Konstantin Zarubin discusses (Russian link) the new Russian law extending the purview of Roskomnadzor to all sites written in Russian (with 3,000+ readers a day). Anywhere. This ludicrous overreach is met by Zarubin with a solution that looks silly at first but makes more sense the more you think about it: break up the Russian language. If they could do it to Serbo-Croatian, why not Russian? The Russian-speakers of Ukraine can speak Ukraino-Russian, those of Belarus Belaruso-Russian, and so on. Sashura tries to decide (Russian link) whether to express himself in Anglo-Russian or Franco-Russian. Fortunately, it is easy for the foreign student to read all varieties… though if Russia isolates itself sufficiently, who knows what the future holds?
The Anxious Scribe.
I just ran across a quote attributed to an Egyptian scribe named Khakheperresenb (Walter Jackson Bate, in The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, says 2000 BC, Wikipedia says ca. 1900 BC) that I found irresistible:
Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.
A lot of other people have found it irresistible, too (four thousand years ago they were already complaining everything had been written!); if you put “Would I had phrases that are not known” into Google Books search you get a whole lot of hits. But it’s very odd that the Wikipedia article linked above cites no references other than Bate; at first I had the uncharitable suspicion Bate might have invented both scribe and saying, but then I found it in Thomas Eric Peet’s A Comparative Study of the Literatures of Egypt, Palestine, and Mesopotamia: Egypt’s Contribution to the Literature of the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 1931). Peet attributes it to “the Complaint of Khakheperresenb, of which a fragment has come down to us on a pupil’s writing-tablet now in the British Museum,” but if you search on “Khakheperresenb” at the museum’s site you get no results. So I ask the Varied Reader: do you happen to know anything more about this elusive author, fragment, and quote? Is there a currently more favored form of the name Khakheperresenb? The thanks of a grateful Hat await you.
Update. The thanks of a grateful Hat go to MMcM, who points out that the name is better spelled Khakheperraseneb. See thread below for British Museum link and translation.
Football vs. Soccer.
As an American, I think I’m fairly typical in not paying much attention to soccer except when the World Cup comes around every four years, at which point I root mainly for Argentina, where I went to high school — I’m pleased, of course, when the U.S. wins, but in men’s soccer they have little hope of winning it all, and if I want to root for a hopeless cause I’ll stick with my Mets (currently battling it out for last place in the NL East). I’m certainly typical in calling it “soccer” rather than “football.” I’ve always been a little puzzled by the vitriol people who are not Americans can exhibit over this terminological difference, vitriol they do not usually expend over (say) “trunk” vs. “boot” or “eggplant” vs. “aubergine.” After all, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that the Italians call it calcio, and the word “soccer” was, after all, created by Brits. At any rate, I was pleased to discover that Stefan Szymanski, a University of Michigan professor, has gone into the history of the difference in a paper (pdf) called “It’s Football not Soccer,” and I’m posting it to celebrate the start of the 2014 Cup; you can also read a press release about it, or watch a short video in which he summarizes the main points.
One of the things I learned from him that most surprised me was that “soccer” was quite popular in the U.K. up until the 1980s (though it never rivaled “football”); here’s a telling paragraph:
Football biographies and autobiographies are particularly interesting in this respect. Famous personalities are likely to be sensitive to the choice of name, given the intense scrutiny of the lives and actions of these individuals. Given the antipathy to the word “soccer” in the UK today, it might surprise many people to know that many of the most famous personalities of the 1960s and 70s used the word “soccer” in their autobiography. Thus Sir Matt Busby, the celebrated manager of Manchester United in the 1950s and 60s entitled his autobiography “Soccer at the top”. One biography of George Best, the most famous player of the era, was titled “George Best: the inside story of soccer’s superstar”. Jimmy Hill, one of the most influential figures in the development of English football entitled his autobiography as a player “Striking for Soccer” in 1961, while the autobiography of John Charles, a great player of the 1950s was titled “King of Soccer”.
From his conclusion:
The main purpose of this article has been to illustrate the trends in usage. It is possible to offer some speculations in explanation of these trends. One key difference in the usage of “soccer” in Britain and the US seems to have to do with social status. In Britain the word seems carried both an elitist connotation – the language of the ruling class – and an air of informality. It was, possibly, just a little too colloquial in the first half of the twentieth century for use in high-brow newspapers such as The Times of London or to be used in the title of a book. In the US it seems to have had a more democratic flavor – everyone used it – and more easily shifted from a colloquialism to a proper name because of the utility of distinguishing it from the other “football”.
There are lots of good details in the paper, which I commend to your attention. If you have any interest in Russian soccer/futbol, I also recommend Robert Edelman’s Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State
Update. I just got a timely delivery from Amazon, the copy of David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer
The Rise of Local Languages in India.
