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Megan Gannon reports for Smithsonian.com:

On April 30, 1828, a Cherokee stickball team stepped into the underworld to ask for help.

Carrying river-cane torches, the men walked into the mouth of Manitou Cave in Willstown, Alabama, and continued nearly a mile into the cave’s dark zone, past impressive flowstone formations in the wide limestone passageway. They stopped inside a damp, remote chamber where a spring emerged from the ground. They were far from the white settlers and Christian missionaries who had recently arrived in northeastern Alabama, putting increasing pressure on Native Americans to assimilate to a Euro-American way of life. (In just a few years President Andrew Jackson would sign the Indian Removal Act that would force the Cherokee off their land and onto the Trail of Tears.) Here, in private, the stickball team could perform important rituals—meditating, cleansing and appealing to supernatural forces that might give their team the right magic to win a game of stickball, a contest nicknamed “the little brother of war.”

This spiritual event, perhaps ordinary for the time but revelatory now, only recently became known because of a set of inscriptions found on the walls of the cave. A group of scholars have now translated the messages, left by the spiritual leader of the stickball team, and describe them in an article published today in the journal Antiquity. Prehistoric ancestors of the Cherokee left figurative paintings inside caves for centuries, but scholars didn’t know that Cherokee people also left written records—documents, really—on cave walls. The inscriptions described in the journal article offer a window into life among the Cherokee in the years immediately before they would be forcibly removed from the American southeast.

“I never thought I would be looking at documents in caves,” says study co-author Julie Reed, a historian of Native American history at Penn State and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. The inscriptions were written in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system that was formally adopted by the Cherokee just three years prior in 1825. It quickly allowed a majority of the tribe to become literate in their own language, and the Manitou Cave inscriptions are among a few rare examples of historic Cherokee writing recently found on the walls of caves. “Cavers have been going in caves in the Southeast for a really long time, looking for more prehistoric artwork,” says Beau Carroll, the lead author of the study and an archaeologist with the tribal historic preservation office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. “For you to be able to pick out actual syllabary you have to be familiar with it. I think it’s all over the place. It’s just that nobody’s been looking for it.”

There’s more on the history of the tribe, the syllabary, and the discovery at the link, along with some good photos. Thanks, Trevor!

Alison Flood reports for the Graun on an amazing find:

It sounds like something from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and his The Cemetery of Forgotten Books: a huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist. But the real deal has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.

The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.

The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.[…]

The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years. It was Guy Lazure at the University of Windsor in Canada who first spotted the connection to Colón. The Arnamagnæan Institute then contacted Mark McDonald at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who passed it on to Wilson-Lee and his co-author José María Pérez Fernández, of the University of Granada, for verification. […]

After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”.

Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.

Patrick Taylor, the LH house etymologist, posted on Facebook about the word sasquatch. The basic etymology is known; to quote the AHD (Patrick’s bailiwick), it’s from “Halkomelem (Salishan language of southwest British Columbia) sε´sq’əč.” But how is the Halkomelem word formed? Patrick looked it up in the Dictionary of Upriver Halkomelem, by Brent Douglas Galloway, and showed in his post the entry for sasq’ets (“a stl’áleqem creature resembling a huge (six- to nine-foot tall) wild hairy man, the name was first borrowed into English apparently after being spelled by J.W. Burns, a teacher at Chehalis Indian school on Harrison River where sasquatches were sighted fairly often”). Unfortunately, it’s too full of special symbols for me to try to reproduce here; if you can’t see the FB post, maybe you can see this Google Books link to p. 558 of the dictionary, which has the entry. Here’s what Patrick had to say in his post (for some reason I can’t get a link to the post itself; the “April 7 at 1:48 PM” link there, which I used above, only shows the image from the dictionary):

Recently I became curious about the etymology of the word Sasquatch. Most dictionaries say that the word came into English from Halkomelem, a Salishan langauge of southeast Vancouver Island and the nearby islands and mainland coast. The Halkomelem word can be written as sásq’ets. But is there any more to say about the word in the Halkomelem cultural context? Does sásq’ets mean anything else besides “Sasquatch” in Halkomelem? I discovered that Brent Douglas Galloway in his Dictionary of Upriver Halkomelem (UC Publication in Linguistics 191, 2009, p. 558) breaks down sásq’ets as follows… The first part is possibly sasq’-, an intensive/augmentative reduplication of seq’, “to crack”. Is this in reference to the creature’s splitting and breaking of trees? The second part is possibly -ets, “on the back”. I wonder what the sense of “on the back” could be—“behind itself” maybe? That is, the meaning would be “(the one) leaving a trail of broken trees”? However, typical descriptions of Sasquatch often mention broad shoulders, too, so perhaps the thought was “snapping trees across its (strong) back”? I wanted to write Galloway about this but he died in 2014. Still, I believe this etymology deserves wider currency.

