languagehat.com

I think Leonid Andreev (also romanized as Andreyev) first swam into my ken in 2016, when I edited Leonid Livak’s In Search of Russian Modernism — see my 2018 review of that superb book, in particular the first quoted paragraph. It took me a long while to get around to him, though, because at the time I was reading my way through the 1850s and when I finally finished my Long March through Russian literature in 2019 I headed straight to the late 20th century. But I finally caught up with him a couple of years ago, prompted by Dmitry Bykov; as I wrote Lizok at the time:

I was reading Bykov again — his “100 books for 100 years” series — and I decided to read his pick for 1900, Leonid Andrev’s “Молчание,” which he calls the beginning of Russian Gothic, and when I read it I thought “that’s Gorbunova’s line of descent.” If you eliminated a lot of details and any hint of пафос and just kept the basic story line, it could fit into one of her collections. (One of her signatures is squeezing out пафос the way Chekhov squeezed the serf out of himself.) Then I read his 1901 story “Жили-были” and could see why it was so popular: he puts vivid characters in a stressful situation and lets things develop very effectively. I’ll have to read more of him.

The story is online here; молчание means ‘silence,’ and in my Chronology I summarized it thus:

after the haughty Father Ignatii’s daughter kills herself and his wife has a stroke, an audible silence fills the house and then the world; in Zhurnal dlya vsekh 12; D. Bykov calls it the beginning of Russian Gothic: “This silence is the main sound of the 20th century”

(Bykov’s entire «100 лекций о русской литературе ХХ века», all 548 pages, is here as a pdf, or you can read it online here — the Andreev chapter is the first one.) So the other day I decided to follow it up with a longer story, his 1903 Жизнь Василия Фивейского [The life of Vasily Fiveisky, translated in 1920 by Archibald J. Wolfe as The Life of Father Vassily], about which I knew nothing — I vaguely assumed it was the life of a saint, since Vasily Fiveisky (Vasily the Theban, or Basil of Thebes) sounded very saintly. But it was not that at all, and the (very sparse) commentary I’ve found on it completely misinterprets it, so I am here to remedy that, with the aid of the earlier short story.

The Life of Father Vassily, in Wolfe’s translation, begins thus:
[Read more…]

Peter Dizikes writes for PhysOrg:

It is a deep question, from deep in our history: when did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin—as the researchers strongly think—the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.

“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”

The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology.

All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group. Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place.

Anyone who has followed LH for any stretch of time will not be surprised that I have the gravest doubts about all this (the logic of MIT is not the Hat’s logic), and Bathrobe, who sent me the link, also feels uncomfortable about it, but I figured I’d put it out there and see what y’all have to say.

I was enjoying Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker piece (archived) on the various traumas of renting and buying (particularly in New York) when I got to this passage:

I imagined living in a society where people don’t need to own a home only to have something they can take out a mortgage on should calamity or college tuition strike. There, the flimsy divide between low- and middle-income workers wouldn’t be concretized through housing policy. In Vienna, for example, where income limits for government benefits are less stringent, eighty per cent of the population qualifies for social housing. (The Austrian city is famous for its Pawlatschen, “access balconies,” which open up onto a shared courtyard.)

Of course, I fixated on the Pawlatschen (you can see examples at the German Wikipedia article); it turns out the word Pawlatsche is borrowed from Czech pavlač, which is derived from the verb povléct ‘to cover,’ a prefixed descendant of Proto-Slavic *velťi ‘to drag’ (“Indo-European background unclear”). I thought that was interesting enough to share (and I envy the Viennese).

Ted Chiang is not only a good writer but a sharp and interesting thinker, a combination that is sadly rare. This LARB interview with Julien Crockett (archived) is well worth reading in full, but I’ll pull out the passage about language:

Your work often explores the way tools mediate our relationship with reality. One such tool is language. You write about language perhaps most popularly in “Story of Your Life” (1998), the basis for the film Arrival (2016), but also in “Understand” (1991), exploring what would happen if we had a medical treatment for increasing intelligence. Receiving the treatment after an accident, the main character grows frustrated by the limits of conventional language:

I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. […]

I’ll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent.

