languagehat.com

Laura Esther Wolfson’s NY Times essay on staying in touch with exes (archived) is delightfully written and, I would say, good life advice, but this is the bit that made me post about it:

There’s another one I can still bring to the brink of ecstasy when he comes to my place. I do it now by reading out snippets of Tolstoy, Chekhov or Babel in the original. I’m a Russian translator, and on our first date, we bonded over our love of Russian literature. Next, I provide an off-the-cuff rendition in English, and then we look at several other translations and compare.

“I’ll never be able to do this with anyone else,” he said tearfully when he broke up with me, gesturing to my shelves of Russian books. It seems that he was right about that, because when the dust settled, we revived our little reading club.

It reminds me of Wanda pleading “Say something in Russian!” in A Fish Called Wanda.

From Phys.org: How many languages can babies learn? Study shows how Ghanaian babies grow up speaking two to six languages.

Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a research team led by the Potsdam psycholinguists Prof. Dr. Natalie Boll-Avetisyan and Paul O. Omane now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly—i.e. via radio, television or background conversations—while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them. The results of the study have now been published in the journal Cognitive Development.

The study, which examined 121 babies aged three to twelve months in Accra, the capital of Ghana, demonstrates a remarkable variety of language input in the early months of life. The children are regularly exposed to two to six languages. Strikingly, the number of caregivers the children have also ranges between two and six, and babies who have more adults in their daily lives who regularly take care of them also hear more different languages. In Ghana, families often live in so-called “compound buildings,” where many everyday interactions take place in the courtyard, where family, neighbors and other relatives play an important role in the lives of children.

“The idea that a child learns only one particular language from a single caregiver, as is often assumed in Western cultures, does not apply to these communities. Rather, children are surrounded by a rich spectrum of linguistic inputs from the very beginning,” says O. Omane, the first author of the study. […]

A key finding of the study is the distinction between direct and indirect language input. While English is primarily acquired through indirect channels such as television and official communication, children receive most of the local languages (such as Akan, Ga and Ewe) through direct contact with their caregivers. Accordingly, the proportion of direct input is higher in the local languages than in English, which is predominantly present as indirect input. […] As a result of their empirical study, the researchers call for a broader view in language research. The common assumptions do not reflect the diversity and complexity found in other cultural contexts such as Ghana. The study makes it clear that it is not only the number of languages a child hears, but also the diversity of people and the different forms of input that have a decisive influence on language acquisition.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I’m still loving Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (see this post), and I ran across a word I wasn’t familiar with but like a lot. Here’s the passage; I’ve bolded the word:

Je prétextai des migraines pour justifier ma torpeur. Stanislas, qui s’y connaît (il a du sang polonais), me donna une kyrielle d’astuces pour se remettre d’une gueule de bois.

The narrator complains of a headache, and his roommate offers him “une kyrielle d’astuces” — a bunch of tricks — for curing a hangover. But kyrielle is one of those words that’s not easily explainable in another language; that Wiktionary entry does a terrible job:

1. (dated) rigmarole
2. host, stream (de (“of”))
3. (poetry) kyrielle

The poetic sense is obscure enough it’s not in any of my bilingual dictionaries (though it’s the source of the word: the form has a refrain that recurs like “Kyrie” in the text of the mass); the only sense in general use is 2, and “host, stream” doesn’t do a good job of rendering it. My Collins Robert dictionary says “[injures, réclamations] string, stream; [personnes] crowd, stream; [objets] pile,” which is more helpful, while my giant Larousse doesn’t bother trying to generalize and says:

kyrielle [kirjɛl] une ~ de bambins fam a whole bunch of kids; une ~ d’insultes a string of insults; une ~ de mensonges a pack ᴏᴜ string of lies.

Anyway, I like it. A little later on I learned another good word:
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Joseph Berger reports for the NY Times (archived) on a literary discovery:

Altie Karper had been waiting for the call for years.

An editor at a Knopf imprint, she had long wanted to publish an English translation of the last novel by Chaim Grade, one of the leading Yiddish authors of the 20th century. Grade was less well known than the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but was held in greater esteem in some literary quarters. He’d written the novel in question through the 1960s and 1970s, and published it in installments in New York’s Yiddish newspapers. But he died in 1982 without publishing a final Yiddish version.

