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Since this delightful Richard Wilbur poem focuses on fine lexical distinctions, I figure it’s LH material; it’s from his 1966 collection The Mind-Reader (I reproduce the text in my Collected Poems 1943-2004):

Rillons, Rillettes

RILLETTES: Hors d’oeuvre made up of a mash of pigmeat, usually highly seasoned. Also used for making sandwiches. The Rillettes enjoying the greatest popularity are the Rillettes and Rillons de Tours, but there are Rillettes made in many other parts of France.

RILLONS: Another name for the Rillettes, a pigmeat hors d’oeuvre. The most popular Rillons are those of Blois.

      — A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, edited by Andre L. Simon

Rillons, Rillettes, they taste the same,
And would by any other name,
And are, if I may risk a joke,
Alike as two pigs in a poke.

The dishes are the same, and yet
While Tours provides the best Rillettes,
The best Rillons are made in Blois.
There must be some solution.
            Ah!—

Does Blois provide, do you suppose,
The best Rillettes de Tours, while those
Now offered by the chefs of Tours
Are, by their ancient standards, poor?

Clever, but there remains a doubt.
It is a thing to brood about,
Like non-non-A, infinity,
Or the doctrine of the Trinity.

Me, I am very fond of rillettes; I have no opinion on rillons.

For as long as I’ve studied Russian I’ve been bothered by the cognates год ‘year’ and годиться ‘to suit; to be fit (for), to be of use.’ I knew they were related, but I could never remember how the semantics worked. The first is from Proto-Slavic *godъ ‘suitable/right time; holiday, feast; time, term; year’ and the second from Proto-Slavic *godìti ‘to please,’ which suggests the basic idea, but I’m going to quote the extended discussion on pp. 142-43 of Louis Jay Herman’s Dictionary of Slavic Word Families (incidentally, Herman was one of those hyperpolyglots we’ve been hearing so much about — see this 2010 post):

From a semantic standpoint, the derivatives [of *god ‘good, suitable’] can be divided into three broad groups:

(1) The basic meaning is apparent in a wide variety of words expressing such notions as suitability, worthiness, convenience, advantage, pleasure and agreement (the last of these giving rise to the meanings “to hire,” “to negotiate” and “to decide”) or, with the addition of a negative prefix, such ideas as misfortune, displeasure and disagreement.

(2) The widespread secondary meaning “time” reflects a semantic shift from the notion of “suitable time” (still apparent in “festival, holiday,” “feast,” “opportunity”) to that of “time in general” (> “time, era,” “year,” “hour,” “occasion,” “to wait,” “to postpone,” “until”); it is implicit in the meanings “to happen,” “event” and “chance, accident.” (A similar progression in meaning is discussed in the note on Pol.-Cz.-S-C doba.)

(3) The verbal derivatives, in a reversal of the normal process of semantic development from the concrete to the abstract, have undergone successive changes in meaning from “to be suitable, pleasing” to “to aim,” “to throw” and, finally, “to hit” (whence, further, “to get (into)” and “to guess”).

Non-Slavic cognates include Eng. good and (reflecting the original Indo-European meaning of the root, “fitting, belonging together”) gather, together.

(I’ve replaced his underlines by italics, which he presumably would have used if the typography hadn’t been so primitive.) Among the words with a negative prefix he mentions is Russian негодование [negodovania] ‘indignation,’ which is extremely common in 19th-century literature and which, as it happens, was the spark that inspired this post.)

As I wrote in 2015, “We seem to discuss hyperpolyglots every couple of years (2009, 2011, 2013), so it’s time for another installment”; I’m a year late, but herewith a piece from the latest New Yorker, Judith Thurman’s “Maltese for Beginners” [archived] (that’s the title in the actual magazine — online they’ve chosen the more boring “The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages”). Much of it will be familiar to anyone who has read about such people before (the usual suspects are here: Mithridates, Cleopatra, Mezzofanti, et al.), but there’s more than enough new material to make it well worth reading. Thurman accompanies Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia to Malta for a week to watch him learn the basics of Maltese:

