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As promised in my earlier post, here are some passages from Veltman’s Virginie (all from the inserted correspondence, which constitutes at least half the text) that provide ironic takes on Russian literacy in the early 19th century; I’ll put the Russian originals after the translations (probably still with uncaught OCR errors). The first is from a social gathering:

At dinner I wound up sitting next to a young man who was submerged in a weighty jabot; I started a conversation with him, wanting to acquire some information about Russia, but imagine my surprise: he seems to have no more knowledge of Russia than I do. Here’s our conversation:
I. – What an extraordinary talent for learning languages Russians are endowed with; I have never seen a European nation that spoke French so fluently.
He.—Yes; but all those who want to be educated are forced to do so.
I don’t understand; please explain it to me.
He.—It’s quite clear; we don’t have our own language. Would you believe that in Russian it is not possible to put two decent words together in a salon, not to mention that the Russian language has absolutely no words for expressing ideas; it is impossible for an enlightened person to express his thoughts in Russian.
I. – That’s remarkable; I had imagined that the Russian language was one of the richest.
He. – You are mistaken. The Russian language exists only among the common people. It is a crude language, the very simplest.
I. – But the written language? the language of Russian literature?
He. — All Russian literature is written in the Slavic language, that is, in the Church language. This language is even worse: no one learns it except the clergy and scribes; for even our legal proceedings are in the Slavic language.
I. – But surely someone is engaged in the development of the Russian language?
He.— Absolutely nobody; all decent people speak and write French, they know English, German, Italian.
I.- But I seem to remember reading that in Russia there are the poets Lamanousoff, Dershavni….
He – Lomonosov is famous only because he was the first to write the vilest poems in Russian… And as for Minister Derzhavin. . . He is a Minister, therefore, it was not difficult for him to make himself famous . . . and what did he write? some odes; but they are also in the Slavic language, which, I confess, I do not understand, and therefore I cannot be enraptured by Russian works. In any case, I have no need of them, like any educated person who can read European works… I’d rather open the charming Delille, the sublime Racine, Corneille, Voltaire! …
Is it possible to express in Russian, for example, the verse when Assur says to Semiramis: “Madame! c’est à vous d’achever votre ouvrage”?
I asked him to translate the verse into Russian; my interlocutor thought for a long time, and finally translated it. I wrote it down, and here it is:
“Sadarina, eto vam prinadlejit kontchit vasch rabоto.”
My God, is it even possible to compose something decent in Russian? continued the Russian youth.
Judging by his words, and by the general conversation of society in French, one must assume that the Russian language will completely die out and be replaced by French.

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Dmitry Pruss writes me:

We have an etymology discussion under my Facebook post with ermine pictures. Vasmer says one thing about горностай, Trubachyov another, and wiktionary shies away from it but suggests a paper with discussion.
Does the learned world of the hatters know?

I’ve added links so interested parties can follow up; to summarize, Trubachov says it’s from an Old Saxon *harmenes-tagl- / *harmenes-tail- ‘ermine’s tail,’ while Vasmer calls that idea mistaken (“Ошибочно”) without further analysis, rubbishing another couple of hypotheses in the process (“unacceptable… also unacceptable… absolutely fantastic”), and says Proto-Slavic *gornostajь remains unexplained (“остается необъясненным”). All thoughts welcome!

In 2023, introducing my review of Alexander Veltman’s Предки Калимероса [The forebears of Kalimeros] (1836), I wrote “having since read more Veltman than doubtless all but a handful of Americans, I’ve finally gotten around to one of his early works I missed along the way,” and now I’ve renewed the exploit by reading his 1837 novel Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию [Virginie, or a journey to Russia]. As usual, I have no idea whether anyone else would be interested in it, and even if they were it’s unlikely they’d actually read it because 1) it’s never been translated (and doubtless will never be) and 2) even to read it in Russian you have to download a pdf of the original publication, in pre-reform spelling and often hard to make out (at least that’s the only text I could find). So I will thoroughly spoil the plot in my summary (though plot is always the least important thing in Veltman).

