languagehat.com

Alex Rawlings writes for the BBC about Ghil’ad Zuckermann:

While Australia may be famous the world over for its biodiversity, for a linguistics professor like Zuckermann, the country has another allure: its languages. Before European colonisers arrived, Australia used to be one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, boasting around 250 different languages. Due in part to Australia’s long geographic isolation, many of these had developed unique grammatical structures and concepts that were unknown to languages in other parts of the world. […]

“I believe that most people care more about animals that are endangered than about languages that are endangered,” Zuckerman explains. “The reason is that animals are tangible. You can touch a koala, even though in the wild you’d be crazy to do so because she can kill you with her claws. But koalas are cute. Languages, however, are not tangible. They are abstract. People understand the importance of biodiversity far more than that of linguistic diversity.”

Yet for Zuckermann, preserving linguistic diversity is hugely important. For indigenous communities in Australia and worldwide that are still grappling with the legacy of colonisation, being able to speak their ancestral language is about empowerment and reclaiming their identity. It may even carry significant consequences for their mental health.

There’s a good discussion of when and why it makes sense to try reviving languages which goes beyond the usual touting of the beauties of diversity. Thanks, Bathrobe!

I’m almost done with Alison Smith’s For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (see this post), and I was stopped dead by a Russian word provided in parentheses in the middle of this (very interesting) passage about Venedikt Malashev, whose father was a member of the minor Polish nobility (and originally named Malaszewicz) but had become enserfed after the partition of Poland and who himself had been freed by Count Vorontsov in 1810; given the freedom to choose his estate (see that previous post), he became a member of the artisan guild:

Malashev knew well the language of soslovie, but his specific choice shows that even those statuses chosen rather than inherited might be disconnected from the way individuals actually lived. Moscow’s artisan guild was subdivided into twenty-four subguilds, and individuals belonged to one or the other of those guilds. Some were based on obvious crafts, like cooking, carpentry, or hat-making, but Malashev joined one of the more unusual guilds: the barber’s (fershel’nyi) guild. Despite its name, it officially included an odd hodgepodge of crafts and trades: not just hairdressers and hair dyers but also those making pomades, perfumes, and rouges; tobacconists, including cigar makers; and those who made “chalk for card games.” None of these seem to have much to do with Malashev’s life before his freedom—and nor did they reflect his next actions.

In essence, Malashev’s registry was simply one of convenience. Registry in the guild gave Malashev status in Moscow, but he immediately set off to work elsewhere.

For the rest of Malashev’s saga, you’ll have to read the book, but what stopped me was the word fershel’nyi. I might have thought it was a typo, but the book is remarkably free of them (kudos to Oxford University Press!), and when I looked it up it turned out to be an adjective from fershel’, a variant of fel’dsher, a familiar word to anyone who studies Russian — it’s defined in my beloved, beat-up, much-annotated Oxford dictionary as “doctor’s assistant, medical attendant (medical practitioner lacking graduate qualification).” It has its own Wikipedia article:

According to the World Health Organization, a feldsher (German: Feldscher, Polish: Felczer, Czech: Felčar, Russian: фельдшер, Swedish: Fältskär) is a health care professional who provides various medical services limited to emergency treatment and ambulance practice. In Russia and in other countries of the former Soviet Union, feldshers provide primary-, obstetric- and surgical-care services in many rural medical centres and clinics […]

The equivalent type of provider may also go under different titles in different countries and regions, such as “physician assistant” in the United States or “clinical officer” in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The International Standard Classification of Occupations, 2008 revision, collectively groups such workers under the category “paramedical practitioners”.

But the next section, on the history of the word, is truly striking:

The word Feldsher is derived from the German Feldscher, which was coined in the 15th century. Feldscher (or Feldscherer) literally means “field shearer,” but was the term used for barber surgeons in the German and Swiss armies from the 17th century until professional military medical services were established, first by Prussia in the early 18th century. Today, Feldshers do not exist in Germany anymore, but the term was exported with Prussian officers and nobles to Russia.

