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Magda Teter had a review in the December 7, 2023, NYRB (archived) of what she calls “a frustrating book, requiring a patient reader,” Moshe Taube’s The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe; after describing “a late-fifteenth-century Russian collection called the Academy Chronograph” that “follows almost verbatim a medieval Hebrew text known as Midrash Ma’aseh Hanukkah,” she says:

Yet at the time this manuscript was produced, Jews were not allowed to live in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, or Muscovy, where this particular manuscript appears to have been created. Vasily I (1371–1425), the grand prince, did not allow Jewish merchants or immigrants; neither did his successors. […]

How did medieval Jewish texts such as the Midrash Ma’aseh Hanukkah end up translated into Slavic languages in regions from which Jews were banned? This is a puzzle Moshe Taube seeks to solve in The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe. Taube, an Israeli scholar of linguistics and Slavic philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who spent thirty years studying and comparing different manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, and various old Slavic languages, unravels a fascinating if difficult to follow story of pre-Ashkenazi Jews’ presence in medieval eastern Europe and their intellectual contributions, which have been lost within Jewish culture but were preserved in east European Orthodox Christian society.

What makes the existence of this Slavic version of medieval Hebrew texts even more intriguing, Taube points out, is that Muscovy was then a backwater, its clergy “barely literate.” No “classical learning of the ancient Greeks and Romans penetrated the walls of pious obscurantism in Russian church institutions, including the monasteries.” If so few scholars had Greek, certainly none were trained in Hebrew. And even Kyivan Rus’, a region where Jews lived that was politically and culturally distinct from Muscovy, was a place known “as a source of furs and slaves,” not erudition.

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Hannah Seo writes for the NY Times (archived) about her experience with ASL:

Learning ASL was both a culture shock and a bruise to my ego. As a writer and journalist, I pride myself on a certain facility with language. I was taught that there’s an optimal combination of words that can most precisely communicate any thought. Often, my preoccupation with language as the primary tool for expression has meant that in talking or writing about my emotions, I have held them at a distance. This is compounded by the fact that learning a new language, or speaking in a language that I haven’t mastered, is always frustrating. It’s why I avoid situations where I’d have to speak Korean (I never spoke it growing up, and I communicate with the vocabulary of a 6-year-old). My deficits make me simple, unfunny, a bit childlike and too direct — not at all as I imagine myself to be.

With ASL, I expected to feel similarly, and thought fluency would come once I collected a critical mass of signs. The first thing you learn in ASL class is the alphabet. As my classmates and I asked and answered questions using words we didn’t have the signs for, those early weeks were filled with laborious spelling. This was embarrassing: Seeing a dozen politely smiling faces watching me as I slowly spelled, misspelled and restarted spelling words — often multiple times — was its own kind of purgatory.

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My wife and I were admiring an image of the strange-looking bird called the nightjar when she asked me, naturally enough, what the “jar” in its name meant. I, naturally enough, turned to the OED, whose entry was revised in 2003:

1.a. A nocturnal, insectivorous, migratory bird, Caprimulgus europaeus (family Caprimulgidae), of Europe and eastern and central Asia, which has grey-brown cryptic plumage and a distinctive churring call. Also called fern-owl, goatsucker.

1630 Ill boding Owles, Night-iarrs, and Rauens with wide-stretched throats.
T. May, Continuation Lucan vii. sig. K4
[…]
1991 Suddenly another sound begins, completely evoking the spirit of the ancient heath—the hypnotic ‘churr’ of the nocturnal nightjar.
Bird Watching June 75/3

It has this interesting etymology:

The second element in the name reflects the bird’s distinctive call; compare other (chiefly regional) names for the bird, as churn-owl n., churr owl n., eve-churr n. 2, eve-jar n., jar-owl n., nightchurr n. Many similar imitative formations for the name of this bird are found in other languages.

(It would be nice if they’d mentioned some of those imitative formations.) If we turn to the synonym goatsucker (entry revised 2016) we find an equally interesting etymology:

< goat n. + sucker n.,

after classical Latin caprimulgus (Pliny; < capra she-goat (see capriole n.) + mulgēre to milk: see milk v.),

itself after ancient Greek αἰγοθήλας (< αἰγο-, αἴξ goat (see Aegipan n.) + θηλάζειν to suck).

