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I’m editing a book on language in Africa, and a chapter on Senegal has introduced me to two obscure French terms:

Signare “was the name for the Mulatto French-African women of the island of Gorée in French Senegal during the 18th and 19th centuries”; according to Wikipédia, it’s from Portuguese senhora, which makes sense but which I wouldn’t have guessed.

Laptots “were African colonial troops in the service of France between 1750 and the early 1900s. The term laptot probably derives from the word lappato bi in the Wolof language, referring to interpreters, intermediaries or brokers.” If anyone can explain how lappato bi works in Wolof, I will of course be grateful; I don’t have a Wolof dictionary.

Another amazing resource available online:

From 1965–1970, Fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3,000 “Informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and D.C., collecting local words, phrases, and pronunciations. In addition to answering more than 1,600 questions from the DARE Questionnaire, many of the Informants, along with auxiliary speakers, agreed to be recorded by the Fieldworkers. These recordings consisted of conversational interviews as well as readings of “The Story of Arthur the Rat” (devised to elicit the essential differences in pronunciation across the country). This fieldwork data provided invaluable regional information for the Dictionary of American Regional English Volumes I–VI (1985–2013) and Digital DARE.

The Fieldwork Recordings are finally available online approximately fifty years after the recordings were first made. The recordings contain American regional speech samples from all fifty states, but their value is not linguistic alone. The full interviews contain an abundance of oral history from the 1960s, with topics ranging from the making of moonshine to the moon landing; from light-hearted jokes, recipes, and songs to serious discussions about race relations, politics, and the Vietnam War. It is truly a time capsule of American voices.

Via MetaFilter, where commenters are being taken back to their childhoods:

There are two recordings from my small, rural, midwestern town from 1968. Listening to it, I am freaking out. The vowel sounds that I left behind, the vowel sounds I beat out of myself, are all there. Plus, I heard slang that that rang me like a bell; stuff I hadn’t heard since I was a little child.

I look forward to exploring it. (DARE previously on LH.)

Update (Aug. 2017). Sadly, DARE is apparently coming to an end as an ongoing project.

The Paris Review posts a translated selection from the Ulysses “logbook” of “the indefatigable Bernard Hœpffner, who translated many English masterpieces into French [and] drowned off the northern coast of Wales this past May”; he was part of an eight-person team that retranslated Joyce’s Ulysses into French (quite properly, he felt “disappointment upon learning this would be a team effort” — it was a terrible idea, I don’t care how good the results may have been), and his entries make fascinating reading. A few excerpts:

October 9, 2001 – Which of the many different editions should we use? We settle on the 1922 edition with Gaskell and Hart’s alterations, with the occasional glance at Gabler’s edition. Pointed discussions over how much to Gallicize proper names (last names, geographical locations): a matter of understanding how Joyce had undone English, and how we might in turn undo French. Joyce has pulled us into a double bind: even though the unique style of each episode grants each team member a great deal of liberty, the immense number of echoes forces us to make decisions we have to agree upon. Patrick Drevet almost convinces us that the place names ought to be translated, but his absence from the next meeting allows us to renege, as it would be impossible to be fully consistent; Patrick very graciously accepts our decision. […]

December 3, 2001 – We’re having more and more trouble working with global decisions when they deviate far enough from Joyce’s original. Jacques explains how Ulysses’s literary stakes are not only varied but at times contradictory. As such, it’s hard for us to all read the book the same way and create a homogeneous translation.

March 4, 2002 – Long back-and-forths result in our replacing “Mrs” and “Mr” with “Mme” and “M.” We also decide to translate urban nomenclature: bridge, street, et cetera. (We will, much later, reverse course, without any exceptions). […]

January 16, 2003 – Gallimard consents to a communal “postface” written by the team. Tiphaine wants to try her hand at translating Oxen of the Sun, the episode that, from the start, we had agreed we would keep in Morel’s translation; she will abandon it several months later; we then decide, together, a posteriori and in bad faith, that, since this episode is a history of the English language, integrating Morel’s translation makes it a history of Ulysses’s translations—but it is still true that the echoes don’t reverberate here. We go back and forth while sending the typescript back to Gallimard, going through edits, and production.

