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Vera Dunham’s 1976 In Stalin’s Time is one of those books that routinely gets called “seminal”; apparently for a year after it was published people talked about little else at gatherings of Russianists. Her theoretical point was about “the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen,” which she called the “Big Deal.” Her analysis of the complexities of that relationship and the way it changed after WWII dropped like a thunderbolt into the stagnant, simplistic assumptions about “totalitarianism” and the like that ruled American academia in those days, but it has long been assimilated and the field has moved on. What makes the book worth reading today — and it is very much worth reading — is its illustration of her points by lots and lots of quotes from the formulaic official literature of the late Stalin period (from 1945 to his death in 1953), novels and poems and plays that were avoided with a shudder by other scholars who preferred to concentrate on “real literature” (Dunham proudly said she had waded through mountains of elephant shit to write the book), and explication of the plots in terms of the changing relations between party officials and the managers of factories and farms (and between men and women, and between front-line veterans and those who had spent the war trying to keep the country functioning). Those things seem dry when presented theoretically, but when you have seen them in action (in her summmaries and quotes, of course — nobody wants to replicate her work of reading the stuff in full!) you will understand them in your bones.

Nevertheless, I have complaints (when do I not have complaints?), and I am here to share them with you. First off, the book needed a copyeditor — even more than most books do, since English was not the author’s native language (she was born Vera Sandomirskaya in Russia, came to the United States in 1940, and married H. Warren Dunham in 1942). The very phrase “Big Deal” is unfortunate, and somebody should have suggested a replacement; she was presumably thinking of FDR’s New Deal, but the ironic slang sense of “big deal” makes it problematic. Her English is good but occasionally shaky, and I’m not sure whether “scroundrel” on p. 188 is a typo or her own charming mangling. To my mind, her obsession with “meshchanstvo” (usually translated “petty bourgeoisie” or “philistinism”) betrays a typically Russian intelligentsia contempt for the pursuit of the pleasant things of life, whether potted plants, canaries, a television, or whatever, and she should have been urged to rethink that bit of rhetoric. But to be honest, the thing that most annoys me about the book is her insistence on replacing the names of most of the characters in the works she discusses by cutesy English nicknames; it’s bad enough when she at least provides the original Russian form — “Mrs. ‘All-or-Nothing’ (Kraineva)” — but it’s infuriating when she doesn’t, as when on page 190 she calls a particular type of pedantic party functionary a “talmudist” (itself a very unfortunate term when discussing this period with its anti-Semitic campaign against “cosmopolitans”) and then calls a character in Ocheretin’s Pervoe derzanie (First daring) “Comrade Talmudist,” even maintaining that pseudonym in a quote from the book (“You work, Comrade Talmudist, from nine to five…”)! For that, I want to call her in and give her the sort of dressing-down the experienced party officials in these books give young hotheads who are messing up kolkhoz production.

But now that I’ve gotten that off my chest: it’s a really good book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the period.

The Public Domain Review describes a phenomenon which, if I ever was aware of it, I had forgotten — Napoleon I’s grudging but dogged study of the English language:

The British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments, but he could not have what he most craved — family, power, Europe. To make matters worse, he had virtually nothing to read. Newspapers were banned, and those he did manage to get his hands on were nearly all in English. That was the main reason why, on January 16, 1816, three months after landing on the island, he decided to learn the language of his captors. For the following three months he studied nearly every afternoon. The daily labour produced a mixed bag of verbal fruit; a sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet taste of his time on the island where he would end his days, six years later, aged 51.

Far more than rote learning conjugations, declensions, and articles, Napoleon enjoyed scribbling his thoughts in French and then translating them into English. The results were often wistful:

When will you be wise
Never as long as j should be in this isle
But j shall become wise after having passed the line
When j shall land in France j shall be very content…

My wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong if he will be able to trink a bottle of wine at dinner j shall [toast] with him… / The women believe they [are] ever prety / The time has not wings / When you shall come, you shall see that j have ever loved you.

