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A decade ago I quoted Kornei Chukovsky:

If the youth of those days [the 1840s] happened to use in conversation words unknown to earlier generations such as fakt [fact], rezul’tat [result], erunda [nonsense], solidarnost’ [solidarity; joint responsibility], the representatives of those earlier generations declared that Russian speech suffered no small loss from such an influx of highly vulgar words.

At the time I didn’t realize how chronologically precise he was, but now, reading Nekrasov‘s “Петербургские углы” (Petersburg corners) in his 1845 anthology Fiziologiya Peterburga (The physiology of Petersburg; see this post) I discover that it was exactly at that time, in mid-decade, that the word was coming into printed use:

—Ерунда(*), сказалъ дворовый человѣкъ, замѣтивъ, что я зачитался.

“Erunda*,” said the house-serf, noticing that I had been reading for a very long time.

And the footnote says:

(*)Лакейское слово, равнозначительное слову — дрянь.

*A servant’s/servile word, synonymous with dryan’ [trash, rubbish].

I went to the Национальный корпус русского языка and found that the oldest cite was from the same year, 1845: Druzhinin (then twenty, just the right age to be picking up the latest lexical innovations) wrote in his diary for October 11, “Кончил «Дедушку и внучку» Диккенса. Ерунда, но временами довольно милая.” (I finished “Grandfather and granddaughter” [presumably The Old Curiosity Shop] by Dickens. Erunda, but quite pleasing at times.)

The origin of the word is unclear. Vasmer derives it from Latin gerundium (via seminary-student slang), but Vinogradov says this is as much a wild guess as Leskov’s suggestion that it is from German hier und da. But it seems to have started out meaning ‘trash’ and gradually changed to mean ‘nonsense’ (joining synonyms like чушь, чепуха, белиберда, вздор, дичь, and мура — Russian sure has a lot of words for it!).

The house-serf, by the way, is illiterate (he’s in Petersburg on obrok [quitrent]), and at one point he blows up at the narrator, who’s showing him some poetry:

Ты мнѣ этимъ не тычь! Что ты мнѣ этимъ тычешь! Я, братъ, не дворянинъ: грамотѣ не умѣю. Какая грамота нашему брату? грамоту будешь знать — дѣло свое позабудешь.

Don’t poke that at me! Why are you poking that at me? I’m no nobleman, brother: I don’t know how to read. What use is reading to people like me? If you know how to read, you forget your business.

Plato would have nodded in recognition.

Ramsey Nasser’s Artist’s Notebook page is absolutely fascinating to me, even though I barely understand a single thing he says. He starts off:

Arabic programming languages with the honest goal of bringing coding to a non-Latin culture have been attempted in the past, but have failed without exception. What makes my piece قلب different is that its primary purpose was to illustrate how impossible coding in anything but English has become.

About the last paragraph I more or less understood was this:

The current name قلب means Heart, but is actually a recursive acronym for قلب: لغة برمجة pronounced ‘alb: lughat barmajeh meaning Heart: A Programming Language. Acronyms in Arabic are generally difficult to pull off, and قلب is the first recursive one I have seen. Recursive acronyms – acronyms where the initial letter stands for the acronym itself – are common in computer science humor. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Processor, GNU stands for GNU’s not Unix, and so on. قلب’s name connects it to that tradition of software engineering names.

After that it got too technical for me, but the illustrations are pleasing to look at, and it ends with a nice piece of tile calligraphy. For informed commentary (also incomprehensible to me), go to the related MetaFilter post. (Thanks, ardge!)

Last year Jonathan Law, as part of “his occasional series on artists who have vanished into thin air,” had a fascinating Dabbler piece on a poet I (and very likely you) had never heard of, Rosemary Tonks. She had a brief, sparkling career half a century ago, publishing six novels and a handful of poems: “her first collection, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, came out in 1963 and a second, Iliad of Broken Sentences, in 1967. For once, the cliché about ‘slim volumes’ is entirely apt: the books contain Tonks’s complete poetical works – a total of 46 short poems.” The poems are remarkable; they don’t sound like any other English poetry, though they do sound like her main influences, the French symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Here’s a bit from “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas”:

I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum
… the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid … or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.

