languagehat.com

This MetaTalk thread (about the owner, Matt Haughey, donating the twitter handle “mefi” to OGC Nice for the use of their eagle mascot) led to a couple of interesting words in Niçois/Niçard, mèfi ‘watch out!’ and ratapignata ‘bat,’ a symbol of Nice:

The ratapignata of Nice is not well-known outside of the city, and even articles on it in French tend to diminish its importance, due largely to its status as a symbol of imperial resistance. […] Nice was once part of the Duché de Savoie, which was not French. It only became part of France just over 150 years ago, and under rather suspicious circumstances – the ballot was stuffed, with people long dead mysteriously voting to become part of France, and votes against the rattachement oddly being lost. Even before that, however, Nice’s place in Savoy was the result of conquest; the Comté de Nice had been a semi-autonomous member of the Comté de Provence starting in the 12th century, after the fall of Rome.

While most French articles about the ratapignata start with the Carnaval of 1875, the black bat has been a counterweight to the royal eagle for much longer than that. Indeed, as this excellent article in French by Niçois Eric Fontan notes, it symbolizes the power of the people, being the eagle turned upside down. With its wings open wide, to the difference of the more restrained eagle, it is also said to represent the desire of Niçois to take an active part in their city’s affairs.

The linked article I quoted from is by Anna Stevenson, “Located in Nice, France since June 2000, and Paris since March 2014.”

Tablet magazine, an excellent source of discussion of all things Jewish, has reprinted a 2010 article by the late Cherie Woodworth (I wrote about her sudden death last year, and I still miss her and find it hard to believe she’s gone) on the titular subject; she begins with the great scholar Max Weinreich and the new edition of his magnum opus, History of the Yiddish Language (over 750 pages of footnotes!), and his very influential theory that

…Jews from Rhineland France, presumably through contact with Jewish settlements in southern Germany, converted from old Judeo-French to western Yiddish, which was more purely German with some elements of Latin or early French. In subsequent centuries—when, exactly, is a source of considerable debate—this language moved east with Jewish emigrants, settlers, and refugees, either in the 12th century (after the Crusades and persecutions) or in the 14th or 15th. There it picked up a significant cargo of Slavic vocabulary and expressions and became the Yiddish more familiar today: eastern Yiddish.

She then moves on to Paul Wexler and his very controversial book The Ashkenazic Jews: A SlavoTurkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity; you can tell from the title why it’s controversial. Her discussion of all this is fascinating and (like all her work) well written; I’ll just quote a bit on my own former specialty and leave you to read the whole thing when you have the time and attention span:

Comparative linguistics poses two genuine, and interconnected, problems when its methods are used to make arguments about history. The first is that in its most specialized details, the evidence and arguments are inaccessible to outsiders; Wexler will not be able to persuade historians about the origins of the Jews by discussing lexical inventories and phonemic shifts (especially as long as other linguists return fire with equally arcane and scientific-sounding counterarguments about other phonemic shifts). Second, despite its stress on precision and details, comparative historical linguistics is not as scientific or as purely historical as it seems; lost forms must be reconstructed, development must be interpolated, and thus no argument is definitive. The majority view among Yiddish linguists—a very small but committed cadre of scholars—is that Wexler’s argument is untenable.

Tablet followed up Cherie’s piece with an equally long and very lively one by their staff writer Batya Ungar-Sargon, “The Mystery of the Origins of Yiddish Will Never Be Solved,” in which she discusses the, shall we say, vivid personalities involved in the arguments. She starts out with an amazing story about a 1987 book, Origins of the Yiddish Language, which got a scathing review in Language that turned out to have been almost certainly written by Wexler under a pseudonym (though he denies it). She goes on to describe the various contending theories. Dovid Katz’s is that “the Jews arrived in what Katz calls ‘the cradle of Yiddish,’ the city of Regensburg, speaking Aramaic. It is this spoken language that provided the source material for the Semitic component of Yiddish, spreading both further east as well as west, to the Rhineland, replacing whatever language the western Jews were speaking.” Then there’s Alexandre Beider, who has a doctorate in applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and “believes that western and eastern Yiddish are simply too different to have a common origin. Rather, Jews spoke German dialects until the 14th century, when gradually their dialects became different from those of their co-territorialists.” And of course Wexler, who “holds the controversial position that Yiddish is neither German nor Jewish but a Slavic language with German and Hebrew words slotted into Slavic grammar in a process called ‘relexification’:

Other linguists have not taken kindly to the Slavic hypothesis, nor to its author. “I have no impression that Paul Wexler is searching for the truth,” said Beider. “Sometimes I even wonder if he himself believes in what he writes. If he is not believing, but making a provocation, his writings of the last 20 years are oriented just to prove that Jews are not Jews. In this case, there is nothing to discuss.” Indeed, though he has a following amongst non-specialists, most linguists disagree with Wexler. “I respect him as a linguist, but I don’t agree with him,” said Steffen Krogh. Simon Neuberg called the relexification theory “very adventurous” but said ultimately it “seems more of a marketing trick.”

And finally, there’s Manaster Ramer, who “believes that Roman Jews speaking a Romance dialect, not French but related to it, lived in both western and southern areas of what would become Germany. When the German tribes invaded the Roman territories, these Jews learned perfect German”:

So, if the Jews who started speaking Yiddish originally spoke German, how and when did the Semitic component enter the language? The question itself is unscientific, said Manaster Ramer, ignoring as it does the historical context in which Yiddish came to be, which incidentally was a time in which German too underwent a similar process, incorporating loan words from Latin. Indeed, said Manaster Ramer, the influence of Latin on German was far greater than the Hebrew and Aramaic influence on Yiddish, “and yet no Yiddishist seems to asks, why does the massive Latin influence on German not mean that German is not German, if the much smaller Hebrew influence on Yiddish is supposed to mean that Yiddish is not German,” he wrote in an email. Any language spoken by polyglot people can incorporate words from their second or third language at any time. Furthermore, he said, almost all of the Hebrew and Aramaic words in Yiddish are accretions added to the language after the 13th century.

We’ll probably never know the truth, but I sure enjoy the back-and-forth. Thanks for the links, bulbul and Kobi!

As I wrote here, I got David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer to accompany the World Cup, and I’m finding it riveting; it’s almost certainly the best history of any sport I’ve read, brilliantly combining sporting and social history. Surprisingly (to me), it starts with Chinese cuju and continues with the ball game both popular and culturally central in ancient Mexico and Central America, immortalized in the Popol Vuh (in which the sun and moon are the bodies of the hero twins who lost a game of ball to the gods), but neither are ancestral to the modern game, and he soon turns to the “large-scale and often riotous” ball games of the Celtic world which probably gave rise to the medieval English pastime so often, and fruitlessly, banned by the authorities. Having survived royal prohibition, it nearly succumbed to modernity, and in 1801 Joseph Strutt could write, “The game was formerly much in vogue among the common people, though of late years it seems to have fallen into disrepute and is but little practiced.”

But football, as we know, survived. It did so because it was preserved and nurtured in institutions that were beyond the cultural reach of Methodists, industrialists and artisans. Britain’s public schools were the ludic zoos of the age. They provided refuge for the wild and endangered games of rural Georgian Britain where they were bred and developed before being released into the new sporting and social ecology of industrial Victorian Britain.

If you find that as delightful as I do, you may want to read the book. At any rate, in the chapter on the first expansion of the game to the wider world around the turn of the twentieth century, I found a passage of clear LH relevance:

The English language itself was considered the mark of modernity and an essential device for excluding any would-be players from the lower classes. In its inaugural statutes the early Parisian club White Rovers stated, ‘Football being an essentially English game, all players must use the English language exclusively when playing together.’ This homage to the power of English remains in the Anglicized club names of the Netherlands, like Go Ahead Eagles and Be Quick Denver, and of Italy, where it is AC Milan not Milano, and Genoa not Genova. In Switzerland Grasshoppers and Young Boys remain among the leading clubs, while in Latin America Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal, Lawn Tennis, Corinthians and The Strongest still play in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia respectively.

He goes on to talk about “Dr James Spensley, the leading force and player at Genoa Cricket,” who “was described in his obituary as having ‘widespread interest[s] in philosophical studies, Greek language, Egyptian Papyrus, football, boxing and popular university. He even initiated an evening school in Genoa.'” Talk about your Renaissance man!

