languagehat.com

Three readers have sent me three different links about the discovery of a new language, so I’d better post about it! I’ll lead with the most scholarly source, the Lund University website’s “Unknown language discovered in Southeast Asia“:

A previously unknown language has been found in the Malay Peninsula by linguists from Lund University in Sweden. The language has been given the name Jedek. […]

“Jedek is not a language spoken by an unknown tribe in the jungle, as you would perhaps imagine, but in a village previously studied by anthropologists. As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed”, says Niclas Burenhult, Associate Professor of General Linguistics at Lund University, who collected the first linguistic material from Jedek speakers.

The language is an Aslian variety within the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by 280 people who are settled hunter-gatherers in northern Peninsular Malaysia.

The researchers discovered the language during a language documentation project, Tongues of the Semang, in which they visited several villages to collect language data from different groups who speak Aslian languages.

The discovery of Jedek was made while they were studying the Jahai language in the same area.

“We realised that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai. Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula”, says Joanne Yager.

There’s a brief video clip if you want to hear a few sentences in the language. The other links are from NPR and IBT, both basically reprinting the press release; there’s a link to the article in Linguistic Typology, but it is, alas, behind a paywall. Thanks, Trevor, Kobi, and Christopher!

Thea Thorsen’s OUPBlog post Want to know the Latin for “true love”? is mainly about Ovid, but this paragraph contains what I’m pretty sure is a false assertion:

Fidus amor. That’s “true love” in Latin. Historically, such love is often claimed to have emerged with the troubadours of twelfth century Provence. The troubadours used the Occitan term fin amor for this kind of love rather than the more famous amour courtois, “courtly love”, which is a modern concoction. However, “Fin amor”, is “derived from Latin fidus, ‘faithful’. Originally, fin amor was admirable and refined because it was faithful, by definition.” So the term, fin amor, comes from Latin, as do many in the romance languages.

The “derived” link goes to a book by Bernard O’Donoghue, but he’s primarily a poet, though apparently he’s been “emeritus fellow and tutor in Old English and Medieval English, Linguistics and the History of the English Language, Modern Irish Literature, Yeats and Joyce at Wadham College, Oxford.” I don’t see how fin could come from fidus, which gives rather fis/fit in Old French, but if anyone knows of any grounds for this assertion, by all means speak up!

Via this University of North Carolina Library press release I learn about a remarkable individual:

A free public celebration on March 20 will mark the acquisition of a book of Latin poetry published in 1573 by Juan Latino. Scholars have described Latino as the first person of sub-Saharan African descent to publish a book of poems in a Western language. […]

Latino was born around 1518 in either Africa or Spain. He was a slave in a noble Spanish household, serving as a page to the family’s son. While accompanying the young duke to classes, Latino learned Latin and Greek. He eventually earned his freedom and became a professor of Latin grammar in Granada. He came to use the surname Latino or Latinus, reflecting his mastery of the Latin language.

Latino’s book has an especially lengthy title […] The phrases describe its three parts: epigrams, or short verses, dedicated to King Philip of Spain on the birth of Prince Ferdinand; a book of verse regarding the king and Pope Pius V; and the “Austriad,” a long poem on the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.

The Hanes Foundation gift also includes a copy of Latino’s second book, along with ten scholarly books about Latino’s life and work.

I’ve elided the bit after “lengthy title” because they cite it with a bunch of ellipses, which is a shame. Here’s the full title, in all its glory:

Ad Catholicum pariter et invictissimum Philippum dei gratia hispaniarum Regem, de foelicissima serenissimi Ferdinandi Principis navitate, epigrammatum liber.

Deque Sanctissimi Pii Quinti Romanae Ecclesiae Pontificis summi, rebus, & affectibus erga Phillipum regem Christianissimum, Liber unus.

Austrias Carmen, de Excellentissimi Domini D. Ioannis ab Austria, Caroli Quinti filii, ac Philippi invictissimi fratis, re benè gesta, in victoria mirabili eiusdem Philippi adversus perfidos Turcas parta, Ad Illustrissimum, pariter & Reverendissimum D. D. Petrum à Deza Praesidem, ac pro Philippo militiae praefectû. Per Magistrum Ioannem Latinum Garnatae studiosae adolescentiae moderatorem. Libri duo.

Thanks, Trevor!