I agree, so here it is.

Anna Aslanyan (a convenient name for this purpose) writes celebratorily and lipogrammatically [or rather, wrote on March 29] in the LRB blog:

La Disparition, a lipogrammatic classic, turns 50 today. You probably know who it’s by; if not, you can look it up to find out why I’m unwilling to say who did it. From its first publication on 29 March 1969, this book built a cult following. It’s primarily famous for what’s missing from it, a basic but important thing that forms a part of words you can’t usually do without. Staying strictly within this tight constraint, it says what it wants to say about its protagonist, Anton Voyl, and his vanishing act – a conundrum for his companions – in a grippingly ludic, rigidly formulaic way.

Various translations of La Disparition painstakingly follow its track, cutting all that has to go without ruining its plot. G. Adair’s A Void (1994), an award-winning translation and a scintillating work of art in its own right, is a linguistic triumph. La scomparsa – alas, its Italian translator must languish in anonymity, too – is just as skilful in its acrobatic wordplay. Moving on to Russian and Cyrillic, V. Kislov transforms La Disparition into Исчезание (a slightly artificial word), so now it’s o that’s out of action, a similarly difficult omission to sustain. Spanish plays its cards sans a, which is not as crucial a symbol, I’m told, but it’s still a hard trick to pull off.

The rest is at the link; as I said to John Cowan, who sent it to me, I am particularly fond of “Shakspar.” I linked to “a stern e-less review of Adair’s e-less translation of Perec’s e-less novel” back in 2004, but alas, the linked site has gone the way of all those e’s [but here it is — thanks, mollymooly!]. If you’re curious, the Russian version begins (the Преамбула, or Preamble):

разъясняющая читателю — правда, не сразу, — как наступает царствие Заклятия

Три кардинала, раввин, адмирал («каменщик братства М.»), три жалкие партийные пешки, чьими действиями управлял, сибаритствуя, английский и американский капитал, выступили в эфире и в прессе и заявили без стыда: «Так как грядет дефицит еды, население рискует навсегда расстаться с жизнью». Сначала, ну как тут не рассмеяться, весть приняли за шутку, за журналистскую «утку». А жизнь ухудшалась, ситуация усугублялась. Люди взялись за дубины и палки. «Хлеба!» — кричали массы, улюлюкали на власть имущих и капитал предержащих, хаяли правящие классы. Везде зачинались тайные кружки, секретные ячейки, брезжили антиправительственные идеи и бунтарские идейки. С наступлением сумерек публичные стражи уже не решались выбираться на улицу. В Масексе неизвестные лица даже напали на местную мэрию. В Ракамадуре разграбили склад: грабители вынесли и увезли на тачках бразильские зерна (в пачках), филе тунца (в банках), кефир (в пакетах), кукурузу (в брикетах), правда, все эти запасы уже стухли. В Нанси путем усечения шеи a la française казнили сразу тридцать трех (тридцать двух ли?) судей, затем спалили редакцию вечерней газеты; ей вменили в вину заискивание перед властями, так как та печатала декреты. Везде захватывались базы, склады, магазины.

I’m on the final section of Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, one of the best histories of a country I’ve ever read (see this post from a few weeks ago), and I wanted to quote this passage on the incursion of the Libyans during and after the ignoble collapse of the New Kingdom; it ends with an interesting bit on linguistic change:

Under Ramesses III, the battles against the Libyans in 1182 and 1176 had been nowhere near as conclusive as the official propaganda had suggested. Behind all the triumphalism, the authorities had felt it necessary to fortify temples on the west bank of the Nile, including the king’s own Mansion of Millions of Years, with its valuable treasuries and granaries. Despite the Egyptians’ best endeavors, the Libyans who had been repelled from the western delta had simply turned southward to infiltrate the Nile Valley in Upper Egypt. The frequent attacks on Thebes during the later Ramesside Period showed the Libyans’ determination and persistence. Ramesses III had also boasted of forcing thousands of Libyan prisoners to “cross the river, bringing them to Egypt,” where they were settled in fortified camps (“strongholds of the victorious king”), branded with the pharaoh’s name, and forcibly acculturated: “He makes their speech disappear and changes their tongues, so that they set out on a path they have not gone down before.” Yet the integration had often been only superficial, and sizeable concentrations of Libyans around the entrance to the Fayum and along the edges of the western delta had resolutely hung on to their ethnic identity, forming distinctive communities within the local Egyptian population. By the reign of Ramesses V, a land survey of Middle Egypt noted a substantial proportion of people with foreign names. The Libyans were by now well ensconced. A generation later, a boisterous community that had settled in the central delta near the town of Per-hebit (modern Behbeit el-Hagar) was causing the Egyptian authorities particular concern. During the course of the Ramesside Period, Egypt had unintentionally become a country of two cultures, in which a large ethnic minority made its presence increasingly felt.

