languagehat.com

On the one hand, I am constantly feeling like a latecomer to culture, having to figure out allusions that I would have been aware of had I been educated a century or so earlier. On the other hand, living as I do in the twenty-first century, I have blessedly little trouble figuring them out. I’ve gone back to Karamzin’s «Письма русского путешественника» [Letters of a Russian Traveler], to which, as I said here, I return whenever I need a break from my reading schedule, and I’m greatly enjoying his stay in Paris in the spring of 1790 — what a time to be young and traveling in France! (I confess, though, I do skim or skip his lengthy descriptions of paintings, statuary, and the like, written in a sentimental style that was all the rage at the time but is fairly tedious now.) Karamzin describes Bieder, the fellow he hired to show him around (German by birth, though he’s long forgotten the language, he sleeps in the attic above Karamzin’s rooms at the Hotel Britannique on the rue Guénégaud), as “беден, как Ир, а честен, как Сократ”: poor as Ir and honest as Socrates. But who was Ir? A little googling told me he is known in English as Irus; he’s the greedy beggar Odysseus meets and knocks out on his return to Ithaca in Book 18 of the Odyssey: “Arnaeus was the name his mother had honoured him with at birth, but all the young men called him Irus, because he ran errands on demand” (Irus [Ἶρος] is a masculine form of Iris [Ἶρις], the messenger of the gods). Brewer, of course, has an entry:

The beggar of gigantic stature, who kept watch over the suitors of Penel’ope. His real name was Ar’neos, but the suitors nicknamed him Iros because he carried their messages for them. Ulysses, on his return, felled him to the ground with a single blow, and flung him out of doors.
    Poorer than Irus. A Greek proverb, adopted by the Romans (see Ovid), and existing in the French language (“Plus pauvre qu’Irus”), alluding to the beggar referred to above.

And in Russian, “бедный/беден, как Ир”; the Национальный корпус русского языка finds five occurrences, in Karamzin, Lazhechnikov, Herzen (twice), and Saltykov-Shchedrin. There’s a Greek epigram purporting to be an epitaph for Epictetus:

Δοῦλος ᾽Επίκτητος γενόμην, καὶ σώμ’ ανάπηρος,
    καὶ πενίην ῏Ιρος, καὶ φίλος ἀθανάτοις.

The traditional translation is:

Slave, poor as Irus, halting as I trod,
I, Epictetus, was the friend of God.

While I’m on the subject of Karamzin, one pleasure of reading the Letters is occasionally running into the germs of future (and now better known) writings of his. In the section where he describes some of the streets of Paris, he visits the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie because of a sad event that took place there centuries earlier:

Агнесса Геллебик, прекрасная молодая девушка, дочь главного конюшего при дворе Филиппа-Августа, любила и страдала. От Парижа далеко до мыса Левкадского: что же делать? броситься в колодезь на улице Трюандери и концом дней своих прекратить любовную муку.

Agnès Hellebick, a beautiful young woman who was the daughter of the head equerry at the court of Philip Augustus, loved and suffered. From Paris it is a long way to the Leucadian rock [from which Sappho supposedly leaped to her death out of love for Phaon]: what could she do? She threw herself into a well in the Rue de la Truanderie and put an end to the torments of love along with her life.

Surely this is the source of his most famous story, “Poor Liza,” which I discussed briefly at the end of this post. And when he meets Pierre-Charles Levesque, he tells us that although Levesque’s History of Russia is very good, it has serious inadequacies:

Больно, но должно по справедливости сказать, что у нас до сего времени нет хорошей российской истории, то есть писанной с философским умом, с критикою, с благородным красноречием. Тацит, Юм, Робертсон, Гиббон – вот образцы! Говорят, что наша история сама по себе менее других занимательна; не думаю: нужен только ум, вкус, талант. […] Левек как писатель – не без дарования, не без достоинств; соображает довольно хорошо, рассказывает довольно складно, судит довольно справедливо, но кисть его слаба, краски не живы; слог правильный, логический, но не быстрый. К тому же Россия не мать ему; не наша кровь течет в его жилах: может ли он говорить о русских с таким чувством, как русский?

