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I forget why I looked up bock, as in bock beer ‘strong dark German beer,’ but I was startled to see in the Wikipedia article this origin story:

The style known now as bock was a dark, malty, lightly hopped ale first brewed in the 14th century by German brewers in the Hanseatic town of Einbeck. The style from Einbeck was later adopted by Munich brewers in the 17th century and adapted to the new lager style of brewing. Due to their Bavarian accent, citizens of Munich pronounced “Einbeck” as “ein Bock” (“a billy goat”), and thus the beer became known as “bock”. To this day, as a visual pun, a goat often appears on bock labels.

Is that true? I mean, the OED says it’s “< Einbeck, Eimbeck, a town in Lower Saxony, Germany,” so I guess the ultimate origin is correct, but is it true about the Munich accent?

As I wrote here, I’ve taken a break from Pasternak to read Marina Tsvetaeva, and I’ve run across an amazing poem from 1936 (she had only another five years to live) that shows off her late style at its most impressive. It’s only two stanzas; here‘s the Russian:

В мыслях об ином, инаком,
И ненайденном, как клад,
Шаг за шагом, мак за маком —
Обезглавила весь сад.

Так, когда-нибудь, в сухое
Лето, поля на краю,
Смерть рассеянной рукою
Снимет голову — мою.

Most of the vocabulary is fairly basic, with the startling exception of the fifth word, инаком, a declined form of инакий, which is so rare it’s not in any of my Russian-English dictionaries. It is, however, in Dahl (s.v. иной) and Vasmer; it’s an archaic synonym of иной ‘other,’ and here is found directly after it, serving as a mysterious almost-repetition. I’m going to render it as the Scots “ither” in the rough-and-ready translation below, just to convey the almost-repetition and synonymy:

Thinking of something other, ither,
And undiscovered, like a treasure,
Step by step, poppy by poppy,
I beheaded the entire garden.

Thus, at some future time, in a dry
Summer, on a field’s edge,
Death, with an absent-minded hand
Will take off a head — mine.

That gives you the general idea, anyway. The basic idea is a cliche: humans are like unto the flowers of the field; golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. But see how a great poet can make it new! It opens with a magic triplet, complete with a magic obscure word: “ином, инаком, И ненайденном” [inóm, inákom, i nenáidennom]. Notice how the three terms grow from the cell of inóm, using the i-n-m matrix to build longer words? Then we get the thudding, ominous “Шаг за шагом, мак за маком” [Shag za shagom, mak za makom], again using near-repetition, capped by the killer: “I beheaded the entire garden.”

The second stanza opens with the basic poetic hinge так ‘thus, in the same way,’ followed by another ingeniously constructed triplet: “когда-нибудь, в сухое Лето, поля на краю” [kogdá-nibud’, v sukhoe leto, polya na krayú], this time varied rhythmically: da-DA-dada, da-DA-da-DA-da, DA-dadada-DA; with the last phrase (as Viktoria Schweitzer, whose biography of Tsvetaeva I’m reading, points out), she’s alluding to the Russian proverb “Жизнь прожить — не поле перейти” ‘to live life is not the same as to cross a field’ (and this, as Schweitzer neglects to mention, was famously used by Pasternak as the last line of Гамлет [Hamlet]). And then the kicker: death will behead me as I beheaded the flowers.

What occurred to me as I was rereading it was that it reminded me strongly of Emily Dickinson, who even used dashes similarly, and I wished Tsvetaeva could have translated Dickinson. It wouldn’t have been faithful, but it sure would have been worth reading.

A Guardian piece by Nancy Groves focuses on Caroline Bergvall’s multilingual performance Raga Dawn, a part of Estuary, “a 16-day festival celebrating the distinct character of the Essex ‘edgelands’ between Tilbury and Southend”:

Not only is Bergvall duetting her poetry with classical singer Peyee Chen, to a score by Gavin Bryars, the pair are accompanied by the recorded voices of the Punjabi-speaking community of Southend and a group of Romansh speakers from Switzerland. […]

Blame the polyphony of Raga Dawn on Bergvall’s “bilingual brain” – her description, incidentally, though “multilingual” might be more accurate. Born in Germany to French and Norwegian parents, she moved to London in 1989, drawn by art and love (namely, her then girlfriend), and became energised by the queer arts scene of the Vauxhall underground.