Then the work on the innumerable echoes throughout the book starts in earnest. Each of us tries to convince the others to accept particular exceptions to the rules we’d agreed on; invariably due to puns, or neologisms. Numerous emails follow:

“So you think ‘chiasse’ is too strong. What do you say to ‘merdasse’?”

There’s much, much more (“I suggest hiring someone who doesn’t know French to proofread the translation in keeping with the spirit of the original, which had been given to compositors unfamiliar with English”), including various examples of what an unpleasant person Stephen Joyce is; read the whole thing. (Thanks, Trevor!)

The mail brought an Amazon package containing an item I only recently added to my wishlist (because it’s only just been published), Shushan Avagyan’s translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s Гамбургский счет, The Hamburg Score (with a very touching note from the generous reader who ordered it for me — thanks from the bottom of my heart, Clay). I have been unreasonably fond of Shklovsky’s writing ever since I read A Sentimental Journey, his memoir of “the travels of a bewildered intellectual through Russia, Persia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus during the period of the Russian Revolution,” to quote the Dalkey Archive description (Dalkey Archive Press has been issuing all of Shklovsky’s work as fast as they can get it translated, just one of the outstanding services they provide the world of literature — go buy books from them!). I don’t know what it is; those quirky sentences arranged into tiny paragraphs that constantly leap in unexpected directions are like catnip to me. I don’t even care if he’s right or wrong (and I’m quite sure he’s wrong about Velimir Khlebnikov being “the champion” of early-20th-century Russian literature — the Formalist critics had a passion for the Futurist poets in general and Khlebnikov in particular that mystifies me), I could listen to him deliver obiter dicta and crack obscure jokes for hours.

I haven’t had time to do more than glance at this beautiful, compact paperback yet (work! work!), but I’ve already learned something. I ran across the expression «гамбургский счёт» [Hamburg calculation/reckoning/score] years ago, learned that it meant ‘objective measurement of who’s better than who,’ and assumed it had been around since, say, the early 19th century (when Russians habitually went to Germany for education and culture). But it turns out Shklovsky was the one who publicized it, after hearing an anecdote at the Herzen House restaurant in Moscow (and got in trouble for it after World War II, when he was accused of unpatriotic leanings for favoring a German city); his preface to this book begins:

The Hamburg score is a very important concept.

All wrestlers cheat in matches and fall on their shoulder blades at the behest of the entrepreneurs.

But once a year wrestlers gather at a pub in Hamburg.

They wrestle behind closed doors and curtained windows.

It is a long, hard, and ugly fight. But this is the only way to determine their true worth — to prevent them from getting corrupted.

We need a Hamburg score in literature.

As I say, he calls Khlebnikov the champion, but I say Shklovsky is the champion of Formalist critics and Dalkey Archive Press is the champion of literary publishers.

I’m almost finished with Part One of China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, by Peter C. Perdue; I’m enjoying it greatly, and I thought I’d share this passage from pp. 126-7:

The greatest gift of the Mongols to the Manchus, of course, was the Mongolian script. In 1599 Nurhaci ordered Erdeni Baksi and G’ag’ai to create a script for the Manchu “national language” (guoyu). They objected that the Manchus had long used the Mongolian script and language, and they could not create a new one. Nurhaci then said, “When the Chinese read out their writing, people understand it, whether or not they can read Chinese; likewise for Mongols; but our words must first be translated into Mongolian; then [the Manchus] don’t understand it.” He then ordered them to create a new alphabetic script, using the Mongolian script as a model:

Taizu [Nurhaci] asked, “Why is it difficult to write down our language, but easy to learn the languages of other countries?” G’ag’ai and Erdeni replied: “It would be best to create a script for our country’s language, but we do not know how to transcribe the sounds.” Taizu said: “If you put a letter for ‘ma’ after a letter for ‘a,’ is this not ‘ama’ [father]? If you put a letter ‘me’ after a letter for ‘e,’ is this not ‘eme’ [mother]? My mind is made up; you just try it out.” Thereupon they took the Mongolian script and wrote the Manchu language. The creation of the Manchu script began with Taizu.