Painful though it is, justice requires me to say that to this day there is no good history of Russia, one written with a philosophic mind, with critical ability, with noble eloquence. Tacitus, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon — those are models! They say that our history is in its own right less entertaining than others, but I disagree: one only needs intellect, taste, talent. […] Levesque as a writer is not without gifts, not without merit; his comparisons are adequate, he tells a story adequately, his judgments are adequate, but his brush is feeble, his paints are not lively; his style is correct and logical, but not rapid. Furthermore, Russia is not his mother; it is not our blood that flows in his veins: can he speak of Russians with as much feeling as a Russian?

A quarter of a century later, Karamzin would begin publishing his own history of Russia, which would not only replace Levesque’s as the standard account but would be considered by Russians as the height of Russian prose style. I wonder if he was already considering trying his hand at a better version when he was setting down those remarks?

Some useful sites: Unicode character table (great layout), shapecatcher (draw your own characters), amp-what (type a description). Via MetaFilter (where people will doubtless post other links that are useful and/or fun).

I ran across a piquant footnote on p. 214 of Ancient and Modern Malta, by Louis de Boisgelin (aka Pierre Marie Louis de Boisgelin de Kerdu), Knight of Malta (London, 1805). Boisgelin writes:

Sacchitti, the Maltese ambassador at Rome, wrote to his court that a Russian, Boyard, general of the Muscovite army and ambassador from Peter the First, had expressed a wish to visit Malta… The same dispatches gave an account of the honours paid this Boyard and his suite. His name was Kzeremetz * […]

And the footnote reads:

* Voltaire, in his History of the Empire of Russia under Peter the Great, chap viii. says, that he was originally a Prussian, and spells his name Sheremeto, though by others he is called Sheremetov, Sheramotoff, and Czeremetoff. L’Eveque in his History of Russia, the edition printed in 1800, calls him Cheremeteff; but I have written his name according to the credentials sent by the czar to the grand-master, in which he is termed Kzeremetz. The original of his harangue to the pope is preserved in the Vatican; I have a copy of it; and in that he is called Kremer: but in his discourse to the grand-master, of which I have likewise a copy, he is named Czeremeter; and Szerempsen in the letter of recommendation sent by the emperor Leopold to the grand-master. Sebastian Paolo has printed it in his Codex Diplom. vol. II. page 373. He has also printed his credentials.

An impressive array of variants, of which the author chose the very silliest; I wonder how anyone came up with “Kzeremetz”? The Boyard’s, or boyar‘s, name in a modern version is Boris Sheremetev.

This announcement provides an example of science making a difference in the real world (which is to say, that of words):

QUT Senior Lecturer in Physics, Dr Stephen Hughes, sparked controversy over how a humble siphon worked when he noticed an incorrect definition in the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary.

In 2010, eagle-eyed Dr Hughes spotted the mistake, which went unnoticed for 99 years, which incorrectly described atmospheric pressure, rather than gravity, as the operating force in a siphon.

Dr Hughes demonstrated the science of siphons in a paper published yesterday in Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Reports. […]

Dr Hughes, whose previous research has taken him to Bhutan to examine how siphoning could prevent inland tsunamis, said siphons had been used since ancient times but how they work was still debated.

“If you think of a car, atmospheric pressure is like the wheels, it enables it to work. But gravity is the engine,” he said.

“It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm.”

The Oxford English Dictionary corrected the error and removed the reference to atmospheric pressure after Dr Hughes pointed it out. However, he said the new entry “unfortunately remains ambiguous”.

“This definition still leaves the question open as to how a siphon actually works,” Dr Hughes said.

“But at least the reference to atmospheric pressure has been removed. The vast majority of dictionaries of all languages still incorrectly assert that siphons work through atmospheric pressure and not gravity.

Three cheers for scientists who pay attention to dictionaries, and for the lexicographers who listen to them! I have to point out, however, that the entry linked to is from an Oxford English dictionary, not the Oxford English Dictionary, whose entry is from 1911 and has a small-type section beginning “The way the action of the siphon is explained has varied” and citing explanations dating back to 1675.

