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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.

A few years ago I read Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300 and found it very enlightening (see this post), so when Jonathan Morse alerted me to his new book, The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850, I went to the Amazon page, saw (with sadness but no surprise) that the price was outrageous (for shame, Cambridge University Press!), and had the free Kindle sample sent to me forthwith (thanks, Amazon!). Much of the introduction is laying out of concepts and intentions, but I thought the section about the chronological benchmarks was interesting enough to share. He says the range 1450-1850 will seem banal to historians of Western Europe but will probably surprise Russianists, ignoring as it does the supposedly fundamental shift brought about by Peter the Great, and goes on to explain the start and end points:

The ‘graphospheric’ excuse for beginning from the second half of the fifteenth century is derived from a cluster of disparate phenomena, few (or none) of which may be regarded as particularly dramatic or decisive in themselves, but which together reflect initial stages in the emergence of the early modern graphosphere. A continuous practice of public inscription in Muscovy can be traced to the late fifteenth century. In the second half of the fifteenth century, after decades of coexistence, paper replaced parchment as the almost exclusive material for the production of manuscripts. The same period also saw the end of the continuous or regular tradition of using birch bark as a material for inscription. Wax replaced metal as the normal material for seals. With regard to the linguistic landscape, in the late fifteenth century coinage ceased to be bi-scriptal in Cyrillic and Arabic, becoming monolingually Slavonic. Towards the end of the century Muscovites could also see the first prominent public lapidary inscriptions in Latin. With regard to technologies of the visible word: the craft of casting cannons in bronze was brought to Moscow in the late 1480s, and cannons (and bronze-cast bells) became regular bearers of monumental inscriptions. Or, with respect to a more familiar technology: although Muscovite printing did not start until the middle of the sixteenth century, active engagement with products of the printing press (via imported books) can also be dated to the final decade of the fifteenth century. Finally, with regard to institutions of production: the emergence of regular specialised administrative personnel is normally traced to the second half of the fifteenth century, an initial phase in the emergence of a state bureaucracy.

Back in 1910, the OED called talionic (“Of or pertaining to the law of talion, or to the rendering of like for like,” from lex talionis) “rare” and had only one citation (where it seems oddly misused):

1886   G. MacDonald What’s Mine’s Mine v   The growing talionic regard of human relations—that, namely, the conditions of a bargain fulfilled on both sides, all is fulfilled between the bargaining parties.

Now it seems to be… well, not everywhere exactly, but used in a lot of places as if its meaning is self-evident; a Google Books search gives “The Talionic Impulse originates from Biblical Principles,” “Judge Walter Williams of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is especially good at the art of talionic restitution,” “The obscenities of talionic conduct – if one can indeed dignify it with such a phrase – are as much in evidence in the British tabloid newspaper front pages screaming for vengeance […],” “If a nuclear talionic reprisal terminates nuclear violence, the process may be considered a kind of nuclear peacekeeping,” “Early in the evolution of humankind, the talionic impulse emerged […],” etc. It’s always interesting to me to see an obscure word climbing up the charts for no apparent reason.

We discussed the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae a few years ago, but the NY Times has a nice piece by Annalisa Quinn that provides a useful update and has some great illustrations:

The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too. […]

The poet and classicist A.E. Housman, who died in 1936, once referred to “the chaingangs working at the dictionary in the ergastulum [dungeon] at Munich,” but the T.L.L. is now housed in two sunny floors of a former palace. Sixteen full-time staffers and some visiting lexicographers work in offices and a library, which contains editions of all the surviving Latin texts from before A.D. 600, and about 10 million yellowing paper slips, arranged in stacks of boxes reaching to the ceiling.

These slips form the heart of the project. There is a piece of paper for every surviving piece of writing from the classical period. The words, arranged chronologically, are given in context: they come from poems, prose, recipes, medical texts, receipts, dirty jokes, graffiti, inscriptions, and anything else that survived the vicissitudes of the last two thousand years.

Most Latin students read from the same rarefied canon without much contact with how the language was used in everyday life. But the T.L.L. insists that the anonymous person who insulted an enemy with graffiti on a wall in Pompeii is as valuable a witness to the meaning of a Latin word as a poet or emperor. (“Phileros spado,” reads one barb, or “Phileros is a eunuch.”) […]

[Read more…]

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series (“starting with our traditional opener from Languagehat’s Stephen Dodson” is the way they put it). This year I talk about Dorothy Richardson’s autobiographical novels (see this post, in which I introduced her, and this one, which quotes some of her ruminations about language and links to others); I also mention a couple of up-and-coming writers named Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and if you aren’t familiar with them you’ve got some treats waiting for you! There are briefer mentions of novels by Joseph Conrad and Cathleen Schine, as well as a passel of excellent scholarly histories, some of which I’ve discussed here and some not. My thanks to The Millions for giving me the podium, and to those who support them so they can keep doing so.