It starts off:

Hector d’Alm, a handsome young Parisian, was compelled as a result of a purchase of land to spend a good deal of time in Briançon and in the environs of that Alpine city.

Парижанинъ Гекторъ д’Альмъ, прекрасный собою молодой человѣкъ, принужденъ былъ по случаю покупки земли, прожить долгое время въ Бріансонѣ и въ округѣ этого Альпійскаго города.

He has no interest in the antiquities of the region (“Что мнѣ до символовъ прошедшаго, я хочу видѣть только настоящее”) and dreams of women, so in the interest of meeting some local members of the fair sex he visits a tree-planting festival. Ignoring the ancient roots of the celebration, he fixates on a beautiful girl and follows her to her home in a nearby village, where he pretends to be interested in the antiquarian researches of her father while casting smoldering glances at the girl, who is, of course, the titular Virginie. She, a virginal and naive fifteen-year-old, responds with the requisite blushes, and eventually, alone with her while her father is rummaging in his storeroom, he seizes the opportunity to give her a kiss. Unfortunately, she melts in his arms, her father dashes in, and before he knows it Hector is officially engaged to the tremulous Virginie. What to do?
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In the course of a LLog post about an xkcd comic, Mark Liberman has some interesting things to say about the history of chemical nomenclature:

As background for these jokes, it’s worth considering that modern chemical nomenclature was linguistically inspired:

Lavoisier, together with Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude-Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, submitted a new program for the reforms of chemical nomenclature to the academy in 1787, for there was virtually no rational system of chemical nomenclature at this time. […]

The total effect of the new nomenclature can be gauged by comparing the new name “copper sulfate” with the old term “vitriol of Venus.” Lavoisier’s new nomenclature spread throughout Europe and to the United States and became common use in the field of chemistry.

Or the new names “ethanoic acid” or”acetic acid” (or CH3COOH) for the old name “vinegar”…

The full proposal was published in 1787 as Méthode de nomenclature chimique (facsimile on Gallica here, on Google here). It starts with Le Mémoire sur la nécessité de réformer et de perfectionner la nomenclature de la chimie, which was written and read to the Académie by Lavoisier on April 18, 1787, and argues that the chemical nomenclature inherited from the alchemists should be methodically revised to make the names reflect the (recently discovered) components of the named substances.

Lavoisier’s argument is explicitly founded on an argument from Condillac’s Logique about the role of language in developing ideas about the nature of the world.

More details, quotes, and links at the Log post; it’s always interesting to see the history behind terms that we take for granted.

Joel at Far Outliers posted excerpts from Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), and I thought this one was of Hattic interest:

Those who remained reasonably healthy and curious would have been immediately struck by Navidad’s sheer diversity. As the port’s population swelled from a few dozen to several hundred, it turned into something of a Babel of races, nationalities, classes, and occupations. Native Americans were ubiquitous. Coming from nearby towns such as Tuxpan and Xilotlán, they had been compelled to abandon their families, homes, and fields and go to Navidad to work for token compensation according to a system of corvée labor known as repartimiento. For these Indigenous peoples, service at the port was yet another labor sinkhole that they had to endure, like the silver mines or the road construction projects. Also common were African slaves, purchased by the viceroy and dispatched to Navidad to aid in the building effort. Some had been Christianized and spoke Spanish, but many others, the so-called negros bozales, had been imported directly from Africa. Particularly visible was a team of Black slaves constantly moving cargo from various towns into Navidad and managing a train of twenty-seven mules and two horses.