My wife asked me about the colloquial phrase cotton to ‘take a liking to,’ and (as often happens) I had no idea where it came from, so I did some research and discovered nobody else really does either. The OED, in an ancient entry (first published 1893), gives the primary sense of the verb as “To form a down or nap on; to furnish with a nap, to frieze,” adding that it’s obsolete, and various other senses (“To furnish or clothe with cotton”) before getting to branch II, the figurative senses, “To prosper, succeed, ‘get on’ well. Obs.,” ” To ‘get on’ together or with each other; to suit each other; to work harmoniously, harmonize, agree,” “To agree, to fraternize,” and “To ‘take’ to, attach oneself to; to become drawn or attached to,” of which it says “The original notion in branch II is uncertain.”

So I turned to The Phrase Finder, which has an entry Cotton on to that gives a full discussion, beginning with the information that the phrase cotton on to in the sense “To get to know or understand something” “appears to be limited in usage to the UK and other countries that were previously part of the British Empire, notably Australia and New Zealand. In the USA, especially in the southern states, ‘cotton to’ is used, with the slightly modified meaning of ‘take a liking to’.” It then goes into theories of origin:

As early as 1648, in a pamphlet titled Mercurius Elencticus, mocking the English parliament, the royalist soldier and poet Sir George Wharton used ‘cotton’, or as it was spelled then ‘cotten’, as a verb meaning ‘to make friendly advances’. ‘Cotten up to’ and ‘cotten to’ were both used to mean ‘become friendly with’. Whether this was as a reference to the rather annoying predisposition of moist raw cotton to stick to things or whether it alluded to moving of cotton garments closer together during a romantic advance isn’t clear. […] ‘Cottoning on’ as we now use it derives from the meaning of ‘attaching oneself to something’, specifically an attachment to an idea that we haven’t encountered before. It would seem to be a reasonable bet that at least one of the variants of this phrase would have been coined in one of the major English-speaking cotton producing regions of the world, for example India or the USA. Not so; which gives more credibility to the notion that this phrase has little to do with the cotton plant.

So it remains a mystery, but at least we know a little more than we did before.

I’ve long been interested in Mali, and I’ve posted several times about the incredible manuscript collections of Timbuktu (2003, 2006, 2007). Needless to say, I was upset at reports that Islamist rebels were destroying them, and relieved when news started emerging that many or most of them had been saved; you can now read a riveting account by Patrick Symmes of the rescue. A brief snippet, to give you a taste:

In the morning, we went straight to the Ahmed Baba Institute. After seven months, you could still see not merely the sooty starburst left on the floor by the bonfire of books, but the actual shreds and cinders of manuscripts themselves, which were swirling around in a sheltered area by the men’s room. I took a step to investigate and heard the crunching of ancient knowledge under my feet. Had I just crushed the only existing copy of an Ottoman geography or the final verses of a Moorish poet? It smelled like the fire happened yesterday.

The institute was founded in 1973 but only gained real traction in 1984, when Haidara joined, bridging the gap between state researchers and some 65 families with private collections. Like most, he retained physical control of his books, and his own 45,000 items make up by far the largest collection in Timbuktu. These were not just piles of old scraps. Often they were high-quality works with spectacular Arabic calligraphy, illuminated with bright red and blue inks and graced with gold-leaf arabesques that wrapped in infinite loops, reflecting the never-ending nature of God. In 2000, Mali greatly expanded the institute, and this new building opened in 2009 with a staff of 50 Malians trained to protect and digitize the books.

Via this MetaFilter post, which has further links.

A Haaretz story by Yarden Skop raises one of those eternal questions, in this case with reference to the teaching of Arabic in Israel:

For years the education system has been debating over what to emphasize in the study of Arabic − whether literary Arabic, which would give students the skills to read, write and translate, or spoken Arabic, which would allow them to hold a simple conversation.

An Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities committee found that “there are no clear goals for the teaching of Arabic in the Hebrew education system. Is the goal to create a connection with Arabs in Israel by teaching conversational skills? To provide direct access to what is happening in the Middle East (by imparting skills in understanding media in Arabic)? Opening a window onto the religion and culture of Islam? The panel believes that the setting of goals is important because this will set the objectives of study in each of the skills of the language.”

