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Via this Log post by Victor Mair about a 2004 Chinese novel called Yīnggélìshì 英格力士 (the title is a Chinese rendering of “English”; it’s about a guy named Love Liu who grows up in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, studies English, and “becomes enamored of this new language and attracted to his teacher”), I discovered Bruce Humes’s blog Altaic Storytelling: Tales from Istanbul to Heilongjiang, which is well worth checking out. Humes is now in Istanbul studying Turkish:

The goal would be to get enough modern Turkish under my belt so I could move onto Ottoman Turkish. Eventually, I’d like to be able to carry out research into the history of translation between Turkic languages and Chinese, or even better, re: the current topic of my newly christened blog: Altaic storytelling, particularly the role of itinerant aşık. I don’t know much about it, but it really appeals. The older I get, the more interested I am in oral transmission as opposed to written literature.

A post that particularly intrigued me is about “Evenki Place Names behind the Hànzì” in Chi Zijian’s novel Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸).

Nath of Imprints of Philippine Science has a post called Philippine language relations in a map that shows, well, Philippine language relations in a map. Nath starts off with the disarming confession: “I am not a linguist and I am not a geographer/cartographer. I am a physicist who is in dire need of a stress reliever. Mapping this is therapeutic while in the thick of preparing a manuscript for submission.” If you click on the map, you’ll get an enlarged .jpg, and there’s interesting discussion in the comments.

And then there’s https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1pk4dj/america_as_labeled_by_an_australian/. No linguistic relevance, but funny as hell. (Commentary, and unlabeled maps of Australian and French national divisions, at the Log.)

Addendum. Make it three maps; here‘s a neat one showing the words for ‘bear’ [and eight other words; thanks, iakon!] in the languages of Europe, with related ones in the same color.

Paul T. sent me a link to the Internet Archive page for Passing English of the Victorian era: A dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase by J. Redding Ware (1909). The preface makes delightful reading:

It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is ‘quite too dull’. Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added. ‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion. Not only is ‘Passing English’ general; it is local; often very seasonably local. Careless etymologists might hold that there are only four divisions of fugitive language in London—west, east, north and south. But the variations are countless. Holborn knows little of Petty Italia behind Hatton Garden, and both these ignore Clerkenwell, which is equally foreign to Islington proper; in the South, Lambeth generally ignores the New Cut, and both look upon Southwark as linguistically out of bounds; while in Central London, Clare Market (disappearing with the nineteenth century) had, if it no longer has, a distinct fashion in words from its great and partially surviving rival through the centuries—the world of Seven Dials, which is in St Giles’s—St James’s being practically in the next parish. In the East the confusion of languages is a world of ‘variants’—there must be half-a-dozen of Anglo-Yiddish alone—all, however, outgrown from the Hebrew stem. ‘Passing English’ belongs to all the classes, from the peerage class who have always adopted an imperfection in speech or frequency of phrase associated with the court, to the court of the lowest costermonger, who gives the fashion to his immediate entourage. Much passing English becomes obscure almost immediately upon its appearance—such as ‘Whoa, Emma!’ or ‘How’s your poor feet?’ the first from an inquest in a back street, the second from a question by Lord Palmerston addressed to the then Prince of Wales upon the return of the latter from India.

But you mustn’t take seriously the etymological speculations that follow (“‘Dead as a door nail’ is probably as O’Donnel…. the still common ‘Bloody Hell’ is ‘By our lady, hail’, the lady being the Virgin.”). Anyway, it’s great fun to leaf through and see what has survived (“afters” for dessert is, I think, no longer confined to Devon) and what has vanished with little trace (“affigraphy” meaning “To a T, exactly”).

Lately I’ve been musing on general and perhaps unresolvable questions about what might be called the culture of Russian literature. One such topic is the turn to social realism that it took in the 1840s and maintained more or less uninterrupted for generations; all of Europe had a Balzac period, but only Russia was so stubborn about it. (There is an interesting discussion about this going on at XIX век [The tyranny of the radical critics, part 1, part 2].) Now, as I read Sollogub‘s 1841 Аптекарша [The druggist’s wife], another has started vexing me. The story begins in a way that’s become a cliché/signifier for Classic Russian Literature: “Уездный город С. – один из печальнейших городков России” [The provincial city of S. is one of the saddest towns in Russia]. This raised a smile, but when the second section started with a jump in time and space and I read “Городок, в который я вас хочу перенести, читатель мой благосклонный, совсем не похож на тот, которым я так грустно начал повесть свою об аптекарше” [The town which I wish to carry you off to, gracious reader, is completely unlike that with which I began my tale of the druggist’s wife in such a melancholy way], it occurred to me to wonder about that cliché. Why are towns in Russian literature always (or almost always) unnamed? Once you descend below the two great capital cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, there is nothing. In the United States, every city has associated books; we can all think of famous novels set in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but even relatively two-bit regional centers like Albany, N.Y., have dedicated chroniclers like William Kennedy. You can get to know pretty much any city in America by immersing yourself in novels if you’re so inclined; authors love to try to do for their hometowns what Joyce did for Dublin.