Of all the country’s institutions, the army had felt the impact of Libyan immigration most acutely. The Egyptian military had a long and proud tradition of employing foreign mercenaries, and had therefore proved a natural, and popular, career choice for many Libyan settlers. Whether manning remote desert garrisons or fighting on campaign, Libyan soldiers had served their adopted country with loyalty and distinction throughout the second half of the Twentieth Dynasty. Moreover, some of the more ambitious Libyan soldiers had been able to secure themselves positions of considerable influence at the heart of Egyptian government. Two such individuals were Paiankh and Herihor, the military strongmen who headed the Theban junta in the dying days of Ramesses XI’s reign.

[Read more…]

I wrote about the Arabic-based orthographies called “Ajami” used to write various African languages back in 2009, expressing my surprise that Afrikaans had been thus written; now Alia Yunis reports on the Muslim Cape Malay families who own books, called kitabs (kitab means ‘book’ in Arabic), written in Arabic letters:

Even after the official end of slavery in 1834, and prior to apartheid forcing the separation of people by race in 1948, Cape Muslims lived on the periphery of the white colonial rulers, and they remained connected through religion. During community gatherings and family lessons, a religion teacher or family member would write and read from kitabs, which mostly contained Qur’anic lessons and sermons. […]

After some encouragement, we convince [92-year-old Abdiyah Da Costa] to go to the closet in her bedroom and dig out her family’s kitabs. There are two books, each handwritten by her father, and two older, yellowing books that are not mere copybooks but gracefully written, elegantly bound tomes in the practiced handwriting of religious teachers. One is in Jawi, a Southeast Asian language that uses Arabic script. The other one is especially rare: Dated 1871, it is one of the few remaining kitabs in Arabic Afrikaans.

Afrikaans, which today is one of 11 official languages of South Africa, is derived largely from Dutch, as the Dutch East India Company established Cape Town (and later all of South Africa) as a stopping-point colony until the Dutch government was forced to hand it over to the British in 1814. In addition, Afrikaans also carries influences from Malay, English, Portuguese and Khoi, an indigenous language. And the first time Afrikaans was written down—possibly as early as 1820—was with the Arabic script, mostly for lesson writing in kitabs.

Dutch linguist Adrianus van Selms coined the term “Arabic Afrikaans” in the early 1950s upon discovering manuscripts in Arabic script but with Afrikaans words. The oldest existing one is Uiteensetting van die Godsdiens (An Exposition of Religion) written in 1869 by Islamic scholar Abu Bakr Effendi. Linguists believe that although there may have been earlier Arabic Afrikaans publications, the first usage of Arabic Afrikaans, and thus the first written Afrikaans, appeared in homegrown kitabs. Afrikaans was not taught in schools until it became an official state language in 1925.

We ask Abdiyah to read for us from the Arabic Afrikaans kitab. She agrees and puts on her glasses. But then she wavers, becomes overwhelmed, a little frazzled. “No, no, it’s been too long,” she says. “I’m not so fluent. I can’t. No.” It’s a firm no. She only agrees to read us a poem she has written in memory of her husband. She’s tired now. It is time for us to go.

The piece is full of touching stories and striking photographs. Thanks, Trevor!

Good news from the Library of Congress:

In celebration of the Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz, the Library of Congress has digitized and made available online for the first time the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection, which sheds light on scientific, religious, philosophical and literary topics that are highly valued in the Persian speaking lands. This collection, including 150 manuscripts with some dating back to the 13th century, also reflects the diversity of religious and confessional traditions within the Persian culture. […]

The unique manuscripts feature beautifully illuminated anthologies of poetry by classic and lesser known poets, written in fine calligraphic styles and illustrated. It includes the Shahnamah, an epic poem that recounts the history of pre-Islamic Persia. Also, it contains the most beloved poems of the Persian poets Saadi, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with works of the poet Nizami Ganjavi. […] In addition to the manuscripts, the Library will expand the Rare Persian-language Collection with lithographs, early imprint book and Islamic book bindings in the following months.

Keep up the good work!