There was a very famous restaurant Яр [Yar] in Moscow, founded in 1826 in the central city (on Kuznetsky Most) but best known in its later incarnation in Petrovsky Park, just outside of the (nineteenth-century) city on what is now Leningradsky Prospekt (and if anyone knows exactly where, please tell me — I like being able to place things on the map). I had thought it was named for the Russian word яр ‘steep bank, ravine’ (borrowed from Turkic), but in the fantastic new Poemas del río Wang post by frequent LH commenter Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) on the tango “Ojos negros que fascinan” (“I spent years trying to solve the riddles and mysteries surrounding Dark Eyes, a song about fatal love and perdition which almost prophetically touched most of the talents who ever touched it, making them vanish from history”), which I urge anyone interested in music, history, or the untangling of tangled tales to go read at once, Dmitry writes “the famous suburban restaurant, the ‘Yard,’” and sure enough, the accompanying image of a postcard has “Restaurant ‘Yard.'” Why “Yard”?

Well, the Russian Wikipedia article says it was founded by a Frenchman named Tranquille Yard, and this information is also purveyed in a couple of books (e.g., Max Fram’s The Motherland of Elephants: “The original restaurant in central Moscow was founded and owned by the Frenchman Tranquille Yard”). But I don’t believe it. “Yard” is not, so far as I know, a French surname, and Tranquille is only a (rare) surname, not (so far as I can tell) a given name. Of course if irrefutable evidence exists of such a person with such a name, I’ll accept it, but for the moment it seems far more likely to me that something has gotten garbled in the nearly two centuries since the founding of the restaurant. A similar mystification is noted in Dmitry’s post about one of the creators of the song, Florian (or Feodor) Hermann:

Most often, we are told that Hermann was French, and came to Russia with Napoleon’s Grand Army. Sometimes we hear that his Valse Hommage started as a march of the advancing French troops in 1812. But sometimes, that it mourns the French army losses as it forded the icy Berezina river on retreat from Moscow. We even hear that Florian Hermann visited the home estate of Evgeny Grebenka, the author of the lyrics of the future song, during the Napoleonic Wars! But sometimes Florian Hermann turns out to be a German rather than Frenchman. We are even told that the lived in Strasbourg. One has to note that Valse Hommage is always titled in French in the international score catalogs, while some of the other Hermann’s compositions are titled in German. However, my research shows that Florian Hermann was a Russian patriot from the Wilno strip area of Poland / Lithuania, and that he composed some of his most popular pieces in 1870s through 1890s. And very recently, I was able to find out a few details about his youth and his family in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).

As always, I welcome all thoughts from the Varied Reader.

Veronique Greenwood writes for the Atlantic on an ever-interesting topic, A Language’s Popularity Could Influence Its Grammar and Vocabulary:

It’s a peculiar observation that the more people speak a language, the simpler its grammar tends to be. English and Mandarin, for instance, have notably straightforward structures. On the other hand, languages spoken in just a single mountain valley or village can have gorgeously intricate grammars, full of gender and cases and declensions. They also tend to have rather small vocabularies. Meanwhile, the vocabularies of widely spoken languages are enormous.

What is going on here? What connection might there be between how many people speak a language and what it is like?

There are many things that could be at play, from the level of historical trends all the way down to how parents speak to their children. It also isn’t exactly clear which comes first: lots of speakers, or simple grammar? Still, the researchers behind one recent paper wondered whether the fact that grammar is relatively hard to learn and new words relatively easy might be enough to explain this trend, at least in broad strokes. They built a mathematical model in which individuals in small and large social networks have conversations and occasionally learn new words or ways of saying something from each other. What the team found was that even in this simple, stick-figure version of the world, the same patterns emerge. The results suggest that these general rules, along with the number of speakers, can influence how a language grows and changes.

Read further for details and suggested explanations; if you want to dig deeper, here‘s the actual paper, “Simpler grammar, larger vocabulary: How population size affects language” by Florencia Reali, Nick Chater, and Morten H. Christiansen (Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285, issue 1871). Thanks, Bonnie and Martin!

Via Joel at Far Outliers, this quote from A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, by Michael Axworthy:

Although Darius established a standard gold coinage, and some payments were made in silver, much of the system operated by payments in kind. These were assessed, allocated, and receipted from the center. […] Couriers were given tablets to produce at post stations along the royal highways, so they could get food and lodging for themselves and their animals. These tablets recording payments in kind cover only a relatively limited period, from 509 to 494 BC. There are several thousand of them, and it has been estimated that they cover supplies to more than fifteen thousand different people in more than one hundred different places.