Addendum. And now I know why the Italians call it calcio; on p. 154 Goldblatt, writing about the rise of Italian nationalism, says:

This flicker of Italian nationalism in football was inflamed even further when in 1908 representatives of the gymnastic movement acquired a majority on the Italian Football Federation’s governing council. The cabal immediately began to agitate over the power and role of foreigners in Italian football, and Milan, Genoa and Torino — all of whom insisted on fielding foreigners — were excluded from that year’s national competition. In a strained compromise, indicative of the fundamental weakness of Italian ultra-nationalism, the ban on foreigners was rescinded in return for the official adoption of calcio as the name of the game rather than football: a symbolic victory based on an invented history.

Sandra Blakeslee’s NY Times piece “Computing Crime and Punishment,” while very interesting (it’s about the use of the trial records of the Old Bailey to help analyze in detail how the British criminal justice system came to distinguish between violent and nonviolent crimes), doesn’t have much to do with language until the end:

To simplify their task, the researchers turned to the 1911 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, which sorts 26,000 distinct English words into 1,040 numbered categories called synonym sets. For example, words involving love and affection are in the high 800s, money and wealth in the low 800s. “Kick,” as in striking a blow, is No. 276, while killing is No. 361.

“The beauty of this,” Dr. DeDeo said, “is that for every word we have a number that equates with a meaning” that can be modeled mathematically.

One key finding is the gradual criminalization of violence.

In the early 1700s, violence was considered routine. […]

Over time, the transcripts have more superlatives and intensifiers — words like “very,” “so much,” “most” — in reference to acts of violence. Exaggeration is normal in a courtroom, but violence brings out more hyperbole; if someone steals your wallet, you are upset, but if someone beats you up, you are likely to use stronger language.

Apparently, the Old Bailey corpus is “the largest existing body of transcribed trial evidence for historical crime” and “the most detailed recording of real speech in printed form anywhere in the world.” Thanks, Kobi!

Leland de la Durantaye has a very nice Boston Review piece on Swann’s Way, its reception, the difficulties of translating it, and the problems with Yale University Press’s new annotated edition of the original Moncrieff translation. The problems begin with the fact that the editor, William C. Carter, chose to go back to Moncrieff rather than taking account of the improvements by Kilmartin and Enright and the entirely new, and much-lauded, version by Lydia Davis; there’s a troubling account of a particular passage in which the narrator’s grandmother says of a country church she loves that if it played the piano it would not jouer sec, and Carter announces his own “version that matches Proust” (“I am sure it wouldn’t sound dry“): “not only does he fail to note that a very similar choice had already been made a decade earlier in Davis’s translation, he nowhere notes the existence of Davis’s translation—not once, not anywhere.” There are also problems with the annotations; one, on the church of Combray with “certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil,” reads “Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), Greek philosopher revered by theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages,” providing information any reader of Proust is likely to know already while ignoring Proust’s point, that the church depicts “Aristotle on all fours with a beautiful woman astride his back, riding him like a horse.”

The whole thing is well worth reading if you like this sort of detailed and occasionally captious discussion; I’ll quote a passage near the start, about one early reader’s reaction:

A few years later Virginia Woolf would sit down to thank a friend for sending her a slab of nougat from Saint-Tropez, but, put in mind of France by the package, she soon found herself talking only of the novel. “My great adventure is really Proust,” she wrote, “I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.”

Thanks, Paul!

A typically thorough and illuminating post at Poemas del río Wang discusses the complex ethnic and religious makeup of the Crimea following the Russian takeover:

After the late 18th-century Russian conquest, for virtually all the ethnic groups, be they Jews, Armenians or Gypsies, there were two classifications: Tatar and non-Tatar: “ours” and “newcomer”. As a result of five hundred years of Tatar rule, even the ethnic groups which, due to their religion or occupation, maintained their identity, adopted the Tatar language in place of their mother tongue. The Crimean Armenians and Karaim Jews, with the section of the Silk Road from the Crimea to Poland in their hands, spoke Tatar even in late 17th-century Lemberg, and used Armenian or Hebrew only as a liturgical language. The small group of the latter that survives in Galician Halich, which we will write about, even today carve their gravestones in Hebrew characters, but in the Tatar language. And both groups distinguish themselves from the Armenian-speaking Armenians and Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews who moved into the Crimea after the Russian conquest.