Compare goat-milker n.

Whence also the Russian козодой ‘goat-milker.’

You can hear “the bird’s distinctive call” here.

I’ve never read the Ionesco play, but I always found the title intriguing, and Wikipedia provides a very satisfying explanation:

The idea for the play came to Ionesco while he was trying to learn English with the Assimil method. Impressed by the contents of the dialogues, often very sober and strange, he decided to write an absurd play named L’anglais sans peine (“English without toil”). Other possible titles which were considered included Il pleut des chiens et des chats, (“It’s raining cats and dogs”, translated in French literally); “L’heure anglaise” and “Big Ben Follies”.

Its actual title was the result of an error in rehearsal by actor Henri-Jacques Huet: the fire chief’s monologue initially included a mention of “l’institutrice blonde” (“the blonde schoolteacher”), but Huet said “la cantatrice chauve”, and Ionesco, who was present, decided to re-use the phrase.

Now, that’s what I call Theatre of the Absurd. I got there via Mark Liberman’s Log post, where you will find further absurdities, including James Thurber’s quotes from Collins’ Pocket Interpreters: France, such as:

There are no towels here.
The sheets on this bed are damp.
I have seen a mouse in the room.
These shoes are not mine.
The radiator doesn’t work.
This is not clean, bring me another.
I can’t eat this. Take it away!
The water is too hot, you are scalding me!

Thurber described it as a “melancholy narrative poem” and “a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind.”

I’ve started reading a novel by my man Veltman that I had somehow missed when I was reading my way through the nineteenth century, his 1837 «Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию» [Virginie, or A Journey to Russia]; the protagonist, Гектор д’Альм [Hector d’Alm], is a Parisian who has had to move to Besançon because he bought property there and is terminally bored by provincial life. He goes to a solar festival, “праздникѣ солнца (Sauleou),” that involves families bringing fried eggs, and Veltman remarks:

Однакожъ этотъ праздникъ не казался
ни сколько замѣчателенъ Гектору, онъ
не видѣлъ въ немъ безотчетнаго уже
обряда одной изъ древнѣйшихъ религій;
онъ смѣялся бы, еслибъ ему сказали, что
яичница есть символъ jao, того перво-
бытнаго яйца, которое, по мнѣнію древ-
нихъ, носилось въ Хаосѣ, и изъ котора-
го произошла Вселенная.

But this festival didn’t seem in the least remarkable to Hector, who did not see in it the inexplicable rite of one of the most ancient religions; he would have laughed if someone had told him that the fried egg is the jao, the symbol of that primordial egg which, according to the ancients, floated in Chaos and from which the Universe arose.

Does anybody have any idea what this “jao” might be? The j could represent any number of sounds — Veltman could have taken it from Sanskrit, Chinese, a Germanic language, or who knows what else.

John D. Norton (of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh) wrote an essay back in 2012 called “What is Time? Or, Just What do Philosophers of Science Do?” I figure that as an attempt to define a word it’s LH material, but it also confirms me in my belief that philosophers think they have a better grasp on language than they do. He begins:

There is a competition, the “Flame Challenge,” underway at the time I write these words for the best answer to the question “What is time?” The target audience is eleven year old children and children of this age will be the ultimate judges. […]

The challenge is introduced with a perfunctory and familiar disclaimer. First comes a celebrated quote from Augustine

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
– Saint Augustine

The sentence that follows arrives with reliability that night follows day follows night and was offered, I expect, without reflection. Doesn’t everyone know that…

It’s a deep question, and it has no simple answer.

Is that really so?

He goes on to say that “the question ‘What is time?’ as asked is not really a scientific question at all”:
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To appreciate this story (Anatoly is reposting from Yulya Fridman), you need to know that for Russians, the surname of Niels Bohr, Бор, is identical to the name of the element boron (Бор). With that out of the way (I translate from the Russian original):

Incidentally, [V.I. Kogan] boasted that many years ago, when a fellow student found him with Brillouin’s book Атом Бора [translation of L’atome de Bohr, i.e., The Atom of Bohr — but the Russian could also mean The Boron Atom] in his hands, V.I. managed to convince him that such books had been written on the entire periodic table […], that is, there were books The Aluminum Atom, The Copper Atom, and so on, from the Mendeleev series. He proudly said: “I convinced him with ease! I don’t really know why… Actually, there are no such books about other atoms…” From the audience someone objected that there certainly were, showing the book Атом гелия [The Helium Atom].

