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Alison Flood reports for the Guardian on a timeless classic:

From Horrid Henry to Just William, naughty children are not difficult to find in children’s books today. But bad behaviour isn’t confined to recent decades – a manuscript from 1480, which has been digitised for the first time by the British Library, gives an insight into the antics of medieval children, as it exhorts them to “pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys” – don’t pick your ears or your nostrils – and to “spette not ovyr thy tabylle”.

The 15th-century conduct book, The Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke, was intended to teach table manners. It has been put online as part of a new children’s literature website bringing together original manuscripts, interviews and drafts by authors from Lewis Carroll to Jacqueline Wilson. The medieval text is part of the British Library’s own collection, and “by listing all the many things that medieval children should not do, it also gives us a hint of the mischief they got up to”, said the library.

“Bulle not as a bene were in thi throote,” is another piece of advice doled out by the book – or “don’t burp as if you had a bean in your throat”. “And chesse cum by fore the, be not to redy,” children are warned – or “don’t be greedy when they bring out the cheese”. And long predating the Victorian age’s exhortations for children to be seen but not heard: “‘Loke thou laughe not, nor grenne / And with moche speche thou mayste do synne.” Or: “Don’t laugh, grin or talk too much.” […]

More than 100 “treasures from children’s literature” feature on the new site, Discovering Children’s Books, including pages from Judith Kerr’s sketchbook for The Tiger Who Came to Tea, showing tigers drawn from life at London zoo. Axel Scheffler has shared the changing face of the Gruffalo, after he was told to make it less scary. There is also the first manuscript of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Enid Blyton’s typescript drafts of The Famous Five and Last Term at Malory Towers.

Thanks, Trevor!

Update (Aug. 2025). Only five years later, the collection is gone (they haven’t just changed the URLs, because a Google search turned up nothing but five-year-old references to the old site). I’ve provided archived links above, but what the hell, British Library? Institutions like that aren’t supposed to have a mayfly’s attention span!

One of the most prominent and influential Russian literary-religious-philosophical texts is Vladimir Solovyov‘s Три разговора о войне, прогрессе и конце всемирной истории (War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ), published in 1900. I’ve dipped into it over the years and always wanted to read it eventually, and that desire has been strengthened by reading Dmitry Merezhkovsky‘s Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи (The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci), the second part of his Christ and Antichrist trilogy, also published in 1900 (I hope to report on it tomorrow) — as you can see, the Antichrist was very big at the turn of the last century. As important as the Three Conversations were, however, they are way down towards the bottom of the list of works of Russian literature that I would have expected to be made into movies.

And yet, here we are: the Romanian director Cristi Puiu‘s latest movie is Malmkrog, which, to quote Ben Flanagan in Slant, “is based on 19th-century Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov’s prophetic Three Conversations, which, through a series of dialectical maneuvers, addresses such topics as economic materialism, nationalism, and abstract moralism.” He continues:

The film takes place on a snow-covered hillside, where a large pastel-pink mansion sits and Puiu turns the philosophical into drama. Sheltered in the mansion’s walls are a small group of aristocrats that includes a politician, a general and his wife, and a young countess. It all has the makings of a game of Clue, but the mysteries here are linguistic. A Christmas gathering stretches on in what seems to be real time, as the party’s high-minded philosophical and political chatter takes on an increasingly strained air.

That tension is heightened by the obstacles that Puiu uses to discombobulate his audience. Malmkrog is the Transylvanian village where the film takes place, yet the characters, who speak primarily in French, talk of being in Russia. And as they discuss imminent war and the potential outcomes of violence, it’s as if the film appears to exist outside of time and place.

There are plenty of reviews, like Jay Weissberg in Variety (“is cinema really the best means to delve deep into this level of intense philosophizing?”), Nick James in Sight & Sound (“Although I got a lot out of this rigorously crafted intelligent work, I can’t in all conscience – conscience being a major topic here – recommend this film to the many. It’s too richly complex for the medium of film to convey”), and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian (“This is a film of formidable and almost intimidating seriousness, which is admirable and refreshing in its way, but it does not make many concessions to anything as vulgar as entertainment or even drama”); as you can see, they tend to combine respect with bafflement and warn off the prospective viewer. I, however, would love to see it; it looks gorgeous from the clips, and I don’t mind movies based on dense conversation.

What drives me to post, however, is the title. At first it seemed bizarre: why would a Romanian movie about French-speaking Russians have a Swedish title? But it turns out Malmkrog isn’t Swedish at all, it’s the German name for the Transylvanian village now known by the Romanian name of Mălâncrav (the Hungarian name is either Albkarak or Almakerék, depending where you look); this site says “it has a larger Saxon population than any other Transylvanian village.” I wonder what the original form was, what it means, and why the German form looks so Scandinavian?