Then, “at some point in the mid-1970s Rosemary Tonks slipped out of that big house in Hampstead and to all intents and purposes vanished. She would never publish again and for many years the literary world had no idea if she was alive or dead.” Over the years readers kept discovering those few poems, and from the late ’90s on they started appearing in anthologies; apparently the 2002 Bloodaxe Books anthology Staying Alive: Real Poetry for Unreal Times won her quite a few fans. But hardly anyone knew much about her life until she died; I won’t spoil it for you, but after you’ve read Law’s piece you’ll want to read Neil Astley’s Guardian obituary, published last Friday. (I got these links from the MetaFilter post, which has more if you’re interested.) While she was alive she refused to allow any collections of her work to be published; hopefully now that will change. (And no, I don’t believe the wishes of dead authors should be respected; otherwise we’d have hardly any Virgil or Kafka.)

Update (Aug. 2025). The Dabbler gave up the ghost last year (the most recent archived version is from July 2024) and the URL has been taken over by a betting site. Bah!

Thanks to the kindness (and research ability) of commenter uwe in this thread, I am reading Nekrasov’s anthology Fiziologiya Peterburga [The physiology of Petersburg]; I skimmed the introduction, but enjoyed Belinsky’s “Peterburg i Moskva,” on the differences between the two capitals, and the piece on the Petersburg dvornik (janitor/yardman) written by Vladimir Dahl under the pseudonym V. I. Lugansky (Dahl was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod). Now I’m reading Grigorovich‘s chapter on шарманщики (organ-grinders, players of the sharmanka — see here for loving descriptions, images, and an Okudzhava song), and the second section starts off with an excursus on the word sharmanka, whose etymology was apparently unknown at the time (it’s actually from the German tune “Scharmante Katherine,” which was often played on such an instrument). Dahl writes: “Еслибъ я принадлежалъ къ числу почтенныхъ мужей, называющихъ себя корнесловами…” [If I were one of those worthy men who call themselves korneslovs…].

I was immediately smitten with the word korneslov, which Dahl tells us (in the dictionary that made him famous two decades later) can mean either an etymologist or a work of etymology — in the latter sense, корнесловие [korneslovie] is also used. It’s made up of корень [koren’] ‘root’ and слово [slovo] ‘word,’ and it has the same rough-hewn beauty as книгочей [knigochéi] ‘book-lover, bookish person,’ which I wrote about here. I looked it up in the Национальный корпус русского языка and found a handful of examples, including Dovlatov‘s “Оно погружено в корнесловие, насыщено метафорами, изобилует всяческой каламбуристикой, аллитерациями, цеховыми речениями, диалектизмами” (It [the work of such writers as Khlebnikov, Zamyatin, and Remizov] is immersed in korneslovie, saturated with metaphors, it abounds in all sorts of puns, alliterations, guild [or ‘factory-shop’] locutions, and dialect forms) and Herzen’s “Книгопродавец Трюбнер требовал от него лексикон русского корнесловия и грамматику… Но в качестве русского он брался за все: и за корнесловие, и за переводы, и за уроки…” [The bookseller Trübner asked him (Engelson) for a lexicon of Russian korneslovie and grammar… But as a Russian he undertook everything: korneslovie, translations, lessons…).

My favorite of the citations, though, is from Mandelstam’s 1922 essay “О природе слова” [On the Nature of the Word]; I’ll quote the whole passage (with the translation from The Complete Critical Prose, by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link):

Когда прозвучала живая и образная речь «Слова о полку Игореве» — насквозь светская, мирская и русская в каждом повороте, — началась русская литература. А пока Велимир Хлебников, современный русский писатель, погружает нас в самую гущу русского корнесловия, в этимологическую ночь, любезную уму и сердцу умного читателя, жива та же самая русская литература, литература «Слова о полку Игореве». Русский язык так же точно, как и русская народность, сложился из бесконечных примесей, скрещиваний, прививок и чужеродных влияний. Но в одном он останется верен самому себе, пока и для нас прозвучит наша кухонная латынь и на могучем теле языка взойдут бледные молодые побеги нашей жизни, подобно древнефранцузской песенке о св. Евлалии.