As interesting as all that is, what prompted me to post was this passage:

Bergvall’s thoughts on these issues are set out in a thought-provoking 2010 essay, Middling English, in which she attempts to break down the development of modern English into four elements: midden, middle, middling and meddle. As she puts it, the “midden” is the soils of the English language, originated in multiple cultures. The “middle” is the historical Middle English period where the language settled into the one we recognise today. “Middling” is any attempt to standardise English, too often in prejudicial ways. This is something we see playing out in current political and social debate. Should new immigrants learn English as standard? And if so, what English do we mean? As Bergvall says, every new generation brings their own words to the mix: “Pop music and rap and even slam poetry all disturb the language.”

So what about the “meddle”? “The meddle is the artist or writer who messes things up and shows up the language’s complexity and richness,” says Bergvall. “The meddle is wanting to tackle issues, to bring other areas of awareness to the work you make.” Audiences can meddle, too, she adds. “We’re simply jumping in and activating it.”

Good for her: more meddling, less middling! (Thanks go to Trevor for the link.)

A NY Times “What in the World” piece by Gaia Pianigiani describes the results of Italy’s complex linguistic situation:

Say you’re shopping at a farmer’s market in Rome, and you’d like to pick up some nice, ripe watermelon. The signs at some stands call it “anguria”; others say “cocomero” or “melone d’acqua.”

Why so many different words for the same fruit? Because in their daily lives, many Italians don’t speak Italian.

That is, they don’t shop or chat or argue in standard Italian, the kind that is studied in school and heard on the news. They use one of the country’s hundreds of local dialects, each with its own quirks of pronunciation, inflection and vocabulary.

“You call it watermelon in New York, and that would be ‘anguria’ in Italian,” said Tino Mattiussi, a third-generation owner of a fruit and vegetable stand in the colorful Campo de’ Fiori market in central Rome. “But here, everyone knows it as ‘cocomero,’ so I wrote what people understand better.”

A few stands away, Mauro Ranucci had a different approach. “We advertise it as ‘anguria,’ as that is Italian,” he said firmly. “At least, that’s how people call it in the north.” When a southerner once asked him for a “melone d’acqua,” Mr. Ranucci said, it took him a minute to realize what he meant.

“We all speak Italian with strong regional connotations, even if the discrepancies are minor,” said Giovanni Ronco, vice director of the Italian Linguistic Atlas. “No other country has so many linguistic differences in such a limited space.”

There follows a brief discussion of relevant history. Oh, and if you were wondering, cocomero has antepenultimate stress: co-CO-mero. Thanks, Eric!

That’s the conclusion of a study by Julie Boland and Robin Queen reported here by MJ Franklin:

A study published in March suggests what we’ve all long suspected: People who are obsessed with grammar aren’t as nice as the rest of us.

For the study, scientists Julie Boland and Robin Queen from the University of Michigan asked 83 participants to read email responses to an ad for a roommate, and then evaluate the writer on both social and academic criteria.

There were three types of emails shown in the study: emails without errors, emails with grammatical errors only and emails with typos only. […]

According to Boland and Queen’s research, more agreeable participants (as determined by the results of the Big Five Personality index) tended to rate grammar errors less harshly than less agreeable participants, who showed more sensitivity to “grammos” — homophonous grammar errors like to/too, it’s/its.

The study, published in the journal PLOS One, then speculates that the difference between the two groups may be “perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention.”

Mind you, I wouldn’t put money on the accuracy of the results, but if it makes even a few people think twice about “correcting” other people’s spelling and grammar, I’m all for it.

Cambridge News reports on a worthy initiative:

A Cambridge start-up is on a mission to save some of the world’s most endangered languages from extinction.

Tribalingual is a language learning platform backed by the Cambridge Social Ventures programme in the Centre for Social Innovation at the Cambridge Judge Business School. It focuses solely on teaching rare and endangered languages.

It has been founded by Inky Gibbens, who became interested in endangered languages when she discovered that Buryat, the northern-Siberian language of her grandparents, was in danger of dying out.

“The rationale for using a language school to save languages is obvious,” said Gibbens.

“The only real way to save languages is by getting more people to speak them.”

So where others attempt to preserve languages by mummifying them through documentation and archiving, Tribalingual wants to give them a new lease of life by cultivating new generations and communities of speakers.

The company will initially focus on three dialects: Ojibwe, an endangered musical language in North America; Tulu, a South Indian language that is passed down orally only and doesn’t have a writing system; and Ainu, the language of a marginalised indigenous tribe in Japan, with less than 10 speakers worldwide.

