languagehat.com

An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived):

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper. […] Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world. The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through. Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle. […]

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As a Laurence Sterne fan of long standing (see my reveling in A Sentimental Journey in 2012 and my description the following year of his influence on Russian lit: “both writers got this style from the fons et origo of all divagating, diverting, dissertating novelists and prestidigitators of prose, Laurence Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy“), I was pleased to read Peter Budrin’s OUPblog post about what sounds like a very interesting book, his Laurence Sterne and his Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans:

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing. […]

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David S. Reynolds’ NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature by David Anthony provides repellent instances of “hostile portraits of Jews in various realms of US culture during the two decades before the Civil War,” but I’m bringing it here for this passage:

It has been said that nineteenth-century America was mawkishly sentimental—a culture of pap and prudery against which serious authors like Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman rebelled. To some extent this was true, as evidenced by the era’s didactic novels, religious tracts, and codes of proper decorum. It was an age when Evangeline St. Clare, the angelic heroine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired millions, and when, in polite circles, undergarments were called “unmentionables,” legs “limbs,” men’s trousers “continuations,” and a trip to the bathroom “visiting Aunt Jones.”

We all know about “unmentionables” and “limbs,” and the OED confirms that use of “continuations” (though it doesn’t sound much like a euphemism: “Gaiters continuous with ‘shorts’ or knee-breeches, as worn by bishops, deans, etc. Hence in later slang, trousers, as a continuation of the waistcoat”; 1883 citation “For fear of spilling it over what a tailor would call my continuations”), but I can find nothing to back up the claim about “visiting Aunt Jones” except the footnoted source for the assertion, R.W. Holder’s How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms (Oxford University Press, 2007). The relevant entry in that volume reads

aunt² a lavatory
To whom many women say they are paying a
visit. In Victorian days it was their Aunt Jones.

Which sounds more like the notoriously chatty and unreliable Eric Partridge than a dependable reference work, and I can find no examples of this alleged usage in Google Books. Is anyone familiar with it?

Matthew Scarborough, LH’s house Indo-Europeanist (e.g.), has a new project going, which I’ll let him introduce:

A small project that I’ve started doing for fun – and to be frank give me a small outlet in this current moment of being between jobs – is an account I’ve made over on Bluesky posting a line-by-line translation of Hesiod’s Theogony (for the non-Hellenists out there, a roughly seventh to sixth-century BCE short epic on the origins of the Greek pantheon) together with metrical analyses and, since line three, phonological transcriptions of the Greek text.

I am currently aiming to post one line per day, together with parsed vocabulary, and I’ve already put together a full translation and transcription with metrical analyses and parsing of the entire text on my computer, so the only thing preventing me from not doing the whole text over the course of the next two and a half years is simply me remembering to post a line per day (and Bluesky continuing to be a viable online platform, which in this current social media ecosystem, who knows?).

I do have an ulterior goal from all this, however. I aim to add philological and etymological commentary to the master file that I’ve prepared and add as an introduction a sketch of Greek historical grammar. In something more of a book-like format, it could serve as an introduction to Greek historical linguistics and Indo-European to students of Greek or students of Indo-European, and possibly a reliable linguistically annotated text for general linguists who might want illustrative examples of Ancient Greek in the heterogeneous variety of East Ionic that is typically used for early Greek epic poetry.

Anyway, if this is the sort of thing you might be interested in check it out. As of today I’ve posted up to line 43 of 1021, so there’s already a month’s backlog for reading. I think the expanded historical linguistic commentary and grammar outline is a good idea for a textbook project, but I don’t know how big of an audience there is for it. I can’t be the only person who thinks that the textbook would be a good thing to be out there if I can just manage to finish it in the first place. Let me know if the comments what you think.

I for one think this is a great idea and hope he keeps it up.

As I said here, my wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, and I’ve gotten to another passage of sufficient Hattic interest to post. One of the protagonists is Hari Kumar, who was raised by his father Duleep to be a perfect Englishman; in this section we are learning about Duleep’s background:

Duleep Kumar was the youngest of a family of four boys and three girls. Perhaps a family of seven children was counted auspicious, for after his birth (in 1888) it seemed for several years that his parents were satisfied and intended no further addition. […] Of the four brothers only Duleep completed the course at the Government Higher School and went on to the Government College. His family thought that to study at the college was a waste of time, so they opposed the plan, but finally gave in. In later years he was fond of quoting figures from the provincial census taken round about this time, that showed a male population of twenty-four and a half million and a female population of twenty-three million. Of the males one and a half million were literate; of the females less than fifty-six thousand, a figure which did not include his three elder sisters. His father and brothers were literate in the vernacular, semi-literate in English. It was because as a youth Duleep had acquired a good knowledge of the language of the administrators that he began to accompany his father on visits to petition the sub-divisional officer, and had the first intimations of the secrets hidden behind the bland face of the white authority. There grew in him a triple determination – to break away from a landlocked family tradition, to become a man who instead of requesting favours, granted them, and to save Shalini from the ignorance and domestic tyranny not only his other sisters but his two elder brothers’ wives seemed to accept uncomplainingly as all that women could hope for from the human experience. When Shalini was three years old he began to teach her her letters in Hindi. When she was five she could read in English.

Duleep was now sixteen years old. The Government College to which he had gained admittance was at the other end of the earth: a hundred miles away. His mother wept at his going. His brothers scoffed. His elder sisters and sisters-in-law looked at him as if he were setting out on some shameful errand. His father did not understand, but gave him his blessing the night before his departure and in the morning accompanied him to the railway station in a doolie drawn by bullocks.

