languagehat.com

Remember my post about Matthew Scarborough’s Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries: A Guide for the Perplexed? It ended with “I can’t wait for the promised coverage of handbooks for individual languages/branches!” That promised coverage has begun with Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries for the Perplexed: Anatolian Languages, and it’s just as wonderful as I expected. It’s mostly Hittite, of course, but I didn’t realize there was so much material:

The two main comprehensive dictionary projects are the Chicago Hittite Dictionary (CHD) based at and published by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and the second edition of Johannes Friedrich’s Hethitisches Wörterbuch (HW²) which is currently based at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (regarding the first edition, see further below). […] Awhile back the Oriental Institute recently made all of their publications freely downloadable from their website, including much (if not all?) of their back-catalogue, so all of the CHD volumes are freely available to download from their website. The HW² is only published in print form through Winter Verlag, so it is somewhat more difficult to access unless you have access to a good research library or are the sort of person who has/is willing to shell out hundreds of euros it costs to buy the fascicles outright from Winter Verlag.

At present, the CHD and HW² still do not cover the latter half of Š, and T, U, U̯, and Z. For these letters, there are two shorter single-volume dictionaries that are occasionally useful. […] Johannes Friedrich’s Kurzgefaßtes Hethitisches Wörterbuch [Concise Hittite Dictionary] originally published between 1953–1956 is the only really complete single-volume dictionary. There are three further Ergänzungshefte [supplementary volumes] that were later published and bound together with it in the 1991 Winter Verlag reprint. More recent is Johann Tischler’s Hethitisches Handwörterbuch [Concise Hittite Dictionary] which is also a useful, more recent shorter dictionary, but it lacks lists of the different inflected forms in cuneiform transliteration, for which Friedrich (1966) is still more useful.

But the really fun stuff is the etymological dictionaries, of which there are three, count ’em, three, “either recently completed, or still in the works”:

These are Johann Tischler’s Hethitisches Etymologisches Glossar (Innsbruck, 1977–2016), Jaan Puhvel’s Hittite Etymological Dictionary (Berlin & New York, 1984–), and Alwin Kloekhorst’s Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. All three of these works have their own particular approaches to the Hittite lexicon in terms of their breadth of coverage of the lexicon, their interpretation of the philological data, and their systems of Indo-European reconstruction.

There is detailed discussion of each, with page scans, including the entry ḫāran- ‘eagle’ so you can directly compare them. He ends with a section on Anatolian languages other than Hittite; it all makes me want to relearn cuneiform and have a go at these long-forgotten languages.

I was translating for my wife Kozma Prutkov’s wonderful little fable Кондуктор и тарантул [The conductor and the tarantula] — for the purposes of the poem, тарантул [tarantul] has final stress as opposed to its usual penultimate stress — and when I got to the moral, beginning “Читатель! разочти вперёд свои депансы,/ Чтоб даром не дерзать садиться в дилижансы” ‘Reader! calculate your expenses in advance,/ So that you don’t dare to sit in diligences without paying [like the tarantula],’ she asked me “Why is a diligence called that?” I went off to investigate, and told her that it was from French, short for carosse de diligence ‘coach of speed,’ but I didn’t know how the ‘speed’ sense developed from Latin dīligentia ‘care, attentiveness’ (itself from dīligō ‘esteem, love’). Anybody know? (Incidentally, apparently there used to be a short form dilly which survived in English dialects for “various kinds of carts, trucks, etc., used in agricultural and industrial operations.”)

I spent most of the last month reading Dostoevsky’s Бесы, better known in English as The Possessed but more literally translated as The Devils (the title references both a Pushkin poem and Luke 8:32-36); it’s been several days since I finished it, but I haven’t been able to put together a coherent post, mainly because I haven’t been able to figure out quite what I think of it. So here’s a long, rambling post about a long, rambling novel. You have been warned.

Critical discussion tends to focus on the neat way in which all the lines of influence that cause the various catastrophic events can be traced back to Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, the self-important old Westernizer with whom the book opens: he is the neglectful father of Pyotr Stepanovich, the leader of the terrorist group; he is the tutor and spiritual father of Nikolai Stavrogin, the younger Verkhovensky’s idol; and he is the landowning aristocrat who casually sent his serf Fedka into military service, setting him on a track that ended with his escaping from Siberia and returning as a thief and murderer who plays a crucial role in the plot. There are all sorts of symmetries, religious allusions, political implications, and so on that can be laid out and admired ex post facto.