So Erdeni and G’ag’ai, following Nurhaci’s orders, created the new writing system, and soon began to translate Chinese texts into Manchu, as well as using Manchu in imperial proclamations. Dahai, in 1632, added the diacritical marks to distinguish different Manchu vowels, along with extra symbols for particular Chinese consonants; this “pointed” script became the standard Manchu writing system for the rest of the dynasty.

Nurhaci was, of course, wrong to assume that classical literary Chinese could be understood when read out loud. His advisers, well acquainted with Mongolian imperial language, resisted the introduction of Manchu writing probably in order to maintain ties to the Mongolian institutional tradition. To judge from his discussion, Nurhaci had in mind a syllabic script (like Japanese hiragana and katakana), not the actual Mongolian or Manchu scripts, which were alphabetic. Nurhaci’s motives were political, not linguistic. What he stressed was oral communication of written commands by the ruler to the entire Manchu population, literate and nonliterate. He needed a scriptural apparatus to bolster his new state because he, like all previous Central Eurasian rulers, needed to communicate his personal will beyond the boundaries of person-to-person contact. His edicts could now be read out in their own language to all his Manchu subjects, and texts could be translated into their native language for their own education. In effect, by creating a distinctive script, Nurhaci broadened the cultural horizons of his people, allowing them to adapt non-Manchu ideas but maintain their distinct identity. The new technology of writing made possible the expansion of the state to cover all the Manchu people. But it also allowed the introduction of large quantities of Chinese classical literature through translation into the Manchu literate world, which had formerly been much more closely tied to Mongolia and the Buddhist world of Central Eurasia.

(Suggestions for the etymology of the name Manchu in this 2009 post.)

I didn’t think I could be surprised by news about Hemingway, but Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera managed to do it with this piece at Lingua Franca:

In Cuba, Hemingway gave public speeches and interviews in Spanish, and spoke it around the house. It was also his routine language while vacationing off the island. In Africa in 1954, Spanish was regarded as his “tribal language” and he recalls a conversation with a lion: “All the time I was stroking him and talking to him in Spanish.” […]

Hemingway’s wife Mary Welsh said he talked in his sleep in Spanish – and the photographer Raúl Corrales noted, “He used to speak to himself out loud when he was alone. I heard him a few times and it drew my attention that he spoke to himself in Spanish and not in English.” […]

[Discussing The Old Man and the Sea:] As Santiago contemplates the sky, Hemingway unpacks a translingual pun: He “saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream” and says “Light brisa.” Brisa translates as “breeze” but in Cuba it also means hunger.

The Old Man and the Sea is written in an English-ized Cuban Spanish. Gayle Rogers, an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, says the language interplay can appear “illogical,” making the crosslingual depths “apparent only to readers who know both English and Spanish … and can see the colliding linguistic planes.”

In this sense, the way we read Hemingway’s Cuban writings should be less English-centric, taking his Cuban linguistic environment more closely into account.

“Spanish [is] the only language I really know,” wrote Hemingway in 1954, playing with Spanish, French, Italian, English, and Kamba: ”As it is I must write in English, a bastard tongue but fairly manoeverable. Spanish is a language Tu.”

It stands to reason that he’d learn Spanish living in Cuba for twenty years, but apparently it went pretty deep (even making allowances for Hem’s inevitable quota of self-aggrandizing bullshit).

In investigating various matters connected with this post, I ran into John M. Tait’s site Scots Threip:

Scots Threip consists of writings of my own on the Scots Language. It started as a place to put them so that I could refer to them in forum discussions. Many of the articles are in Scots as they were written either for Scots forums or Lallans magazine.

The Site Guide is on the left margin; it’s quite a rabbit hole. I particularly recommend Wanchancies if you want a glimpse into the arguments surrounding the proper rendition of “Scots as a functioning language with its own characteristics”; as an outsider, I wouldn’t dream of taking a position myself.