“India After English?” is the misleading title of Samanth Subramanian’s very interesting piece for NYRBlog; English, the only national language India has, isn’t going anywhere, but the economic boom the country has been experiencing means that the local languages are becoming much more prominent in print:
For a couple of decades now, the rise of English-language journalism was assumed to be a natural consequence of India’s steady gains in literacy and rapidly growing middle class, which now includes more than 200 million people. In 1990, India had 209 English dailies; two decades later, the number had increased nearly seven-fold, to 1,406. […]
Most recently, though, India’s major newspapers have been expanding in a different direction. In 2012, Bennett Coleman, the publisher of The Times of India, the world’s largest English daily, started a Bengali newspaper and poured fresh resources into its older Hindi and Marathi papers. Last October, the publisher of The Hindu, a 135-year-old English paper, launched a Tamil edition. Another leading English daily, The Hindustan Times, has enlarged the staff and budgets of its Hindi sibling Hindustan. And this past winter, a few months before the election, The Times of India launched NavGujarat Samay, a Gujarati paper for Modi’s home turf.
In nearly every case, the publishers of these new papers aim to be more sophisticated than the existing vernacular press. Editors are asked to court the young and the middle class by covering technology, world news, and business, so that the Ukrainian revolution or the launch of a new iPhone, for example, gets as much serious play as in an English daily. The tone is less partisan, the style less tabloid. These papers are finding exceptionally diverse audiences: youngsters buying their first paper, older adults to whom a paper has never been marketed before, people who are the first readers in their families, and urban subscribers who purchase The Hindu in Tamil or Bennett Coleman’s Bengali paper alongside their regular English daily.
A decade or more ago, the publishers of English newspapers scorned Indian language readers, assuming that, as hundreds of millions more Indians became literate, they would turn automatically into consumers of English papers. But the steady rise in literacy rates—from 64.8 percent of the population in 2001 to 73 percent in 2011—has had unexpected consequences. The new middle class is increasingly found in smaller towns, and prefers to read in its own regional language, rather than English. Meanwhile, major media houses have discovered that English readership is declining or stagnant, and that advertising rates in English papers cannot be pushed much higher. Along with an influx of politicians from non-elite backgrounds and the growing importance of regional and state-level politics, these developments have begun to challenge the assumption that English is the default medium of Indian public life. By putting more energy into regional languages, said Ravi Dhariwal, the chief executive of Bennett Coleman, “We’re just adapting to the way our country is changing.”
You can read more about this heartening development, including further analysis of the causes (as well as a great deal about politics), at the link.
It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Job.
I love reading Gasan Guseinov; among other things, he’s a reliable source of Russian slang and allusions that are often new to me. This column on the verbal formulas we use to help us find our way through life ends with a truck driver contrasting Western Europe with Russia, saying that when he goes west he says to himself “Все продумано” (Everything has been thought through), so that if he doesn’t understand something he thinks about how things might be arranged for the greatest convenience of the user and he can usually figure it out (in this section I learned the colloquial use of the word азимут ‘azimuth’ from the phrase “и вот по этому азимуту идти” ‘and take my bearings from that’). But when he heads back east, he repeats to himself “Все схвачено”: “Значит, надо забыть об удобстве и тупо искать этого вот того, у которого все схвачено. Я так всегда делаю. И за двадцать лет ни разу не ошибся.” Literally the phrase means ‘Everything is seized/caught’: ‘That means you have to forget about convenience and dumbly/blindly look for the guy who has everything seized. I always do that, and in twenty years I’ve never once been mistaken.’ But that didn’t make much sense, so I went to my go-to guy for Russian allusions, Sashura, who explained to me that “Все схвачено” is a slang expression referring to someone who has all the right connections and reliable protection, who is “in control and using it for his own corrupt advantage, for profit.” He adds, “It’s very interesting that this expression, which I’d date back to the ’60s-’70s, that grew out of the shortages and controlled distribution of goods and services, has survived in our time of, supposedly, market economy.”
He finishes up with this intriguing question: “I loved his last phrase: Поэтому дома работа тяжелая, а там – трудная. How would you say it English? At home, work is a grind, over there, it’s toil?” I wondered the same thing; the first word for ‘hard, difficult,’ тяжелый, literally means ‘heavy,’ while the second, трудный, is derived from труд ‘labor, work,’ and we don’t have a comparable distinction in English. I tentatively suggested “here it’s a burden, there it’s a task,” but that’s not really satisfying, so I thought I’d throw it open for suggestions.
Chinese and Indo-European Roots and Analogues.
Matt at No-sword has a post about the 1861 paper “Chinese and Indo-European Roots and Analogues” by Pliny Earle Chase (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 8, pp. 5-48):
Spoiler: Chase would like to suggest that the Roman alphabet (and its sister scripts) are derived from the Chinese writing system.