Do you think there could be a “better” language? Or is it just mathematics?

Umberto Eco wrote a book called The Search for the Perfect Language (1994), which is a history of the idea that there exists a perfect language. At one point in history, scholars believed the perfect language was the language that Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden or the language angels speak. Later on, scholars shifted to the idea that it was possible to construct an artificial language that was perfect, in the sense that it would be completely unambiguous and bear a direct relationship to reality.

[Read more…]

Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and they are extraordinarily interesting from a linguistic point of view; I’ll quote excerpts from each.

Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist:

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.

As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.

At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.

From Dari at DLI to AFSOC:
[Read more…]

Robbie Armstrong’s The Bell story about magnet fishing in Glasgow’s canals is lively and well worth reading, with plenty of juicy Glaswegian dialogue, but this bit is what brings it here:

“What’s that, a chibber, oan yer first throw an aw?” McGeachin shouts over to Glasgow Magnet Fishing OG, Paul Goody, a hulking joiner with a gentle nature. He wanders over to see. Goody shows him the 1954 military pocketknife. “Finders keepers, this one,” Goody says joyfully, hastening to assure me: “Any big blades we hand it into the police.”

From context, chibber seemed to mean ‘knife,’ but I was unfamiliar with it; the only form in DSL is chib (Gangster slang) “A knife, a dagger; a knife or razor used as a weapon,” which is from Romani chhib, chhiv (to quote the OED, which has entries for both chiv and shiv — I am familiar with the latter). And for a spectacular folk etymology, contemplate the fearsome Mary McChib, “a headmistress in Scotland that took order and punishment very seriously”:

Here she is standing with her Chibber, a cupboard full of different types of spikes that she could add to the top of her cane. Before the belt or standard cane came into play in the 1900s, Mary would punish misbehaviour with the threat of stabbing in the top of the arm, a term that became known as getting “chibbed”.

We’ve discussed translation many times, but it’s a subject I never tire of, and I liked very much Val Vinokur’s take on “translating marked voices,” quoted at this XIX век post:

So here’s one of my insights from having translated Chamoiseau and from having translated skaz in general (which is to say, kind of orally inflected speech). A lot of translators, when they’re confronted with this, go for a super-folksy kind of, you know, Cockney or whatever… you know, like film noir kind of thing. The interesting thing about this kind of orally inflected speech, especially when it’s written but even when it’s oral… The person who gets this right more often is David Milch. The way that he writes dialogue, which sounds totally fanciful, but what he realizes is that people who are effectively self-educated, they will overreach, they will actually make their syntax more complicated, right, or more Biblical, because often the thing that they know is the Bible. So it will often sound more archaic, or some combination of the folksy and the archaic, because they’re reaching for something. So it doesn’t sound, you know, quite like the cliché of something low. So I try to keep that awkwardness, that it sounds both idiomatic and idiosyncratic at the same time, really. And also because, in particular, that’s how Babel’s skaz works, right? His skaz is very much Babel’s skaz. You know, his Cossacks talk like, you know, if Babel were a Cossack. They sound beautiful. And weird. And I feel like this is a mistake that a lot of translators make: they say, “well, I know how regular people sound like, so I’m going to… this is what it means to take license and make this sound folksy.” But there’s no one-to-one equivalence with that, so you have to kind of invent this idiom that shouldn’t sound exactly like something you’ve already heard before.

The way that this came up when we were translating Chamoiseau is, what do we do with the Creole, what do we do with the Creolized French? It’s like, “oh, let’s make them sound like Jamaicans!” And it’s like, “no!” Right? So we drew on, sort of, all of the dialects that we knew—including Yiddish!—to kind of come up with this idea of, what would Creolized French sound like in English, and it has to sound like something you’ve never heard before, because you’ve never heard it before.

That’s from a reading and discussion he gave at NYU in 2018; you can watch the whole thing at the link, and there’s another good quote there from Boris Dralyuk, taking a different point of view. Skaz is defined at Wikipedia and in the second paragraph of this 2009 post; it’s one of my favorite things about Russian fiction.