Their website is here, and they’ve got a blog. Thanks, Trevor!

It’s been a while since reading about a new book on language made the bile rise within me; I’ve been very pleased with the increasing number and quality of good books on the topic. But Megan Garber’s piece in the Atlantic on Ross and Kathryn Petras’s You’re Saying it Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse accomplished that feat quickly and efficiently:

[…] the 180-page volume—a bloggy compendium of those words, featuring brief etymologies along with their correct pronunciations—does tell me, quite usefully, that “timbre” is pronounced “TAM-ber,” not “TIM-ber.” And that it’s “spit and image,” rather than “spitting image.” And “chaise longue” rather than “chaise lounge.” And “MIS-chuh-vus” rather than “mis-CHEE-vee-us.”

I’m feeling the bile again just copy-and-pasting that heap of steaming dung. Nobody says or writes “spit and image”; nobody except the kind of wretched pedant who would correct your “mispronunciation” of timbre or mischievous. (If you search on the phrase in Google Books, you get a bunch of usage guides.) And check out some of its “corrective pronunciations”:

açaí: ah-sigh-EE
phở: fuh
Budapest: boo-da-PESHT
Colombia: co-LOHM-bee-ya
Qatar: kuh-tahr
Uranus: YOOR-uh-nuss

You see the general approach: insist that English-speakers use an approximation of the pronunciation in the language the word was borrowed from, but get that pronunciation wrong enough to annoy anyone who actually knows the language. In Hungarian it’s BOO-daw-pesht (more or less), not “boo-da-PESHT”; in Arabic, it’s CUTter (with a really back C=Q), not “kuh-tahr.” And a lot of people are irritated, not impressed, by anglos pretending to give a Spanish twist to place names like Colombia and Nicaragua. And “YOOR-uh-nuss”? Seriously?

The only use for a book like this, the only possible excuse for its existence, would be if it confined itself to terms not found in dictionaries, like FOOD BRANDS (Fage: FAH-yay, Hoegaarden: HOO-gar-duhn) and FASHION DESIGNERS (Bulgari: BUHL-guh-ree, Givenchy: zhee-VON-she). But given their slovenly approach to other sorts of words, I don’t trust them on these, either. And check this out:

“In many cases,” they note, “so many people mispronounce a word that the new (originally wrong) pronunciation slowly becomes accepted … and sometimes even preferred.” They insist, though, that as that process takes place, there are clear lines between the correct and the incorrect. They note, in the book’s introduction, that 47 percent of Americans are “irritated” by mispronunciations and, as a result, correct their family and friends. In Britain, they add, “a whopping 41 percent go on the attack and stop a conversation to correct someone else.”

Clear lines, yes, that’s what this sort of peever always demands (and in the case of authors, claims to provide). Unfortunately, language is messy, people make different choices, and there are no “clear lines between the correct and the incorrect” — in almost all cases discussed in books like this, those terms are meaningless. And those statistics are clearly pulled out of the collective authorial ass. Please, people, if you want to know how a word is pronounced, look in a damn dictionary, and if there are two or more alternatives, feel free to use any or all. And shut the door in the face of anyone who shows up peddling crap like this.

Having read Pasternak’s pseudo-epics (or, as one might uncharitably call them, failed epics) of the mid-1920s, 1905 and Lieutenant Schmidt (both of which seem pretty unknown to English-speakers, to judge from Google results), I’ve taken a break to read Marina Tsvetaeva (along with the biography by Viktoria Schweitzer), and I thought I’d take a moment to give my impression of the long Pasternak poems. They’re both about the 1905 Revolution — apparently Pasternak wasn’t ready to deal with the more recent ones (when he was ready, the result would be Doctor Zhivago) — but nothing in them aroused my interest in either the revolution or the noble Lieutenant Schmidt, who gave up his life for the sake of the revolting sailors. What excited and moved me, and I’m sure what Pasternak put his heart into, are the passages that have nothing to do with politics or biography but are pure descriptions of nature (always close to Pasternak’s soul).