My problem is that none of this is apparent when you’re actually reading the book. It’s exactly the reverse of The Idiot (LH post): there the first part “carries the reader along seamlessly from the Prince’s meeting with Rogozhin on the train to the party where Nastasya Filippovna hurls the money into the fire,” and it’s only with the continuation that it starts bogging down in confusion; here it’s the first part that is (or was for me) a slog — a long section about the past and present relations of Stepan Trofimovich and his patroness Varvara Petrovna (Stavrogin’s mother), two of the most irritating characters in world literature, with occasional cryptic references to various younger people who will turn out to play important roles in the plot but who at this point are just names. You can’t tell Lyamshin from Lebyadkin, or Dasha from Marya. (As a matter of fact, there are two Maryas, Maria Timofeevna, the lame madwoman who turns out to be Stavrogin’s wife, and Marya Ignatievna, Shatov’s wife who shows up pregnant with Stavrogin’s child — the latter appears to be one character too many for most readers, since I never see a mention of her in criticism of the novel, and she is omitted from the otherwise comprehensive list of characters in the Russian Wikipedia article, even though she has an entire chapter to herself.) I kept thinking “Why am I supposed to care about this?”
[Read more…]

Via Bathrobe, who says “Apparently written by Ken Miner,” How to Make a Linguistic Theory, by Metalleus:

Assemble a judicious amount of grammar, preferably English grammar since you’re aiming at readers of English. (If you feel there might be a market for linguistic theories written in Cebuano, by all means, give it your best shot.) Be sure to include passive constructions, accusative-with-infinitive constructions, and constructions with front-shifting. Leave everything else to future research (don’t worry, you’ll never have to actually do it).

Set up two levels of linguistic representation; call them Level 1 and Level 2, or even better, Level Alpha and Level Beta. This is to divide your explicanda into two conceptual domains so you can let one explain the other. Leave these levels and all constructs supporting them undefined; these will be your Theoretical Primes. Define everything else, however, not only as rigorously as possible but using as many symbols from the predicate calculus as you can understand.

Be sure to leave undefined the notion mu. Now make mu a unit at both undefined levels. For each mu use ordinary English spelling, but in upper case letters on one level, and in lower case letters on the other. Use abbreviations with upper case; for example, ERG, PRO, +ITAL for ergative, pronominal, borrowed from Italian.

From this point on you need a graphics expert. Draw guitar strings (don’t call them that, of course) from units on one level to units on the other level. Count and classify the various arrangements of strings you need for the amount of grammar you began with; then pronounce all other logically possible arrangements of strings forbidden by Universal Constraints. Give each constraint a handy name, such as The Adjustable Bridge Constraint, or The Open-String Pull-Off Constraint. Always capitalize and use the with constraints.

At this point it will be proper, though not absolutely necessary, to bung in a bit of data from other languages. Since ultimately theories like yours can be constructed only by trained linguists who speak natively the languages they are examining, frankly, the Second Coming will be upon us well before you’ll really have to think seriously about other languages. […]

I’ll send you to the link for the exciting conclusion. I do love linguistics snark!

Madeline Woda at OUPBlog presents The language of victory: 8 ancient phrases used by Emperor Justinian:

When writing about the Justinian era, historian Peter Heather chooses to use both Greek and Latin terminology as a way to bring Justinian’s legacy to life. We’ve listed out some of the terms that help detail the political and martial history of Emperor Justinian.

Every schoolboy knows Nika and denarii, and I was vaguely familiar with bucellarii and the silentiarius, but I confess this was new to me:

Nomos empsychos—law incarnate (Greek): From the late third century onwards, Roman emperors dominated lawmaking in the Roman world and were themselves customarily viewed as law incarnate. They could make (and sometimes break) laws as they wished, as long as they could present what they were doing as supportive of the ideals of rational civilization.

It’s good to be the king.

LinguisticsNetwork is “an interactive online resource for linguistics and language-related studies”; it’s a for-profit thing, and I’m not pushing it here, but Bathrobe sent me an e-mail saying:

They have a number of free exercises where you can test your knowledge of linguistics. It starts with this real beauty about nodes. Having done the exercise, I now know that I know NOTHING about linguistics. Perhaps the readership of LH might find the same (although I’m willing to swallow my pride and admit that I’m wrong).

I can reassure him that plenty of linguists don’t bother with the details of this particular theoretical approach, but it’s always fun to take tests; they’ve got them for phonology and phonemic symbols as well. Enjoy!

A couple of comments in this thread have drawn my attention to two of the most magnificent star names ever created, Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi. The former, the brightest star in the constellation Libra, is nonetheless called beta (β) Librae; its name is from Arabic الزُّبَانَى الشَّمَالِيّ‎ (az-zubānā š-šamāliyy), ‘the Northern Claw.’ The latter, symmetrically enough, is الزُّبَانَى الْجَنُوبِيّ‎ (az-zubānā l-janūbiyy), ‘the Southern Claw,’ and despite being called α Librae is the second-brightest star in the constellation. As to why a scale has claws, you can get the backstory in this Star Gazers video (if you’re in a rush [spoiler!]: they used to be part of Scorpius, the scorpion).

Susanna Zaraysky writes for BBC Travel (which tends to do a surprisingly good job with language stories) about the traditional language of Bosnian Jews (and, of course, many others):

When the Jews left Spain, they took their language with them. Over the last 500 years, the language has maintained the structure of medieval Spanish and sounds more similar to some forms of Latin American Spanish than European Spanish. “We could not have contact with Spain and the Spanish language, and therefore we have a special language that we speak,” Kamhi said.

Today, the language is known by a number of different names: Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo, Spanyolit, Djidió (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Haketia (in North Africa). And, according to Unesco, it is one of the world’s 6,000 languages that are at risk of extinction.