Another striking etymology I recently learned is for the word гирло [girlo], which I came across in Bunin (a rich source of unusual words); according to Brockhaus and Efron, it means a strait, canal, or more or less deep channel laid down by the flow of a river (and often confused with the river’s mouth). Vasmer says it’s from Romanian gîrla ‘brook, rivulet; backwater,’ which is itself borrowed from Slavic *gъrlo, which gives Russian горло ‘throat.’ So it’s one of those there-and-back-again etymologies we recently discussed somewhere.

Noor Al-Samarrai at Atlas Obscura describes “an Akkadian cuneiform text from ancient Ur […], dubbed ‘At the Cleaners’ by scholars, dating back to 1600 B.C. or so”:

The text is a take on the classic, “the customer knows best” trope, says Martha Roth, editor in charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, except that in this case the client isn’t just making idle demands—he really does know how the task is done. But that doesn’t make him any less of a pest. He gives the cleaner excessively detailed instructions, down to the water that should be used to wash his clothes: “come upstream of the city, in the environs of the city—let me show you a washing-place,” and the wind he should use to dry them, specifically from the east, and the specific types of wood and stones that the cleaner should use to felt and flatten the clothes to restore them to their original fit. The text illustrates that a Mesopotamian cleaner’s tasks went beyond removing dirt, oil, and other detritus of everyday life. He was a full-service shop, charged with repairing clothing and restoring it to its original condition (size, shape, tightness of warp and weft). The process involved a variety of specialized implements, and a great deal of care was taken to ensure the job was done right.

The cleaner is frustrated by the customer’s haranguing and lowball offer for his services (a single measure of barley). “He says, ‘No way! How do you have the nerve to talk like that, nobody could manage it—I’ll show you a washing place and you can do it yourself if you think you know the work so well,’” Roth says. […]

Roth says that the text was likely used to educate scribes. The text is modeled after dialogues and riddles that would have been classics at that time. The garment the cleaner is tasked with washing is a luxury item, with many features that require special treatment, such as fringes, complex weaving, and embroidered adornments. These details offer the opportunity to bring in a technical vocabulary, as well as grammatical quirks. Like the school exercise in which children have to instruct an alien in how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in excruciating detail, this basic task is used to illustrate a great deal about many aspects of the culture at once—and is entertaining to boot. Educational texts like these actually serve the same purpose for lexicographers such as Roth over 3,000 years later.

Thank goodness for scribal education!

Amateur Reader (Tom) at his blog Wuthering Expectations (see this LH post) is beginning a series of posts about Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which I wrote briefly about here; his first post covers the first two chapters, his second chapters 3-7. In the latter he mentions something I had not noticed, the book’s Francocentrism:

Here I will stop to note that there are sixteen chapters left, and the linguistic division is: two Italian, two English, one German, one Spanish and thus (I will need all of my fingers) ten chapters about French literature. Which sounds about right to me. Auerbach only glances at Russian literature because discussion “is impossible when one cannot read the works in their original language” (Ch. 18, 492), and he completely ignores American literature because he, I don’t know, does not care, however much I would love to read his (imaginary) chapter on Moby-Dick.

Mimesis is half French. And Auerbach, and for that matter the translator, Willard Trask, assumes we all read French. Long passages are translated, but untranslated sentences and phrases are scattered everywhere.

Anyone interested should start following along; I find that Internet Archive has the whole thing available online, which is certainly convenient. I will quote the following passage, of linguistic interest, from chapter 6:

How much more elastic and mobile this language is than that of the chanson de geste, how much more adroitly it prattles on, conveying narrative movements which, though still naive enough, already have far freer play in their variety, can be observed in almost every sentence. Let us take lines 241 to 246 as an example: La la trovai si afeitiee, si bien parlant et anseigniee, de tel sanblant et de tel estre, que mout m’i delitoit a estre, ne ja mes por nul estovoir ne man queïsse removoir. The sentence, linked by la to the preceding one, is a consecutive period. The ascending section has three steps, the third step contains an antithetically constructed summary (sanblant-estre) which reveals a high degree of analytical skill (already a matter of course) in the judgment of character. The descending section is bipartite, and the parts are carefully set off against each other: the first—stating the fact of delight—in the indicative mood; the second—hypothetical—in the subjunctive. Nothing so subtle in structure, and merging with the narrative as a whole so smoothly and without apparent effort, is likely to have occurred in vernacular literatures before the courtly romance. I take this opportunity to observe that in the slow growth of a hypotactically richer and more periodic syntax, a leading role seems to have been played (down to the time of Dante) by consecutive constructions (the sentence quoted on page 100 [p. 95 in my paperback edition — LH] from the Folie Tristan also culminates in a consecutive movement). While other types of modal connection were still comparatively undeveloped, this one flourished and developed characteristic functions of expression which were later lost; the subject has recently been discussed in an interesting study by A. G. Hatcher (Revue des Études Indo-européennes, 2, 30).