I presume I’m not the only one who remembers with fondness those cheap, sturdy Dover books that had such a fascinating range of topics, at least a few of which would be attractive to any particular browser; I doubtless still have some kicking around odd corners of my bookshelves. Karin Falcone Krieger has an interesting history of the company at Contingent:

While my proximity to the Dover Bookstore may have given me unique access to its huge and varied catalog, the publisher is well-loved by people of wide-ranging interests for its affordability, accessibility, and design. Started by Heyward and Blanche Cirker in their apartment in post-war Queens, NY, Dover Publications produced 10,000 book titles over the course of 80 years. They built a profitable company through a number of unique and innovative publishing practices, most notably filling their catalog with republished versions of books that had fallen out of copyright.

Josh MacPhee, a Brooklyn designer and archivist, likes the striking graphic design of early Dover covers, but also the philosophy he sees behind the books themselves: the “nearly unique belief that bedrock math, science, logic, anthropology, and history texts should not only be available to a broad, general audience, but that if made affordable, this audience would buy them.” Dover, he argues, “is arguably as political a publishing project as the most anarchist of anarchist book outfits.” […]

In 1941 Hayward and Blanche Cirker began their small business in their Forest Hills, NY apartment, the Dover, for which the company is named. Hayward worked in the publishing industry briefly before deciding he wanted to be his own boss, selling remaindered textbooks. After discovering that the copyright to a particular German textbook had been voided by the federal government because of the war, Hayward published Tables of Functions with Formulas under the Dover imprint, photographing the pages and using offset printing to avoid paying a typesetter. This out-of-print reference work for physicists, mathematicians, and engineers became the first Dover Book.

The venture was a success and a business model he would follow going forward: looking for materials whose copyright had expired and publishing them under the Dover imprint. The Cirkers and Dover’s editors combed the entire history of print for works that could be published under this model. Dover’s editors never revealed the secrets of exactly where or how they found the originals to reproduce, though editor Stanley Appelbaum recounts borrowing a “priceless” manuscript from a private library, personally escorting it to the photographer, and returning it the same day.

I don’t think I ever asked myself where the name Dover came from; I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it was a Queens apartment building!

It is rare to see a sequence of letters to the editor used by a journal to such good effect as here in the LRB (10 May 2018); the final note from The Editors made me laugh out loud:

Do we have a policy?

Quite often the London Review publishes articles containing quotations in foreign languages with no translation, as for example in T.J. Clark’s piece on Cézanne’s portraits (LRB, 25 January). My last year at comprehensive school was 2010 and, like more than 90 per cent of my classmates, I do not speak any foreign language fluently. I doubt that the majority of your readers are fluent in French. What’s more, I would be surprised if, in an article about a Vietnamese artist, you would publish an untranslated quotation in Vietnamese. Or in Polish or Arabic (which must be more commonly spoken in London than French).

Does the LRB have a well-defined policy on this? In the 8 March issue Marina Warner’s article appears with French quotations usefully translated, and there is a poem by Galen Strawson entirely in French, which I found evocative in the same way I find, say, Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange to be evocative, though one of the feelings evoked is alienation since none of these languages is intelligible to me.

I concede that there is something alluring about the old attitude of expecting everyone to know French, and I do wish it was still reasonable. When I first started to read the LRB, the occasional untranslated quotation contributed to the impression of intellectualism (along with the austere layout, which should last for ever). It is part of the tradition of literariness in Britain. But it seems more and more to me a pointless tradition. The LRB should be progressive and inclusive, not disdainful of its readers. It should be challenging because it deals with complex concepts and is written to the limits of the language. In Amia Srinivasan’s piece on the ‘right to sex’, the word ‘unfuckability’ is used without scare quotes (LRB, 22 March). It is ‘unfuckability’ that is dangerous, highbrow and literary; untranslated French is just atavism.

                    Conrad Teixeira
                    Manchester

A number of people have expressed puzzlement about the title of my poem ‘After Flaubert’ (LRB, 8 March). I shouldn’t have omitted the epigraph, a deeply characteristic comment from Flaubert’s letters (which are, arguably, his greatest achievement): ‘De quelque côté qu’on pose les pieds on marche sur la merde’ (to Louise Colet, Saturday, midnight, Croisset, 29-30 January 1853).

                    Galen Strawson
                    University of Texas at Austin

Which, translated, means: ‘However carefully you tread, you end up with shit on your shoes.’

                    The Editors

While I have no problem reading French, I agree with Teixeira that it should be translated for the Frenchless reader. (Also, if you follow my first link to the letters section, the initial exchange between an indignant Emily Wilson complaining about the review of her Odyssey translation [see this LH post] and her imperturbable reviewer Colin Burrow is both entertaining and thought-provoking.)