It is significant that the tablets were written mainly in Elamite, not in Persian. We know from other sources that the main language of administration in the empire was neither Persian nor Elamite, but Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. The Bisitun inscription states directly that the form of written Persian used there was new, developed at Darius’s own orders for that specific purpose. It is possible that he and the other Achaemenid kings discouraged any record of events other than their own monumental inscriptions, but these are all strong echoes of the Iranian distaste for writing that we encountered earlier in Mazdaism, and it may go some way to explain an apparent anomaly—the lack of Persian historical writing for the Achaemenid period. It is possible that histories were recorded, that poems were written down, and that all sorts of other literature once existed and have since been simply lost. But later Persian literary culture was strongly associated with a class of scribes, and the fact that the scribes in the Achaemenid system wrote their accounts and official records in other languages suggests that the literature was not there, either. There was no Persian history of the Achaemenid Empire because the Persian ruling classes either (the Magi) regarded writing as wicked or (the kings and nobles) associated writing with inferior peoples—or both. To ride, to shoot the bow, to tell the truth—but not to write it.

That said, no histories as such have survived from the Egyptian, Hittite, or Assyrian empires, either. It is more correct, in the context of the fifth century BC, to call the innovation of history writing by the Greeks an anomaly.

(Lots of Wikipedia links at Joel’s site, which I haven’t bothered to copy here.)

I’m reading On Beauty, by the wonderful Zadie Smith — I get to read her books after my wife finishes them — and I’m struck, as always, by her love of words, everyday, slang, dialect, recondite, whatever, she loves them all. I learned one of the latter variety in this passage:

The fate of the young man in his earphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.

Walking up Redwood Avenue with its tunnel of cernuous willows, Levi found he had lost the will even to nod his head, usually an involuntary habit with him when music was playing.

Cernuous! I knew I liked it even before I knew what it meant, which I learned the modern way, online, via the Merriam-Webster definition: “inclining or nodding : pendulous, drooping” (etymology: “Latin cernuus with the face turned toward the earth; akin to Latin cerebrum brain”). Note its placement between the preceding “academics” and the following “nod his head”; what fun!

But before I looked it up the modern way, I tried the old-fashioned way, with a physical dictionary, to wit the Concise Oxford (see this post); it wasn’t there, but right after its hypothetical location I found:

ceroc /sɪˈrɒk/ ► n. a type of modern dance having elements of rock and roll, jive, and salsa.
—ORIGIN 1990s: invented word, apparently coined in English from Fr. ce (as in c’est ‘this is’) + roc ‘rock’.

An interesting etymology, and I was taken aback to discover a word for a cultural phenomenon about whose existence I had no clue, though it’s apparently been around for at least two decades. Maybe a UK thing?

This e-mail from Bathrobe is self-explanatory, and he’s given me permission to quote it verbatim, so I will:

I started reading the Hound of the Baskervilles (which you no doubt know was written by Arthur Conan Doyle) and came across a curious expression in the very first paragraph:

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.” Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry–dignified, solid, and reassuring.

The expression that caught my eye was “Penang lawyer”. I had no idea of the origin of this name: colonial as it appeared to be, I could not think of any way that lawyers from Penang would be particularly noteworthy within the Empire. When I looked it up the answer was quite straightforward:

(From Websters 1913)

Pe*nang″ law″yer (?). [Prob. fr. Malay pīnang līar.] A kind of walking stick made from the stem of an East Asiatic palm (Licuala acutifida).

This suggests a fanciful misinterpretation of the Malay pronunciation. But Wikipedia at its article on Licuala also offers an alternative explanation:

Licuala acutifida is the source of cane for the walking stick nicknamed the Penang-lawyer by colonials, probably from the Malay phrase pinang liyar for a wild areca, although the term may also refer to the use of these canes as deadly knobkerries to assassinate litigious enemies.

That is the end of the story. It’s not a very complicated one, but what piqued my interest was how translators have dealt with this strange name. The first paragraph of a Russian translation available online goes:

Мистер Шерлок Холмс сидел за столом и завтракал. Обычно он вста- вал довольно поздно, если не считать тех нередких случаев, когда ему во- все не приходилось ложиться. Я стоял на коврике у камина и вертел в руках палку, забытую нашим вчерашним посетителем. Это была хорошая толстая трость с набалдашником – из тех, что именуются «веским аргументом». Чуть ниже набалдашника было врезано серебряное кольцо шириной около дюй- ма, на котором было начертано: «Джеймсу Мортимеру, Ч.К.X.О.*, от его друзей по Ч.К.Л.» и дата: «1884». В прежние времена с такими тростями – солидными, увесистыми, надёжными – ходили почтенные домашние врачи.

Lo and behold, “Penang lawyer” is translated as веским аргументом [‘weighty argument’ — LH]! The translator seems to have adopted an interpretation closer to the second one in Wikipedia.