Perhaps of more immediate use to those of us who don’t read Persian: Curated and Randomly Generated Selections from the Library of Congress. Every time you refresh, you get a new batch of links, so if something looks interesting it’s best to open it in a new tab if there are others you want to investigate. I was intrigued by the title “More borrowings,” and it turned out to be a collection of quotable quotes Compiled by Ladies of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California and published in 1891. Warning: time sink!

Stuart Gillespie, author of the forthcoming Classical Presences: Newly Recovered English Classical Translations, 1600–1800, summarizes some of his research for OUPblog:

Thanks to increasing scholarly interest, we understand the history of literary translation in English better today than we did only a couple of decades ago. Bibliographical tools have appeared, historical narratives have been published (the weightiest of them the five-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation in English), and critical studies are no longer restricted to a small number of high-profile writers. But the record of printed translation on which this understanding is based reflects only part of the historical phenomenon, and not necessarily a representative part. Translations that never reached a printer may hold as much interest for us as those which were widely read in their own day, and in some cases more. One example recently printed for the first time is the English translation of the Latin epic poem of Lucretius, De rerum natura, by the civil war period writer Lucy Hutchinson. This shows us very clearly how someone quite different from any published translator of Lucretius responded to his epic. Hutchinson may well be its very earliest English translator. Hutchinson was a Puritan, Lucretius was renowned as an atheist. Like all Lucretius’s other translators, Hutchinson was a capable Latinist; but unlike them, she was a woman. […]

Translating a Greek or Latin verse text was an exercise in which a surprising number of people indulged. Some of them are anonymous. Some belong to social groups previously not much in evidence in the record. Writings by more familiar figures can be recovered too. The private diaries of Warren Hastings, the eighteenth-century statesman, contain remarkable translations of Catullus which Hastings never published. An impressive English version of part of a Horatian epistle appearing in two contemporary manuscripts is likely to have been written by Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright contemporary with Shakespeare.

Plenty of schoolroom translation exercises are certainly extant, but so is much sophisticated work by adults – their translations are often not the amateurish productions we might expect. They are frequently responses to the professional printed translations with which they are familiar, but these responses can be questioning or testing, undercutting, subversive, hostile. They tend to be in some way alternative because, after all, a reader entirely happy with existing translations would have no reason to devote time to creating another. Thus different Catulluses, different Juvenals, different Horaces emerge here from those we know in the familiar or classic English versions. One reason for this must be that innovation, experiment, playfulness, and risk-taking are much more likely to happen among translators who do not have to satisfy a publisher who commissioned their work, and have no public to avoid offending.

By the eighteenth century, English-speaking readers acquired the habit of seeing the world in terms of the ancient works with which they had become so familiar. This familiarity came about partly through a heavily Latin-based education. But it also came about through the burgeoning production of English classical translation, by now at the very forefront of literary endeavour and prestige. What we have not understood until now is how energetically, and with what creativity and sophistication, these readers participated in that production themselves.

I approve of this kind of democratizing research.

The National (UAE) reports on what is definitely a good idea:

Sharjah is compiling a landmark historical record charting 17 centuries of development in the Arabic language. The Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language will look at how the world’s fifth most widely spoken language, as well as Arab culture, has grown. News of the project was set out at the Arabic Language and Culture Festival in Milan by Dr Mohamed Safi Al Mosteghanemi, secretary general of Sharjah’s Arabic Language Academy. […]

Its contents will chronicle Arabic language and culture from the past 17 centuries in three research stages – old inscriptions, the Semitic branch of languages with a focus on Arabic, as well as the practical use of the language. It will encompass five ages: pre-Islamic, Islamic (Umayyad and Abbasid), separatist dynasties, the Mamluk Sultanate, and modern history. More than 300 senior Arabic researchers and linguists, editors and experts divided into nine committees in nine countries are working on the creation of the dictionary, and that the editing committee sits at the Union of Arab Scientific Language Academies’ premises in Cairo, Egypt. […]

“There are many dictionaries in the Arab world, but none as comprehensive as this one, which documents the history and evolution of all Arabic words,” Dr Al Mosteghanemi told an audience. “This project faced challenges, especially those that were related to its massive scale. The historian or linguist cannot build on specific references and leave others. They should not include books on literature and its genres and ignore books on philosophy, history and other sciences.” […] He said the project entails the development of a Digital Language Registry along with the physical dictionary.

But there’s already a Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language, which launched a web portal last year (and which I posted about in 2013); I don’t know if there are any links between the projects, or if this represents a pointless duplication of effort. Anybody know? (Thanks, Trevor!)

