languagehat.com

In this post from a few months ago I expressed my pleasure at finding “a strange international word of the day [the early 19th century] that’s been utterly forgotten,” and now I’ve run across another one. I’m back to Veltman, reading his 1835 story “Эротида” [Erotida], which involves a frame story in which a Poet is telling, or rather reading (his guests “frowned at the word read“), a tale of a brigadier who never tired of reliving his glory days under Catherine and who was bringing up his daughter Erotida (“he loved enigmatic Greek names and he had found this one either in the Hypotyposis or in the Complete Church Calendar“) exactly as he would have brought up a son, giving her toy soldiers to play with, teaching her to march and ride, and in general “preparing her for service in the dragoons” (all my English quotes are from the translation by James Gebhard in Selected Stories, to my knowledge the only Veltman available in English). In discussing the bygone delights of aristocratic life at Kuskovo in the previous century, Veltman indulges his love of obscure and foreign words (Russian below the cut):

Having dined, the honored guests would sit down to play préférence, la mouche, panfil, tercet, bassette, mariage, hombre . . . The ladies would stroll in the garden, where the trees would be hung from top to bottom with pineapples, oranges, and peaches . . . On the pond from a gilded boat came the sound of horn music — as if it were the last coming. Then would come a brilliant theatrical performance . . . Oh, the mastery of the actors and all of them homegrown! As for stagecraft, there were all kinds of machines — things moved by themselves! Then would come the ball: the polonaise, the pergu[r]din, the monimaska, the minuet. And what gowns!

It goes on, but we’ve come to the part I want to single out. I noticed pergu[r]din (пергурдин) because it was clearly a variant of перигурдин, which I had just encountered in Sollogub’s История двух калош [Story of two galoshes] and which this site tells me represents French Périgourdine (presumably a dance originating in Périgord). But what really caught my attention was monimaska (манимаска), which reminded me of bergamasque: what kind of name was it? French, Italian, Spanish? The truth turned out to be much stranger.

After various flailings I won’t trouble you with, I discovered this site, where if you scroll down to MONEY MUSK/MONYMUSK you will discover a lengthy history of what turns out to be a Scottish dance tune:

A pipe tune (written within the range of nine notes, with the so-called ‘double tonic’ tonality) and the name of an Aberdeenshire, Scotland, estate called Monymusk House, long in the possession of the Grant family. ‘Moneymusk’ is the ‘Englished’ version of the Gaelic words Muine Muisc meaning a noxious weed or bush. The tune was composed by Daniel (sometimes Donald) Dow (1732‑1783) in 1776 and first appeared in his Thirty Seven New Reels, c. 1780 (pg. 5), under the title “Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk’s Strathspey” […] Linscott (1939) says the melody was called “The Countess of Airly” in the early 18th century, and came from the village of Monymusk, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, although by what authority he makes this claim is not known. […] It has since that time [1799] been generally known simply as “Monymusk” or its alternate spellings and variations. Christine Martin (2002) uses the tune as an example of one of the vehicles for a foursome reel, and says “Monymusk” is often used for dancing the Highland Fling.

And scrolling down a little further I struck pay dirt: “Paul Gifford reports that a history of Romanian music by Poslusnicu gives that ‘Money Musk’ (recorded as ‘manimasca’) was one of the dances at a nobleman’s ball in Bucovina, Moldavia, sometime after 1812, and that the music was not unlikely played by Jewish musicians.” Bucovina is one of Veltman’s old stomping grounds, and he may well have heard it there and noted down the Romanian form of the name, manimasca, squirreling it away for future use. Thus does a Scotch reel turn up in an evocation of Catherinian noble balls! (I presume Gebhard changed the first a in manimasca to o to better suggest the English source.)