The committee noted in the introduction to its report that “most graduates of the Hebrew education system do not understand Arabic and do not see Arabic literature as a source of inspiration for thought and creativity.”

The committee concluded that the goal of teaching Arabic ought to be to allow access to the Middle East and Islam by teaching students how to understand texts, and that the study of Arabic literature should be the overriding goal.

Their decision is, of course, controversial (“there are those who believe too much emphasis is placed on literary Arabic and students are frustrated that after years of study they cannot hold a conversation”), and it’s one of those problems that inherently resists a single answer. My own relation to languages has been largely determined by circumstance; I learned spoken Spanish very well because I was living in Argentina, whereas my spoken Russian is lousy because I never get a chance to practice it. But being the bookish sort, I’m happy with my reading knowledge. (Thanks, Kobi!)

An e-mail (thanks, Eric!) has informed me of the BBC series “Keep your English up to date,” pointing in particular to this post on the expressive word minging, originally ‘smelly, stinking’ and now more generally ‘disgusting; ugly, unattractive.’ I was familiar with the word, but pleased to hear it discussed by John Ayto (there’s an audio file accompanying the text), because I’ve got several of his books on words (Dictionary of Word Origins, A Diner’s Dictionary: Food and Drink From A to Z, and Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms) and it was fun to hear his voice.

But what led me to post was this sentence: “A select list of adjectives we’ve applied over the past hundred years to people or things we find disgusting would include ‘scroungy’, ‘skanky’, ‘manky’, ‘icky’, ‘grotty’, ‘grungy’, ‘poxy’, ‘scuzzy’, ‘onkus’ (that’s Australian), ‘yucky’, ‘snotty’, ‘septic’, ‘gross’… I could go on.” Onkus?? Sure enough, it’s in my Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary (1 disagreeable, distasteful. 2 not functioning properly, out of order.), the Cassell Dictionary of Slang (s.v. oncus: it can apparently be spelled several ways), and the OED, which adds an interesting bifurcation:

1. N.Z. Good; pleasant.
Quot. 1944 [A. F. St. Bruno Desert Daze 55 Now Auld Jock and Bluey, having successfully partnered a crown-and-anchor board in their Naafi, and having ‘done up’ the feloose A.W.L. in Cairo Y.M.C.A.’s, had arrived back at Maadi decidedly ‘onkus’.] is ambiguous and may have either a good or a bad connotation (cf. sense 2).
2. Austral. Unpleasant or disagreeable. Of food or drink: inferior, of poor quality. Now rare.

The last two citations for the second sense are:

1962 D. McLean World Turned Upside Down 121 All this yabber about Danny is onkus.
1999 D. Seal Lingo 61 Onkus means disagreeable or unpleasant and was used in civilian life between the wars..only to stagger on well into the 1960s, though it is rarely heard today.

Anybody familiar with this pungent word?

Some interesting stuff I’ve run across:

1) The Un-X-able Y-ness of Z-ing (Q): A List with Notes: Sean Cotter reports on a translated title that “like a spot of dye, dropped into the flow of culture and altered the hue of English as it diffused downstream.” I had not realized that Milan Kundera didn’t want to use “the unbearable lightness of being” as the title of the English translation of his Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí; he told Michael Heim, the translator, that “for you Americans the title will be a bit hard-going.” Heim said, “We’re not children. If The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the title, so be it.” And a meme was born.

2 De Vulgari Eloquentia: Not Dante, but a board game based on Dante (Suggested Ages: 14 and up; Playing Time: 120 minutes):

Italy, late Middle Ages. The fabric merchants need to write down their contracts in a language that everyone can understand and the literates are looking for an alternative to the elite of the traditional Latin language. So, the Volgare, the language spoken by the common people, taken from the dialects spoken in the various Italian regions, starts to gain relevance. … The players will have to do their part in the creation of this new language! But who will provide them the proper knowledge to understand the manuscripts in the different dialects? Who will succeed to uncover the secrets of the books inside the Papal Library? Who will embrace the religious life and who will remain a merchant? Some of the players can become a famous banker, someone else can climb the church’s hierarchy to be the next Pope! But in the end, who will be the most appreciated and respected for his status and his culture?