In 1905 there is the bravura passage about the sea that opens the section Морской мятеж [Sailor’s revolt], beginning “Приедается все,/ Лишь тебе не дано примелькаться…” (‘Everything palls;/ Only to you is it not given to become overly familiar from looking’ — you can see from that second line how impossible it is to translate); Dmitry Bykov said it sinks instantly into the memory of any Russian speaker, and I had little trouble memorizing a substantial chunk of it. I suppose the closest thing in English is Byron’s “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,—roll!/ Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain…” In Lieutenant Schmidt there’s a similarly glorious section about the Sebastopol harbor beginning “В зимней призрачной красе/ Дремлет рейд в рассветной мгле…” [‘In winter’s spectral beauty/ The roadstead slumbers in dawn’s haze…’], which has an irresistible passage in which he lullingly lingers on palatalized l’s: “Еле-еле лебезит/ Утренняя зыбь./ Каждый еле слышный шелест…” [‘Barely, barely flatter-crawl/ The morning ripples./ Every barely audible rustle…’]. But what prompted me to post was another passage, the start of section 2, that begins “Вырываясь с моря, из-за почты,/ Ветер прет на ощупь, как слепой” [‘Pulling itself out from the sea, beyond the post office,/ The wind makes its way by touch, like a blind man’]. I memorized that as well, with the result that it was fresh in my mind when I hit this bit from Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin: “The black wind is like a blind man, who gropes his way, caressing the air and barely touching nearby objects with his outstretched hands. It is blind, it does not see where it is going…” I don’t think it’s likely that Malaparte had read the Pasternak poem, even though he knew Russian literature, since it probably hadn’t been translated into any language he read; it’s just a coincidence, but certainly a striking one. I will never encounter a wind in my face quite the same way again.

Greg Uyeno has a CBS News story on the unusual (for mainstream media) topic of communication with aliens, which is of interest to someone like me who grew up immersed in sf and interested in language. The hook is the forthcoming sf movie Arrival (which I am eager to see), based on an excellent story by Ted Chiang (which is a pleonasm, because all his stories are excellent), and after a long excursus on Daniel Everett and his work with the Pirahã, it concludes with this passage:

But even if people are able to discern the patterns in the language, the way the message is sent could be a challenge. Humans communicate mainly through sight, sound and touch, but aliens might not. “It’s hard to imagine a language working on taste, but who knows?” Everett said.

If extraterrestrials​ have starkly different perceptual or expressive systems than those of humans, technology could help bridge the gap between human perception and alien output, linguists said. For example, if aliens spoke at frequencies that people can’t hear, humans could instead interpret digital recordings as visual waveforms.

Snedeker said she asks her students a question on exams to test their understanding of the shared structure and evolutionary basis of human language: “If we discover a new kind of creature on Mars that seems to have a symbolic system of great complexity, who should we send, and how likely are they to succeed?”

“There’s no right answer to the question,” Snedeker said.

I wish I thought the question might be answered in my lifetime.

Ingi Birchell Hughes lives in a Welsh village and is learning Welsh, and she didn’t like a piece in the Grauniad:

Last week the Guardian published an odd mean little article about how 5 boxes of Scrabble yn Gymraeg had been lingering unsold on a dusty shelf in Waterstones in Carmarthen.

It was a master class in invalidation — implying, without ever stating, that the reason they hadn’t sold must have been either a lack of Welsh speakers who like to play board games — fitting into the ‘Welsh people are thick’ trope, or worse, a general lack of Welsh speakers, fitting into the ‘Welsh is a dying language’ trope.

I don’t know about you, but most people into board games buy them online. And just so you know most Welsh speakers and learners in Carmarthenshire, who are perfectly able to shop online by the way, are more likely to buy books and other items in the Welsh language from Siop Y Pentan — which happens to also be in Carmarthen. Welsh speaking people have got so used to not having their needs catered for, that they are probably quite surprised that boxes of Welsh Scrabble are to be found in the Carmarthen branch of Waterstones. These are quite possibly, apart from Welsh language course books, the only items Yn Gymraeg in the entire shop.

She describes some of the problems she’s encountered learning the language, e.g.:

Wales is a bilingual country but English is the default language in supermarkets, shops and public spaces. If I go to Germany, and shop in a German supermarket, all the products will be labled German, all the the conversations I have with the checkout person or shopkeepers will be in German. Here in West Wales everything bar occasionally eggs and some milk, is labelled in English. You rarely get immersed in the language in public spaces. If I want to practise my Welsh I can try it out in the chemist — and I have found several chemists more than willing to help me practise. However discussing health matters in your second language is uncomfortable and an irony not lost on me.

Nothing spectacular, but an interesting read.