The OED has a new entry (Third Edition, September 2002) s.v. money musk defining it as “A kind of country dance for three couples in longways sets” and giving the etymology as “< Monymusk (formerly also Monemusk, Moneymusk), the name of a village in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which was rebuilt in the 18th cent. as a planned village for estate workers by Sir Archibald Grant (see below).” The first citation is from 1792 (E. P. Simcoe Diary 4 June vii. 86, “I was very near fainting after having danced Money Musk”) and the last from 1999 (Boston Globe 28 Feb. [New Hampshire Weekly] 11 “Bob McQuillen, piano, Jane Orzechowski, fiddle and Deanna Stiles, flute..took a crack at ‘Money Musk’, a difficult contra dance tune that dates back hundreds of years”).

The original:

откушают — почетные садятся играть в преферанс, в ламуш, в панфил, в тресет, в басет, в марьяж, в ломбер… Дамы идут прогуливаться в сад, деревья от маковки до корня унизаны ананасами, апельсинами, персиками… На пруду раззолоченная шлюпка, роговая музыка гремит, как на страшном суде. Потом театр воздушный… что за актеры!.. а все доморощенные!.. про кулисы и говорить нечего: машина на машине — сами двигаются!.. Потом откроется бал… пойдут полонез, пергурдин, манимаску, менуэт… А что за наряды!

The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. The About page says:

The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary was established by faculty and students in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. For many years, Professor John Nichols digitally recorded Ojibwe elders as part of a research grant for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Endangered Languages Program. His goal was to expand A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe, which he co-authored with Professor Earl Nyholm (Nichols, Nyholm, 1995). … In time, Nichols anticipated the need for a talking dictionary where digital audio would be embedded within the dictionary entry. Nichols and his departmental colleague, historian Brenda Child, along with curator Marcia Anderson from the Minnesota History Society, began to envision a new dictionary with a broader Ojibwe cultural context. This dictionary would draw on the superb collections of the Minnesota Historical Society to create a virtual museum. As a result, instead of the simple line drawings typical of a print dictionary, the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary features beautiful illustrations of Ojibwe material culture and activities, to narrate the rich cultural heritage and present-day lives of Ojibwe people from the Great Lakes.
Recent technology made it possible to design this innovative, illustrated, talking dictionary, with photographs both old and new, and allowing insight into an Ojibwe way of life that is difficult to comprehend without a visual aid. … Best of all, it allows users to search using the Ojibwe language.

It’s really splendidly done, and listening to the audio clips (not just word forms, but sample sentences) makes me want to learn the language. Thanks for the link, Mik!

We’ve all heard stories about family names that were “changed at Ellis Island” (where immigrants coming to New York were processed a century ago); allegedly, officials would change foreign-sounding names to something easier for Americans to deal with. Well, those stories are all the bunk. Philip Sutton, of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library, has written an informative post on the subject, showing that “Names were not changed at Ellis Island. … Inspectors did not create records of immigration; rather they checked the names of the people moving through Ellis Island against those recorded in the ship’s passenger list, or manifest. … The manifest was presented to the officials at Ellis Island when the ship arrived. If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists.” People sometimes changed their name before making the journey; “[m]ore commonly, immigrants would change their names themselves when they had arrived in the United States.”
But don’t just absorb that nugget of information and move on. The main reason I’m posting this is the astounding story of Frank Woodhull, told in the latter part of Sutton’s account. You owe it to yourself to read it. As Monk used to say, “You’ll thank me later.”

Anatoly has a post (in Russian) about how when he was studying English in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, they were still taught the antiquated rule that you say I shall, you will, he will, and he wonders if they still teach that nonsense in Russia today. Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes, at least in rural and backward schools, and one commenter shows an image of a textbook from 2012 that has “I shall go to the Zoo. He will go to the Zoo. She will go to the Zoo” and links to this post (in English) by a woman who “quit her job in August 2011 to spend a year volunteering and traveling through all 15 countries of the former Soviet Union” and reports on “A Day in a Russian School”:

What saddened me was what I saw in the English classes. Olga herself admitted to me that she was not trained as an English teacher, but happened to end up teaching the English class because she was one of a few teachers who knew some English. And her English was not close to fluent; she sometimes struggled to understand me as we spoke and she often mispronounced words that she was trying to teach to the students. Her lessons were full of errors that had me biting my tongue to I wouldn’t jump in to correct her. It wasn’t surprising, then, that the oldest students hadn’t progressed much further than knowing a few words of vocabulary, despite having studied English for almost a decade.