When the lively and image-laden speech of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polka Igoreve) resounded, each turn of phrase temporal, secular, and Russian through and through, Russian literature began. And when Velimir Khlebnikov, the contemporary Russian writer, plunges us into the very thicket of Russian word roots [korneslovie], into an etymological night, dear to the mind and heart of the intelligent reader, that very same Russian literature, the literature of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, comes alive once again. The Russian language, just like the Russian national spirit, is formed through ceaseless hybridization, cross-breeding, grafting, and external influences. Yet it will always remain true to itself in one thing, until our kitchen Latin resounds for us and until pale young shoots of our life begin to sprout on the mighty body of our language, like the Old French song about Saint Eulalia.

Reading Mandelstam always makes me want to read more Mandelstam.

Update. I’m now reading the next piece in the anthology, “Петроградская сторона” (“The Petersburg Side,” a description of the part of St. Petersburg now known as the Petrogradsky District), by E. P. Grebyonka, and I just got to a bit where he’s discussing the Сытный рынок, the oldest market in the city, whose odd name is of disputed etymology — the adjective сытный means ‘filling’ (of a meal) — and he writes “Объ этомъ я спрашивалъ извѣстнаго корнеслова” [I asked a well-known korneslov about this]. It was evidently a current word at the time. I will add that Grebyonka is a fine writer who tells stories well; I can see why he was in demand by readers (he appeared in all the journals and newspapers of the day), and I’m sorry he, like so many of the people I’m reading, has been so utterly forgotten.

Emily McConville has a recent Observer story about a guy with an interesting job:

The Vatican library provides invaluable resources for Department of Classics professor Joseph Amar, but in the course of his study, he has worked to correct discrepancies in one of the library’s manuscript catalogs, he said.

Using manuscripts from the first centuries of Christianity, Amar said he studies the writings of early Christian thinkers. Many of the manuscripts he studies reside in the Vatican Library, collected over many centuries and cataloged in the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, an 18th-century tome that lists the authors of documents, their publication dates and descriptions of their contents, Amar said.

[…] Amar said as he delved into the texts over the course of his career, documenting the ideas of early Christian thinkers and studying everything from the content of manuscripts to handwriting styles, he noticed that the Vatican Library had a record-keeping problem. Until recently, he would find the documents he needed ⎯ often the only copies in existence ⎯ stacked on shelves, unorganized and unprotected.

Amar also found serious discrepancies between the manuscripts themselves and the catalog that was supposed to guide the scholars researching them, he said. Some descriptions misidentify the author of a text or the date of its publication, Amar said. Others misrepresent the manuscript’s argument, in what Amar called a “Catholicizing tendency.”

[…] Part of Amar’s job is to correct these errors, he said. In addition to his research on the time period itself, Amar works as a consultant for the Vatican Library, pointing out where the manuscripts and the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana differ.

[…] Amar’s work has taken on new significance in the digital age. In addition to improving its organization, in recent years, the Vatican Library has begun to digitize its oldest and rarest documents. Whereas the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana was once the only source of information on a text, the library can now update the description on the Web, incorporating Amar’s research, he said. The project involves many scholars who are largely in charge of the digitization in their own fields.

You’d think, or at least I would have thought, that over the centuries they would have done more to get their catalog in shape, but better late than never. At any rate, there’s an interesting tidbit at the end:

Amar said the process often leads to new discoveries. For example, scholars believed for centuries that Jacob of Edessa, an influential Biblical scholar, had written a commentary on the Book of Genesis ⎯ but no one could find it. Meanwhile, a catalog contained a misidentified Genesis commentary, Amar said. By comparing that manuscript’s writing and handwriting style with Jacob’s known works, Amar said he was able to correctly attribute the commentary to him.

There’s some speculation here as to what that commentary might be. (Thanks, Paul!)

Linguist Lynne Murphy, an American living in Britain, explains the math/maths situation in this video by Brady Haran. I was getting a little tense for the first couple of minutes as she went on about the rationalizations people gave for thinking maths was somehow better, but then she made the essential point that it was just a matter of habit, and from then on it’s a brilliant exposition of how the forms developed, starting with Ancient Greek. I highly recommend watching it; it’s less than seven minutes long, and you can have the added entertainment of noticing the ways in which her native US English has been affected by the UK environment she’s been in since the year 2000. (I’m pleased to see from her faculty page, linked above, that she got her B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, just down the road from my house!)