(I’m having trouble reproducing the example passages properly, but you can see them in their original glory here.) He ends with links to “a couple of rather less freewheeling monographs on related ideas, except with the lines of influence going from Near East to Far: Julie Lee Wei’s Correspondences Between the Chinese Calendar Signs and the Phoenician Alphabet, and Brian R. Pellar’s The Foundation of Myth, On the Origins of the Alphabet, and On the Origins of the Alphabet: New Evidence.” A nice combination of the exploded old and the thought-provoking new.
In the Lands of the Romanovs.
In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917), by Anthony Cross, is a great project:
Over the course of more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia, foreign visitors and residents produced a vast corpus of literature conveying their experiences and impressions of the country. The product of years of painstaking research by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Anglo-Russian relations, In the Lands of the Romanovs is the realization of a major bibliographical project that records the details of over 1200 English-language accounts of the Russian Empire.
Ranging chronologically from the accession of Mikhail Fedorovich in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, this is the most comprehensive bibliography of first-hand accounts of Russia ever to be published. Far more than an inventory of accounts by travellers and tourists, Anthony Cross’s ambitious and wide-ranging work includes personal records of residence in or visits to Russia by writers ranging from diplomats to merchants, physicians to clergymen, gardeners to governesses, as well as by participants in the French invasion of 1812 and in the Crimean War of 1854-56.
Providing full bibliographical details and concise but informative annotation for each entry, this substantial bibliography will be an invaluable tool for anyone with an interest in contacts between Russia and the West during the centuries of Romanov rule.
A free, socially enhanced version of this book is available on Wikiversity, a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to educational resources. You can access it at:
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/In_the_Lands_of_the_Romanovs:_An_Annotated_Bibliography_of_First-hand_English-language_Accounts_of_the_Russian_Empire_(1613-1917)
I expect I’ll be getting a lot of use out of it, and perhaps you will find it handy as well. (Via Sashura [Russian link].)
Lefebure.
Many years ago I bought and enjoyed Molly Lefebure‘s book Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium
Ainsi pour le nom de famille Lefèvre (du latin faber), il y avait deux graphies, l’une populaire et simple, Lefèvre, l’autre savante et étymologique, Lefèbvre. Grâce à la confusion de v et u dans l’ancienne écriture, Lefèbvre a été lu Lefébure avec un b qui n’a jamais existé réellement dans le mot, et un u provenant d’une équivoque. Or maintenant cette forme est réellement prononcée.
So for the family name Lefèvre (from Latin faber) there were two spellings, one popular and straightforward, Lefèvre, the other learned and etymological, Lefèbvre. Thanks to the confusion of v and u in the former writing system, Lefèbvre was read as Lefébure, with a b which never really existed in the word, as well as a u which came from an ambiguity. And now this form is actually pronounced.
He goes on to complain that in Paris, you can already hear sept femmes [seven women] with the t pronounced, which apparently appalls him (an odd attitude for a linguist); frankly, I had no idea it was ever silent. Thus we see once again the pointlessness of peevery!
Incidentally, the English name Lefebure is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable (LEFF-ə-byoor), whereas Lefebvre is lə-FEE-vər (according to the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names).
ArticulatoryIPA.
If you’ve ever wanted to see how exactly a voiced bilabial plosive is formed, or watch as people from all over the English-speaking world say “real,” this site is for you. (Via MetaFilter.)
Masha Gessen on Dovlatov.
I’ve proselytized for Sergei Dovlatov before (e.g., here) and am doing so again by sharing Masha Gessen’s fine NYRB review of Pushkin Hills, his daughter Katherine’s translation of his 1983 novel Zapovednik [The reserve]. She describes Dovlatov’s life and the ups and downs of his reputation (“While Dovlatov’s reputation in Russia soared, in America, where he was first recognized, he was gradually forgotten”), and of course his work
Like all of Dovlatov’s books, Pushkin Hills is a first-person account of a series of events that schematically resemble events in the writer’s own life. Each of Dovlatov’s books does so: The Zone tells of his time in the military, serving as a gulag guard; The Suitcase is a series of interlocking short stories each of which purports to give the background of an item in the author’s émigré suitcase. Pushkin Hills is loosely based on the time Dovlatov spent working as a tour guide in an Alexander Pushkin theme park while his semi-estranged wife and daughter got ready to emigrate to the United States. Leaving ample clues pointing to the autobiographical nature of his books, Dovlatov complicated matters by assigning character names in accordance with an undecipherable logic or, possibly, no logic at all. Some of his characters bear the names of real friends and acquaintances; others are thinly disguised and sound like their originals; and still others are fictitious. “The names, events and dates given here are all real,” Dovlatov wrote quite inaccurately in the author’s note to The Zone[…]
Gessen is always an enjoyable writer, and she’s got a great subject here; read the whole thing.
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