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I’m now about halfway through Perdue’s China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (see this post) and have just gotten to the central event, the extermination by the Qing Empire of the Western Mongol nation he calls the Zunghars in the 1750s: “The [Qianlong] emperor deliberately targeted young and able men in order to destroy the Zunghars as a people…. This deliberate use of massacre has been almost completely ignored by modern scholars.” It’s a splendid, brilliantly written historical account, but history is not the remit of LH, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about the name of the nation, which is variously spelled Dzungaria (the Wikipedia version), Zungharia, Zungaria, Jungharia, Jungaria, and Dzhungaria. (I was tempted to title this post “J/Dz(h)ung(h)aria,” but it looked too ugly.) If the Jungar Empire had not been wiped out, presumably we would have settled on one version, but since it’s been nearly forgotten, we have to look under D, J, and Z in the index of every historical work that might cover it in hopes of finding it. (I’ve taken to penciling in cross-references under each of those letters pointing to whichever one the book uses.)

Fortunately, Christopher I. Beckwith (see this post) published an article called “A Note on the Name and Identity of the Junghars” (Mongolian Studies 29 [2007]: 41-45) that deals with just this topic. He begins by discarding the “very old” folk etymology from Middle Mongolian jegün gar ‘left (or east) hand (or wing of an army)’ (“nonsensical historically”; he later says “it is impossible at this point to establish a genuine etymology of the name”); he continues:

The spellings ‘Dzungar,’ or ‘Zungar’ represent modern Mongolian dialect forms that developed after the Mongol Empire period and have become dominant since the Junghar Empire period. The spelling ‘Dzungar’ reflects the pronunciation of the name in the dominant modern Khalkha dialect, whereas the spelling ‘Zungar’ reflects the modern Kalmyk züünghar [zü:ngar]. […]

The pronunciation züünghar is reflected in a number of modern foreign transcriptions. However, historically contemporaneous oral transcriptions of the name ‘Junghar’ into directly neighboring languages (Russian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Persian) — that is, transcriptions made at the time of the Junghar Empire — regularly give the initial consonant as j-/j– [ʤ] or in some cases unaspirated č– [ʧ], both reflecting foreign [ʤ] […] The most accurate historical spelling in English would thus seem to be ‘Junggar,’ or simply ‘Jungar,’ as in one of the most frequent spellings of the name of their homeland, ‘Jungaria.’ I have however spelled it ‘Junghar’ in order to reflect the undeniable influence of the putative etymology on the modern forms in Mongol dialects. In any case, the pronunciation of their name by the Junghars themselves during the time of their empire thus seems fairly clear.

Me, I’m going with Jungaria because it’s the simplest and apparently reflects their own pronunciation, but feel free to pick and choose according to your own inclination. Nobody will care except a few scholars.

If you google the phrase “Dostoevsky’s worst novel” (with quotes, because otherwise it defaults to telling you about his best novels), the reply is unambiguous: The Insulted and Injured [Униженные и оскорбленные]. I’ve read three of the four parts, and I’m here to tell you that that judgment is faultless; if it hadn’t been by Dostoevsky, I’d have given up after a few chapters. It starts with a fine passage, mind you: Ivan, a struggling writer, tells how a year ago he saw an old man and a dog going into an eatery, followed them in, and witnessed a scene that ended with the ragged old Jeremiah Smith dying on a Petersburg street. Unfortunately, he then moves into the late Smith’s wretched top-floor apartment, meets his granddaughter Elena (aka Nelly), saves her from prostitution, and acts as go-between for his love Natasha and her parents, whom she left to live with the foolish young Alyosha, whose father, Prince Valkovsky, wants him to marry the heiress Katya… In short, it gallops straight into melodrama and never looks back. There are the pure of heart, who are crushed (or, if you like, insulted and injured) by the mustache-twirling villain, and there is the improbably simple-minded author/narrator, who tells us the tale, with frequent cliffhangers and repetitions of “I’ll tell you all about it… but not right now.”

I’m exaggerating for effect; naturally, since it’s Dostoevsky there are many good things, culminating (as far as I’ve read) in a splendidly malicious rant by the prince at the end of the third part. I’ll probably provide an update when I finish it, with whatever more mature judgment I reach. But at the moment I want to point to a couple of things of linguistic interest.