Having finished Yakov Butkov’s Петербургския вершины [Petersburg attics] (see this post), I thought I’d report on the second half of the book, which consists of three longish stories, because they are considerably deeper than those in the first half, almost rising in places to the level of tragedy. Butkov wasn’t much of a stylist and certainly couldn’t have held a novel together — and he was resentfully aware of his subordinate place in the Petersburg literary world — but he was intimately familiar with the lives, fears, and compromises of the petty clerks who made up such a substantial part of the population of the capital, and he reported on them in a way that can grip and hold the reader despite the determinedly jocular names and heavily ironic turns of phrase. He might have made a fine writer of detective fiction had such a genre existed in his day. Since hardly anybody has read him since his death in 1856 except Dostoevsky scholars (he died, poor and forgotten, in his mid-thirties of pneumonia, and Dostoevsky, who was appalled by his sordid end, apparently based a number of characters on him), I thought I’d memorialize him by summarizing the three final stories.

The first and longest, “Первое число” [First of the month], follows two roommates, Collegiate Secretaries named Evsei Evteevich and Evtei Evseevich (remember what I said about the jocular names?) both quiet fellows who work as clerks in some government department, as they live through the titular payday. Evtei, who has a university education and considers himself a Deep Thinker, earns ten silver rubles a month for copying documents when what he really wants to do is write them. Evsei, a half-educated parish-school graduate with beautiful handwriting who would like nothing better than to copy documents but is forced by his job to compose them, gets twelve silver rubles a month; by dint of scrupulous saving, denying himself every luxury, he is accumulating a nest egg with which he hopes to make a good marriage and set himself up in life, while his dreamier and more feckless roommate can never resist wandering along Nevsky Prospekt on payday, dropping into the Wolf and Beranger café for some expensive liqueurs and piroshki. On this particular day each announces to the other, shyly but proudly, that he is intending to get married; they congratulate each other and go their separate ways. What they don’t know is that they are planning to marry the same woman, whom one of them knows as Anna Alekseevna and the other as Karolina Ivanovna. The long central section tells her story: once known as Русая головка (the girl with the light brown hair), she worked in a store until her eye was caught by a passing uhlan with jingling spurs and fine mustaches, who took her away and set her up in a fine second-story apartment. Unfortunately, he eventually lost interest in her and stopped paying the rent, after which she had to move to progressively cheaper apartments ever closer to the attic and cultivate gentleman callers who could help with her finances. She is trying to decide which of the petty clerks to accept as her fiancé; alas, the impetuous Evtei barges into her apartment as she is entertaining his roommate, who has just told her he has saved a thousand rubles and can afford to give her the good life she’s been dreaming of. Evtei rushes out, goes home in a frenzy, and shoves a battered old clerk’s uniform he thinks is his into the stove. When Evtei arrives, flushed with romantic success, it turns out that the uniform is his — and he had sewn all his painfully accumulated banknotes into it. Both men’s lives are in ruins, and both go mad.

The second story, “Хорошее место” [A good place/job], tells the story of Terenty Yakimovich Lubkovsky, who leaves the Ukrainian village of Chechevitsin (“Lentiltown”) to seek his fortune in Saint Petersburg. He soon discovers that he is not (as he had expected) going to be made a governor upon arrival; over time he lowers his ambitions to the point that he is grateful to be given a five-ruble-a-month job as the pettiest of clerks. He gradually makes acquaintances who explain to him the mysteries of the capital, such as the fact that people in his situation, unable to make ends meet on their miserable salaries, sometimes take jobs on the side as night watchmen in the vegetable gardens that line the Obvodny Canal, where they get free food and lodging for ten months out of the year. He gets such a job and manages to save enough money to get married, but married life is much more expensive and he is once again in despair until he discovers another of the secrets of Petersburg life, pimping his wife out to a superior official in exchange for a fine apartment in the center of town. He’s OK with leaving the apartment at six every evening and returning after an hour, except that when it’s nasty out, with a cold driving rain, he’d really prefer to stay in his warm office. He forces himself out, nodding to his Милостивец (Benefactor) as their paths cross. When he returns, he is upset for a while, but then he lets his gaze rest on all the nice objects he has accumulated, returns to his usual calm acceptance, and says “Yes, a good place!”