I checked the Mongolian translation (which is from the Russian, not the English), and found myself in a game of Chinese whispers. In Mongolian it is translated as ноцтой баримт, meaning something like “serious facts”. The only other translation I have got hold of is an online Chinese version, which translates the offending phrase in a pedestrian way as:

这种木料产于槟榔屿，名叫槟榔子木。

This kind of wood is produced in Penang; its name is Penang wood (or perhaps ‘Areca wood’, since 槟榔 means Areca).

This may not be totally worthy of an LH post, but apart from being interesting in itself, I’m intrigued at the possibilities for straying from the original meaning in other languages.

I love everything about this: the phrase itself, the dueling explanations, and the “Chinese whispers” translations. And I was a huge Holmes fan in my childhood; I still have my two-volume Collected Stories from back then.

Lorraine Berry has a Guardian review of what sounds like an interesting book, In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten:

Among these lost works are those by Nikolai Gogol (Parts II and III of Dead Souls, which he burned); Sylvia Plath (a novel called Double Exposure which disappeared after her death); Lord Byron (his personal memoir, which his family had burned to protect his reputation) and Ernest Hemingway (an entire suitcase of early work, stolen from a train at Gare du Lyon).

For bibliophiles like me, the knowledge that these works once existed and are now gone evokes something akin to pain. Van Straten writes: “There is a quotation from Proust: ‘To release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way of love there must be … the risk of an impossibility’. I think that passion for a lost book, often like love for a person, arises from the impossibility of reading it.”

In his book, Van Straten distinguishes between missing and lost works. If a manuscript is missing, there remains the hope that it was misplaced in an archive, waiting to be discovered. But with lost works – such as the novel Malcolm Lowry spent nine years working on, which went up in flames when his cabin burned to the ground – no hope is still possible. Yet it’s also clear that Van Straten still searches for lost books, even as he recognises the futility of it. He likens the search to his childhood notions of the quest, to his longing to be “the hero who will be able to solve the mystery”. […]

As painful as it is to contemplate what became of them, I find myself returning to Van Straten’s argument that lost books are like lost loves. Just as Tennyson wrote in In Memoriam (“Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”), knowing that these works once existed is oddly comforting, even if they’re never found or restored. The space for that knowledge is not empty – it is a void. As Van Straten writes, “By the end of the voyage I had realised that lost books possess something that others do not: they bequeath to those who have not read them the possibility of imagining them, of telling stories about them, of reinventing them.”

Good food for thought, though I for one don’t miss the last parts of Dead Souls — I’m pretty sure they would have been a sad comedown. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Pasternak’s middle period, between the flashy, often incomprehensible genius of the first books and the classic simplicity of the Zhivago poems, tends to be somewhat overlooked, and the 1941 “Peredelkino” group in particular doesn’t get much respect. But there’s some wonderful poetry in it, and I’m especially struck by Опять весна [Spring again], which begins as a noir mystery (suddenly I heard a strange sound…) and continues as a philosophical meditation on the familiar phenomenon of spring being both new and infinitely repeated (Pasternak, of course, studied philosophy as a young man) without ever ceasing to be a splendidly musical poem (it gets muddled and hard to understand for a brief bit in the middle — what the heck is that jacket? — but that’s the Pasternak trademark). I had read it quite a few times, and in fact memorized it, before I realized that the opening three lines are a mutated equivalent of the opening three lines of Dante’s Inferno. At any rate, I thought I’d provide my own literal prose translation, followed by two published poetic ones after the jump.

The train’s gone, the embankment’s black. How am I going to find the road in the dark? I don’t recognize this place at all, even though I was here just a day ago. The clang of iron has died away from the ties. Suddenly — really, what’s this new weirdness? Commotion, gossips’ babbling: what devil’s gotten into them?

Where did I hear these snatches of speech before, maybe sometime last year? Ah, it must have been today, all over again, the stream came out of the grove at night. Just like those times before, the pond swelled up and moved chunks of ice. Truly, this is a new wonder: just as before, again it’s spring.

It’s her, it’s her, it’s her sorcery and wonder, it’s her jacket beyond the willow, shoulders, kerchief, figure and back. It’s the Snow Maiden at the edge of the precipice, it’s for her that the half-mad chatterbox is pouring ceaseless ravings from the bottom of the ravine.

It’s in front of her that the rapids, pouring over obstacles, are sinking in a watery haze, nailed to the slope with hissing by the lamp of the hanging waterfall. Teeth chattering from the cold, it’s the icy stream pouring across the edge into a pond and from the pond into another vessel. The speech of the floodwater is the raving of existence.

I am preempted from even trying a poetic version by the dazzle of the penultimate line: В пруд и из пруда в другую посуду [v prud i iz pruda v druguyu posudu]. But you can see what the professionals have done with it below.
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