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I ran across the Russian word томпак [tompak], looked it up, and discovered it was defined as “tombac.” Just this once, the Oxford dictionary took pity on the ignorant user and added the parenthetical “(copper and zinc alloy),” so I knew what it meant, but of course I wanted to know the derivation. Vasmer told me it was from French tombac and originally from Malay, AHD said “French, from Dutch tombak, from Malay tembaga,” and Wikipedia says the latter is “an Indonesian/Malay word of Javanese origin meaning copper,” but the best (or at any rate most intriguing) etymology I’ve found (via Google Books) is in Robert Blust’s “Linguistics versus Archaeology” in Archaeology and Language III: Artefacts, Languages and Texts, p. 138:

A second term that spread in much the same way as Dempwolff’s *pirak was the Prakrit /tamraka/ ‘copper’, attested as Tagalog /tumbaga/ ‘copper-gold alloy’, Malay /tembaga/ ‘copper’. As noted in Blust (1992) this term appears to have entered the AN world during the early Srīwijaya period. During the later Srīwijaya or early Islamic period it was diffused via Malay trading activities into the Philippines, apparently arriving first in the area of Manila Bay. In time the Manila galleon trade which brought New World metals to the Philippines to trade for southern Chinese silks led to a redefinition of the earlier Tagalog /tumbaga/ ‘copper’ to mean ‘copper-gold alloy’, and the borrowing of a Southern Min word (Tagalog /tansoʔ/) as a new term for copper’.

And Prakrit tamraka is presumably Sanskrit ताम्रक tâmra-ka ‘copper,’ whose etymology I do not know. A well-traveled word!

I recently came across the Polish word księżyc ‘moon’ and thought “That’s odd — the other Slavic languages have reflexes of either Proto-Slavic *luna (like Russian) or *měsęcь (like Serbo-Croatian and Czech). Where did this come from?

It turns out (and this is a great etymology) that it’s originally a diminutive of książę ‘prince’; to quote Buck’s Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: “As the sun was the lord of the day, the moon of the night, the latter was the lesser ‘prince’.” What I want to know is, is that transparent to Poles, or is it something they learn with at least mild surprise when they see it pointed out?

Richard Gray at the Atlantic writes about a perennially interesting topic:

The library at Saint Catherine’s Monastery is the oldest continually operating library in the world. Among its thousands of ancient parchments are at least 160 palimpsests—manuscripts that bear faint scratches and flecks of ink beneath more recent writing. These illegible marks are the only clues to words that were scraped away by the monastery’s monks between the 8th and 12th centuries to reuse the parchments. Some were written in long-lost languages that have almost entirely vanished from the historical record. […]

Over five years, the researchers gathered 30 terabytes of images from 74 palimpsests—totaling 6,800 pages. In some cases, the erased texts have increased the known vocabulary of a language by up to 50 percent, giving new hope to linguists trying to decipher them. One of the languages to reemerge from the parchments is Caucasian Albanian, which was spoken by a Christian kingdom in what is now modern day Azerbaijan. Almost all written records from the kingdom were lost in the 8th and 9th century when its churches were destroyed.

“There are two palimpsests here that have Caucasian Albanian text in the erased layer,” says Michael Phelps, the director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and leader of the project. “They are the only two texts that survive in this language … We were sitting with one of the scholars and he was adding to the language as we were processing the images. In real time he was saying ‘now we have the word for met’ and ‘now the word for fish.’”

Another dead language to be found in the palimpsests is one used by some of the earliest Christian communities in the Middle East. Known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, it is a strange mix of Syriac and Greek that died out in the 13th century. Some of the earliest versions of the New Testament were written in this language. “This was an entire community of people who had a literature, art, and spirituality,” says Phelps. “Almost all of that has been lost, yet their cultural DNA exists in our culture today. These palimpsest texts are giving them a voice again and letting us learn about how they contributed to who we are today.”

I look forward to many more such discoveries. Thanks, Ryan!

The Economist‘s Johnson column (on language) has a good roundup of the vexed issue of hyphens, which starts with the classic quote “If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” I got the link from this post by Lucy Ferriss, who is quite wrong about spelled-out numbers followed by a reference to a measurement, as in “a twenty-five-year-old car.” She thinks it’s OK to “skip one or two, e.g. a twenty-five year-old car.” No. It is not. You use every one of those hyphens or you fail my copyediting test.

UrbanAbydos has a Potterglot post that discusses… well, I’ll let the poster tell you:

The amount of variation in the Spanish editions of the Philosopher’s Stone is stunning. Writing is an art and from draft-to-draft, you expect the language to be tweaked. But once it has been edited and published, you don’t expect noticeable variation from edition to edition; maybe just the correction of a typo or two. Similarly, translation is absolutely an art; arguably more difficult and nuanced than just writing by itself. In addition to all the same kind of variation you expect from draft-to-draft, there is also the variation that comes from trying maintain the character and intent of the original. But again, once a translation has been edited and published, you don’t really expect that much variation in the final text from edition to edition. “Expect” is definitely the operative word here. Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal is all over the place! I hope that Spanish is unique in this regard because I’m terrified that if I start looking this closely at any of the translations (or the original English editions for that matter!) that I’ll find that Spanish is not the exception!