The first “Tatar” group of Crimean Gypsies, the Gurbets (who called themselves Turkmens) according to their own traditions arrived in the Crimea together with the Tatars as professional horse traders. They retained this profession until the revolution of 1917. They took their horses around to the fairs, not only in the peninsula, but in the whole steppe of Novorossiya, and the fortune of their wealthiest members was estimated at twenty thousand silver rubles. The other, more or less nomadic groups of the “Tatar” Gypsies were also organized primarily by crafts: the Demerdzhis were itinerant blacksmiths, the Elekchis sieve-makers and basket-weavers, the Dauldzhis the professional musicians of Tatar weddings and Ramadan celebrations. Although all of them declared themselves Sunni Muslims, the Tatars looked upon them with suspicion, because they also practiced a number of Shia customs, referring to their Iranian origins. Some of their groups allegedly used the confession “There is no god, but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet” with the addition of “and Ali, the God-like”; and in the holy month of the Shiite martyrs they roamed the villages with flags and drums, mourning Hassan and Hussein.

After the Russian conquest, an influx of the non-Tatar Gypsies, called “Lakhins”, which is to say Poles, started from the other regions of the empire, primarily from Moldova and Bessarabia. By profession, they were primarily Ayudzhi, bear-leaders, wandering entertainers, who, in addition to the village circus, earned their meagre bread by cartomancy, chiromancy and other magic practices. They spoke Vlach, and declared themselves Muslims, but they did not go to mosque, celebrated their feasts according to pre-Islamic customs, and at the time of the 1831 census dictated their names in double, Muslim and non Muslim-form: “Mehmet, that is, Kili, Osman, that is, Arnaut, Hassan, who is also Murtaza…” Their nomadism was ended with the Tsar’s decree of 1809, which forced them to settle. After that time they learned the crafts of the earlier Gypsy groups, from which, however, they kept their distance until the very end.

There’s much more, including a grim section beginning “The question of who is Tatar and who not became really important in the 1940s,” and of course there are the usual magnificent illustrations. Don’t miss it, and may Studiolum and his fellow riverines of Wang live long and keep posting.

Fans of Pablo Neruda will be excited by this news, quoted here from Alison Flood’s story in the Guardian:

More than 20 unpublished poems by Pablo Neruda – works of “extraordinary quality” according to his publisher – have been unearthed among the papers of the late Nobel laureate in his native Chile.

Neruda’s Spanish publisher Seix Barral called the discovery “a literary event of universal importance”, and “the biggest find in Spanish literature in recent years”. The poems, which range from love poetry to poems dealing with everyday objects, were written by the mature Neruda, said the publisher, after 1950’s Canto General. They are, said the poet and academic Pere Gimferrer, who is involved with the publication of the poems, as full of “the imaginative power, the overflowing expressive fullness and the same gift, the erotic or loving passion” as Neruda’s best works. […]

The poems were found, said Seix Barral, in boxes of the poet’s manuscripts kept at the Pablo Neruda foundation in Chile, and they will be published in late 2014 in Latin America and early 2015 in Spain.

I look forward to reading them, but what I want to know right now (this is a question that’s bothered me over the years) is, how do Spanish-speakers say Seix Barral? Both names are Catalan, and I presume Catalan-speakers say /seʃbəˈrral/ or /seʒbəˈrral/ (depending on whether they assimilate the end of the first name to the start of the second), but do Spanish-speakers say /ˈseiks/? /seˈiks/? /ses/? Something else? If you know, please share.

One of the books I’m reading very slowly, a bit at a time (usually at bedtime), is Yuri Fedosyuk’s Что непонятно у классиков, или Энциклопедия русского быта XIX века [What we don’t understand in the classics, or An encyclopedia of Russian daily life in the nineteenth century] (see LH posts from 2004 and 2013), and I’m now on the section (towards the end of Ch. 12) dealing with train travel and the associated vocabulary. Fedosyuk writes (Russian at the end):

The locomotive was originally called a parokhod [which now means ‘steamship’]. This circumstance still confuses people who listen to Glinka’s well-known “Travel(ing) Song,” written to the lyrics of N.V. Kukolnik:

A column of smoke boils up, the parokhod smokes…

And further on:

And faster, quicker than the will
The train races along in the open field.