Not so in Russia. Ancient towns like Rostov and Pskov; important regional centers like Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan; proud Siberian cities like Tomsk and Irkutsk—none of them, as far as I know, feature in literature beyond occasional mentions. Authors came from them, but they didn’t write about them except in their memoirs (as in Gorky’s autobiography about growing up in Nizhny). Now, one obvious response would be that Russia is far more centralized than the U.S., and all cultural life is concentrated in the capitals; while there’s some truth to that, it needn’t have had such a drastic result. Even if writers had to live and work in Petersburg or Moscow to have a career, why couldn’t they have written with affection (or spite, as the case may be) and deep local knowledge about the places they were from or in which they had spent time? Instead, when they wrote about cities other than the capital it was almost always a generic “city of N” (or S, or whatever other letter caught the writer’s fancy). This seems to be changing (recent novels have been set in places like Kazan and Kaliningrad), but it was true for a very long time, and I think it requires explanation.

Addendum (Dec. 2014): I’ve just found a perfect example at the start of Anastasia Marchenko’s story Гувернантка (“The governess,” from her collection Путевые заметки; see this post):

Три часа пробило на колокольнѣ маленькаго городка, названіе котораго я не нахожу нужнымъ объявлять вамъ, не потому, чтобы я хотѣла скрыть тщательно отъ васъ это названіе, или чтобъ подобная таинственность была необходима для лицъ моей повѣсти; — совсѣмъ нѣтъ я, просто, не хочу пуститься въ географическое описаніе и заставить васъ отыскивать (пожалуй, еще по картѣ) въ такой-то губерніи. подлѣ такой-то рѣчки, незамѣченный доселѣ городокъ… Не все ли равно, въ Сибири, или въ Украйнѣ совершалось это происшествіе нашей вседневной жизни? вѣдь вы не пойдете собирать справки въ вѣроятіи разсказа, а принуждены вѣрить автору на слово.

Three o’clock sounded from the bell tower of a small town, whose name I don’t feel I need to announce to you, not because I want to carefully hide the name from you, or because that kind of secrecy was essential for the people in my story; not at all — I simply prefer not to embark upon a geographical description and force you to track down (maybe even on a map) in such-and-such a province, by such-and-such a river, a town hitherto unnoticed… Isn’t it all the same whether these events of our daily life took place in Siberia or Ukraine? After all, you’re not going to go around collecting information to verify the likelihood of my story, you’ll have to take the author’s word for it.

I note that she uses the preposition в rather than на with the name of Ukraine, as preferred by Ukrainians today; I don’t know what current use was in the 1840s or whether it depended on geography (she grew up in Kovno, now Lithuanian Kaunas, and moved to Odessa as a teenager, shortly before publishing the stories), but I thought it worth mentioning.

Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson, from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Radboud University Nijmegen, have published a paper (abstract) arguing that (in the words of this Jul. 9 Sci-News.com story) “essentially modern language and speech are an ancient feature of our lineage dating back at least to the most recent ancestor we shared with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.” The abstract linked above says:

This reassessment of the antiquity of modern language, from the usually quoted 50,000–100,000 years to half a million years, has profound consequences for our understanding of our own evolution in general and especially for the sciences of speech and language. As such, it argues against a saltationist scenario for the evolution of language, and toward a gradual process of culture-gene co-evolution extending to the present day. Another consequence is that the present-day linguistic diversity might better reflect the properties of the design space for language and not just the vagaries of history, and could also contain traces of the languages spoken by other human forms such as the Neandertals.

Now, my instinctual reaction is “What a load of poppycock,” but both Dediu and Levinson have been mentioned with respect over at Language Log, and I’m certainly not competent to have an informed opinion. I’m posting this so that those better informed than I can weigh in, and in the hope that it might prompt one of the Loggers to address it.

From the Palgrave Pivot anniversary page:

In October 2012 we launched Palgrave Pivot in response to feedback from the scholarly community that they needed a mid-form publication format for publishing their work. One year later we’ve published over 100 Palgrave Pivot titles across the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business.

To celebrate we are offering access to the first 100 Palgrave Pivot titles FREE for 100 Hours. From 9am on Monday 28th October to 1pm GMT on Friday 1st November you can access all 100+ Palgrave Pivot titles FREE on Palgrave Connect.

Unfortunately, their interface is clunky and maddening to use; fortunately, MetaFilter user Going To Maine has posted a complete list of available titles, with links, at the MetaFilter post where I found out about it. I’ve already noticed “Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature,” by Nicholas Birns, and “The Moscow Pythagoreans: Mathematics, Mysticism, and Anti-Semitism in Russian Symbolism,” by Ilona Svetlikova, and I’ve barely started looking at it. There’s less than two days to go before it all goes back behind the paywall, so check it out sooner rather than later; I’m pretty sure any LH reader will find something that interests them.