Spaniards constituted the largest share of the expeditionaries, as one would expect. The catchall appellation español, however, masked yet more diversity. Friar Urdaneta and Commander Legazpi were both from the Basque Country, so a disproportionate number of voyagers hailed from that region. As Basque is a non-Indo-European language, they enjoyed a private means of communication completely impenetrable to all other Spaniards—far more so than, say, English, German, or Russian. Galicia in the north of Spain, Castile in the middle, and Andalusia in the south were also well represented at Navidad. Although these historic kingdoms were linguistically and culturally closer to one another, the differences between them were greater in the sixteenth century than today and inevitably led to cliques and divisions within the crew and the two companies of soldiers.

A fixture of all early voyages of exploration was the high proportion of non-Spaniards. They could account for as many as a third (according to some regulations) and up to half (as in the case of Magellan’s expedition) of all crew members. The Navidad fleet was no different. The documentation mentions a Belgian barrel maker, a German artilleryman, an English carpenter, Venetian crew members, a French pilot, two Filipino translators, and so forth. Portuguese mariners made up the largest and most conspicuous foreign group: at least sixteen could be counted at Navidad. Spaniards regarded them as rivals but also valued their nautical skills. The Afro-Portuguese pilot Lope Martín, our protagonist, was among them.

(Click through for more on the very interesting Lope Martín.) It makes sense that Basque would have made a good private language.

Louis Menand has a review in last week’s New Yorker (archived) of Zora Neale Hurston’s much-rejected and now finally published novel The Life of Herod the Great; Menand describes her attempts to interest publishers, saying it “was turned down by Hurston’s publisher, Scribner’s, in 1955”:

She continued working on the book. In 1958, it was turned down by another house, David McKay, the publisher of Fodor’s travel guides and Ace Comics. In 1959, she wrote to Harper & Brothers to ask “if you would have any interest in the book I am laboring upon at present—a life of Herod the Great. One reason I approach you is because you will realize that any publisher who offers a life of Herod as it really was, and naturally different from the groundless legends which have been built up around his name has to have courage.” Harper & Brothers was Richard Wright’s publisher—as the reference to “courage” was intended to remind the recipients. But they passed on “Herod.” This was Hurston’s last extant letter.

One is primed to expect a happy ending — guess what, it turns out to be a masterpiece! But alas, Menand agrees with the publishers:

This is the Herod of “Herod,” a superhero of the Levant. He excels at everything, from man-to-man combat to interior design, an impossible combination of rectitude and swagger. When Cleopatra tries to seduce him, he refuses her. He’s a married man! When he has his wife executed, as the real Herod did, his reasoning is unassailable. When Cleopatra’s lover, that dissolute sensualist Mark Antony, sizes him up for a possible same-sex hookup, he can see right away that Herod is not that type. As Hurston describes the moment, “Antony was silently appraising Herod’s masculine perfection, his large, luminous eyes and superb lashes, his muscular limbs well developed by military use. But he did not sense that Herod’s mind would be capable of persuasion.”

The whole book is written like this, in a kind of illustrated-classics prose.

The bandit wheeled and snarled at Herod, exposing his rotting front teeth. He cursed Herod roundly and coarsely, then suddenly gripping his heavy spear, hurled it. But it was a second too late. Herod’s own spear was on the way, it hit Hezekiah fairly in the chest and pinned him to the ground. “Oh, allow me to finish him, Herod,” one of Herod’s young officers begged. “He is finished,” Herod said confidently making his way towards where Hezekiah lay. “I have been practicing that throw since I was ten years old.”

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Grace Dean of BBC News reports on a phenomenon I had vaguely thought was safely in the past:

Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent. But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.

Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.” When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”

Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust. More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting. […]

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We’ve discussed recent DNA findings quite a bit in various threads; this post at Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning is an attempt to pull them together into one package. It starts with a potted history of IE studies (“In 1780’s Calcutta, Sir William Jones was a 30-something British polymath with a particular talent for linguistics…”) and eventually gets down to business:

Language’s inherent flexibility kept scholars debating into this century whether Indo-European languages had diffused via memes or genes. But now with a 2024 crop of blockbuster Indo-European papers and preprints, I think it’s fair to say we have answered the biggest questions Jones raised and are in the late stages of settling most of the minor outstanding ones.

