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Joel at Far Outliers posted a passage from A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, by Michael Axworthy, that ends with a nice summation of a phenomenon that’s been mentioned here before:

Nader’s campaigns are a reminder of the centrality of Persia to events in the region, in ways that have parallels today. A list of some of Nader’s sieges—Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, Herat, Kabul—has a familiar ring to it after the events of the first years of the twenty-first century. It is worth recalling that Persians were not strangers in any of the lands in which Nader campaigned. Although he and his Safavid predecessors were of Turkic origin and spoke a Turkic language at court, the cultural influence of Persian was such that the language of the court and administration in Delhi and across northern India was Persian, and diplomatic correspondence from the Ottoman court in Istanbul was normally in Persian, too. Persian hegemony from Delhi to Istanbul would, in some ways, have seemed natural to many of the inhabitants of the region, echoing as it did the Persian character of earlier empires and the pervasive influence of Persian literary, religious, and artistic culture.

I might add that Persian/Farsi is quite an easy language to learn (and well worth it for the poetry alone).

This New Maine News story is just a bit of fluff, and I really should have posted it on April 1, but what the hell, it’s still snowing occasionally here so it resonates with me. Here’s the start:

Orono — Linguists studying the distinct Maine dialect believe they’ve cataloged every possible swear word Mainers have for snow.

Currently there are 73 swear words Mainers use to describe snow, but linguists with the University of Maine say that number could increase.

“There are obvious ones, the ones that most easily spring to mind when you first have to shovel a path through the dooryard,” said lead researcher Donna Ingalls.

“As the season progresses and snow accumulates, more words enter the lexicon.”

Ingalls said by March, Mainers are stringing together seemingly unrelated swear words to describe the late-season snow.

“Oh, absolutely. It almost sounds like a random barking of obscenities, but the way the Maine dialect works, the swears are often repeated for emphasis in long, long rants.”

Ever-resourceful Mainers will even sometimes invent swearwords on the spot.

And yeah, having to shovel the snow around the mailbox so the goddamn friggin mailman doesn’t have to get out of his goddamn delivery truck is a goddamn pain.

I don’t do video games, but those of you who do might be interested in this one (Andrew Webster reporting for The Verge):

Initially, the premise for Heaven’s Vault sounds like a typical video game. You play as a young woman named Aliya Elasra, accompanied by her temperamental robot Six, and together you explore a series of moons that were once home to a mysterious ancient civilization. But the ruins aren’t filled with violent aliens to kill or powerful weapons to discover. Instead, what the civilization left behind is words, and it’s your job to figure out what they mean.

Heaven’s Vault is the next release from Inkle, the British studio best known for the globe-trotting adventure 80 Days. It’s a 3D open-world game built by a team of just eight people, though the scale of the world — or worlds since Heaven’s Vault takes place across a network of moons — isn’t the most impressive thing about it. Instead, it’s the language. In order to make players feel like true archaeologists, Inkle created an entirely new hieroglyphic language from scratch. At first, you won’t understand a word of it, but as you play, you’ll not only start to understand the words, but also the society that created them. […]

The first time you see a hieroglyph, you essentially have to guess what it is. The game will show you a pictorial, and then give you a few options for what it might mean. A symbol could mean either “temple” or “garden,” and, initially, all you have to go on is the context of where the symbol is and what it looks like. If you guess wrong, you aren’t punished. In fact, the game lets you carry on thinking that could be the meaning of the word. As you explore, you’ll keep seeing symbols repeatedly and learn new ones that can give you a better idea of what others mean.

Sounds intriguing; thanks, bulbul!

Anna Bitong at BBC Travel writes about the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego; there’s stuff about their history and current status, but what concerns us is this passage:

That inspiration can be seen in a word that has garnered rapturous admirers and inspired many flights of the imagination. Mamihlapinatapai comes from the near-extinct Yaghan language. According to Vargas’ own interpretation, “It is the moment of meditation around the pusakí [fire in Yaghan] when the grandparents transmit their stories to the young people. It’s that instant in which everyone is quiet.”

But since the 19th Century, the word has held a different meaning – one to which people all over the world relate.

Magellan’s discovery of a ‘land of fire’ prompted more long-distance voyages to the region. In the 1860s, British missionary and linguist Thomas Bridges set up a mission in Ushuaia. He spent the next 20 years living among the Yaghans and compiled around 32,000 of their words and inflections in a Yaghan-English dictionary. The English translation of mamihlapinatapai, which differs from Vargas’ interpretation, debuted in an essay by Bridges: “To look at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something, which both parties much desire done but are unwilling to do.”

[Read more…]

I can’t really say how good Sam Allingham’s story in last week’s New Yorker is, because my enjoyment of it was overdetermined: it’s about a Russian-American taking a German class with people of different backgrounds, with discussion of various languages, such as this:

“Where do you live?” Kiril asked. He had to force himself to use the casual du. Sometimes, when he searched for German, Russian came to him instead, and he reverted to the patterns of childhood.

And I like the way Allingham renders the effect of the effortful German of the students (the class is conducted in German), mimicked in English:

“I like very much the park,” he said. “It is dark and cool, and in the park there are dogs and people and flowers and trees.”