Another interesting post by Dan Nosowitz at Atlas Obscura; it’s called What Is the Hardest Language in the World to Lipread? but that’s something of a bait-and-switch — the URL’s “lipreading-around-the-world” is much more accurate. Nosowitz starts off asking “What language, of the 6,000-plus distinct tongues in the world, is the hardest to lipread?” and continues:

This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view. This question, frankly, is a nightmare.

He then goes into a long and fascinating discussion of how lipreading works; he talks about “profound connection between the auditory and visual senses when understanding speech” and explains the McGurk Effect, then getting around to lipreading itself:

González does not know American Sign Language. She relies entirely on lipreading and the little bits of sound she can detect with her hearing aid. Our conversation was very smooth […] The commonly cited low success rate for lipreading isn’t based on people like González. Much of the research uses subjects with normal hearing; Masapollo, for example, doesn’t work with deaf subjects. His work is less about lipreading than it is about the perception of speech. In fact, it’s weirdly difficult to find data about the effectiveness of lipreading as practiced by people who actually do it as part of their daily lives. People with normal hearing test at around 10 to 12 percent accuracy, and there’s some suggestion that hearing impaired people are more like 45 percent accurate. But most of these studies are a little weird, because they tend to test accuracy by seeing whether people can identify individual phonemes—the sounds that make up words, like “gah” or “th”—or words. But, according to González, that’s now how lipreading works.

“We don’t lipread sounds,” she says. “Some people think we’re looking at phonemes and stringing them into words. Doesn’t work anything like that. We’re seeing words and putting them together in sentences.” Context is everything for a lipreader, because, well, context is everything for anyone trying to understand speech, regardless of which sense is being used. Whether you can trick a lipreader into confusing the words “ball” and “bull” is not reflective of real-world accuracy, because it’s unlikely that those words would be used in a way that makes it unclear which one is intended: “The dog wants you to throw his bull.”

Not many studies acknowledge any of this, though one from 2000, in the journal Perception & Psychophysics, did. In it, the researchers examined lipreading abilities among those with impaired hearing (IH, in the study) and normal hearing. Crucially, it was assessing the ability to understand entire sentences rather than just phonemes. “Visual speech perception in highly skilled IH lipreaders is similar in accuracy to auditory speech perception under somewhat difficult to somewhat favorable listening conditions,” the researchers concluded. This tracks with what González told me: Lipreading, once you get really good at it, is more or less equivalent to understanding a speaker in a busy restaurant.

Eventually he gets around to the initial question:

There’s a body of literature on lipreading various non-English languages, but they don’t make things any clearer. The problem with trying to find the hardest language to lipread is that lipreading is exceedingly based on the individual, and most of the best lipreaders in each language—the ones who depend on it—don’t show up in studies. So figuring out how things differ from language to language requires an awful lot of guesswork. […] My first thought was to figure out which phonemes are especially hard to distinguish, under the assumption that a language that has more of those must be harder to lipread, right? […] Another element of some languages that could present lipreading difficulty comes from tones. […] Still other languages heavily rely on another class of sounds made without much from the lips—namely, by using the larynx or creating a sound back in the throat. […] I’ll toss in Chechen, because it has such a startling number of consonants and vowels, around 50 of each, including a whole mess of sounds that are made back in the mouth and throat. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Pirahã, a language spoken by a few hundred people in the Brazilian Amazon. Pirahã has about as few phonemes as a language can possibly have, which I suspect would make a lot of words look the same. It’s also a tonal language and may be substantially informed by rhythm; nobody’s quite sure […]

There’s no good answer to the question, but then again, there are very few good answers to any questions about lipreading.

More details at the link, obviously; it’s interesting stuff to think about, even if there aren’t many answers.

David Segal has a riveting account in the NY Times [archived] of Gérard Lhéritier, once called the “king of manuscripts” but now known as “the Bernie Madoff of France.” Excerpts from the beginning:

PARIS — A letter from Frida Kahlo, signed and twice kissed with red lipstick, fetched just over $8,800. A page of scribbled calculations by Isaac Newton sold for about $21,000. A 1953 handwritten speech by John F. Kennedy took in $10,000.

“Adjugé!” said a gray-haired auctioneer, over and over, as he gaveled away nearly every one of the 200 lots for sale at Drouot, an auction house, in Paris in mid-November. The sale generated $4.2 million, which might sound like a triumph.

Actually, the sale was a fiasco, or, more precisely, one part of an ongoing fiasco. All of the items came from a now-defunct company, Aristophil, which starting in 2002 built one of the largest collections of rare books, autographs and manuscripts in history — some 136,000 pieces in all. […]

Six years ago, the French authorities shut down Aristophil and arrested Mr. Lhéritier, charging him with fraud and accusing him of orchestrating what amounts to a highbrow Ponzi scheme. As he bought all those rare manuscripts and letters, he had them appraised, divided their putative value into shares and sold them as if they were stock in a corporation. Those shares were bought by 18,000 people, many of them elderly and of modest means, who collectively invested about $1 billion.