And for lagniappe, here’s the first couple of stanzas of Sydney Goodsir Smith’s “Epistle to John Guthrie”:

We’ve come intil a gey queer time
Whan scrievin Scots is near a crime,
“There’s no one speaks like that”, they fleer,
–But wha the deil spoke like King Lear?

And onyways doon Canongate
I’ll tak ye slorpin pints till late,
Ye’ll hear Scots there as raff an slee–
Its no the point, sae that’ll dae.

I wondered about the phrase “up to snuff,” so I looked it up. Turns out it didn’t always mean “meeting the required standard,” as it does now; Gary Martin tells us:

In 1811, the English playwright John Poole wrote Hamlet Travestie, a parody of Shakespeare, in the style of Doctor Johnson and George Steevens, which included the expression.

“He knows well enough The game we’re after: Zooks, he’s up to snuff.” &

“He is up to snuff, that is, he is the knowing one.”

A slightly later citation of the phrase, in Grose’s Dictionary, 1823, lists it as ‘up to snuff and a pinch above it’, and defines the term as ‘flash’. This clearly shows the derivation to be from ‘snuff’, the powdered tobacco that had become fashionable to inhale in the late 17th century. The phrase derives from the stimulating effect of taking snuff. The association of the phrase with sharpness of mind was enhanced by the fashionability and high cost of snuff and by the elaborate decorative boxes that it was kept in.

The later meaning of ‘up to standard’, in the same sense as ‘up to scratch’ (see also: ‘start from scratch’) began to be used around the turn of the 20th century.

Lots of idioms don’t make sense, but some do if you can trace them back far enough.

I just finished reading Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya‘s 1861 novella Пансионерка, which (amazingly for a largely forgotten nineteenth-century writer) has been translated (by Karen Rosneck) into English, as The Boarding-School Girl. It was kind of a pain to read, since to have it on my Kindle I had to download the entire issue of Otechesvennye zapiski as a pdf file and squint at the resultant smudges through the already somewhat smudgy screen. But I persevered, because it’s important to me to read as much literature by women as possible, and it was worth it.

It starts off unexcitingly, with a conversation between two youngish men who had become friends elsewhere and now meet again in a provincial town: Ibraev has been sent there as an important official as a stepping-stone in his career, Veretitsyn as a political exile who will have to cool his heels as an ill-paid, overworked scribe until the authorities allow him to depart. Ibraev is condescending and self-absorbed, Veretitsyn sarcastic and self-pitying; after they’ve talked for a while, they notice children playing next door, and a fifteen-year-old girl in a boarding-school uniform studying a book. She will turn out to be our heroine, Elena (“Lyolenka”) Gosteva. Ibraev leaves, discomfited at having unwittingly compromised himself by associating with a man under police surveillance; Veretitsyn chats for a bit with the girl, making fun of her book and her studies, and gets into the habit of talking with her over the fence from time to time, laughing sarcastically at everything she says.

These conversations mean nothing to Veretitsyn, who is obsessed with his situation and his love for the beautiful Sofya Khmelevskaya. But they overturn Lyolenka’s life; from a diligent student and obedient daughter, she becomes a rebellious girl who half-deliberately fails her exams and is increasingly frustrated by her home life. The thing is, though, that she is not a conscious rebel; she does not understand what is happening to her, does not even realize that she is falling in love with her ironic neighbor. The middle chapters of the book are an acute psychological investigation of the development of an adolescent girl that reminded me of both Avdotya Panaeva‘s Семейство Тальниковых [The Talnikov family] (see this post) and Pasternak’s Детство Люверс [The Childhood of Luvers, also translated Zhenia Luvers’ Childhood and The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers]. Ironically, she was chastised at the time by people like Saltykov-Shchedrin for excessive attention to psychology (he complained about the same thing in George Eliot) — they wanted plot and politics, not girls trying to figure out who they are and why they do the things they do. But she got great reviews in general; in 1880 Pyotr Boborykin wrote that she had no equal in Europe except for George Eliot. After her death in 1889 she was forgotten, like all her female contemporaries (Elena Gan, Elena Kube/Veltman, Sophie Engelhardt — whose “Не сошлись” Erik at XIX век is now translating as “It Didn’t Come Off”: introduction here, first installment here).