The following year, his mercurial widow, Inna Hecker Grade, signed a contract with Knopf to publish an English-language translation. To do that, Knopf needed the original pages in Yiddish, with Grade’s changes and corrections. But Inna, who held his papers, put up roadblocks. She offered to translate, but then went silent, rebuffing entreaties from two editors over the years and refusing to consent to another translator. Karper took over the project in 2007, with no success.

And then, in 2010, Inna died without any children or a will, leaving behind a morass of 20,000 books, manuscripts, files and correspondence in their cluttered Bronx apartment. The Bronx public administrator turned the papers over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel.

The galleys, if they existed, were somewhere in there.

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I confess I’m not impressed with Jackson Arn’s New Yorker essay on the color red (Feb. 10, 2025; archived); it’s classic thumb-sucking, pseudo-eloquent philosophizing with infinite regard for the writer’s feelings about stuff and minimal interest in, you know, facts. It’s the kind of piece that uses “we” to make the author’s whims seem like universals (“unable to explain our response directly, we are reduced to saying…”). But it did introduce me to an interesting word:

To start with, “Girl with the Red Hat” was not intended to be a portrait of any specific person; it’s an image of a type. Art historians will tell you that this genre, popular in the Dutch Golden Age, is called tronie—you’re supposed to be looking not at an individual old man but at old man-ness, not at a soldier but at soldier-ness, not at a girl but at girl-ness.

I wasn’t familiar with the word “tronie,” and it’s not in the OED; Wiktionary has it, though: “(art) A kind of painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression.” We got it from Dutch, where it means:

1. (informal, Netherlands, slightly derogatory) a face, especially one with an unpleasant or unprepossessing look or expression

2. (art) a depiction of a person’s face with an expressive, often unflattering expression; a tronie.

Etymology
From Middle Dutch troenie, from Middle French trogne, possibly ultimately from a Celtic language, for which a Gaulish *trugna has been proposed (compare Welsh trwyn [‘nose, snout’]).

I’ll probably never have occasion to use the word, but at least I know it.

Neal Stephenson has a post The Wrongs of Thomas More (Wrong 5) that begins:

In my previous post I talked about spelunking through the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “wrong” to see how the usage of that word had developed down through the ages.

Embedded in that definition was a citation that caught my eye. But first I need to point out that “wrong” has many shades of meaning. The particular one to which the following quote applies is: “Not in consonance with facts or truth; incorrect, false, mistaken.” And one of the oldest, and certainly pithiest, examples of this usage is cited as follows:

1528 MORE Dyaloge III. Wks 210/1 Our hart euer thinketh the judgement wrong, that wringeth us to the worse.

Now, that one’s a beauty because it has one foot in the more ancient meaning of the word, and one in the modern. “Wringeth us to the worse” goes to the older, bending or twisting sense of the word, and means turning or wrenching us off course into a less desirable outcome. “The judgement wrong” refers to an error, a bad call. How do we discern between a right and wrong judgment? Our heart does it (the author, writing in 1528, doesn’t draw modern distinctions between the heart and the brain). Evaluating a particular judgment, our heart thinks that it’s wrong if its result is that our fate is turned or wrung in a bad direction.

The author is clearly engaging in wordplay here; he knows the etymology of this word. He’s amusing himself, and perhaps his more erudite readers, with the neat turn of phrase. Thanks to the OED, we less erudite moderns can get the joke too.

I was so curious about the context of this passage that I began tracking it down in the expectation that it might make for an interesting footnote. Instead I fell into a substantial rabbit hole.

The rabbit hole involves the purchase, “for a cool $150,” of a copy of A Dyaloge Wherin be Treatyd Dyvers Maters and the (very demanding) reading thereof, from which he concludes “it makes Thomas More look like a terrible human being.” You can see an image of the facsimile edition, where I note that immediately before the quoted bit there’s an occurrence of “theym ſelfe” (i.e., themself). I recommend also reading the preceding post, linked in the first sentence, which describes the semantic development of wrong. And from the OED entry I pluck this twisty quote from the Ayenbite of Inwyt: “Yef þe onderstondingge is wrong, oþer yef he tuysteþ oþer wyþwent.., al þe inwyt ssel by þiestre and þe hieap of uirtues.” I presume “wyþwent” is a form of obsolete withgo “To go against, act in opposition to, oppose; in past participle opposed (to),” but I can’t say I understand it.

Thanks, Trevor!

Retraction Watch reports on a spectacular find:

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.