The Times story is probably behind the paywall if you don’t subscribe; if you can’t read it, here’s Joel Warner’s 2018 Esquire story on the same case, but it focuses too much on the Marquis de Sade for my taste. If I were to fall for a Ponzi scheme, it would probably be one like this: “Hey, pal, want to own part of a first edition of the Cantos?”

If that doesn’t interest you, have some Homophones, Weakly.

Update (May 2024). Apparently I didn’t know, or had forgotten, about the Wayback Machine when I posted this, but I have now added an archived version so nobody has to fool around with the measures advocated in the comments.

Manchán Magan in the Irish Times, Uncovering Ireland’s lost field names before it’s too late:

Field names can tell us much about our local area how people appreciated the physical landscape, its hills and hollows, streams, and bogs; but also its history and traditions, from holy wells, to fairy forts, old settlements, and estates. An article in The Irish Times Magazine in 2018 explored the insights garnered from 7,000 names collated by the Kilkenny Field Name Recording Project, and 24,700 field names recorded in Co Meath, unveiling some very odd names indeed, including Co Antrim’s townland of Ballypitmave, derived from Baile Phite Méabha (which translates as Queen Maeve’s vulva), Co Tipperary’s Skeheenarinky, from Sceichín an Rince (little thorn bush for dancing), and Co Leitrim’s Faslowart, from Fás Lúghoirt (the deserted herb garden).

Each placename is like a code that can be deciphered to reveal insights into the culture, genealogy, myths, climate, botany, topography, and geology of a region. They are “the essential threads that hold the quilted fabric” of the landscape together, according to Alan Counihan of the Kilkenny Field Name project.

The latest area to have embarked upon such decoding of its landscape is Westmeath, where 725 field names were collected from 64 townlands in 2018, with the same amount again gathered from a further 55 townlands in 2019. Overall, 100 volunteers were involved in the harvesting of this lore and some noteworthy elements arose, such as the fact that in parts of north Westmeath, 10 to 15 per cent of the field names were in Irish, revealing that the language survived in the area far longer than one would imagine. […]

But for every prosaic and practical name rooted in the physical attributes of a place, there are others dealing with the esoteric and the unknowable. They include the many field names linked to fairy forts, and the few that were considered to be potential portals to another dimension, often known as “The Stray Field”. These had the ability to disorientate you and seemingly transport you to somewhere unrecognisable. The Horse Field in Cummerstown, Collinstown, is an example, which was described by a local as being “Noted for the Stray”, meaning that one could get lured to the Otherworld by walking through it.

I’m a sucker for local onomastics (cf. this 2011 post); thanks, Trevor!

A delightful bit of YouTube japery (40 seconds): “Wilford Brimley goes head-to-head with an actual endocrinologist to determine the proper pronunciation of diabetes.” Also, Brimley tweets about it: “Ellie, no. I am the ‘diabeetus’ guy.”

JC sent me this Academia.edu link, adding:

The publisher’s blurb says:

More detail on morphological change including cutting-edge discussions of iconization

Coverage of recent developments in sociolinguistic explanations of variation and change

New case studies focusing on Germanic languages and American and New Zealand English, and updated exercises covering each of the topics within the book

A brand new companion website featuring material for both professors and students, including discussion questions and exercises as well as discussions of the exercises within the book.

The editor, Robert McColl Millar, (a professor of linguistics and Scots at Aberdeen) writes:

It is also important that I pay tribute to Larry Trask, a man I never met, much to my regret. While a considerable part of this book has been formed by me, the general conception is Larry Trask’s. I suspect that I would not have been as capable as he was in producing such an impressive structure while not forgetting the small details so important to its success.

But surely this paragraph (addressed to the teacher) is ur-Trask:

The book is as atheoretical as possible: absolutely no knowledge of contemporary theories of phonology or syntax is presupposed, and such theories are not introduced in the book. Some acquaintance with the notation of classical generative phonology will be helpful for Chapter 3, but is not essential. The only theories introduced here are theories of historical linguistics and of language change.

And there is still plenty of Basque.

(See my 2004 obit post for Trask.) Thanks, John!

Iman Ghosh has posted a very nice infographic showing the world’s major languages as circles, larger for those with more speakers, arranged on family trees; I’ve seen a lot of displays of languages, but this one really stands out for its easy readability and emphasis on language families and subfamilies (Spanish and Portuguese aren’t just Western Romance, they’re Ibero-Romance and West-Iberian). From the text below the image:

Today’s detailed visualization from WordTips illustrates the 100 most spoken languages in the world, the number of native speakers for each language, and the origin tree that each language has branched out from.
[…]
The data comes from the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, a database covering a majority of the world’s population, detailing approximately 7,111 living languages in existence today.

Enjoy!