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After seeing Antonioni’s Blow-Up for, I think, the third time (his greatest hit, but not his best movie), I finally decided to read the Cortázar story, “Las babas del diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”), on which it was partially based; I confess that one reason was that I was curious about the title. Here’s the relevant passage from the story:

Y mientras se lo decía gozaba socarronamente de cómo el chico se replegaba, se iba quedando atrás-con sólo no moverse-y de golpe (parecía casi increíble) se volvía y echaba a correr, creyendo el pobre que caminaba y en realidad huyendo a la carrera, pasando al lado del auto, perdiéndose como un hilo de la Virgen en el aire de la mañana.

Pero los hilos de la Virgen se llaman también babas del diablo, y Michel tuvo que aguantar minuciosas imprecaciones, oírse llamar entrometido e imbécil, mientras se esmeraba deliberadamente en sonreír y declinar, con simples movimientos de cabeza, tanto envío barato.

Here’s Paul Blackburn’s translation:

And while that was getting said, I noticed on the sly how the boy was falling back, sort of actively backing up though without moving, and all at once (it seemed almost incredible) he turned and broke into a run, the poor kid, thinking that he was walking off and in fact in full flight, running past the side of the car, disappearing like a gossamer filament of angel-spit in the morning air.

But filaments of angel-spittle are also called devil-spit, and Michel had to endure rather particular curses, to hear himself called meddler and imbecile, taking great pains meanwhile to smile and to abate with simple movements of his head such a hard sell.

I don’t know why he chose to render “un hilo de la Virgen” (‘a thread of the Virgin’) with “a gossamer filament of angel-spit,” but in any case it’s not clear what the phrase means; fortunately, this site cleared it up:

“El hilo de la virgen” es una teleraña tan liviana y fina que flota por el aire. Según un documental (que vi hace mucho) la propietaria de la telaraña puede viajar muy lejos e incluso cruzar océanos.

“The virgin’s thread” is a spider web so light and fine that it floats through the air. According to a documentary (which I saw a long time ago) the owner of the spider web can travel very far and even cross oceans.

My question is: is there a name in English, or for that matter other languages, for such drifting spider webs?

I was struck by Lameen’s recent post on Jabal al-Lughat about a language of South Sudan:

The least well documented subgroup of West Nilotic is the Burun group, spoken around the borders between Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. The largest language in this subgroup is Mabaan, spoken in South Sudan, for which there exists at least one dictionary (available without bibliographic information on Roger Blench’s site), and several very interesting articles by Torben Andersen. But we are no longer in the era where a non-field linguist could be content to look at printed sources alone; there is a fair amount of Mabaan content on YouTube, including a channel by a BA-trained linguist and first language speaker of Mabaan, Thomas Anour: Learn Maban, African Language with Thomas Anour. (Like and subscribe, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do on YouTube to encourage creators.) Between these, that makes enough material to observe an interesting phonological difference.

In Mabaan as described by Torben Andersen and in the aforementioned anonymous dictionary, /h/ seems to show up only in interjections or loans, and /ħ/ is not mentioned at all. The variety spoken by Thomas Anour, however, features a number of words with initial [ħ] (occasionally varying with [h]). A single cognate in a North Burun language, Mayak, suggest that this is the reflex in his variety of *r, which otherwise becomes a semivowel in Mabaan; more would be desirable. […]

Edit (12/12/2024): The Elenchus comparativus (von Hurter, 1800) records, s.v. “souris” (mouse), <hén> for “Abugonos Burun” vs. <rine> for “J. Kurmuk”. This is the only word in the list transcribed with initial h – and the only word on the list corresponding to any of the ones above – but seems sufficient to suggest that this pronunciation is indeed old. Among words with *r, one notes Abugonos <yonga> “meat” and <ímaghi> “blood” (Kurmuk <rin>), which do not support the hypothesis of *r > ħ, but, given the imprecise transcription, do not disprove it either. My thanks to Shuichiro Nakao for sending me a link to this exceptionally early source.

Isn’t that great? Of course there’s material on YouTube for all sorts of languages, but it still surprises and pleases me that a linguist can use it for this kind of historical analysis. (If you’ve developed an interest in Mabaan pharyngeals, there’s a follow-up post.)

Dmitry Pruss wrote me in regard to the perplexing etymologies of Ghanaian royal titles:

“Zosimli Naa” is a title bestowed on outsiders who play such an honorary role in Ghanaian societies that the local tribal hierarchy steps in to elevate them to chiefs aka royals.