3) The Space between Languages is a talk by Herta Müller, a writer born to a German-speaking family in the Banat region of Romania who “learnt Romanian quite late in life, when I left my small village for the city at the age of fifteen to go to high school.” The discussion of her relationship to that language is interesting (“There is not a single Romanian sentence in any of my books. But Romanian is always with me when I write because it has grown into my way of seeing the world”), but the main reason I’m bringing it here is to correct an irritating error. She writes:

A swallow suddenly appeared in a different light in Romanian, where it is called rindunica, “sitting-in-a-row”. The bird’s name suggests how swallows perch on a wire, close together in a row. I used to see them in my village every summer, before I knew the Romanian word. I was amazed that a swallow could have such a lovely name. I became more and more aware that the Romanian language had words that were more sensuous, more in tune with my perception, than my mother tongue.

No. The Romanian word rândunea or rândunica ‘swallow’ is not from rând ‘file, row,’ it is from hirundinella, a diminutive of Latin hirundo. I hate to burst such a poetic, sensuous balloon, but there it is.

4) The ever-readable Gasan Guseinov has a brief post saying that all those who use the blatantly foreign бабуин for ‘baboon’ instead of the good Russian word павиан (which, as of course Guseinov knows perfectly well, is borrowed from German Pavian, which ultimately goes back to the same source, French babouin, as бабуин) should be made to repeat the palindrome А НИ У БАБУИНА НИ У БАБУИНА (something like ‘and neither at the baboon nor at the baboon’). I note that Wikipedia has separate articles for бабуин and павиан. Can my Russian-speaking readers tell me whether these two words are distinguished in ordinary use, and which of them is commoner?

I seem never to have mentioned the Nigerian anti-Western group Boko Haram here, and that’s a good thing, because if I had I would have spread the usual story that Hausa boko is from English book, and that turns out to be mistaken, according to “The Etymology of Hausa boko” (pdf) by Paul Newman, according to Wikipedia “the world’s leading authority on the Hausa language of Nigeria and on the Chadic language family.” Newman points out that:

1) If English book had been the source, it would have been adopted in Hausa as something like [búukùu] (he gives examples of such words).
2) The word boko “has a related morphological form marked by reduplication, short final vowels, and a set low-low-high-low tone pattern, namely bòokò-bóokò ‘deceptive, fraudulent’ … This pattern is found in Hausa with various other words… This reduplicated construction is unproductive and limited to a small set of words, many of which are now obsolete, thereby indicating that boko must be an old Hausa word with considerable ancestry in the language and not a recent loanword.”
3) It occurs with the word biri ‘monkey’ “as part of a fixed compound biri-boko (lit. monkey-fraud). … That biri-boko is found in Bargery’s dictionary… is a good indication that the compound is of considerable age in the language and hardly a recent creation…”
4) The order of definitions in old dictionaries suggests the original sense was ‘fraud.’
5) “It is perhaps worth pointing out that boko in the sense of something western or secular tended not to be used as an independent noun, like English book (as is now often done), but was almost always used as a modifier.”
6) Finally, “it would have been curious indeed for Hausa to have borrowed the English word book (in the form boko) and have it come to represent despised Western education. In the first place Hausa has long had its own word for book (littafi), which was borrowed at a very much earlier period from Arabic. This word was already well established and fully integrated in the language at a time considerably prior to the British takeover of northern Nigeria and the opening of colonial government schools in Kano at the beginning of the 20th century.”

His conclusion: “Hausa boko does not mean ‘book’ and it is not derived etymologically from the English word book. The phonetic and orthographic similarity between the two is purely coincidental. They are what the French call ‘faux amis’ (‘false friends’).” I was particularly impressed with this frank acceptance of responsibility for the error:

This is not a matter of an occasional reporter or amateur linguist going astray. This is a systematic error that we professional Hausa specialists have perpetuated over the years and thus we deserve real blame for having provided other scholars and the general public with misleading information.

(Thanks for the link, Paul!)