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This post is one of a series “books I read that pissed me off enough that I felt the need to chastise them publicly” (cf. Travelling Heroes), but there will be a bit of language-related material at the end, if you persevere. The book to be soundly whipped is Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars, about a journey to eastern Turkey he made in 1980; the relevant section in his obit in The Times gives a good idea of it:

His most praised work was Journey to Kars (1984), an account of a lone journey in the early 1980s through the Balkans to Greenmantle country in eastern Turkey. Influenced by the accounts of Victorian travellers such as Austen Layard, the excavator of Nimrud, and Glazebrook’s fellow Old Etonian Alexander Kinglake, author of Eothen (1844), it was in part a quest for what it was in the Orient that induced such men to abandon the comforts of home.

Glazebrook’s conclusion, couched in prose often as picaresque as those of his inspirations, was that in the East they found an outlet for their romantic notions, fuelled by Malory and Tennyson, of a knight errantry increasingly absent from their ever more mercantile homeland.

For Glazebrook, too, the romanticised past often seemed another, and better, country. He never pretended to be a professional travel writer, one immersed in the culture and language of the place he was visiting – he spent only a fortnight in Turkey. Instead, he approached the East mentally in the company of those earlier authors, and the reality of his encounters with back-packers and modern Turks seemed to provoke disappointment and melancholia in equal measure.

He did bring a novelist’s observational skills to bear, and wrote well about the frustrations and muddles of travel. There was, however, always a sense in his books of a lofty detachment, that of a connoisseur writing more for his own pleasure than from any vulgar need to please a readership.

Now, I have nothing against amateur travel writing in general, and I am drawn to descriptions of that part of the world, which is why I picked up the book in the first place. But Glazebrook seems to want not only to understand the mental world of Layard, Kinglake, et al., he wants to be one of them — except that, lacking their specialized knowledge and interests, he contents himself with their attitude, that of a Victorian Englishman, utterly complacent in his confidence in the superiority of his own “race” (as he would have said) and civilization and contemptuous of the lesser breeds he encounters. And he exhibits a truly bizarre refusal to acquire any information about the places he finds himself in, preferring to be guided by his own random impressions of (say) the bus station where he is dropped off. This produces especially ludicrous results about halfway through the book:
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Good news for those of us who are indiscriminate fans of ancient languages; I quote the Altorientalisches Institut – Universität Leipzig’s Facebook post:

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new long-term dictionary project!
The Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary (LAD) at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig will start in January 2025. The 17-year project aims to create a new, up-to-date digital online dictionary of Akkadian.
The existing major Akkadian dictionaries, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and von Soden’s Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, are outdated. Numerous cuneiform texts have been published since their completion, containing new words and facilitating more detailed and precise descriptions of known words.
The LAD will collect the vocabulary of Akkadian in its entirety. It is a reference dictionary that not only translates the words into English, German, French, and Arabic, but also documents their contexts, uses, and etymologies. The existing print dictionaries will be digitized and integrated into LAD. Links will lead to glossaries and indices of other online projects. The digital publication is based on a database structure and allows the vocabulary to be analyzed one corpus at a time rather than alphabetically. The first intermediate objective is to analyze the vocabulary of Akkadian literary texts (including royal inscriptions).
The project is headed by Michael P. Streck at the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Leipzig University.

The full press release (in German) is here.

Frequent commenter rozele wrote to me about the afterword to Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, calling it “a pretty amazing example of the godawful things done to people’s words in the name (quite explicitly) of turning what we actually speak into True Language”:

in the course of a psychoanalytically-informed account of journalists’ writing processes, and what she describes as a defense of “the necessity for [journalistic] mediation” (by “showing how the literally true may actually be a kind of falsification of reality”), malcolm gives us a transcription of a section of a tape-recorded interview, and then what she asserts is the rendering that appeared in the main text of the book. the latter, she has already told us, is “English”; the former something she calls “tape-recorderese”, which she very clearly considers not to be language at all. “translating” the one into the other is, apparently, absolutely necessary for “trustworthy quotation”.

it’s fascinating on several levels. to my ear the rewrite (without altering its abstract factual content) quite thoroughly transforms the tone, emphasis, and impact of what malcolm’s interviewee says, rather than simply shortening the passage or cutting false starts or abandoned shifts of direction. on top of that, what she claims is the published rendering in fact omits the entire last sentence of what is actually printed in the book as a quotation – no trace of which appears in any form in the transcription excerpt she provides. and what comes through most strongly is her absolute contempt for what she denies is “English”: the language people actually speak and the ways we speak it.

it makes me wonder whether people whose conception of language is constrained to literary writing are even aware of the layers of meaning that they’re refusing to acknowledge. i get the impression that malcolm is not – that she thinks what she’s doing is adding, not destroying, meaning and complexity – though perhaps this is because i can’t picture taking pride in that endeavor, much less calling attention to it at length while discussing my working methods.

I haven’t read the book, but I certainly agree with rozele’s point. (We discussed Janet Malcolm and a different trial back in 2010.)