How often do you see a reference to Revue des Études Indo-européennes in a work of literary criticism? The passage he cites from the Folie Tristan:

en ki me purreie fier,
quant Ysolt ne me deingne amer,
quant Ysolt a si vil me tient
k’ore de mei ne li suvient?

(In whom can I have confidence, if Ysolt deigns not to love me, if Ysolt considers me so despicable that she does not now remember me?)

Robert Booth reports for the Guardian on the linguistic situation in English courts:

Do you know your “tum-tum” from your “ching” and your “corn” from your “gwop” (gun, knife, ammunition and money)? Neither do police and prosecutors, who have begun consulting a linguistics professor to help decipher urban slang and drill lyrics used as evidence in criminal investigations. The complexity of inner-city dialects and the growing use of texts and social media posts in court evidence has forced detectives and lawyers in London, the West Midlands and Essex to seek translations, according to Tony Thorne, an academic at King’s College London, who has been studying youth slang since 1990. Thorne has compiled dictionaries of hundreds of slang words and a vocabulary of drill, a form of rap music which often deals with real-life violence. He said he has advised police on more than a dozen cases, including one where police believed the use of the word “plug” meant stab, but it was being used to describe a source.

The dialect has become known among academics as multi-ethnic London English (MLE), though is not limited to the capital. Last autumn, an image circulated of a glossary of “youth language” on a whiteboard in a Lancashire police station including “peng = attractive, feds = police, swear down = tell the truth”. Courts in places such as Northampton are also struggling to deal with its shifting meanings; schoolchildren in east Yorkshire are speaking the dialect, as it spreads rapidly through song lyrics and the internet. “I am advising defence lawyers, criminal prosecutors and police with interpreting and translating language which is being used in evidence,” Thorne said. “If they want to dispute evidence they need someone like me to translate. They put me on the list with translators of Hindi and Gujarati.”

Thorne has a network of informants including teachers, youth workers and grime and drill enthusiasts to help him, but admits there are holes in his knowledge and that it might seem anomalous that an “elderly white guy” would seek to be an expert in the dialect. […] MLE mixes white working-class English with patois, largely from black Caribbean dialect, but with some Arabic and Polish. It is rich in status words (badmanz – tough male, bozz – leader, wallad – foolish male) and relationship words (darg – attractive male, game – flirtatious, begfriend – sycophant, fam – group).

Thanks, Original Lars!

Most of this map (from Brilliant Maps) has nothing to do with language, but the few bits that do are funny enough I thought I’d post them here:

Bulgaria: Still use the Russian alphabet?
Portugal: Do you speak Brazilian right?
Turkey: Can you translate this Arabic sentence?

And yes, it’s odd they include Turkey but not Russia in “Europe.” Via Des Small at Facebook; he says “There’s nothing for Danmark, sadly, but perhaps that’s part of the joke. (There’s no need to make fun of Belgium, obviously.)”

I was enjoying the splendid lament in Micah 1:8, which in the King James version reads “Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls,” and wondered why the Russian version has страусы ‘ostriches’ for the final word, and upon investigation I discovered, as you will if you click the above link, that some versions have one and some the other. That’s odd, thought I, and googled up A Commentary on Micah by Bruce K. Waltke, who on p. 66 quotes G. R. Driver:

The literal meaning of bat ya‘ănâ . . . is either ‘daughter of greed’ (Gesenius) or ‘the daughter of the wilderness’ (Wetzstein), and it has consequently been always explained as the ostrich […] for this bird is noted for its voracious appetite and is found only in the wilderness. Not all, however, that is said of this bird in the O.T. is applicable to the ostrich. This indeed inhabits the open wilderness but requires water […] but it does not haunt deserted or ruined cities (Is. xiii 21; Jer. i 39); it certainly does not wail (Mic. i 8) but booms; nor is it raptorial. These are all habits of owls, so that the bat ya‘ănâ may well be the eagle-owl, a large owl which is found in semi-desert areas covered with scrub, where it rests on bushes during the day and hunts partridges, hares and rodents, by night […]

Which is all well and good, but I’m always suspicious of arguments from scientific plausibility when dealing with poetic biblical texts (cf. this LH post from last year). Does anybody know anything about what “daughter of greed” might have meant to the author of the Book of Micah?