His father is a Peruvian businessman, and the family lives comfortably in Lima. His mother is a shop manager of Italian origin, and his maternal grandmother, who cared for him as a boy, taught him Piedmontese. He learned English in preschool and speaks it impeccably, with the same slight Latin inflection—a trill of otherness, rather than an accent—that he has in every language I can vouch for. Maltese had been on his wish list for a while, along with Uighur and Sanskrit. “What happens is this,” he said, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Nijmegen, where he was chatting in Mandarin with the owner and in Dutch with a server, while alternating between French and Spanish with a fellow-student at the institute. “I’m an amoureux de langues. And, when I fall in love with a language, I have to learn it. There’s no practical motive—it’s a form of play.” An amoureux, one might note, covets his beloved, body and soul. […]

People who live at a crossroads of cultures—Melanesians, South Asians, Latin-Americans, Central Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, plus millions of others, including the Maltese and the Shawi—acquire languages without considering it a noteworthy achievement. Leaving New York, on the way to the Netherlands, I overheard a Ghanaian taxi-driver chatting on his cell phone in a tonal language that I didn’t recognize. “It’s Hausa,” he told me. “I speak it with my father, whose family comes from Nigeria. But I speak Twi with my mom, Ga with my friends, some Ewe, and English is our lingua franca. If people in Chelsea spoke one thing and people in SoHo another, New Yorkers would be multilingual, too.” […]

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This ancient post got revived, and I enjoyed rereading it, but this time I wondered how you say “Duino Elegies” in Russian, so I looked it up in my formerly invaluable copy of Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Translated Names and Titles (now largely replaced by the internet, but still fun to use) and found Ду́инские эле́гии, which made me suspect that Duino might have the stress on the first syllable, an idea which had never occurred to me. So of course I googled, but the Wikipedia article didn’t indicate stress. It did add (Slovene: Devin, archaic German: Tybein), which didn’t help but was certainly intriguing. I learned that Duino is a frazione of Duino-Aurisina, and that article has the parenthetical (Slovene: Devin-Nabrežina, German: Thübein-Nabreschin, also Tybein; Triestine: Duin-Aurisina). The Italian article on Aurisina adds the following overwhelming mass of variants:

Nelle registrazioni tergestine, riferite a vigne e oliveti sulla costiera, sotto il ciglione dell’altopiano carsico, compare tra, il 1308 ed il 1349, come Lebrosina, Lebresina, Lobrosina, Labresina, Liurisina ed Aurisin, Aurisins, Auresinis, Auresinum, Aurexinum, Aurixinum, Aurisinum; le menzioni riferibili al villaggio danno Laurisina, Liusirina, Liurixina, Luirisinum.

L’utilizzazione ufficiale del toponimo italiano, attuale, è del 1927 (fino a tale data veniva utilizzato un toponimo italiano ricalcato da quello sloveno, ovvero Nabresina).

In sloveno le forme in uso ufficiale Nabrežina, affiancata dalla forma dialettale Nabržin, pur derivando dal medesimo antico toponimo, risultano modificate per influenza dell’espressione linguistica na bregu (ovvero sul ciglio).

All of which seemed worth a post, but I’m still wondering whether it’s /ˈduino/ or (as I’ve always said) /duˈino/. Do we know?

I had a little fun with Dostoevsky’s Вечный муж [The Eternal Husband] in this post, and I hadn’t intended to make a separate post for a short novel that most people have never heard of, but the more I read the better I liked it, and once I finished it I discovered it has been called “a small masterpiece” (Joseph Frank) and “technically perhaps the most accomplished of Dostoevsky’s works” (William J. Leatherbarrow), so I decided I should try figuring out what I thought and what other scholars have said and report back.