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Via Pengio’s MeFi post on the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting, “the intro to Glaswegian slang that is Modern Toss’s Periodic Table of Swearing (The Scottish Field Report).” It goes from C 1 Cunt to Sbb 102 Shitting A Fucking Breeze Block, and if you click on a square you will hear the sweary element spoken.

Has it really been thirty years? I loved that movie when it came out, and I obviously need to see it again or I’ll be a Prat in a Hat (48).

A fine post from bulbulistan redivivus, that collection of writings of bulbul/Slavo (see this LH post):

Hans Stumme (1864-1936) was a German linguist whose work is is probably known to anyone interested in Berber and North-African varieties of Arabic. Stumme travelled a lot and collected huge amounts of spoken data from – inter alia – Tunisians, Išelḥiyen and the Maltese. […] It is quite clear that Stumme was particularly interested in collecting folk literature, such fairytales and songs, where his books remain an invaluable source of data for folklorists. At the same time, Stumme’s work is extremely valuable for the study of the languages involved […]

This applies doubly to Maltese where there have been at least two major studies of the fairytales (1, 2). As far as I can tell, there is little focus in reevaluating Stumme’s dialectological work (but that might change soon), which is a shame, because there is so much fascinating stuff in there. Like for example song no. 70 from the collection of Maltese songs (Kössler-Ilg and Stumme 1909, p. 27). I am reproducing the text below in standard Maltese orthography and Stumme’s original German translation accompanied by my English one based on the Maltese text.

Ta’ dobra sejrin jsiefru […]

Die Slawen wollen abreisen […]

The Slavs are about to leave […]

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I just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance after decades, and it was just as good (and cynical) as I remembered — I especially enjoyed Edmond O’Brien as Dutton Peabody, editor of the Shinbone Star who orates about the power of the press as he swigs from a jug of booze. But what drove me to post was the name someone uses for that booze: who-hit-John, which Wiktionary defines as “Hard liquor; whiskey.” Nobody seems to know the origin; it’s not in the OED, and Green’s has only one cite for it, from the ridiculously late date of 1980 (“But without a hangover and a headful of Who-hit-John, it is a different light”), but I like it and will try to remember to use it when the occasion arises.

Also, the river which plays such a role in the movie (gun-slinging cattlemen to the north, law-abiding farmers to the south) is called the Picketwire, which is the wonderfully anglicized name of the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado (though the territory-turned-state in the movie is never named):

The Purgatoire River, also known as Rio de las Ánimas, has had multiple names. It was named by New Mexican Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío in 1719 during his exploration of the region. Valverde named it “Rio de las Ánimas,” meaning “River of the Spirits,” as a warning to subsequent explorers of the dangers of crossing the nearby Ratón Pass. Surviving the crossing, they found water and firewood at the river. Over time, the true meaning of the river’s name became lost, and various interpretations emerged. By the end of the 18th-century Spanish traders believed it to be “Rio de las Ánimas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls in Purgatory,” after a supposed massacre that occurred on its banks. This led to the birth of a legend of the same name that explained its history. French trappers learned the name and later translated it as “Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire.” They related their translation to members of the Stephen H. Long expedition in 1820 who renamed it “Purgatory Creek” by removing all references to souls. Mexican traders on the old Santa Fe Trail expanded on the legend and named the river “Rio de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls Lost in Purgatory,” believing the souls to have become lost. Mountain Men had difficulty pronouncing the French translation and called it “Picatoire,” while Anglophone settlers during the Colorado Gold Rush anglicized it to “Picketwire,” despite the river having no relation to any fence.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the surname Valance, it’s a variant of Vallance: “English and Scottish: of Norman origin a habitational name from Valence in Drôme France named with Latin valentia ‘strength capacity’.”

I will not say James Willis’s “The Science of Blunders: Confessions of a Textual Critic” is the best thing ever written about textual criticism; that would be absurd, since I’ve read very little about the subject and Willis would probably rise from his grave and smite me for blasphemy. But it is so much fun to read I am tempted to reproduce the whole thing; instead I will just quote a few bits that delight me irresistibly as I scroll down. After a biographical introduction (which ends, sadly, “We regret that we have found neither obituary nor likeness of Willis to share with curious readers”), Willis’s text begins:

Some apology is sure to be demanded for a life largely devoted to what has been often called “mere verbal criticism” and regarded as no more than fiddling with letters and words which are of no importance in the wider horizon of the historian or the literary critic. Now while it would be useless to attempt to apologize for the lack of success with which I personally have practised the trade of a critic, for the trade itself much may be said in its defence. That textual criticism is a waste of time will be always believed by those who accept the texts of Greek and Latin authors as coming from heaven above by permission of the Syndics of the Oxford University Press, and therefore I will preach only to the convertible – to those who are willing to ask the simple question, “How do we have any knowledge of the Greek and Roman world?”

He discusses the difficult path to survival of literary texts, saying:

At every copying there is the possibility of human error. I say “the possibility”, but it is nearer to certainty. Copying is usually a boring task; boredom breeds inattention; inattention breeds mistakes. Therefore the manuscripts of classical authors contain mistakes. The detection and correction of mistakes in texts is the function of textual criticism. Therefore textual criticism is necessary, Q.E.D.

And he provides a splendid catalogue of examples, beginning:
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I’m stealing ShooBoo’s MeFi post, title and all (it means ‘Irishman in space’), because I can’t improve on it:

Manannán, written in 1940 by Máiréad Ní Ghráda is an Irish-language young adult sci-fi space travel book. It may contain the first use of a Mecha outside of Japan. And the first mention of a gravity assist in literature. A machine translation to English of the first 20 pages.

Hacker News discussion.

As a lover of both Irish and sf, I can only applaud. (That last link has responses from actual Irish speakers, e.g. “I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. […] Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they’re missing a fada.”)