I am informed by bulbul that he is hanging out with Lameen: “He is apparently too busy with his new responsibilities and other work, so it’s up to me to plug his – open access! – new book,” Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures, ed. by Dmitry Bondarev, Alessandro Gori, and Lameen Souag (De Gruyter, 2019):

Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into the factors behind uniformity and variation in Judeo-Arabic in Hebrew script, South Palestinian Christian Arabic, New Persian, Aljamiado of the Spanish Moriscos, Ottoman Turkish, a single multilingual Ottoman manuscript, Sino-Arabic in northwest China, Malay Jawi in the Moluccas, Kanuri and Hausa in Nigeria, Kabyle in Algeria, and Ethiopian Fidäl script as used to transliterate Arabic. One of the findings of this volume is that different domains of manuscript cultures have distinct paths of standardisation, so that orthography tends to develop its own standardisation principles irrespective of norms applied to layout and script types. This book will appeal to readers interested in manuscript studies, sociolinguistics, literacy studies, and history of writing.

Looks very interesting, so I join in plugging it!

Also, I don’t know how long it will last, but Amazon has the Kindle edition of George Steiner’s famous After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation on sale for $1.99; I’ve been wanting to read it for years, so I grabbed it. (Thanks, Eric!)

I’ve posted more than once about the prevalence of the French language in 19th-century Russia (e.g., 2008, 2013, 2014), and I’ve just run across an extended disquisition on the subject in Dostoevsky’s Дневник писателя [A Writer’s Diary] (and it was a special pleasure because he’d been ranting about the Eastern Question and the need for Russia to rule all the Slavic peoples and take Constantinople and how dare anybody object or doubt Russia’s sacred selflessness). This is in chapter 3 of the July/August 1876 issue, consisting of two linked essays, Русский или французский язык? [The Russian or French language?] and На каком язык говорить будущему столпу своей родины? [In which language should one speak to the future pillar of one’s fatherland?]; I wish there were an online translation to link to, but since there’s not, I’ll translate some of it to give the idea. He’s gone to Bad Ems for his health, as did so many Russians of his day, and from that fact he segues into language:

In Ems you can, of course, tell who’s Russian mainly by that Russian-French way of speaking which is peculiar to Russia alone and which has begun to amaze even foreigners. […] What surprises me is not that Russians don’t talk Russian to each other (it would actually seem odd if they did) but that they think they’re speaking French well. […] Russians speaking French (that is, a great mass of the Russian intelligentsia) can be divided into two groups: those who indisputably speak bad French, and those who imagine that they are speaking like real Parisians (all our high society) but in fact speak as indisputably badly as the first group. […] I myself, for example, on an evening walk by the Lahm, encountered two elderly Russians, a man and a lady, talking in a preoccupied way about something with great significance for their family life, something that clearly worried them. They were full of emotion, but were trying to explain themselves in very bad, bookish, French, in lifeless, awkward phrases, and were having such a hard time getting their thoughts across that one would impatiently suggest a word to the other; nevertheless, it never occurred to them to start explaining themselves in Russian. They preferred to do so badly and even risk not being understood, as long as it was in French.

He goes on to say that the falseness of their French is immediately apparent in their pronunciation; they exaggerate the grasseyement of the r “and do so with impudent boastfulness […] imitating for each other the language of a Petersburg barber’s errand boy.” He says they don’t realize that in order to speak really good French, you have to either be born in France or spend a great deal of time there; you won’t get it from the bonnes and gouverneurs with whom well-brought-up Russians were surrounded. He cites a story from Turgenev about a Russian who goes into the Café de Paris and orders “beftek aux pommes de terre,” only to hear another patron order simply “beftek-pommes” and be struck with terror that since he didn’t use the new chic phrase the waiters will despise him. In the second essay, he complains that Russian literature isn’t taught in school and actually compares learning French from your bonne as a child to masturbation (та ужасная привычка, “that terrible habit”)! Lots of good stuff there, and I was surprised that French was still so prevalent among Russians in the 1870s.