The plot is straightforward: Pavel Trusotsky, after the death of his wife Natalya, learns she had had lovers, and goes to Petersburg to confront them. One of them is Aleksei Velchaninov, with whom he had been friendly a decade earlier, and it is Velchaninov who is the point-of-view character — the book opens with his catching glimpses of Trusotsky and becoming increasingly paranoid (he doesn’t remember who he is) until the cuckolded husband barges drunk into his apartment in the wee hours of the morning, acting oddly, assuring him of his undying affection while hinting at darker things. Eventually Velchaninov learns of the existence of a daughter Liza, who he assumes must be his (she is around eight), and he begins plotting to take her away from the increasingly unhinged-seeming and hostile Trusotsky; there are, of course, further complications and developments, some tragic and some comic, and Velchaninov calls Trusotsky an “eternal husband” — one who has to have a wife and will be slavishly subservient to her, turning a blind eye to her infidelity.
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I thought I was used to the New Yorker‘s stylistic quirks, having read it for many decades now, but two words in this week’s Talk of the Town flummoxed me. From Jill Lepore’s lead Comment: “Serious malfeasance really began with Jackson, reached a pitch with Buchanan, then quieted down until the Presidencies of Grant and Harding, but all these shenanigans, he thought, seemed quaint compared with what Nixon stood accused of.” And from Tyler Foggatt’s piece: “From Queens, the tour might proceed to the Pierre hotel, in Manhattan […].” I can imagine an editorial theory under which one might talk of the Grant Presidency (though I would deprecate it), but “the Presidencies” just looks wrong. And I can’t wrap my mind around “the Pierre hotel” — is the idea that it is a generic hotel that happens to be qualified as Pierre, parallel to “the big hotel”? Is that really New Yorker style? I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be hoping something was a misprint, but here we are.

This might seem a picky issue, but the Hattery is the Home of Pickiness, and as an editor (emeritus) I’m all about things like where to place superscripts. So with no further ado, Sijin Xian’s On the Placement of Superscripts in Chinese Texts:

As an English-Chinese translator serving mostly nonprofit and research institutions, I’ve had the distinct honor of working on a wide range of publications, including research papers, policy recommendations, and international organization submissions. Naturally, I deal with a lot of footnotes (or endnotes) and, consequently, the superscripts that hold their places in the texts. While the placement of superscripts in English texts follows a conventional and consistent practice, things tend to be more lax and vague when it comes to Chinese.

Below are a few screenshots I made of Chinese translations of English-language reports by international organizations. Notice where the superscripts are placed in relation to the neighboring punctuation. […]

I opt for the practice where superscripts precede the punctuation. This is how I was taught to write Chinese-language reports in school and the style adopted by Chinese academic journals. (I had a hard time adapting to the superscript placement rule in English when I attended graduate school in the US).

While of course I am used to the superscript placement rule in English, I have to admit that her chosen solution looks pleasing in Chinese. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Kamau Muiga makes a point in his essay Bantu’s Swahili, or How to Steal a Language from Africa that I wouldn’t have thought needed to be made in this day and age: that Swahili is “a Bantu language, an African language that wholly emerged in Africa among Africans.” But apparently it’s still widely said to be “a lingua franca, a pidgin, between African languages and Arabic on the East African coast,” so I’m linking to his demolition of that idea. He starts out citing a passage from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s documentary series Wonders of the African World in which Sheikh Badawi, “one of Lamu’s most venerable Islamic scholars,” said “he carries little if any African ancestry, and that he can trace his own lineage back to Arabs who emigrated to the East African coast over the last few centuries and even back to the Prophet Muhammad himself”; I remember being struck by that myself when I saw the show — it was so evidently false. Muiga also quotes the great book that gave me my own first understanding of African history, W.E.B. DuBois’s The World and Africa. It’s a good, eloquent essay, and I thank Trevor for the link.

My brother sent me a 460-page pdf put out by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training called Argentina: Country Reader that includes interviews with embassy personnel who were there for stretches of duty between the 1930s and early 2000s, thinking I would be interested in the sections on the time when we were there, in the late 1960s, and I was indeed — I learned a lot about the politics and economy of the country that I had been unaware of when living there. I thought this passage from the interview with Edward M. Rowell, Political Officer, Buenos Aires (1965-1968) was LH material:

ROWELL: June, 1965. I was assigned to the Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had no workable Spanish. So I was assigned to the FSI for four or five weeks, the maximum amount of time I could be given that would allow me to get to Buenos Aires to be useful from the point of view of the Political Counselor and the DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission].