Before World War Two, Sarajevo’s Jewish population numbered around 12,000, and the people even printed their own newspaper in Ladino. After the Holocaust, only about 2,500 Jews returned to Sarajevo, with many of them restricting their use of Ladino to the home so as not to stand out. Since the post-World War Two Jewish community in Sarajevo was so small, the Sephardic Jews had to share a synagogue – the one where Kamhi led services until 2017 – with the Ashkenazi Jewish community, whose ancestors had relocated to Slavic countries from Germany and France following the Crusades. Because the Ashkenazi Jews primarily spoke Yiddish, the blended community relied on the Serbo-Croatian language to communicate, limiting the use of Ladino even further.

There are some excellent stories (“‘Ladino saved my life in World War Two,’ Albahari, a Bosnian Holocaust survivor, told us as we sat together in the Sarajevo Synagogue”) and an inevitably depressing conclusion (“‘The new generation doesn’t speak Ladino, they speak modern Spanish,’ Albahari said”); read the whole thing. Thanks, Trevor, and get well soon!

John Schwartz reports for the NY Times on an interesting bit of linguistic trivia concerning the history of space exploration:

So which is it? How do you pronounce Gemini? In “First Man,” the new film about the Neil Armstrong and the moon landing, astronauts and NASA officials say “GEM-uh-knee.” But the first pronunciation in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary Fifth Edition, the standard work used by The New York Times to settle such matters, the first pronunciation is GEM-uh-neye,” which is the way many of us say it. Or, to use the precise dictionary typography, jem′ə nī΄ versus jem′ənē΄. […]

On Tuesday, Bob Jacobs, a spokesman for NASA, said that the “knee” pronunciation is part of the agency’s culture, and serves almost as an insider’s shibboleth — a word whose proper delivery identifies you as someone in the know. “If you get it right,” he said, “you’re part of the space club.” He likened it to the Nashville street Demonbreun, which is pronounced Da-MUN-bree-un, and not like what some have characterized as “demon pickle juice.” Mr. Jacobs also suggested that the pronunciation could have to do with the early space program’s Southernness, in the way that “every pilot speaks like Chuck Yeager.”

And yet it wasn’t always so clear, said Bill Barry, the space agency’s chief historian. Back in the time of the Gemini program, “it kind of depended who you were talking to, and what day of the week it was,” and even varied from NASA locations, he said. […]

As for the filmmakers, Dr. Barry said that he suggested to them that for the sake of clarity, they pick one pronunciation and stick with it. “From my perspective, from 50 years later, whichever you want to use is fine.”

Yes! They’re both fine! Use whichever you prefer! I’m glad this invaluable message — applicable in many other contexts — is being spread. (For what it’s worth, I use the neye version.)

Kevin Mims begins a NY Times Book Review essay by citing Jessica Stillman (a personal library too big to get through in a lifetime “isn’t a sign of failure or ignorance,” but rather “a badge of honor”) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world most dramatically), then continues:

Taleb argues that a personal library “should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

I don’t really like Taleb’s term “antilibrary.” A library is a collection of books, many of which remain unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how that differs from an antilibrary. A better term for what he’s talking about might be tsundoku, a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read. My personal library is about one-tenth books I have read and nine-tenths tsundoku. […]

In truth, however, the tsundoku fails to describe much of my library. I own a lot of story collections, poetry anthologies and books of essays, which I bought knowing I would probably not read every entry. People like Taleb, Stillman and whoever coined the word tsundoku seem to recognize only two categories of book: the read and the unread. But every book lover knows there is a third category that falls somewhere between the other two: the partially read book. Just about every title on a book lover’s reference shelves, for instance, falls into this category. No one reads the American Heritage Dictionary or Roget’s Thesaurus from cover to cover. One of my favorite books is John Sutherland’s “The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction.” It’s a fascinating, witty and very opinionated survey of Victorian England’s novels and novelists, from the famous (Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray) to the justifiably forgotten (Sutherland describes the novels of Tom Gallon as “sub-Dickensian fiction of sentiment and lowlife in London, typically written in an elliptical, rather graceless style”). I’ve owned the book for 20 years and derived great enjoyment from it, but I doubt I’ll ever manage to read every word of it or of dozens of other reference books on my shelves.

He has more to say about “the twilight zone of the partially read”; I find it odd that his primary association is with reference works rather than books you simply stop in the middle of, but his point is certainly valid. (I leave it to my Japanese-speaking readers to say whether tsundoku is a real word and means what it’s alleged to mean.) And the mention of dictionaries prompts me to link to this essay by Michael Adams about their history and uses; here’s a sample paragraph:

After World War II, colleges and universities nationwide required that new students buy the American College Dictionary or the Merriam-Webster Collegiate. Like grammar handbooks, dictionaries supported learning in introductory writing courses, and, for consistency, students and faculty, it was thought, should all refer to the same one. Dictionaries became an icon of the college experience, certified the intellectual status of their owners, and marked the rising social tide of higher education. When you walked into a room and saw a dictionary, you saw it as proof that the owner belonged to your tribe, though, to be sure, you also had to find certain novels, poems, or political manifestos on shelves nearby.

There’s lots of information there, as well as some great illustrations.