His English teacher was Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, an historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena. The Count would later turn their fifteen months of conversations into a publishing sensation, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1822–23). The book recorded Napoleon’s day-to-day life on the island, his sentiments on religion and philosophy, his argument that the ideals of the French Revolution had lived on in the empire. It would be printed and reprinted throughout the century, and do much to turn the perception of Napoleon from a dictator into a liberator — a slayer of tyrannical dynasties more than a founder of his own. It is also the primary window through which we can view the development of Napoleon’s English.

According to Count Las Cases, his pupil “had an extraordinary intelligence but a very bad memory: this latter particularly upset him.” As a result, Napoleon grasped English grammar with an impressive ease but vocabulary with a painful slowness.

When it came to speaking English, the Count relates, “The pupil wished only to recognise [French] pronunciation.” Perhaps the former emperor could not bear to do his vanquishers the honour of speaking their language their way. Perhaps his approach to English mirrored his general approach to foreign territory — he liked to make it his own:

Even in his own language, [he] had a way of garbling proper nouns; as for foreign words, he pronounced them just as he pleased. Once they left his mouth, whatever way he had pronounced them, they remained forever that, because he had, once and for all, lodged them in his head in that way.

Out of this situation arose a completely new language, Las Cases tells us, only comprehensible to pupil and teacher.

There are more examples of his English writing, as well as a copy of Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène open to a page where you can read about the ex-Emperor’s mathematical prowess as well as the beginning of the section on his English. Thanks, Trevor!

Ben Cohen writes for Global Voices about the linguistic (and other) issues involved producing a Russian version of RuPaul’s Drag Race:

Since forming three years ago, the RuPaul VKontakte group has attracted a dedicated team of 10 translators and has expanded to reach an audience of over 5,000 regular viewers across the former Soviet Union. They’ve translated over 70 episodes of the show (now in its ninth season), in which men assume female personae, dress as women, and compete for the title of “America’s Drag Superstar” through a series of grueling performance challenges. […]

Translating one episode of the show can take anywhere from four days to two and a half weeks. As soon as an episode becomes available, the translators communicate through a group chat and decide amongst themselves who will take which section, usually a 10-20 minute clip of episodes that run up to 45 minutes long. Everyone sends in their translations to a designated editor who then splices together the subtitles. “Everyone does as much as they can,” Nikita said.

Still, sometimes the translators get stuck. Take, for example, the rap challenge in season 6, during which contestant Joslyn Fox (whose real name is Patrick Joslyn) used the word “motherfishin.’” In drag culture, “fishy” describes a drag queen who has such a feminine appearance they could be mistaken for being female in real life. And to a native or near-native English speaker, the play on words with a certain expletive would not be lost. But without such a vocabulary in Russian, the play on words could be lost to foreign viewers. Nikita explained, “The biggest problem with translating RuPaul’s Drag Race is a lack of developed drag culture in Russia, and with that, a lack of vocabulary associated with it.”

“I thought about [motherfishin’] for two months and then I had an epiphany,” Elizabeth Rusakova, one of the group’s primary translators, told RuNet Echo. “There is a fish called sterliad’ (sterlet), and it sounds like a combination of the word sterva (witch) and bliat’ (f***)…In my head, something clicked, and I realized that is the perfect word.”

Sometimes, it’s a little less complicated. When one of the contestants wins a challenge, RuPaul always tells them “Condragulations!” which the team on VKontakte routinely changes to pozdragliayu instead of the usual pozdravliayu (congratulations), thus creating an equivalent vocabulary for Russian viewers.

I applaud their ingenuity! (I should note that although blyad’ is the functional equivalent of fuck, its literal meaning is ‘whore.’ For “sterlet,” see this LH post.) Thanks, Bathrobe!