We know now that our genes and our words concur. Far more than recent generations of scholars predicted. We actually kind of are what we speak. But ancient DNA has taken us further still. The tree of our demographic history is an often startlingly strong match to historical linguistics’ shadow tree. And now, 2024 has brought a surfeit of results in two high-impact papers, leaving us a stack of refinements and details with which to update our models. […]

In 2015, only five years into the paleogenomic era, two research teams independently published blockbuster findings that in the period just after 3000 BC, right when scholars like archaeologist Marija Gimbutas had long argued for Indo-European languages expanding into the continent, Europe did indeed see a massive demographic turnover. But whereas Gimbutas’ intellectual heirs, like David Anthony, had theorized a mostly elite migration that would have registered at most a modest genetic impact, while wholly overhauling linguistic patterns, genetics told us that actually across much of northern Europe over half of ancestry was replaced. Today, scholars broadly agree that the Pontic steppe’s Yamnaya people, who contributed this new ancestry, both spoke proto-Indo-European, and aggressively expanded all across Eurasia beginning around 5,000 years ago, overnight shouldering aside venerable Neolithic civilizations from Britain to Central Asia. Between 3000 and 2300 BC, the Yamnaya and their descendents substantially replaced the indigenous peoples across the European continent’s width and breadth.

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Maksym Eristavi has a Substack post RC101 movie night: Alim (“a gem of the Ukrainian-Qırımlı indigenous art”) which goes into some cultural history that’s largely forgotten:

Alim (1926) is a gem of an ancient tradition of cultural solidarity between Ukrainian and Qırımlı indigenous artists. A prominent historian of Russian colonialism, whom I endlessly admire, Rory Finnin, has recently written an amazing book about this special cultural bond that Russia worked hard to break and erase.

This movie is the first Ukrainian Western to retell the story of a Crimean Tatar folk hero who stood up to Russian colonial authorities abusing, pillaging, and exploiting the indigenous people of Qırım. Apart from the storyline about Russian colonialism that remains as relevant as ever, the additional value of the movie is its rare aesthetics and the creators behind it. “Alim” shows you the authentic world of Qırım-Crimea, which was unfortunately completely erased by Russia’s 1944 genocide of the Crimean Tatar people and the following aggressive settler colonialism.

“Alim” is based on a play by a legendary Qırımlı writer Ümer İpçi, whom Russians sent to a concentration camp and then imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. In the 20th century, so-called “corrective psychiatry” was widely weaponized by Moscow to eliminate an endless number of indigenous artists and thinkers.

Mykola Bazhan, a genius of Ukrainian modernism, wrote the script based on Ipci’s play. He will later barely survive the Russia-committed genocide of the Ukrainian people, which wiped out the entire intellectual elite, too. But the price for it would be his artistic freedom. Several years ago, some of his earliest works were packaged into an amazing ‘Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul’ volume and published in English.

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My wife asked me about the word vaudeville, so I turned to the OED (entry from 1916):

1. A light popular song, commonly of a satirical or topical nature; spec. a song of this nature sung on the stage.
[…]
2. A play or stage performance of a light and amusing character interspersed with songs; also without article, this species of play or comedy. Now in frequent use in the U.S. to designate variety theatre (variety n. Compounds C.b) or music hall.

The “now” is amusing (and, I would think, embarrassing — can’t they fix things like that even if they’re not doing a full update?), but it’s the etymology that’s of interest:

< French vaudeville, earlier vau (plural vaux) de ville, vau de vire, and in full chanson du Vau de Vire a song of the valley of Vire (in Calvados, Normandy). The name is said to have been first given to songs composed by Olivier Basselin, a fuller of Vire in the 15th cent.

Alas, apparently that’s considered dubious in these sterner times; Wiktionary says “Unclear. Possibly a corruption of voix de ville (‘voice of the city’), or vallée de Vire (‘valley of the (river) Vire’).”