The book takes a sudden turn towards the end which I won’t spoil for you; I’ll just say that it gets more and more satisfying as it goes along, is never dogmatic, and has penetrating and acerbic things to say about female education, family life, and art. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the life of women in nineteenth-century Russia, or indeed anywhere, and I hope more such works get translated.

Addendum (Feb. 2021). Anne Lounsbery has an interesting discussion of this story in Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800–1917; I’ll quote some chunks of it (warning: spoilers!):

Up to a certain point, Khvoshchinskaia’s plot would seem to recapitulate a pattern we know well from Pushkin, Lermontov, and other male writers: sweet young girl encounters cynical older man who both enlightens and wounds her. But the difference is that in this text the girl, rather than serving as a vehicle for the male hero’s development, keeps hold of the narrative, which comes to be about her transformation and her life. Veretitsyn lacks the intellect and magnetism of an Onegin or Pechorin: his ideas are ready-made, and he is full of self-pity. After he has tutored Lolenka—condescendingly, sententiously—in vaguely radical ideas, and after she has dutifully taken them all in, Lolenka creatively (mis)interprets what Veretitsyn has taught her, and she uses it to transform her life. In the end the male character becomes merely a vehicle for the heroine’s development: Lolenka turns out to be the extraordinary one, as evidenced by her ability to pull herself out of the provincial slough. […]

As the words “I am not a slave” suggest, there is always the possibility of physical violence in this text, though most of it happens offstage or is just hinted at. Lolenka goes home to “supper and abuse”; the entire household fears her father’s rage; her schoolmates will be beaten for failing exams; her little brothers are tied to table legs to force them to study. Occasionally Khvoshchinskaia comes close to representing the abuse: Lolenka’s siblings are beaten, and after Lolenka fails her exams, we are told in passing that “her mother beat her, and not just once.” All of this violence, whether depicted or alluded to, is domestic; Veretitsyn, for example, suffers no physical violence as a result of his political crime. In fact domesticity in this book basically is institutionalized violence, with a little forced labor thrown in; child-raising and family life are at best pointless drudgery. […] Khvoshchinskaia focuses on domesticity and women’s liberation as a way of raising questions about politics and about everyone’s liberation. At the end of the book we learn that Veretitsyn’s love, the angelic Sofia, has devoted herself to a specifically domestic version of feminine self-abnegation, forsaking all personal satisfactions in in order to serve her family in an offstage world that we never see—a solution Veretitsyn says makes Sofia a saint and a martyr, but not an option that the text would seem to be endorsing.

Given the meagerness of the resources (cultural, social, and economic) at Lolenka’s disposal, and the formidable power of her adversaries, the reader expects her to give up and “submit.” But instead Lolenka rebels, thereby effecting her own transformation: having formed the “stubborn, ardent, burning conviction” that her life is bad, she acts on this conviction. And since Khvoshchinskaia does not illuminate the source of her heroine’s strength, when we read the final words in what seems to be the main body of the book—“Mama, you can kill me on the spot, but I will not marry”—we are struck above all by the inexplicability of Lolenka’s metamorphosis. Immediately after these dramatic words, we encounter an ellipsis, then a chapter break, and finally a chapter that functions as a kind of epilogue.

At this point—“you can kill me” followed by an ellipsis—the reader is likely to assume that Lolenka has either died or has been consigned to a death-in-life provincial existence: so convincingly has Khvoshchinskaia described the hellish constraints of provincial life that any other ending seems impossible. However, the next words we read are “eight years had passed since that time”: having just left Lolenka a virtual prisoner in a provincial hellhole, we now meet her—suddenly, miraculously—as a free subject in the midst of utter cultural plenitude: she is sitting in the Hermitage. Lolenka is now an artist, serenely occupying the museum’s Spanish Room and painting copies on commission (a fact to which I will return in a moment). We are left with the question: how did Lolenka get here? And why is her escape—so obviously a crucial juncture in the story—not narrated?