Back in 2014 we discussed the Norn language; extinct though it has been for a couple of centuries, there are videos in it, as Craig writes me: “Have you seen this person who makes videos of herself speaking Norn? She claims to have learned it as a child from her godparents.” The YouTube page is called Nornfru, and there are 16 videos; I have no basis for judging how good her Norn is (though I have the gravest doubts about learning it from godparents), so I simply offer the link for what it is worth. Thanks, Craig!

Daniel Soar’s LRB review (6 March 2025; archived) of Michael Katz’s new translation of The Brothers Karamazov is one of the best things I’ve read on Dostoevsky in a general-interest publication, and anyone interested in author or novel should read it. Here are some excerpts:

The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel first appeared, in serial form, in Russkiy Vestnik (the ‘Russian Herald’), over the course of 1879 and 1880, the year before Dostoevsky died. Garnett worked at great speed – according to one account she turned out five thousand words a day – and didn’t know Russian well: she kept a dictionary by her deckchair and skipped bits she didn’t understand. The (Russian) critic Korney Chukovsky called her translations ‘a safe blandscript: not a volcano … a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner – which is to say a complete distortion of the original’. But the British and American press loved it. The Observer praised Garnett’s ‘careful fidelity’, fully revealing of Dostoevsky’s ‘perfect balance’ and ‘sheer technical skill’.

Except technical skill isn’t really what the prose has to offer. At one level, you can’t disagree with Tolstoy, Chekhov et al [whose criticisms Soar has previously mentioned]: the narration is often awkward, full of little solecisms and redundancies. Presumably, this wasn’t the standard of literary prose Dostoevsky’s contemporaries expected. But there’s a rationale for the ungainliness: the story – or, as the text claims, the history – purports to be written by an unnamed inhabitant of Skotoprigonyevsk, the (fictional) small town somewhere in the provinces where the book is set. This writer is decidedly not urbane, well connected or particularly well educated – a long way from the Petersburg literary elite to which, say, Pushkin and Dostoevsky himself belonged – and he often slips into colloquialism or imprecision or makes the sort of unintended mistake it’s impossible not to laugh at.

[Read more…]

Jerry Friedman writes:

I wonder whether you and the Hatters would be interested in the Danish film Fremmed (Stranger in English), which came out recently. It takes place during the introduction of agriculture to Denmark. The native hunter-gatherers are shown speaking a Siberian language with some additions from Mayan, because reasons, and the foreign farmers are shown speaking a language based on Hattic words and grammar.

This came up at alt.usage.english, with the following quotations:

“There was a guy I knew; he has a PhD in Proto-Indo-European languages. But even those are 2,000 years older than those in our story. We asked him: ‘Can you come up with new ones?’ Tobias [Søborg] took an old Siberian tribal language and merged it with ancient Mayan. Then he did the same thing again, this time using dialects from the area around Turkey. We had a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules. Poor actors. They had to learn so much more than just their lines,” he recalled. “Later, Tobias was also on set, helping with the pronunciations. I think that might have been the single hardest part of making the whole thing work, but we were in it together. It was so amazing to watch it finally come to life.”

Also, from a Danish newspaper:

Tobias Mosbæk Søborg er ph.d. og postdoc ved Københavns Universitet og forsker i gamle indoeuropæiske sprog. Han har til filmen konstrueret to vidt forskellige sprog til henholdsvis jægerfolket og bondefolket, for at filmens dialog kunne fremstå mere autentisk. Til bondefolkets sprog har han især brugt ord og grammatik fra det ældste kendte oldtidssprog fra det nuværende Tyrkiet, hattisk, netop fordi bondekulturen stammer herfra.

“Der er de seneste 10 år sket en revolution i forståelsen af oldtidens kulturmøder. Genetisk og arkæologisk har det været muligt at føre bevis for det, sprogforskere har sagt i 200 år, nemlig at befolkningsgrupper afløste hinanden gennem indvandring,” siger Tobias Mosbæk Søborg.

Google Translate says:

[Read more…]