) and discovered that “gum adragant” was actually a thing:

adragant, n.
[…]
Etymology: < French adragant (16th cent. in Middle French; also in gomme adragant), variant or alteration of dragant dragant n. [A gum; = tragacanth n. Also called gum dragon, and formerly adragant n.], probably by association with Middle French diadragum, diadragentum, etc., a medicinal preparation containing tragacanth (probably 13th cent. in Old French: see diatragacanth n. at dia- prefix2 ).

Now historical and rare.

In full gum adragant, adragant gum. A plant gum obtained from various shrubs of the genus Astralagus; = tragacanth n. 1.

1696 tr. S. Barbe French Perfumer 105 Mix Gum of Adragant, of the bigness of a Small-nut, dissolved with Orange-flower-water.
1697 C. K. Art’s Master-piece 126 Dissolve Gum Adragant in Rose-Water, and beat the whole long together.
[…]
1775 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 65 416 It resembles gum adragant much in quality.
1800 T. H. Horne tr. L.-A. F. de Beaujour View Commerce Greece xi. 179 The Frank commerce exports annually five thousand okes of gum adragant.
[…]
1904 Board of Trade Jrnl. 21 Jan. 120 (table) Pastry (biscuits, cakes, comfits, buns and gingerbread patties, tarts, adragant gum-balls, &c., made with sugar).
1998 Jrnl. Amer. Inst. Conservation 37 15/2 Gum tragacanth, variously rendered in historic treatises as ‘gum adragant’, ‘gum dragon’, etc., is the exudate of various species of the genus Astralagus.

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Rachel Nolan has a New Yorker piece (Jan. 6 issue) about the translation crisis for migrants who speak Mayan languages and the interpreters who are helping them in court; much of it makes for depressing reading, but it handles language unusually well for a general-interest publication, so I’ll quote some of those bits here:

Oswaldo Vidal Martín always wears the same thing to court: a striped overshirt, its wide collar and cuffs woven with geometric patterns and flowers. His pants are cherry red, with white stripes. Martín is Guatemalan and works as a court interpreter, so clerks generally assume that he is there to translate for Spanish speakers. But any Guatemalan who sees his clothing, which is called traje típico, knows that Martín is indigenous. “My Spanish is more conversational,” Martín told me. “I still have some difficulties with it.” He interprets English for migrants who speak his mother tongue, a Mayan language called Mam. […]

One morning in early December, Martín was interpreting for a criminal case in Dublin, east of Oakland. A clerk signed him in—“Buenos días,” she greeted him—and then he met the people he’d be translating for, a Mam husband and wife who had been the victims of an attempted home burglary. […] Martín accompanied the husband to the witness box, while the wife waited in a nearby room. Watching a skilled simultaneous interpreter is a bit like watching someone speaking in tongues. As soon as the judge starts talking, the interpreter mutters along, not waiting for the sentence to be over before beginning to translate. Martín relayed the witness’s answers in a low, steady voice, in American-accented English.

The testimony turned on the layout of the kitchen. There are twenty-two officially recognized Mayan languages in Guatemala; all of them use relational nouns instead of prepositions—Mam uses “head” to say “on top of”—and they have complex grammatical rules to describe bodies in space. The witness pinched his fingers and dropped them down to imitate his wife putting cash in her purse. He worked his eyebrows. He didn’t look up when the prosecutor asked a question. He was telling his story to Martín, the only person in the room who understood. […]

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