Guillermo Carvajal writes about what sounds like an interesting, if frustratingly limited, discovery:

Recent archaeological excavations have uncovered a basalt tablet with inscriptions in an unknown language near Lake Bashplemi, in the Dmanisi region of Georgia. The discovery is significant not only because of the rarity of the material found but also because it could reveal unknown aspects of the ancient civilizations that inhabited the Caucasus.

The finding, made in 2021, is a tablet the size of a book, on which 60 different symbols have been recorded, of which 39 have no exact equivalents in other known ancient writing systems. Archaeologists, based on the archaeological and geological context, believe that the tablet may date from the Late Bronze Age or the early Iron Age, around the first millennium BCE. […]

The basalt tablet contains 39 unique symbols arranged in seven horizontal lines or registers. Some of these symbols repeat, allowing for a total of 60 characters on the stone’s surface. The arrangement and frequency of some of the characters suggest that they may have been used to denote numbers or punctuation marks. Researchers have suggested that the writing system may have been used to record religious offerings, construction works, or military inventories, although these interpretations are preliminary.

By “preliminary” is meant, of course, “completely imaginary”; it’s possible that further examples may come to light, enabling us to understand it better, but it will probably remain yet another mysterious fragment of the past. You can see the tablet, an image labeled “The symbols of the tablet, highlighted and numbered,” and a photo of the place it was found at the link, and you can download the recent paper by Ramaz Shengelia, Levan Gordeziani, et al., here; the abstract:

In Georgia, numerous sites date back to the Bronze Age. Nearby Bashplemi Lake, the site of the discovery of a basalt tablet bearing an inscription with unknown characters, is the site where the skull of a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, the first European, was discovered. This tablet, which bears 60 signs, 39 of them different, raises the question of the origin of the Georgian script, proto-Georgian. While the basalt on which it is based is known to be of local origin, its meaning is unknown and there remains a long way to go to decipher it. An initial comparative analysis conducted with over 20 languages shows that the characters, which could belong to an aboriginal Caucasian population, beside proto-Georgian and Albanian writing signs, bear some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.

Thanks, Dmitry!

Adam Gopnik writes about crowds for the New Yorker (archived); the topic is interesting in general (and I really have to get around to reading Canetti), but this is the Hattic bit:

In his new book, “The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages” (Princeton), Shane Bobrycki, a medieval historian at the University of Iowa, describes a hinge moment in the way people have thought about crowds. It was a period when the rapid de-urbanization of society had reduced or eliminated the Roman vulgus, or mob, but when memories of Roman order and disorder lingered. Bobrycki has devoted himself to a blessedly old-fashioned kind of scholarship, digging through ever-finer shades of meaning, sifting through all the Latin terms that refer to crowds and mobs and gatherings. If you have long wanted to discern the subtle differences in medieval Europe between vulgus, plebs, turba, populus, and rustici, here at last is the book to assist you. And these differences do indeed have weight and significance. It’s fascinating to learn how, when the vulgus was forced out of the dying cities and into the countryside, it became the rustici—the peasants with pitchforks. Plebs, meaning, in classical Latin, “common folk,” came to mean, more neutrally, “the community.” Bobrycki assures us, “Even vulgus could be just another equivalent of the broad populus that was now the lodestar of all crowd words.”

I’m sure there are nits to be picked, so pick away!

Adam Neely has a YouTube channel containing “music theory, music cognition, jazz improvisation, musical performance technique, musicology and memes”; AntC sent me this example (11:14) in which he analyzes why “every pop singer of the past 20 years” sings the phrase “caught in the middle” in a particular way. It’s full of interesting phrases like prosodic dissonance, Picardy third, and Scotch snap, and he discusses the cot-caught merger, but I confess I’m posting it at least as much for the phonetic rendering I’ve used as the post title. I’m a sucker for fish puns.

(Oh, and if you’re thinking of the same half-century-old Stealers Wheel song that I was, impatiently waiting through the whole thing for it to get mentioned, he does so at the very end. He baited me, caught me, and reeled me in!)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a poignant passage from Jaspreet Singh Boparai, “Why Read Lesser Writers? Politian on Silver Latin Literature” (Antigone [November 2024]):

The translator’s task here does not stop at the dictionary: you really do need to read all the Latin (or Greek) texts that Politian mentions, if you have not already done so, and take good notes, because this man is never lazy or vague in how he uses words. You must have a clear sense of what he is talking about. The only way to gain this is by reading everything that he expects you to have read — which sometimes feels like every single ancient text ever written.

No wonder translators shy away from this dismal grind. Alas, there is no way of getting around it. You cannot use American-style ‘theoretical’ gobbledygook to cover up your lack of comprehension. You must sacrifice your eyesight, posture and sanity amidst the dim light and strange smells of your local academic library, and move from your uncomfortable seat only to find copy after copy of a great many Greek and Latin books and add them to the pile on your desk. Those worryingly shabby, unhealthy-looking people who seem to have nowhere else to go, and drip from the mouth when they stare at you? Congratulations. You are one of them now.

[….]