The girl who played the piano murmured wordlessly. Perhaps she had similar feelings.

Kiril began to relax. “And . . . the park . . . is not . . .” Finally the correct word came to him. “Crowded.”

If you enjoy the story, you’ll want to read the interview with the author (“Learning a language means learning the rules to a seemingly endless series of these games, from the correct procedure for ordering coffee to the delicate art of asking your boss for a raise, none of which are quite the same as they are in English”) and perhaps listen to the author read his story.

Thanks to a Facebook post by Steven Lubman, I have discovered the excellent site Полка (polka.academy), which has nothing to do with dancing (‘polka’ in Russian is полька, with a palatalized l) — полка is the Russian word for ‘shelf,’ in this case ‘bookshelf,’ and when you go to the site you are confronted with a stylized row of Russian book spines and one face forward (at the moment it’s showing me Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, which is a good choice). If you click on the “books” link, you see the heading Главные произведения русской литературы, выбранные экспертами «Полки» [The main works of Russian literature, chosen by the experts of “Polka”], followed by a list in order of rating (the top one is Hero of Our Time, followed by Anna Karenina). You can have them listed chronologically, by title, or by author, and there’s a search box; as I wrote on FB:

I searched on Nabokov and was surprised to see they included Lolita, which wasn’t written in Russian! But I’m certainly not going to quarrel with that. The search function doesn’t work too well (when I searched on Gazdanov, I got only Призрак Александра Вольфа [The Spectre of Alexander Wolf], but then elsewhere I ran into my beloved Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire]), but somehow that seems fitting for Russian literature. Very much looking forward to exploring this.

There are discussions (by the experts) of each book included. Highly recommended for anyone who reads Russian.

This Wordorigins thread (derived from a Facebook post, shown as an image) is giving me so much pleasure I have to share my two favorites from it (so far). By NotThatGuy:

“Utnapishtim,” cried Gilgamesh, “Why
Do you get to live, while I die?”
“I can see that you’re vexed,”
[There’s a gap in the text]
The walls of Uruk are quite high!

By Dr. Techie:

There once was a king, Ozymandias,
Who no one had triumphed as grandly as.
But his statue fell down
In shards on the ground,
And now, nothing left but the sand, he has.

Mine isn’t as good (to be fair, I dashed it off pretty hastily), but what the hell, I’ll quote it anyway:

I was off to a wedding one day
When a crazy old man blocked my way.
As he clutched at my coat
He said “Once, on a boat…”
And I missed the whole wedding. Oy vey!

Peter Manson, a Scottish poet and translator, has a fine blog (and god bless the bloggers who keep stubbornly blogging despite the temptations of Facebook and Twitter); a couple of years ago he posted “An essay on poetry and language,” which starts with the proposition “All language is ambiguous” and quickly segues into a discussion of poetry (“Poetry is what happens when a reader can no longer refer a piece of language back to a speaker to unpack its ambiguities”). He describes Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Soliloquy, “an unedited 500-page transcript of every word Goldsmith spoke during one week in 1996,” and provides an excerpt (beginning “I got. I got every I get all my attitude from him too, my outlook on life. Yeah. I wish I had a sunnier temperament. I’m a little dark, you know. Slightly dark. I don’t know where I would get that from. Yeah. I tell you, aw, I’m gawna sit out here all day and watch the goddamned fisherman. Why not?”) that makes me want to read the whole thing. He ends with an excerpt from a book of his own, Adjunct: an Undigest, which “began in 1993 as an attempt to gather together those interesting or funny examples of found language to which my reading habits had begun to sensitise me”; I’m afraid my eyes glazed over reading the excerpt, but I may just not have been in the mood for it. In between, he has this passage, which I like very much:

3.

Artefacts of language are the most human objects in the world, other than those objects which are human beings. Indelibly marked by human consciousness, they are nevertheless clearly not alive. To interact with such objects on their own terms is to confront our own mortality in a way not open to us by other means, and can be a significant test of our humanity. It’s reasonable to expect a human being to accept other humans for what they are: not rejecting or doing violence to their physical person, not imagining a narrative for them then restricting our sense of their potential to the limits thus placed upon them. The practice of accepting texts for what they are, in the fullness of their potential for branching off into realms of meaning unforeseen by any author, is analogous to the practice of human tolerance, and might be considered a useful rehearsal for it.

4.

The writer who accepts this as a fact of life must accept the consequences. Her writing will no longer feel like an act of communication: she may even come to fear the act of writing, dreading the moment when, Midas-like, her living thought freezes into dead matter on the page. If it’s unlikely that such a writer could experience her work as in any simple sense expressive or confessional, there are nevertheless levels on which it can still be a profound act of reconciliation with our status as material beings in a material universe, animate only for the time being.

Thanks, Trevor!