I arrived at the Foreign Service Institute. I said, “I already speak Portuguese and you have already tested me in that. Now I need to speak Spanish.” They started to give me, in knee jerk fashion, their usual four-to-six month course. I said, “No, I don’t have time to waste on that.” They said, “Well, you’ll have to take that course, because otherwise you won’t learn Spanish properly.” So I said, “Test me.” The first thing that they wanted me to do was to sit at home and listen to endless tapes on how to pronounce Spanish. I said, “I think that I can pronounce Spanish. Give me a tape and have me read something. I may not understand what it says, but I think that I can pronounce it.” And I could. They said, “Well, all right, we’ll get rid of those tapes.” It interested them that I didn’t mispronounce Spanish the way a Brazilian would. That’s what they were afraid of — not my American accent but my Brazilian accent.

They finally turned loose a linguist who listened to me and listened to my Portuguese. Then he said, “All right.” And they created a special program for me. I went out and bought some books at one of the university bookstores, probably at George Washington University. I brought them in. They gave me a special class, which involved one linguist, one language instructor, and one student left over from the previous Spanish language course who still didn’t have an onward assignment. That person could act as a foil. In five weeks I was at the 3 – 3 level [speaking level 3 – useful; reading level 3 – useful], because they paid attention to converting my Portuguese, rather than just teaching me Spanish from scratch. That was the genesis of the present language instruction which converts Spanish to Portuguese or Portuguese to Spanish. That is the six-week program that they have.

This is not language-related, but it’s a great story, so I’m quoting it:
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I’m in the middle of Dostoevsky’s 1870 novella Вечный муж [The Eternal Husband; The Permanent Husband]; it’s every bit as melodramatic as The Idiot (LH) or The Insulted and Injured (LH), but it’s not pretending to be anything more than an author playing with his favorite tropes (man meets mysterious quasi-double, little girl in danger, shouting, drunkenness, violence, prostitution), and I’m enjoying it greatly. (Of course, it’s also possible I’m acclimatizing to the wacky world of Dostoevsky.) I just got to this passage, which must have been shocking to readers of the time (the drunken quasi-double, out on the street with a couple of prostitutes, has turned on the central character, who he has been insisting is his dear friend, and the latter has threatened him with a raised fist):

– А знаешь ты, – произнес он гораздо тверже, почти как не пьяный, – нашу русскую …….? (И он проговорил самое невозможное в печати ругательство.) Ну так и убирайся к ней!

“Do you know,” he said a good deal more firmly, almost soberly, “our Russian …….? (And he uttered the most unprintable curse word.) “Well, off with you to it!”

The last sentence makes no sense in English, of course, and I can’t think of an equivalent at the moment. At any rate, I assume, since the missing noun is feminine, it is пизда ‘cunt,’ and the intended expression is “убирайся в пизду” (more often, I think, simply иди в пизду)… except that he uses the preposition к ‘to’ and not в ‘in(to).’ You can say “убирайся к черту” ‘go to the devil,’ except that черт is masculine and perfectly printable. You can say “убирайся к чертовой матери” ‘go to the devil’s mother,’ except that, again, it’s not unprintable. The most common and most unprintable expression of this kind is “убирайся на хуй” (again, more often simply иди на хуй) ‘go onto the cock,’ but again, хуй is masculine and the preposition is wrong. So I turn to my Russian readers in hopes of elucidation: what would Dostoevsky’s readers have understood this to represent? (Or is it a bit of mystification, like his talking about the intersection of two streets that don’t intersect?)

For everyone’s amusement, here’s how Fred. Whishaw rendered the passage in 1888:

“Do you understand Russian?” he asked more firmly, as though his fury had chased away the effects of drunkenness. “Very well, then, you are a——!” (here followed a specimen of the very vilest language which the Russian tongue could furnish); “and now you can go back to her!”

I don’t know if he didn’t understand the last line or (like me) had no idea how to convey a similar implication in English.