The next time you read an accurate-sounding translation of a Neo-Latin text that seems to make coherent sense, and is written in recognisable English rather than objectionable translationese, spare a thought for the hapless wretch who has spent hours on every page, checking and double-checking both the original work and his own rendition of it, whilst knowing that perhaps half a dozen people will fully recognise the effort — and those who do will be those other lost souls who stare occasionally at one another from across the reading-room in the same cursed library, as their only relief from the work to which they have condemned themselves, for reasons no sane or normal man can fathom.

I’ve retained Gilleland’s choice of snippets because it’s a nice self-contained lament, but the whole essay is worth reading — I had heard of Politian, but knew far too little about him, and Boparai brings him to life vividly (and reproduces some gorgeous Renaissance paintings).

This review by Michael W. Clune (in The Point) of Céline’s novel War (the first English translation, by Charlotte Mandell, has just appeared) makes it sound like a book any Céline fan (me, for example) should investigate (“In War, he sets these elements swirling around each other, each interacting on each, to produce in the reader—me, at least—an absolute convulsion of hippopotamic laughter without any parallel in my experience, and which caused my wife and daughter to literally recoil in shock and disgust as I sat there in the corner reading”), but what brings me to post it here is this passage of literary analysis:

Perhaps the most original aspect of War—when compared both with Céline’s classic published novels of the 1930s, Death on the Installment Plan and Journey, as well as with most other great examples of dark comedy—is its liberation from the Quixotic model. Of course Don Quixote’s influence as the greatest and arguably the first Western novel extends far beyond dark comedy. But Céline’s example sensitized us to a special branch of Cervantes’s progeny—call it dark comic quixotism. Quixote provides the template for virtually all literary dark comedy that succeeded it, ranging from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust to George Schuyler’s Black No More to Nabokov’s Lolita to Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote.

Central to all these works is what I will call the Unidirectional Downward Comparison (UDC). Cervantes’s novel is organized around the comparison between the idealized images of chivalric romance and the quotidian images of daily life. Don Quixote sees windmills as giants, roadside taverns as castles. This constant comparison between the real and ideal takes a form so strange and even perverse in its logic that it’s very difficult to find analogues for it outside Don Quixote and its progeny. To explain it, I often draw on a photograph that a friend drew my attention to 25 years ago.

The photograph shows the rappers Big Pun and Fat Joe standing next to each other in a space without other visible objects. I think they were in an alley, with walls to either side of them. Perhaps the photo can still be found somewhere on the internet. At any rate, the feature that my friend pointed out to me was that, in setting up a comparison between Fat Joe and Big Pun, each made the other one look thinner. […]

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I recently ran across the Dutch term kater ‘hangover’ and was curious enough to look it up; Wiktionary told a story interesting enough to pass on:

From German Kater (“tomcat; hangover”), a humorous alteration of Katarrh (“catarrh, mucosal inflammation”, loosely also “malaise”) based on somewhat older German Katzenjammer (“hangover”, literally “caterwaul”). An influence by a brand of beer called Kater is also often cited, though this is doubtful.

Doubtful indeed, but I like the “humorous alteration of Katarrh” origin. Hangover terms must include a wide range of odd etymologies.

The Dial (the new “online magazine of culture, politics and ideas,” not the Transcendentalist/modernist predecessor that published Yeats and Eliot) has a Language issue with a number of interesting items, of which I will feature Julia Webster Ayuso’s Can a Comma Solve a Crime?: “How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.” After introducing us to “France’s best-known unsolved murder case,” that of four-year-old Grégory Villemin, Webster Ayuso goes into the history of her topic:

According to forensic linguists, we all use language in a uniquely identifiable way that can be as incriminating as a fingerprint. The word “forensic” may suggest a scientist in a protective suit inspecting a crime scene for drops of blood. But a forensic linguist has more in common with Sherlock Ho[l]mes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” “The man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence?” the detective asks in the 1891 short story. “A Frenchman or a Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.”

The term “forensic linguistics” was likely coined in the 1960s by Jan Svartvik, a Swedish linguist who re-examined the controversial case of Timothy John Evans, a Welshman who was wrongfully accused of murdering his wife and daughter and was convicted and hanged in 1950. Svartvik found that it was unlikely that Evans, who was illiterate, had written the most damning parts of his confession, which had been transcribed by police and likely tampered with. The real murderer was the Evans’ downstairs neighbor, who turned out to be a serial killer.

Today, the field is perhaps still best known for its role in solving the “Unabomber” case in the United States. […] While U.S. authorities hunted down the Unabomber, the field of forensic linguistics was developing in other countries. The University of Birmingham hosted the first British Seminar on Forensic Linguistics in 1992, bringing together academics from Australia, Brazil, Holland, Ukraine, Greece and Germany. Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University has had a forensic linguistics laboratory since 1993. But it wasn’t until the next decade that the field became more structured, with the creation of university research teams, master’s degrees and government-funded police laboratories and agencies.

“It’s still emerging in places outside where it initially started, but it is growing gradually as people are getting trained,” said Nicci MacLeod, a senior lecturer at the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, England, which was established in 2019.

She goes on to discuss authorship attribution (“identifying the author of a given text and, in some cases, shedding light on long-standing literary mysteries”); I like this example:
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