Anatoly Liberman has an OUPBlog post in which he describes various theories about a common phrase and comes to no conclusion, but I think the facts and conjectures he adduces are interesting enough to pass on:

So long is amazing, because it emerged no one knows where and why, and showed unexpected tenacity. A correspondent from New York wrote in 1880: “This is a queer expression [queer meaning “strange, odd”], used in the sense of ‘good-bye’, often heard in the United States, but always by uneducated people. Sailors, on bidding you good day, say ‘So long’. Coloured people in the Midland States employ these words. It is not of recent adaptation, being fully seventy-five years old.”

This note is remarkable from several points of view. First, the writer’s memory proved to be unusually accurate: so long indeed surfaced approximately when he thought it did. As a rule, such observations cannot be trusted, for words and expressions usually turn out to be much older than people think, which is natural: quite some time separates the first occurrence of a word in print from the time it is appropriated by the speaking community, and of course, an indefinitely long “oral” period precedes the date of the word’s appearance in a book or even in a newspaper article. Second, reference to sailors will recur in our records more than once. Finally, the social strata in which the phrase originated is characterized as low, and this observation will also be confirmed by others.[…]

According to another note in my database, so long was frequently heard in Liverpool, a great sea port. According to a statement by a man from Grahamstown, South Africa, so long was also “a common salutation in [that colony] amongst the English and Dutch.” He added: “I remember hearing it amongst the Blue Noses of Nova Scotia and the New Brunswick.” Nova Scotia is a maritime province of Canada, and for the reason unknown to me, Bluenose is the nickname of an inhabitant of that province. […]

The next note at my disposal, written twenty years later, also deserves our close attention: “There seems to be a consensus of opinion… that this is peculiarly a sailor’s phrase…. Mr. Frank Bullen, at the conclusion of the ‘Cruise of the Cachalot’, says, ‘And now, as the sailor says at parting, ‘So long’, and it would appear to be a farewell peculiarly appropriate to the vicissitudes of a sailor’s life…. It is common not only on the coasts of South America (among the English), but also in South Africa among the English and Dutch, and in London.” Frank Thomas Bullen—The Cruise of the Cachalot is his best book—knew what he was talking about. Now, more than a century after the publication of that letter, I am afraid, there is no consensus on the origin of so long. Yet, despite all doubts, the idea that we are dealing with a sailor’s phrase seems right. If this idea is acceptable, so long is, most probably, a garbled version of some foreign word (compare the history of galoot). […]

Thus, we are invited to choose among several improbable and several suspicious hypotheses. If the etymon of so long is Arabic, then in what part of the world and under what circumstances was the English formula coined? Somewhere, seamen may have greeted one another by saying something that sounded to the English ear as so long. If so, the phrase was brought to the bars frequented by sailors, quite possibly in the New World, spread from there, and later made its way to the British Isles. As time went on, it lost its slangy tinge. Not much of a conclusion, but so long as (= British English as long as) we have no solid facts, it is wiser to stay away from irresponsible guesses. “Fare thee well, and if for ever,/ Still for ever fare three [sic] well,” or, in less Byronic words, so long!

Liberman sometimes annoys me, but I am in agreement with his principle about facts and guesses.

How have I overlooked the existence of the blog Sententiae Antiquae all these years? From their About page:

Through this blog, and the accompanying Twitter feed (@sentantiq), we aim to bring you some of the most famous (and also most confounding) quotations from the ancient world. In addition, we also take pleasure in shining lights on some of the forgotten shelves and corners of classical heritage. You’ll find tidbits from the Archaic Age in Greece all the way through imperial Rome and up to the fall of Byzantium. By Jove, if there is something somewhat classically oriented later than that, you might find it too.

In the real world, we are teachers and compulsive readers. At times, we even dabble in some forms of scholarship as well (longer translations, commentaries etc.). So Sententiae Antiquae is something of a digital commonplace book, replicating all the delights and horrors of ancient authors like Aulus Gellius, Aelian, Macrobius and Philostratus. We are not saying we are anywhere near as good as these guys. But we do quote from them…

I found out about it when the eagle-eyed Trevor Joyce sent me this recent post, an extended quote from Hugh E.P. Platt’s A Last Ramble in the Classics (1906). The passage is about English words for which there are no classical equivalents; I’ll excerpt the same bit Trevor did in his e-mail (he always knows how to get my attention):

With the rise of bigotry, hypocrisy naturally increased also. There is, I think, no Latin word which carries the same associations as our ‘hypocrite.’ Simulator, dissimulator correspond rather to the English ‘dissembler.’ But by a hypocrite we generally mean not merely a dissembler, but a person who pretends to maintain an unusually high standard of morals or of religion. This vice is alleged by the rest of the world to be peculiarly English, I fear not without reason. Certainly the bank directors, the solicitors, the company promoters, who have distinguished themselves among us by their frauds, have almost without exception been persons who made a conspicuous profession of piety. When a famous French actress first appeared in England, the late Mr. Edward Pigott, then examiner of plays, warned her : ‘Remember that whenever you play in this country you will have before you five hundred Tartuffes.’ But the ancient world also had its hypocrites. Cicero more than once draws a lively picture of such a character in Piso, consul b. c. 58; and when Aeneas explains to Dido that his shabby treatment of her was due to high conscientious motives, one thinks for the moment that Aeneas must really have been an Englishman.

Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!