The final story, “Партикулярная пара” [A suit of clothes], is perhaps the best constructed. Its protagonist, born Pyotr Ivanovich Charochkin, decided before the story opens that the many deficiencies in his life were due to his unfortunate surname (based on чарочка ‘little goblet’). After much thought (he almost decided on Vyzhigin, the name of the hero of Faddey Bulgarin’s wildly popular 1829 historical novel Ivan Vyzhigin) he changed it to Shlyapkin (from шляпка ‘woman’s hat’) because of his immense love and respect for women, and sure enough, his fortunes improved immediately. He got a better job and a raise, making 27 assignation rubles and 11 kopecks a month. Now he has discovered a means of augmenting his income so that he can afford occasional luxuries: he takes government paper home with him and makes envelopes out of it, which he sells to businesses for less than they have been paying (since he can cut out the middleman). His best customer, Geldsack & Co., is right on the way between his apartment and his work, so he starts spending time there on a regular basis and gets to know the clerks, who enjoy his jolly company and the tidbits of news he passes on. One day, leaving the theater (one of the luxuries he treats himself to), he saves a couple of women from the unwanted attentions of a boor, walks them home, and discovers they are Mrs. Geldsack and her daughter Maria, who are so taken with him they invite him to visit them any time he likes. He begins dropping by in the late afternoons, enjoying their company and dreaming of somehow marrying the lovely Maria but invariably refusing dinner invitations on the pretext that his martinet of a boss insists on his going back to the office. The truth is that the only outfit he has is his aged, much-mended work uniform (everybody with a government job in tsarist Russia, military or civilian, wore a uniform); it’s okay to wear it when he’s plausibly on his way to or from work, but he can’t possibly show up to dinner in it. What he needs is a партикулярная пара, a black civilian suit, but he’s given up the envelope business as unbefitting a companion of the Geldsack ladies, so he can’t afford one. Finally Maria gives him a pressing invitation to her birthday party, saying his boss can’t possibly keep him from that — she will brook no excuses. He tries to borrow enough money from a friendly supervisor to buy a suit — thirty rubles will do it — but no dice. The night of the party, he walks by the building where it is being held, watches all the well-dressed people getting out of carriages and streaming in, and hears the strains of the mazurka she had especially wanted to dance with him. He goes to the Moika canal to drown himself, but when he shoves his hands in his pockets he discovers a three-ruble bill and a few kopecks, and decides to have dinner instead. He is, after all, a happy fellow by nature.

There are lots of linguistic tidbits in Butkov; one of the most interesting is “перъ-прокура,” the job title of the second-in-command at Geldsack & Co., which comes from the Italian phrase per procura ‘by proxy, by power of attorney’: the bitter Shchetochkin, who used to hold the position, explains to Shlyapkin that Stein, who has it now, couldn’t borrow any money on his own name and credit, but if he presents a bill for a hundred thousand rubles signed “Перъ-прокура Штейнъ,” it will be paid without question. That’s the kind of thing the miserably poor and downtrodden author must have mulled over in his Petersburg attic as he hid from his creditors.

Back in the day, Сhristopher Сulver’s Linguistics Weblog (one of the oldest links in my blogroll) was a dependable pleasure, frequently updated. Then it went pretty much quiet while its author was traveling, and I removed it from the blogroll; when he started posting again I restored it, and now he writes me: “I’m getting back into my studies of esoteric Finno-Ugrian themes as well as blogging on whatever general linguistics topics catch my fancy.” This is excellent news for everyone interested in general linguistics topics, which presumably includes most LH readers, so I encourage you to add him to your bookmarks and/or RSS feeds. Some recent posts to whet your appetite: Doză and badog (“How old is the use of Romanian doză to mean ‘aluminium can’?”), On the etymology of Hungarian srác ‘guy’ (it’s of Yiddish origin), Mari and Chuvash potatoes, and The Steppe of Hunger (what the Russians call Голодная степь is the ‘lord desert’ in Kazakh and Uzbek). Enjoy!

This is very cool:

The goal of the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas is “to make sure that the beautiful Algonquian languages and the cultures they embody will be heard and spoken by many more generations to come.” It isn’t just a repository of words and stories though. It is organized in a way that lets you explore the similarities and differences between the languages, and see how they are distributed by place.

On the upper right of the map are two pulldown menus that let you choose a particular word from a range of categories (family members, days of the week, numbers…) or even whole sentences (“Did your son see that canoe?” “You guys eat those apples now.”) Then you can click a pin on the map to see what that word or phrase is in different Algonquian languages.