Of course, no American has any business pointing fingers at bad language teaching in other countries, and I’m certainly not going to, but it’s still a depressing story.

Via Iridic’s MetaFilter post, a glossary of an early (the earliest?) conlang, Lingua Ignota: “Below is a semi-complete alphabetized English glossary of the Lingua Ignota – a secret language constructed by twelfth century polymath, Hildegard von Bingen. I grew fascinated with this constructed language a while back and was chagrined that there wasn’t a freely available online list of the entire extant glossary.” It may or may not be useful, but it’s certainly a lot of fun.

Anatoly reproduces a poem by Sergei Grakhovsky (Russian Сергей Иванович Граховский, Belarusian Сяргей Іванавіч Грахоўскi) written to demonstrate once and for all that Belarusian is not just a dialect of Russian, as is often claimed or lazily assumed (and I speak as one who has lazily assumed it, even though I knew intellectually that it was a separate language). It’s called «Ветразь» and the opening stanza reads:

У выраі ветразь знікае
За хваляй, нібы на спачын,
І змора яго не злякае,
Не спыніць тугой далячынь.

It definitely does its job, because I have not the faintest idea what that, or any of the rest of the poem, means. I know ветразь [vetraz’] means ‘(the) wind’ because I looked it up on Google Translate. (Amusingly, the first comment in Anatoly’s thread is “Damn, it’s not even a Ukrainian dialect :)))—although some of the words are understandable, if you know Ukrainian, but only some.”)

MIT Technology Review has a brief but intriguing article called “How Google Converted Language Translation Into a Problem of Vector Space Mathematics.” If I could only have read it (or rather, the paper it’s based on) when I was a math major, forty-plus years ago!

The new trick is to represent an entire language using the relationship between its words. The set of all the relationships, the so-called “language space”, can be thought of as a set of vectors that each point from one word to another. And in recent years, linguists have discovered that it is possible to handle these vectors mathematically. For example, the operation ‘king’ – ‘man’ + ‘woman’ results in a vector that is similar to ‘queen’.
It turns out that different languages share many similarities in this vector space. That means the process of converting one language into another is equivalent to finding the transformation that converts one vector space into the other.
This turns the problem of translation from one of linguistics into one of mathematics. […]
The method can be used to extend and refine existing dictionaries, and even to spot mistakes in them. Indeed, the Google team do exactly that with an English-Czech dictionary, finding numerous mistakes.

That would have been right up my alley. Alas, having forgotten all the math I once knew, I can only gape and wonder if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. (Thanks, Nick!)

A Financial Times essay by Harry Eyres describes clearing out his parents’ home, saying “It may sound trite, but the house, and our lives in it, would not have been the same without books…. The rooms suddenly look diminished, denuded, uncomfortably bare”:

Books Do Furnish a Room is the oddly memorable title of one of the volumes in Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”, a sequence of novels about the goings-on among a group of toffs, literati and others before and after the second world war. The statement (made in the novel by a character called Bagshaw, the editor of a post-war literary journal) has an undertone of surprise: how can books furnish a room, when they have no obviously practical value, in the way that chairs and tables and sofas and curtains do?

I always rather took it for granted that books furnished a room. The only rooms in our house without books were the dining-room and the bathrooms. Otherwise there were books everywhere: in all the bedrooms (and one of the pleasures of sleeping in different bedrooms was finding books I hadn’t seen for decades, like old friends), in the drawing-room – where the books seemed more formal and unapproachable – and in the piano room-cum-office which became my parents’ comfortable winter snuggery.

I confess I raised my eyebrows when I got to “The only rooms in our house without books were the dining-room and the bathrooms”: can you really call yourself a book lover if there are any rooms without books? (I’ll never forget the day my younger grandson, exploring the bathroom, opened the bottom drawer to find, yes, a little stack of books—he let out a delighted “Ah!”) Thanks, Paul!