Traditionally “Zosimli Naa” were American educators in African studies programs. Dr. George Lee Johnson Jr., the acting chair of South Carolina State University’s Department of Education, is Zosimli Naa of Madina, and earlier on, Dr. Susan J. Herlin (University of Louisville) was Zosimli Naa of Tamale. After her death, Tamale enskinned (the North Ghanaian equivalent of anointing done with precious skins rather than myrrh) a travel agent from Detroit who runs a popular immersion-in-ancestral-West-Africa travel program (since her story involved DNA testing in search of ancestral African cultures, it came up in my feed). This lady, Kennedy Johnson, actually lives in her royal mansion in Tamale now!

But what is Zosimli Naa?

One source says that it means “Born on Saturday” but metaphorically, “one who brings people together” (presumably American and Ghanaian peoples). Another says that it means “Friendship Queen” but by extension, head of department of development. And Wikipedia says that Naa translates as King or Chief while Zosimli means: Cooperation, Alliance, Accord, Collaboration and Friendships, with the whole title meaning liaison for foreign cooperation (they apparently have separate chiefs for America and Europe).

Dmitry and I await Hattic enlightenment!

I was reading Casey Cep’s New Yorker review (archived) of Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, by the carpenter Callum Robinson, when I got to this:

Closer to home, he recalls his father toughening him up by sending him into the forest to turn on a water line. Carrying only a parang and a T-bar, Robinson falls into a stream, is spooked nearly to death by a deer, and returns home twice in defeat, only to triumph in his third attempt […]

I had no idea what a parang or a T-bar might be. I thought I’d seen or heard the latter, but it turned out to be in the context of skiing — to quote Merriam-Webster, a T-bar is “a ski lift having a series of T-shaped bars each of which pulls two skiers.” I don’t know what it means here and will welcome all enlightenment. As for parang, the OED (entry revised 2005) informs me that it is “A large heavy machete with a blade broader at the end than at the base and a concave cutting edge, used in Malaysia and Indonesia for clearing vegetation or as a weapon”:

1820 The wood-cutter..proceeds into the forest, without any other instrument than his parang or cleaver.
J. Crawfurd, History of Indian Archipelago vol. III. ix. v. 423

1882 Bakar..and a Malay boatman preceded us with parangs to clear the way of branches before us.
H. de Windt, On Equator 103

1925 It was quite fascinating to see Sahar deftly cutting slices off one end of the husk with his sharp parang.
C. Wells, Six Years in Malay Jungle vi. 60
[…]

2001 All six detainees are dangerous criminals who used weapons like knives and parangs to attack their victims while staging robberies.
Malaysia General News (Nexis) 18 December

The OED has the stress on the second syllable (British English /pəˈraŋ/ puh-RANG, U.S. English /pəˈræŋ/ puh-RANG), M-W on the first (ˈpär-ˌaŋ), which suggests sloppiness on someone’s part. I’m not sure why the word is used in the context of a scene set in the eastern Lowlands of Scotland, but I’m glad to know it; it is, as you might have guessed, a borrowing from Malay parang.

As it happens, there’s an entirely different word parang, this one meaning “A variety of Trinidadian folk music, traditionally played at Christmas by groups which travel from house to house serenading the occupants; a performance or tune in this style”; that one is said to be “< Spanish parranda outdoor celebration with music, party, revel,” which is phonetically a bit odd, but I guess the OED knows what they’re doing. In any case, it’s labeled “Caribbean (chiefly Trinidad and Tobago)” and pronounced with first-syllable stress (British English /ˈparaŋ/ PARR-ang, U.S. English /ˈpɛrænɡ/ PAIR-ang, Caribbean English /ˈparaŋ/).

I realized when I clicked on the link cuchuflete sent me that I had already posted Josh Tyra’s “I Am the Very Model of a Biblical Philologist,” but that was ten years ago (almost to the day), so many current Hatters won’t have seen it, and I enjoyed reexperiencing it so much I thought it was worth a repost. Thanks, cuchuflete!

And for those who have seen that one before, I offer Elle Cordova’s Grammarian vs Errorist – a supervillain showdown. She’s always good.