Douglas Q. Adams reports at the Log on an exciting development (to those of us who are excited by Indo-European linguistics), the [mistaken (see update below)] confirmation of a third Tocharian language:

For over a hundred years now linguists have known of a small Indo-European family comprised of two closely related languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B, in the Tarim Basin of eastern Central Asia (Chinese Xinjiang). Tocharian B speakers occupied the northern edge of the Tarim Basin, north of the Tarim River, from its origin at the confluence of the Kashgar and Yarkand rivers eastward to about the halfway point to the Tarim’s disappearance into Lop Nor. Politically Tocharian B speakers were certainly the major constituent of the population of the kingdom of Kucha and natively they called the language (in its English form) Kuchean. To the east-north-east, in the Karashahr Basin, were speakers of Tocharian A, centered around Yanqi (Uighur Karashahr, Sanskrit Agni). On the basis of the Sanskrit name this language is sometimes referred to as Agnean, though we do not have any direct or conclusive evidence as to what the speakers themselves called it. To the east-south-east of Kuqa, along the lower Tarim was the historic kingdom of Kroraina (Chinese Loulan < Han Chinese *glu-glân). The administrative language of Loulan was Gandhari Prakrit, obviously imported into the Tarim Basin along with Buddhism from northwestern India. In documents of the Loulan variety of Gandhari Prakrit are non-Gandhari words that have been attributed to the native language of the area. Some of those non-Gandhari words look like Tocharian (e.g., kilme ‘region’ beside TchB kälymiye ‘direction’) and it has seemed a reasonable hypothesis that the native language of Kroraina/Loulan was another Tocharian language, “Tocharian C.” (That the native language of Loulan was Tocharian was first suggested by Thomas Burrow in his The Language of the Kharoṣṭhī Documents from Chinese Turkestan, 1937.) This is a reasonable hypothesis, for which the evidence is admittedly meager, and many have been (reasonably) dubious or unconvinced.

However, in December 2018 Hempen Verlag of Bremen published Klaus T. Schmidt, Nachgelassene Schriften, edited by Stefan Zimmer. One of the two Nachlass documents was an examination of some ten heretofore ignored texts written in the Kharoṣṭhī alphabet, clearly associated with Loulan, in an obviously Tocharian language that is neither Tocharian A nor Tocharian B. […] This new data firmly establishes the existence of a Tocharian language in the Lop Nor Basin. A rather similar hypothesis, that there was a Tocharian-speaking population in the Gansu Corridor, known to the Chinese as the Yuezhi, is hardly proved by this new data, but it is rendered a bit more plausible in that now we can imagine an unbroken chain of Tocharian languages from the upper Tarim into the Gansu Corridor. The Yuezhi of course, driven from their home by the Xiongnu in the second century BC, migrated to western Central Asia where, ultimately, they were known to the classical world as the Tókharoi. The latter’s name was extended by early investigators (particularly Friedrich W. K .Müller in 1907) to the newly discovered languages of the Tarim Basin (A and B) under the mistaken idea that these peoples represented an eastward reflux of the Tókharoi. This reasoning was clearly wrong, but, if the Yuezhi should happen to have spoken a variety of Tocharian, the name may actually have some historical justification. The classical Tókharoi are now known to have spoken an Iranian language, but it’s quite possible that the incoming Yuezhi (whatever their original language) came to speak the language of the earlier inhabitants of their new home. (Compare the French who today speak a Romance language but whose [partial] ancestors, the Franks, were speakers of Germanic, or the Bulgarians who speak a Slavic language but whose [partial] ancestors, the Bulgars, spoke a variety of Turkic.) Further information and discussion, focusing on the linguistic data and issues, will appear in my review of the book to be published in the Journal of Indo-European Studies.

(Tocharian previously at LH.)

Update (Sept. 2019). Turns out it’s all bullshit: “not one word is transcribed correctly. […] Schmidt’s ‘Tocharian C,’ as it stands, has been removed from the plane of real languages and moved to some linguistic parallel universe.”

First, Schmidt may have subconsciously read into his texts what he wanted to be there. There have certainly been such things happening (the well-known first “transcription” of the Voynich Manuscript by William Romaine Newbold* is such a case). Secondly, and less generously, it may have been an outright fabrication, an attempt at deception. But, what would have been the purpose? Thirdly, and more generously, it might have been a kind of “Tocharian Sindarin”—a created language such as Tolkien played so artistically with, given a certain literary verisimilitude by the reference to old manuscripts where it might be found. If so, it was not meant to deceive, but his family, not having been told of its true nature, passed it on to Zimmer as real. And Zimmer, not being a reader of the Kharoṣṭhī script (precious few Tocharianists are), naturally enough took Schmidt’s transcriptions at face value.

Bah.