The text makes quick work of the implausible development, informing us that Lolenka wrote a desperate letter to her aunt/godmother in Petersburg, with the result that the aunt rescued her: apparently the only mechanism Khvoshchinskaia could find to ensure Lolenka’s deliverance was an auntie-ex-machina. Once in Petersburg, the brief explanation concludes, Lolenka studied art and languages, living with her aunt; when she was able to support herself through translations and paintings, she stopped accepting any help from her relation. […]

Lolenka has not only escaped the provinces, she has made her way to the anti-gorod N: against N’s deadly cultural attenuation, the capital—which is represented, none too realistically, as a giant museum open to all—is a distillation of everything that capital-C Culture can do for you. One thing the capital does for Lolenka is allow her to win the battle that Veretitsyn initiated in their far-off provincial town. There Lolenka would have lost, but in Petersburg the roles are reversed, and she wins: in the Hermitage it is she who first observes and identifies Veretitsyn, laughing at his confusion; she is serene while he is flustered. Above all Lolenka makes a strong case for the life she has chosen, justifying her “abandonment” of her parents against Veretitsyn’s accusations of disloyalty and egoism. Veretitsyn charges that “as long as there were still people” (family members) to whom she had obligations, Lolenka had no right to escape, to which Lolenka retorts, “Injustice, persecution had reached an extreme … didn’t I have the right to tear myself away, to come to hate the memory of the past?” […]

Khvoshchinskaia’s heroine has joined history, history in the sense of “public time” (“time experienced by the individual as public being, conscious of a framework of public institutions in and through which events, processes and changes happened to the society of which he perceives himself to be part”)—a history to which the provincial Town of N provided no access. […]

Only in the metropolis can Khvoshchinskaia’s heroine recreate herself as a markedly modern subject; her only possibility of a future is located in the capital, where she can replace the vertical relationships that structured her past life with the up-to-date horizontal idea of the cohort (“our generation,” as she says repeatedly). If in the end the alternatives Khvoshchinskaia imagines seem imperfect as well as improbable (as is suggested by the stridently doctrinaire nature of her heroine’s diatribes: “Slavery, the family! . . . Precepts of submission to tyranny! […]”), it is not hard to understand why: the text’s unconvincing ending—much like the flimsy ellipsis that stands in for any real explanation of exactly how a girl like Lolenka might escape the provinces in order to make her way to Petersburg and modernity—signals to us that The Boarding School Girl is probably trying to imagine an escape that is not yet quite imaginable.

I don’t know why Lounsbery uses “Lolenka” for Lyolenka; it’s annoying but one gets used to it.

Update (Nov. 2023). Erik McDonald, who has done very well by Khvoshchinskaya (translating her and assembling a useful bibliography of her works in Russian and English), posts about a new site put together by a team of Khvoshchinskaya scholars: “It’s not just links, but actual downloadable .pdfs of the sisters’ works and works about them.” We march towards the shining future, comrades!

Michael Gavin of Colorado State University has a fascinating piece at The Conversation that asks: “Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?”

The questions also seem like they should be fundamental to many academic disciplines – linguistics, anthropology, human geography. But, starting in 2010, when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.

These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical adage – correlation does not equal causation. […]

A better way to identify the causes of particular patterns is to simulate the processes we think might be creating them. The closer the model’s products are to the reality we know exists, the greater the chances are that we understand the actual processes at work.

Two members of our group, ecologists Thiago Rangel and Robert Colwell, had developed this simulation modeling technique for their studies of species diversity patterns. But no one had ever used this approach to study the diversity of human populations.

We decided to explore its potential by first building a simple model to test the degree to which a few basic processes might explain language diversity patterns in just one part of the globe, the continent of Australia.

The success of the model for Australia is truly astonishing; as they say, different patterns will be at work elsewhere, and I certainly join them in their concluding wish: “We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.” Thanks, Trevor!