Dan Nosowitz has an Atlas Obscura piece on what linguists call taboo deformation; he starts and ends with “dagnabbit,” along the way discussing the idea that “if someone finds out your true name […] that person will have all sorts of power over you,” the Jewish name of God, and “mother-in-law languages,” but the bit Trevor excerpted, quite understandably, when he sent me the link is this:

“Bear” is not the true name of the bear. That name, which I am free to use because the only bear near where I live is the decidedly unthreatening American black bear, is h₂ŕ̥tḱos. Or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized base language for languages including English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. “Because bears were so bad, you didn’t want to talk about them directly, so you referred to them in an oblique way,” says Byrd.

H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises, became the basis for a bunch of other words. “Arctic,” for example, which probably means something like “land of the bear.” Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed to snag some of the bear’s power. But in Germanic languages, the bear is called…bear. Or something similar. (In German, it’s Bär.) The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”

In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better: the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.” These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.

It’s worth noting that not everyone was that scared of bears. Some languages allowed the true name of the bear to evolve in a normal fashion with minor changes; the Greek name was arktos, the Latin ursos. Still the true name. Today in French, it’s ours, and in Spanish it’s oso. The bear simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the warmer climes of Romance language speakers, so they didn’t bother being scared of its true name.

Of course, the idea of a “true name” of the bear or anything else is untenable (and the PIE word itself may have been a taboo deformation or euphemism), and the hypothesis that “the bear simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the warmer climes of Romance language speakers, so they didn’t bother being scared of its true name” shouldn’t be presented as settled fact, but hey, it’s just a blog post, and it’s a fun roundup. Thanks, Trevor!

David Adger’s TLS review (paywalled, sorry) of a book by Daniel Cloud begins:

The Domestication of Language offers a proposal about the general principles that lead to words having the meanings that they do. These principles, which Daniel Cloud takes to be akin to those that underlie the domestication of crops or livestock, involve speakers engaging in a more or less rational and deliberate process that prunes away certain terms for certain concepts over time. Just as farmers might choose to propagate plants with the best yield, or hunters might breed the most loyal dogs, communities of speakers choose to use and teach words which best support their culture.

You probably have your doubts already, and they will only be reinforced when I tell you that Cloud is a philosopher with no background in linguistics. That in itself wouldn’t be worth reporting — the world is full of bad books about language written by people with no background in linguistics — but what leads me to post about it is the fact that the reviewer is an actual linguist, who does a polite but thorough demolition job:

Cloud simply doesn’t draw, in his arguments, on any of the vast amount of linguistic work on language structure and language change, choosing instead to use analogies with the evolution of species. In his references I counted maybe four pieces that could charitably be called works in linguistics, and these serve to back up passing comment in the book, rather than to provide evidence for a proposal. I’m not just cavilling here because I’m a theoretical linguist. The lack of discussion of language, in a book ostensibly about language, matters. It has an impact on both the novelty and the consistency of the argument.

Much of the book’s discussion of the social shaping of language is old hat. Traditional and modern studies in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics have proposed principles that govern how word meanings change, and these principles explain a huge range of actual facts. […] Just as perplexing, especially since this is the focus of the book, is the absence of discussion of work on word meanings (what linguists call lexical semantics). […] Things are just as bad when we turn to language acquisition. […] On top of this, when Cloud does discuss language, he gets many basics wrong.

My hat is off to the TLS for assigning the review to someone qualified to do the job, and I am allowing myself to hope that their example will be more widely followed.
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This Quartzy piece by Annaliese Griffin is basically clickbait, but it’s another reminder of how out of touch with the current state of my language I am; apparently the word dank has developed all sorts of trendy uses:

[Marijuana:] Weed is dank’s breakout moment from stolid adjective to countercultural buzzword—and a wholesale flip from an indication of mild unpleasantness to utmost excellence. A dank basement is not a good thing; dank bud is highly desirable. […]

[Beer:] Though Heineken should definitely be described as skunky, no craft beer fan would call Heineken dank. Very hoppy, cloudy IPAs are dank, which seems to be both a reference to their generally high alcohol content and their funky, green resinous flavors. This style has become known as a New England IPA, though it is produced all over the country, and there appears to be a cottage industry in finding ways to incorporate “dank” when naming such a beer. […]

[General dankness:] In certain circles (read: young bros), calling something “dank” is just the newest way to say it’s cool. This is a subtle shift from calling high quality weed dank—you’re not differentiating a good product from a bad here, you’re just saying that something rules. If this doesn’t roll off the tongue naturally, best to just let this one pass you by. In a profile of Jonah Reider “the dorm-room chef” he reportedly texts a buddy to let him know that the bone marrow they had been discussing turned out to be, “so dank.” Enough said?