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Dalya Alberge reports for the Guardian on an amusing literary find:

CS Lewis loathed one of his fellow Oxford academics so much that he satirised him in a series of seven previously unpublished poems that have been discovered. The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand HC Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as “the cad”.

It has now emerged that Lewis even inscribed derogatory verses about him across the blank pages of his own copy of Wyld’s 1921 textbook A Short History of English. One poem begins: “Loud-mouthed, a bully, publicly professing / The impartial, scientific attitude, / Yet, on the point of dialects, confessing / How pruriently class-conscious was his mood.”

Wyld was the author of several influential textbooks on the history of the English language, but he was so pernickety that he censured pronunciations such as “waistcoat” instead of “weskit”. Lewis ridiculed his obsession with analysing sounds at the expense of texts themselves: “He opens and closes his glottis at pleasure,/ Explosives and stops he is able to measure,/ No grunt and no gurgle escapes his attention,/ Religiously marking each slackness and tension”.

The poems were discovered by Simon Horobin, a professor of English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Lewis himself taught. […] Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name “Henry Cecil Wyld”.

He added: “On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English. It’s exciting to see Lewis composing poetry in a range of languages at this early stage of his academic career.”

You can see images and more of the texts at the link; thanks, Jack! (Wyld got a rap on the knuckles here from Piotr Gąsiorowski in 2017.)

Via Ways To Play (“a site about games, traditional and modern, that are played around the world”), The Games of Gargantua (1534—):

One of the most famous historical lists of games is that found in Chaper 22 of François Rabelais’ Gargantua, first published in 1534. In the original French the list contained 216 games, but in each translation the games that are named were changed and often expanded upon. Many of the games are either invented by Rabelais, or are games for which we no longer know the rules.

An in-depth examination of the games in the list lies below the table.

The first five columns give the lists from five different French editions; the remaining columns are from translations into English.

The lists of Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa (Dutch, 1682) and Johann Fischarts (German, 1590) are given beneath the table as they diverge significantly.

Some of them are fairly invariant (au fleux is always a variation on flush), others are a motley mix (au moucōtēt is at the surlie, poor Jack, take miss, or the malcontent; a la blanche is at the lottery, blank draw, blanks, raffles, or whites).

Furthermore, the main page has a link to game names by language, which is also fun.

I’ve read several reviews of The Most Secret Memory of Men, the recent English translation (by Lara Vergnaud) of La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, by the Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and they’ve all made me want to read the book. But Ursula Lindsey’s NYRB review (archived) does so even more effectively by quoting a longish extract that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. The protagonist, Diégane Latyr Faye, wants to be a great (French) writer, and he is inspired by discovering the long-buried work of T.C. Elimane: “The few known facts about Elimane are that he was from Senegal; that in 1938 in Paris, at age twenty-three, he published an acclaimed novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity; that the novel was embroiled in a scandal of some sort; and that he disappeared, never to be heard from again.” Lindsey says:

Sarr makes Diégane well aware of how ridiculous and even pathetic it is to care this much about writing—to want, more than anything in the world, to write a great book. But he also makes him a true believer, a man who, high on an unspecified drug one night on a Paris bench, receives a visitation from literature itself “in the guise of a woman of terrifying beauty,” only to be reminded by an inner voice

that desire isn’t enough, that talent isn’t enough, that ambition isn’t enough, that being a good writer isn’t enough, that being well-read isn’t enough, that being famous isn’t enough, that being highly cultured isn’t enough, that being wise isn’t enough, that commitment isn’t enough, that patience isn’t enough, that getting drunk off pure life isn’t enough, that retreating from life isn’t enough, that believing in your dreams isn’t enough, that dissecting reality isn’t enough, that intelligence isn’t enough, that stirring hearts isn’t enough, that strategy isn’t enough, that communication isn’t enough, that even having something to say isn’t enough, nor is working tirelessly enough; and the voice also says that all of that might be and often is a condition, an advantage, an attribute, a strength, of course, but then the voice adds that in essence none of those qualities are ever enough when it’s a question of literature, because writing always demands something else, something else, something else.

Now, I’m not one of those people who salivate when they see a long list in a novel; I generally like prose to keep moving, not stand still and sparkle. So the fact that this passage made me read it out loud and then go find the French and read that out loud made me realize I very much want to read the whole thing. In French.

Here’s the original:
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