If that intrigues you, click on through — you’ll learn about Spanish owls and second-person pronouns, among other things. As I told Bathrobe, who sent me the link saying he wasn’t sure it would be of interest: “I don’t give a damn about HP (read the first one, thought it was dreadful), but I love this kind of detailed comparison of translations.”

Reading Ford Madox Ford’s memoir Memories and Impressions (highly recommended by my wife, who’s become a Ford devotee), I ran across an expression that baffled me. In his encomium to Holman Hunt Ford says:

But I think I never did advance — it was never my intention to advance — any suggestion that the true inwardness of Pre-Raphaelism, the exact rendering hair for hair of the model; the passionate hunger and thirst for even accidental truth, the real caput mortuum of Pre-Raphaelism was ever expressed by any one else than by the meticulously earnest painter and great man, whose death was telegraphed from the dim recesses of London into the chess-board pattern of sunlit Pre-Raphaelite Hessian harvest lands.

My exiguous Latinity told me that caput mortuum meant ‘dead head,’ but what on earth could that signify in this context? I turned to my trusty Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases in Current English and found:

caput mortuum [Lat. ‘dead head’] the residue left after prolonged distillation; worthless residue; red oxide of lead used as a pigment. 17c.

The first definition was clearly the applicable one, and I approve of Alan Bliss (the compiler of the dictionary) having arranged the senses in that order, with what is presumably the historically prior one last because it is the least likely to be encountered. Has anyone else run into this now obscure term?

Kirk Hazen, professor of linguistics at West Virginia University (i.e., he’s not some bloviating amateur), has a good piece at The Conversation on “the hillbilly problem”:

Many qualities come prepackaged with the hillbilly stereotype: poverty, backwardness and low levels of education. One of the most prevalent is the idea that the way the people of Appalachia speak – the so-called Appalachian dialect – is somehow incorrect or malformed.

From years of research, linguists understand that this perception is simply untrue. But few people are actually interested in discrediting it.

In 1998, I founded the West Virginia Dialect Project to conduct research on the different and changing dialects of West Virginia, a state wholly contained within Appalachia. The language variations that we have identified are far more nuanced than the kind that appear in the media.

He discusses the “frozen in time” myth (which goes back to an 1899 article by Berea College President William Goodell Frost) and goes on to an interesting feature of the dialect, the “leveled ‘was’”:

One pattern of language variation that has existed in English since its beginning in A.D. 449 is the fluctuation between “were” and “was.” The variation of “we was” and “we were” is widespread in English today, and linguists call the “we was” form “leveled” because the same form is used for every subject.

In West Virginia in the early 1970s, the usage rate of the leveled “was” hovered around 70 percent in the speech of the residents of Mercer and Monroe counties. However, looking across generations at the end of the 20th century, usage rates of the leveled “was” declined. Fifty-four percent for speakers born before 1947 used it, while only 8 percent of speakers born after 1980 did so.

The story is actually more complex: the leveled “was” can be used as a social flag, waving to show a person’s rural identity or in-group status. Plus, certain related forms, such as contracted “was” (“We’s out late last night”) aren’t declining, but seem to operate under the radar of social evaluation.

He says “There’s no monolithic ‘Appalachian dialect,’ and language variation – an important component of language everywhere – is just as diverse within Appalachia as it is outside of the region,” discusses the stereotypes, and ends with a hopeful account of dialect-focused projects that are attempting to fight them. As I said at MetaFilter, where I found the link, “The Appalachian dialect is quite similar to the Ozark dialect of my (father’s) people, so I bristle in solidarity when people mock it and its speakers.”

Joanna Hlavacek reports for LJWorld.com on a heartening development:

[Andrew] McKenzie, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, recently secured a grant from the federal government that will allow him to continue his great-grandfather’s work in preserving the Kiowa language — a pressing need, McKenzie says, as the number of fluent Kiowa speakers dwindles by the year.

“Languages only exist in our minds, so once those speakers leave us, they take the knowledge with them, essentially, unless that knowledge is preserved through documentation,” says McKenzie, who began formally studying Kiowa about 20 years ago. “In that sense, the documentation becomes essential because it would allow the language to survive into the future.” […]

Earlier this month, McKenzie learned he’d won a three-year grant from the Documenting Endangered Languages program of the National Science Foundation. The $112,000 award will allow him to “fill a gap” in the study of Kiowa grammar, work his great-grandfather started as a kid passing notes in his native tongue — speaking Kiowa was strictly forbidden at the boarding school he and other Native Americans were forced to attend — during class to his girlfriend, funnily enough.

That early system devised by Parker McKenzie became the basis for methods still used today, though there’s no consensus on the matter, McKenzie says. The Kiowa tribe has never voted to designate an official writing system.

I’m glad the NSF has gotten more sensible about how they spend their money; forty-five years ago, they blew a bunch of it sending me to grad school in linguistics, and all they got for it was this blog. (Thanks, Trevor!)