For example, here are some words for “one”:
[…]

Looking at these words in groups gets you to start asking the kinds of questions linguists like to ask when researching the history of languages. Can these all be traced back to a common proto-word? Why did p become b in Nishnaabemwin? Why is Mi’kmaw so different? The answers are clues to the mixing and movement of people over centuries.

Totally unrelated, but in case any of you were beguiled by the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” papyrus that was all the rage recently, it’s a complete fake.

In a NY Times column, “Using the Foreign to Grasp the Familiar,” William Grimes talks about writers who publish in languages other than their own. He starts off with Francesca Marciano’s story “The Other Language,” in which “an Italian teenager named Emma falls in love with English”:

Ms. Marciano, who grew up in Rome, acquired English more or less as her heroine Emma did, as a teenager. She lived in New York in her 20s and, while spending 10 years in Kenya, wrote her first novel, “Rules of the Wild,” in English after a failed start in Italian. Today she lives in Rome, but English has become her second skin.

“You discover not just words but new things about yourself when you learn a language,” Ms. Marciano said. “I am a different person because I fell in love with English. I cannot revert. I cannot undo this. I am stuck.”

Two waves of emigration from the former Soviet Union, the first in the late 1970s, the second after the nation’s collapse, have yielded a bumper crop of Russian writers who have made English their own. Some, like Gary Shteyngart, and Boris Fishman, whose first novel, “A Replacement Life,” is being published by Harper in June, came to the United States as children and absorbed English by osmosis. Others, like Ms. Litman, Lara Vapnyar, Kseniya Melnik, Olga Grushin and Anya Ulinich, left the Soviet Union in their teens or early 20s, late enough in life to make the transition to another language a conscious effort.

“They are all very fluent, but their sense of the language is different,” said Karen Ryan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stetson University in Florida, who has written extensively on Russian émigré literature. “There’s a sense of play and inventiveness, which is true of all transnational writers.”

Grimes goes on to discuss Aleksandar Hemon, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li, and others who have chosen to write in English, as well as Andrei Makine, a Russian who “dazzled the French with Le Testament Français (published in the United States as Dreams of My Russian Summers), which won the Prix Goncourt and two other literary prizes in 1995.” and Yoko Tawada, “a Japanese émigré who lives in Berlin and writes in German,” who “has won a devoted following for uncanny, dream-shrouded works like Where Europe Begins.”

And Alice Robb’s New Republic piece “Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities” is worth a read (thanks, Dan!); it starts with Noam Scheiber explaining why he stopped speaking only Hebrew to his three-year-old daughter: “My Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let’s face it, less articulate. In English, my natural sensibility is patient and understated. My style in Hebrew was hectoring and prosecutorial.” Robb goes on to discuss research on the subject:

Between 2001 and 2003, linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko asked over a thousand bilinguals whether they “feel like a different person” when they speak different langauges. Nearly two-thirds said they did. […]

In 1964, Susan Ervin, a sociolinguist at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to explore the differences in how bilinguals represent the same stories in different languages. She recruited 64 French adults who lived in the U.S. and were fluent in both French and English. On average, they had spent 12 years living in the U.S.; 40 were married to an American. On two separate occasions, six weeks apart, Ervin gave them the “Thematic Apperception Test”: She showed her subjects a series of illustrations and asked them to make up a three-minute story to accompany each scene. In one session, the volunteer and experimenter spoke only French, while the other session was conducted entirely in English.

Ervin then analyzed the stories, looking at the different themes incorporated into the narratives. When she compared the two sets of stories, she identified some significant topical differences. The English stories more often featured female achievement, physical aggression, verbal aggression toward parents, and attempts to escape blame, while the French stories were more likely to include domination by elders, guilt, and verbal aggression toward peers.

In 1968, Ervin—by this point, “Ervin-Tripp”—designed another experiment to further explore her hypothesis that the content of bilinguals’ speech would change along with the language. […]

In 1998, Michele Koven, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent a year and a half carrying out ethnographic research with bilingual Parisian adults whose parents had immigrated from Portugal. […]

Like many people capable of such interactions, I feel very different when speaking different languages, so I’m fascinated by this stuff, even if it will probably never be possible to fully explain it.