The song was written in 1840, when the short railway line between Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo was already in operation.

Eventually I was able to marvel at the early date of the song (and chuckle at the fact that whoever translated the lyrics here actually renders пароход as “steamship”!), but my first reaction was much like Proust’s when his palate encountered the soaked bit of madeleine: I was plunged into the dark backward and abysm of time.

At the tail end of the ’70s, between the hell of my last years of grad school (borrowing money for a PhD I was never to get and guiltily avoiding my dissertation advisor) and the hell of my first years in New York (whither I followed a woman who immediately dumped me, leaving me alone, bitter, and broke in a cubicle in a basement in Jamaica, Queens, sharing a bathroom with half a dozen Chinese students and forced to stand in the snow on the street to make job-hunting calls from a pay phone), I had a heavenly couple of years living alone in a $25-a-week apartment on Bradley Street in New Haven, working minimum-wage jobs in bookstores and movie theaters and spending all night talking poetry or arguing politics. My dearest friend in those days was a wonderful artist named Lisa Gillham (who hailed from Covington, Kentucky, to which she has long since returned — she recently got a River Cities Historic Preservation Award for the work she’s been doing in her neighborhood of Latonia, and you should all run out and buy her book if you like old pictures of historic towns); we loved a lot of the same music, and she was particularly fond of a record of mine that collected a bunch of songs sung by the Red Army Chorus (it must have been one of these, but after all these years I have no idea which). It had “Polyushko-polye” (YouTube) and “Oi ty rozh'” (YouTube) and “V put’” (YouTube), all of which I sing in the shower to this day, and a bunch of others that have receded into dark corners of my long-term memory, including the Glinka. Suddenly, seeing those tongue-twisting words (it takes a bit of work to get “shibche voli poezd mchitsya v chistom pole” right) I was back in New Haven, listening with my friend to the record I eventually gave her because she loved it so much. Ah, youth! Ah, Alexandrov Ensemble!

Fedosyuk’s original Russian:

Паровоз поначалу назывался… пароходом. Это обстоятельство до сих пор смущает слушателей знаменитой «Попутной песни» М.И. Глинки, написанной на слова Н.В. Кукольника:

Дым столбом – кипит, дымится
Пароход…

А далее:

И быстрее, шибче воли,
Поезд мчится в чистом поле.

Песня сочинена в 1840 году, когда уже действовала короткая железнодорожная линия между Петербургом и Царским Селом.

in Every Russian Novel Ever, Mallory Ortberg provides chapter titles summing up the classic nineteenth-century Russian realist novel. You can take them as representing separate novels or as a single monstrous work that is to War and Peace as War and Peace is to a Pushkin short story. Anyway, it’s funny as hell. (To save you wading through the comments, the only decent suggestion there is “Friends Swindle You While You Lounge on a Couch.”)

My wife asked me about the etymology of the verb root in root for ‘support (a sports team)’; I looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary and told her it was “possibly alteration of rout ‘to bellow, used of cattle.'” But I thought I’d better get a second opinion, so I checked the OED, which includes it in the entry for root “Of a pig: to turn up the ground, etc., with the snout in search of food,” updated September 2010, and says:

It has been suggested that it may be a transferred use of the sense ‘to dig’, ‘to turn up the ground’, perhaps ‘with the imagery of stamping so hard that one is visualized as digging a hole’ (see G. Cohen Stud. in Slang (1989) II. 67–8). A connection with rout v.4 [“Of cattle: to bellow; to low or moo loudly”] has also been suggested, but is unlikely on phonological grounds (although compare rout v.9) and also perhaps also on semantic grounds, since some early examples emphasize stamping and clapping rather than cheering.

The first citation is from 1889 (World (N.Y.) 7 June 11/4 “All during the game Jim never blinked, and he rooted more energetically and with twice the freedom of a Yorkshire porker”); the most recent gives me great pleasure:

2004   M. St. Amant Committed xx. 160 How can anyone root for the Yankees and claim to have a human soul?

Also under this root they include the Austral. and N.Z. coarse slang sense (‘fuck’), with the first citation from 1922, in (of all things) J. Joyce Ulysses iii. 719 (“All the poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me”).