I recently came across one of those lexicographical gaps that drive me crazy. There is a bird called the grandala (Grandala coelicolor); as that Wikipedia article suggests, that is its only name in English, and yet it is not in any dictionary I can find — not even the OED, which has no entry for it, just a lone citation using it (s.v. fire-tailed: “There are two birds of striking colour, the beautiful little Fire-tailed Mixornis..and Hodgson’s Grandala”). It has a Wiktionary stub, but that has only a definition and a photo. All of which means that I have no idea of its etymology, and the only help I have gotten for how to pronounce it is this video, whose narrator says /grənˈdɑːlə/; she’s probably right, but I’d like to have an official source. Does anybody know more?

Last year I posted Kathleen Maris Paltrineri’s LARB interview with Damion Searls, the translator of Jon Fosse (see also this recent post); now the New Yorker has Max Norman’s take on Searls and his work (archived), from which I excerpt some bits I thought might be of interest:

Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”

“Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.

Norman goes into the history of translation in antiquity and the Renaissance, then continues:
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I was enjoying this two-decade-old post about life as a printer’s devil and chuckling at dungbeattle’s comment “Never ever eat a printers pi, you may em, en or be a pica, otherwise you will be hot leaden it” when I wondered “what’s the origin of that sense of pie, anyway?” A visit to the OED (entry revised 2006) informed me that nobody knows:

Origin uncertain; probably transferred use of pie n.² [A baked pastry dish], with reference to its miscellaneous contents. Compare French pâté mass of confused type (1690), spec. use of pâté pâté n.³ [A pie or pasty usually filled with finely minced meat, fish, vegetables, etc.; A rich paste or spread made from finely minced and seasoned meat, fish, or vegetables, usually cooked in a terrine and served cold.]

But the citations are fun:
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The Fortsas Club announces a fascinating exhibit:

Livres Imaginaires, Reid Byers’ exhibition of Imaginary Books, is a collection of volumes that live only in other books: lost, unwritten, or fictitious books that have no physical existence. Its exhibition at the Fortsas Club has been extended until the end of 2024, when it will move to the Grolier Club in New York. In April of that year, the collection will be exhibited at the Book Club of California in San Francisco.

The difficulties associated with exhibiting a non-existent collection cannot easily be overstated. In addition to the purely ontological considerations involved, the mechanics of presenting to the public a series of objects that cannot possibly be on show present a broad spectrum of curatorial challenges, only some of which have been completely overcome.

There are three kinds of imaginary books. Lost books once really existed but have now disappeared completely. […] Unwritten Books are books that authors tried unsuccessfully to write […] Fictional Books are books that appear only in stories. […]

And sealed forever in a Wells Fargo strong box is John Dee’s copy of the Necronomicon (HPL 5), on permanent loan from the library of Miskatonic University.

See the link for examples and some enticing images, and see Sophie Haigney’s NYT story (archived) for more background; if you reach the end of the latter, you will be rewarded with some perhaps significant information about the Club Fortsas. And there are more links at the MetaFilter post that hipped me to this happening.

Sumana Roy’s LARB essay How Does the Writer Say Etcetera? is one of those pieces that could have benefited from merciless editing — the writer flies off in all sorts of only vaguely relevant directions — but that has some interesting things to say. It begins:

The first sign of my little nephew’s moving closer to adulthood wasn’t when he used a cuss word for the first time—he still hasn’t, I must hasten to add—but when he said “etcetera.” I think he was around six years old. Records of his height and weight were being maintained by his parents and pediatrician, but it was his growing into language—lisping, mispronouncing, and, most of all, his daily acquisition of words—that excited me. Suddenly, without any kind of preparation or announcement, he had used the word: etcetera, a word that could hold the entire world in it. It could mean only one thing—he had grown aware of the world, and he had grown up.

A few years later, preparing for a Bangla test, he was writing answers to a quiz that his mother had set up for him. It was an exercise from Bangla grammar—“shondhi bichhed”; he would have to break up a word to reveal the two words that had come together, poetically, sometimes by design, sometimes almost accidentally, to form it. It was fun, even though I still struggle to accept his growing at this pace, to see him breaking up words as he had once broken toy cars. One of the words in the test was “ityadi.” Tuku, as I call my nephew, wrote the answer quickly, without patience: “iti + adi.”

Ityadi—“iti” and “adi,” the end and the beginning, from the end to the beginning.

Etcetera—“et,” meaning “and,” and “cetera,” “the rest.” This has the sense of leftovers.

What does this difference in name for a similar concept—one having the sense of including everything, the other the sense of remainder—imply for those who live in these languages? How do the two concepts affect creative practice? When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world?

Later (much later) we get:
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