She winds up with “dank memes,” and I will sign on to her parting remark: “I’m not even going to wade in here because truly, a dank meme is in the eye of the beholder.” Are you familiar with this mot of the moment? (Thanks, Martin!)

I remember those halcyon days (was it really only a few weeks ago?) when I picked up Leskov’s first novel, Некуда [Nekuda, conventionally translated No Way Out, although the novel itself has never been translated; the Russian word is rather ‘nowhere (to go),’ but you can’t make a good title out of that]. I knew it had been highly controversial when it was published in 1864, and its 700 pages were theoretically somewhat daunting, but I’d liked everything of Leskov’s I’d read, and I was eager to give it a go.

Then I started it, and within a couple of chapters I was bowled over and expecting great things. I had the vague idea it was about radical politics, but Leskov immediately introduces the reader to two young women, Lizaveta (Liza) Bákhareva and Evgenia (Zhenni) Glovátskaya, who have been best friends at boarding school and are now returning to their home town, a provincial city in the Black Earth region, doubtless not all that far from Leskov’s own Oryol Gubernia. Zhenni is a tall, raven-haired beauty of a quiet, peaceable disposition; Liza is shorter and fierier, eager to read, learn, and think for herself. On the way home they stop at the convent where Liza’s aunt is abbess; as Anna Bakhareva she had been a famous beauty who had once danced with Emperor Alexander I, but she had plighted her troth to a young man who was exiled to Siberia (implicitly in connection with the Decembrist revolt) and sent her a note asking her to forget him, upon which she joined the convent and became Mother Agnia. While capable of stern piety and aristocratic hauteur, she is good-hearted and supportive at every turn of Liza’s independence. At night, the girls have a talk with young Sister Feoktista, who tells them how she became a nun: she had made a love match and was happily pregnant when she had a craving for a kind of fish stew and insisted her husband bring her some, whereupon he fell through the ice on the river and drowned, his family (who’d never liked her) threw her out, and she took the veil. When they get to their respective homes, the girls settle into their family lives again, Zhenni easily and Liza unhappily — her family loves her but doesn’t understand her, and her mother uses fainting spells to get her way. Eventually they try to marry her off to an oaf in uniform, whereupon she flees to Zhenni, and after the intervention of Mother Agnia her father agrees to let her be and to order her all the magazines and books she wants.
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Victor Mair has a Log post focusing on a trivial example of misspeaking (or misreading) by Xi Jinping, but what interested me was a section on the etymology of the name “Gesar” (quoted from the same Wikipedia article recently mentioned at LH by David Eddyshaw):

It has been proposed on the basis of phonetic similarities that the name Gesar reflects the Roman title Caesar, and that the intermediary for the transmission of this imperial title from Rome to Tibet may have been a Turkic language, since kaiser (emperor) entered Turkish through contact with the Byzantine Empire, where Caesar (Καῖσαρ) was an imperial title. Some think the medium for this transmission may have been via Mongolian Kesar. The Mongols were allied with the Byzantines, whose emperor still used the title. Numismatic evidence and some accounts speak of a Bactrian ruler Phrom-kesar, specifically the Kabul Shahi of Gandhara, which was ruled by a Turkish From Kesar (“Caesar of Rome”), who was father-in-law of the king of the Kingdom of Khotan around the middle of the 8th century CE. In early Bon sources, From Kesar is always a place name, and never refers, as it does later, to a ruler. In some Tibetan versions of the epic, a king named Phrom Ge-sar or Khrom Ge-sar figures as one of the kings of the four directions – the name is attested in the 10th century and this Phrom/Khrom preserves an Iranian form (*frōm-hrōm) for Rūm/Rome. This eastern Iranian word lies behind the Middle Chinese word for (Eastern) Rome (拂菻:Fúlǐn), namely Byzantium (phrōm-from<*phywət-lyəm).