I’m reading Большой свет [High society, Le grand monde], an 1840 novella by Vladimir Sollogub, yet another fine writer who doesn’t deserve the obscurity into which he has fallen, and I was detained by a couple of items in this passage (Russian below the cut): he says he would like to write about grand passions and thwarted villains…

But alas! I must choose the personages of my story not from an invented world, not from among imaginary people, but among you, my friends, whom I meet every day, today in the Mikhailovsky Theater, tomorrow on the railroad, and always on the Nevsky Prospect.
You, fine young people, my friends, you are good companions, but you are not knights of ancient sensitivity, you are not heroes of today’s novels. You dine at Дюмё, you call for Taglioni, you dance with the dowry of young women or with the importance of young coquettes.

(I’m not at all sure about “the importance of young coquettes” and I wonder if значение ‘meaning, importance’ had some particular sense in the early nineteenth century that I’m not aware of.)
The first thing that struck me was the railroad: the formal opening of the Tsarskoe Selo Railway was October 30, 1837, so this must be one of the earliest references in Russian literature, and it’s interesting to see it mentioned so offhandedly. But what drove me to post was the name of the restaurant. You will note that I’ve left it in Russian; this is because it’s the name of a French restaurant, but it’s not clear what the French name is. This edition of Sollogub renders it Дюмё [Dyumyo], with a ё [yo], but that’s pretty clearly an error—it should be Дюме [Dyume]. This suggests Dumais, and indeed the French Wikipedia article on d’Anthès, the foppish French officer who killed Pushkin in a duel and became the great villain of Russian literary history, says “d’Anthès fut présenté en 1834 au poète par des relations communes, au Dumais, célèbre restaurant français de saint Pétersbourg, dirigé (1820-1840) par un ancien soldat de Napoléon.” All very well, but there’s no citation, and I am unable to find any other mention of it under that name. Google Books tells me that Madame Pouchkine, a 2008 book by Laurence Catinot-Crost, spells it Dumé (“restaurant français, célèbre, sis rue Malaïa Morskaïa à Saint-Pétersbourg”), but I can’t find any support for that either. If it’s so célèbre, why can’t I pin down its name?

[Read more…]

Victor Mair’s Log posts are always enjoyable, and The languages on Chinese banknotes is particularly meaty. A reader sent in a photograph of a one jiao banknote and asked him to explain the languages printed on it, those being Han (Chinese), Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang; of the last, he says “after Han, China’s largest minority, but one that few people outside of China have ever heard of (it is closely related to Thai).” There is detailed discussion of each language and how well it is represented by the text on the banknote; for Zhuang, the answer is not at all well: “This is what one scholar of the region has referred to as ‘the whole fake / improved ethnic language phenomenon. Whatever is written there may have only a limited relationship to the way Zhuang is spoken in real life. It’s the same with Yi.'”
There is a great deal of interesting material in the comments, including this one by Mair:

There is something that has been in the back of my mind since I began to write this post, but it has only now come to the surface. Namely, the whole idea of five main ethnic groups as constituting the most important parts of the Chinese empire goes back to the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. Moreover, there is a distinctly linguistic representation of this manifestation of a multiethnic empire, viz., the polyglot dictionaries sponsored by the Manchu rulers. Of these polyglot dictionaries, the largest and I believe the best known was the pentaglot behemoth known (in Manchu) as the Han-i araha sunja hacin-i hergen kamciha Manju gisun-i buleku bithe. It also has titles in the four other languages that it contains (i.e., Tibetan, Mongol, Turki, and Chinese), but I don’t have time to type all of them out this morning before rushing off to a dissertation defense. You can find them, and other detailed information about this huge pentaglot, in item #126 of Bibliographies of Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, and Tibetan Dictionaries, compiled by Larry V. Clark, John R. Krueger, Manfred Taube, Hartmut Walravens, and edited by Hartmut Walravens (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), pp. 198-199. It is available online in Google Books… Now, isn’t that interesting?! These are the same exact groups as are found on the PRC banknote discussed in this post, with one exception: the Zhuang have replaced the Manchus.

Sometimes I wish I’d followed my old friend Susan into Sinology—there’s so much to learn and think about you’d never get bored even if you had several lifetimes.