Addendum. Another MetaFilter post of LH interest: It knocks like a swearing finger, featuring posts from Stuff Dutch People Like on linguistic topics, e.g. “lekker” and Swearing with diseases.

We here chez Hat are big David Sedaris fans, so we were delighted to see a new piece by him in last week’s New Yorker [archived]. It’s a sober one, but sober or funny he’s always a fine read. This piece had two bits that set off my Hat alarm and made me decide to post and ask the Varied Reader for an opinion.

1) “The kitchen table sat twelve, and there was not one but two dishwashers.” This sounded wrong to me; the alternative, “there were not one but two,” doesn’t sound great either—this is one of those places where the joints of a language don’t quite fit snugly—but it’s what I’d say, since to me the basic structure is “there were … two.” What say you?

2) “Now there was organic coffee, and artisanal goat cheese.” This is obviously not specific to Sedaris, artisanal being a major buzzword of today, but I’ll take the occasion to mention that I never use the word myself, not because I hate it but because I can’t pronounce it. Both “ar-TIZ-ə-nəl” and “ar-ti-ZAN-əl” sound awful to me. What say you?

Lameen Souag of Jabal al-Lughat has a post on “Language policy and Islam” that I cite here for this striking passage:

Regionally, other languages may also come to assume a secondary position in religious education – for example, Urdu in Pakistan, even though most students there have a different first language. A remarkable example of this is to be found in northeastern Nigeria, where advanced religious education requires mastering not just Classical Arabic but also Classical Kanembu, an extremely archaic variety of Kanembu currently used only for explaining Classical Arabic texts (Bondarev & Tijani 2013).

Of course, it’s not really much different than studying Greek through the medium of Latin, which English-speakers did once upon a time.

Having reached 1841 in my Long March, I’m reading what I believe is A. K. Tolstoy‘s first published piece of prose, the novelette Упырь [The vampire]. The first surprise was finding myself not in some haunted grotto, ruined house, or other Gothic scene but at the most ordinary high-society ball, with young people dancing and older people gossiping. The second surprise was that the first bit of dialogue involved language peevery; the narrator approaches a pale young man observing the proceedings, and the latter first tells him there are upyrs at the ball, then bursts out with this explosion of word rage (Russian below the cut):

“You (God knows why) call them ‘vampires,’ but I can assure you that they have a genuine Russian name, upyr; and since they are of purely Slavic origin, even though they are met with throughout Europe and even in Asia, there is no basis for holding on to a name deformed by Hungarian monks who took it into their heads to turn everything into Latin and out of upyr made ‘vampire.’ Vampir, vampir!,” he repeated contemptuously — “we Russians might just as well say fantom or revenant instead of ‘ghost’ [prividenie ‘ghost, apparition’]!”

So it would appear that at that time вампир was the usual Russian word for ‘vampire’; I wonder what the distribution of вампир and упырь is these days?

Addendum. Another sentence of philological interest occurs later, when our hero is ensconced in a purported vampire’s old house, where a suite of rooms has been locked up for many years and Strange Things Happen: “Но он с нею разговаривал, она ему отвечала; он принуждён был внутренне сознаться, что истолкование его не совсем естественно, и решил, что всё виденное им — один из тех снов, которым на русском языке нет, кажется, приличного слова, но которые французы называют cauchemar” [But he had spoken with her, she had answered him; he was forced to admit that there was no natural explanation, and decided that everything he had seen was one of those dreams for which there is no decent word in Russian, but which the French call cauchemar]. The borrowing кошмар [koshmar] was already in occasional use (from Gogol’s 1835 Портрет [The portrait]: “и уже не мог изъяснять, что это с ним делается: давленье ли кошмара или домового, бред ли горячки или живое виденье” [and he couldn’t explain what was happening to him, stress or nightmare (кошмар) or house-spirit, delirium or fever or living apparition]), but it must have been felt to be a blatant Gallicism.

[Read more…]

Mark Liberman at the Log reports on the legalization of the letters Q, W, and X as part of Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Democratization Package”:

The Turkish Alphabet Law of 11/1/1928 was aimed at shifting Turkish from Arabic-based to Latin-based orthography, and it was quite effective in suppressing the use of the Ottoman script. But it has also been used to suppress Kurdish, historically spoken by 10-25% of the country’s population.

But the post is especially worth reading for the passage from Gravity’s Rainbow Mark cites (“ƣ seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate…”); if you enjoy that as much as I do, you will want to read the much more extensive series of quotes from Pynchon’s masterpiece in this nine-year-old Log post (and a quote from a different section at this eight-year-old LH post)—and, hopefully, the book itself.