In the comment thread, martin schwartz says (I’ve made minor fixes to spelling and punctuation for readability):

For all it matters, one may be more precise as to “Iranian” Frôm: It starts with West Middle Iranian–Middle Persian and Parthian, where Hrôm represents the Greek (early Byzantine) form for Rome, with the obligatory pre-aspirated initial R- (usually quasi-transcribed as Rh-). Within colloquial Parthian, fr- was frequently pronounced as hr-, e.g. hraman alongside framân ‘command’. By hypercorrection, other Parthian forms in hr- which are not from *fr, such as the hero-namr Hrêdôn, whose Old Iranian antecedent began with theta followed by r, then became fr- (thus Frêdôn, reflected in Classical Persian as Firêdôn). So too Hrôm became Frôm (for both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires), > Sogdian Frôm and eastward.

And Peter Golden adds:

On 拂菻 Fulin (phrōm-from< *phywət-lyəm>), cf. Old Turkic purum (Kül Tegin Inscription East,4, Bilge Qağan Inscription, East, 5) denoting Byzantium/Constantinople and/or Rome. I am sure that others will have more to say on this.

I find all this extremely interesting, and wonder if Hatters have more to say about it.

BBC News has a nice piece in which Angolan singer Toty Sa’Med explains why he writes songs in a language he barely knows:

My great-grandmother was the last person I knew personally who spoke only Kimbundu. She died 15 years ago. It’s a local language in Angola, spoken in the area surrounding the capital Luanda. That’s where I was born and brought up but, even so, I can only speak a few words. […]

When I was a teenager my headmaster decided to put Kimbundu in our timetable at school. This was unusual – it wasn’t on the curriculum in Luanda but I went to a private school. As a 13-year-old I didn’t realise that it was important – it was the lesson we used to chat through and disrupt.

I had some prejudices about Kimbundu. We were taught by society that the language wasn’t beautiful or civilised. We dismissed it because we thought it was a language for savages. When the Portuguese colonised Angola, they tried to diminish the value of Kimbundu and other local languages. Suppressing the culture made it easier to colonise us. […]

I decided that I can do my bit to keep the language alive by writing songs in the language. The problem is that I can’t construct a sentence. So I asked my friend to help. I wrote the lyrics in Portuguese and she translated them. […]

The next stage for me is to learn how to construct sentences for myself so I’ve enrolled at Kimbundu school. I’ve already persuaded my girlfriend to go to the classes with me and I want some of my friends to register as well so we can speak the language together. If we start now, maybe 60 years from now we will speak Kimbundu, with a few words of Portuguese, rather than the other way round.

Sure, it may be a quixotic attempt, but it’s a noble one, and I hope he gets others to go along with him. (Thanks, Eric!)

J. B. S. Haldane said that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”; further proof, if needed, is provided by Katie Davies at the Calvert Journal:

Bulgarian scientists have erected a new national monument to the Cyrillic alphabet on a remote island in Antarctica.

The joint Bulgarian-Mongolian project on Livingston Island — close to Bulgaria’s Antarctic base — was unveiled to mark Bulgaria’s Independence Day on 3 March.

Standing at 2.5 metres tall, the sculpture comprises four stacked blocks, each side decorated with Cyrillic lettering. Sealed boxes of soil from the Bulgarian cities of Varna, Pliska, Preslav, Veliko Tarnovo, Sofia were also left at the base of the sculpture, which is attached to the ground using two steel bolts.

The monument will stand alongside Antarctica’s first Orthodox church, the St Ivan Rilski chapel, which was erected close to the base in 2001. The outpost also has its own museum of early scientific instruments, and was named an official branch of the National Museum of History in Sofia in October 2012.

More information is available at this Transitions Online post. Thanks, Bathrobe!