Anatoly adds “У физиков есть ‘Атом Бора’, а у программистов – ‘Язык Ада'” [Physicists have The Bohr/Boron Atom, and programmers have the language Ada/of Hell] — ‘hell’ in Russian is ад [ad]. If you read Russian, there are some funny comments in the thread.

I recently read two very different essays that make useful companion pieces. The first is a talk by Allison Parrish, who says “I’m a poet and computer programmer and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program/Interactive Media Arts program.” Her prose strikes me as more professorial than poetic; here’s a sample:

The prototypical example of a transcription is a “transcript”—a written artifact that records the “content” of a stretch of language that was spoken out loud. And indeed, I’ll be talking about transcripts of this kind in more detail later. But I think the term “transcription” usefully applies to adaptations of language between any two modalities. For example, producing a typewritten copy of a handwritten manuscript is a kind of transcription. Taking notes on a lecture is a kind of transcription. Under this definition, even my verbal performance of this talk (reading from my speaker notes) is a variety of transcription.

She contrasts a “folk theory of transcription,” which is that transcription is, for the most part, a transparent process that mostly “just works,” with a more complex view that takes into account all sorts of things that get lost in the process; in her conclusion she says:

So: nothing survives transcription, in the sense that no text makes it to the far side of the transcription process with its life intact. And also, nothing does not survive transcription: the empty parts of a text, the silent parts, the parts of the text that draw attention to its own materiality, specifically operate outside transcription’s capabilities. And all of us—whether as artists, poets, or everyday conversationalists—draw on the “nothing” that forms the gap between what can be transcribed and what cannot as a productive and creative resource.

But we can also look at this from the other direction and recognize that, although no transcript can be accurate, transcriptions are an important site for linguistic intervention. Transcriptions crack open ontologies. You could say that, in a sense, the very goal of making a transcription in the first place is to make an argument about what cannot be transcribed. Nothing survives transcription, and though we may be “lost” (as Jordan Magnuson fears), at least we’re all lost together in an flowering forest of collaborative interpretation.

I found it thought-provoking but, well, academic (“Transcriptions crack open ontologies”); it leaves the reader stroking their chin and saying “Hmm.” Immediately after finishing it, I read John Lee Clark’s fiery “Against Access” (from McSweeney’s 64), which begins with a baseball “bearing personalized inscriptions by two players on the Minnesota Twins, Chuck Knoblauch and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett” that was given him by a staff writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune when he could still see well enough to enjoy baseball, and continues:
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Dmitry Pruss writes:

I noticed that raw herring prep before salting it can be described in Russian by two very similar words, жабренная и зябреная. They turned out to be different, one is just removing gills [жабры], the other also taking out the part behind the gills known as калтычок or калтык. The latter word sounds Turkic but wiktionary gives no etymology. Жабры is common in several Slavic languages but no proto-Slavic form or etymology are given, too.

Any ideas?

From Science (20 Dec 2019, 3666.472: 1517-1522) comes “Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure, by Joshua Conrad Jackson, Joseph Watts, Teague R. Henry, et al.:

Abstract

Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

The conclusion:

Questions about the meaning of human emotions are age-old, and debate about the nature of emotion persists in scientific literature. The colexification approach that we take here provides a new method and a set of metrics to answer these questions by creating vast networks of how people use words to name experiences. Analyzing these networks sheds light on the cultural and biological evolutionary mechanisms underlying how emotions are ascribed meaning in languages around the world. Although debates about the relationship between language and conscious experience are notoriously difficult to resolve (28), our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that emotion experiences vary systematically across cultural groups. More broadly, our study shows the value of combining large comparative linguistic databases with quantitative network methods. Analyzing the diverse ways that people use language promises to yield insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale.

It seems awfully short to be yielding insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale, but what do I know? I await the decision of the jury. Thanks, Trevor!