I was reading Tim Parks’ 2017 LRB review (which may or may not be accessible to nonsubscribers) of Jenny McPhee’s translation of Lessico famigliare (A Family Lexicon) by Natalia Ginzburg, and was struck by this passage, of clear LH interest:

Yet the first impression on opening A Family Lexicon is one of infectious vitality, a quality conspicuous by its absence in the novels.

At the dinner table in my father’s home when I was a girl if I, or one of my siblings, knocked a glass onto the tablecloth, or dropped a knife, my father’s voice would thunder: ‘Watch your manners!’

    If we used our bread to mop up pasta sauce, he yelled: ‘Don’t lick your plates. Don’t dribble! Don’t slobber!’

    For my father dribble and slobber also described modern painting, which he couldn’t stand.

    He would say: ‘You have no idea how to behave at the table! I can’t take you lot anywhere.’

There is a translation problem here. In the Italian, paternal repression (‘we lived in a recurring nightmare filled with my father’s sudden outbursts,’ Ginzburg tells us later) is transformed into comedy by the bizarre words her father uses – sbrodeghezzi (‘dribbles’), e potacci (‘messes’) – originating in Triestine dialect and unknown to most Italians. Though Jenny McPhee’s new version of the book is always sprightly and readable, the English version inevitably loses the fun of these and many other odd words and expressions that turn up in the ‘family lexicon’.

Happily, I was able to google up a 2018 essay by Sarah Axelrod that discusses this very passage in detail, with the original Italian and remarks on how it can affect learners:

Let’s first get into the “easy” part: “Non fate” means “Don’t do.” Fare (the infinitive of “fate”) is a verb that all beginning Italian students know well, because it is so widely applicable that they end up resorting to it all the time when they can’t think of the specific word they want. “Fare” means to do or to make, but the Italian language is littered with delightful little phrases that depart from the literality of doing and making even as they depend on “fare” for their meaning. “Fare la spesa” means to go shopping; “fare due chiacchiere” means to have a chat (two chats?); “fare bella figura” means to show off or to make a good impression.

Now for the tricky part. The closest I can get to “Non fate malagrazie!” is “don’t be rude!” but I would be tempted to say something more like “Don’t do rudenesses!” This sounds funny in English because it actually sounds funny in Italian, too – “malagrazia” is a real word, a noun that means “bad grace,” but as far as I can tell, “fare malagrazie” is not a phrase that exists outside of this father in this family. As for “sbrodeghezzi” and “potacci,” don’t bother looking them up in the dictionary, because you won’t find them. My Italian edition of Lessico famigliare makes liberal use of footnotes to help readers decipher the strange words in the family lexicon, because they don’t exist in standard Italian. For “sbrodeghezzi” the given translation is “porcherie,” meaning anything from “embarrassing mistakes” to “dirty business” and for “potacci” the footnote suggests “pasticci,” meaning “messes” or “trouble;” two words with quite a wealth of meanings in their own right.

So what I tell students is to forget all that. If you want to read the footnotes and say “ah, that’s what a sbrodeghezzo is,” go right ahead (though you’ll still need a dictionary for the supplied synonyms). But try to remember that Natalia Ginzburg did not put those footnotes there, and she does not need you to know what these words mean in a literal sense. Just go ahead, say it to yourself: “z-bro-de-GHE-tsi!” Now say it and roll the R. “Sbrrrrodeghezzi!” That is a goddamn great word. You know some things about this father now. Read the passage again. Kids being kids – knocking a glass over, dropping a knife, dipping bread in sauce. The father thunders “Non fate malagrazie!” and “Non fate sbrodeghezzi! Non fate potacci!”

Incidentally, I am familiar with the name Natalia from Russian, where the antepenultimate is stressed, so I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that in Italian it’s the penult: [nataˈliːa].