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I’m finally reading Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms (see this post), and I’m in the middle of the (necessarily long) chapter “Burgundia: Five, Six, or Seven Kingdoms (c. 411-1795).” I’m fascinated by the extraordinarily complicated history of the various entities that have been known as Burgundy over the centuries (in fact, I have an entire book on it, Phoenix Frustrated: Lost Kingdom of Burgundy by Christopher Cope, which is fun but amateurish), and Davies has plenty of maps and references and I’m enjoying it a lot.

And I’ve just discovered a new language name! When he discusses Franco-Provençal (which was to the medieval Kingdom of Burgundy more or less as Belarusian was to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—the original Burgundians, who may have come from Bornholm, spoke an East Germanic language closely related to Gothic), Davies refers to it as “Arpitan,” which threw me for a loop. Google sent me to Wikipedia, which explains that “Arpitania and Arpitan Language are … neologisms from the 20th century… initially used for the Alpine regions where Arpitan was spoken. The name was popularised by Mouvement Harpitanya, a left-wing political grouping in Aosta Valley in 1970s.” In fact, he reproduces the “Map of Arpitania” shown on that Wikipedia page; it’s fun to see forms like “Lons” for Lyons and “Grenoblo” for Grenoble. Too bad the language, under whatever name, is dying out.

I was reading Benjamin Moser’s LRB review [archived] of Amsterdam Stories by the Dutch writer Nescio (Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh), translated by Damion Searls, and I was startled by this passage:

The apparently laudable movement to reform Dutch spelling – never particularly complicated, compared to English or French – resulted in chaos that continues to this day. There were official language reforms in 1934, 1947, 1955, 1996 and 2006, along with all kinds of minor alterations: by socialists, by Belgians, by South Africans, by the Association for Scientific Spelling. The reasons for these reforms are complex, but their results have been straightforward. It’s far harder for a Dutch-speaker today to read a book written a hundred years ago than it is for us to read T.S. Eliot or Henry James. This is particularly the case with a writer like Nescio, who was committed to reformed spelling, including reforms that never took root. To take a sentence at random from ‘Little Poet’:

En toen werti zoo kwaad op alle levende en doode dingen, datti z’n eindelooze erotiek onderbrak en een grimmig boek schreef, dat ‘m in eens beroemd maakte.

In Searls’s translation:

And then he got so enraged at everything, living and dead, that he interrupted his endless eroticism and wrote a grim and bitter little book that made him famous right away.

The Dutch presents two problems. The first is to do with words whose then standard spellings have been reformed: zoo, doode and eindelooze. The second is the deliberate misspelling that is a hallmark of Nescio’s style: werti and datti, ‘he became’ and ‘that he’. These would normally be written werd hij and dat hij but pronounced as Nescio writes them. Today, informally, they could be written werd-ie and dat-ie. The sentence is entirely comprehensible, especially when read aloud. But, on the page, the presence of five irregularly spelled words in a single sentence – a typical number – is distracting, and Nescio’s updates, daring in 1909, seem tiresome.

The cumulative effect of a century’s reforms has been to cut the Dutch off from their literature. Outside schools, the most commonly read book is probably Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, published in 1860, the same year as The Woman in White. Beyond that is the realm of specialists. Except for the most hardily aspirational reader, literature begins in the second third of the 20th century.

Does anybody know if that’s a fair statement of the facts, as regards the effect of the spelling reforms in general and the readability of Nescio’s work in particular? Also, how do you say “Nescio” in Dutch: /nesio/?

With I Live I See: Selected Poems, English-speakers finally have access to the work of one of the more remarkable Russian poets of recent decades, Vsevolod Nekrasov (1934–2009). Nekrasov is, in a way, an unfortunate name for a Russian writer, almost as bad as Tolstoy; as the “Word from the Translators” that begins this collection starts off (in a section called “Not That Nekrasov”), “When a Russian hears the name ‘Nekrasov,’ the first person that comes to mind is Nikolai Nekrasov, the great nineteenth-century realist-humanist poet”; there’s also the Soviet/émigré prose writer Viktor Nekrasov, among many others. But this Nekrasov is not like any other; to quote the translators again: “A vehement individualist, Nekrasov spent a lifetime fighting political and aesthetic conformism.[…] At a time when the vast majority of his fellow poets—official and unofficial alike—were writing with rhyme and in traditional syllabo-tonic meters, Nekrasov was writing, quite literally, anti-poems.” He used brevity, repetition, page layout; his mature work consists primarily of “scraps” and “fragments” (to quote the “Notes toward a Poetic Biography” by Mikhail Sukhotin). You can see a sample of the translations here, and I’ll quote a couple more below the cut; I’m sure a lot of people will take one look and decide it’s not for them, which is fine (and he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised). But if it piques your curiosity, if the lingering over phrases and the insistent juxtapositions make you want to read more, he may be for you. The translators have done fine work (and provided very helpful notes at the back), and Ugly Duckling Presse has produced a lovely little brick of a book with a gorgeous black-and-white cover. Let me just quote the end of Sukhotin’s introduction, and then I’ll get to the poems:

In 2007 Nekrasov was awarded the Andrei Bely prize “for the uncompromising revelation of the poetic nature of speech as such, for absolute individuality and absolute naturalness of utterance, for an outstanding contribution to the creation of a new poetics, for half a century of creative self-sufficiency.”

Here’s “Again again / Snow snow” [Опять опять / Метель метель]:

[Read more…]

I’ve written about Mayan a number of times, though not recently (e.g. Pok-ta-pok, Mayan in the News Again, Xoc > Shark?); now I’m pleased to learn of the existence of Maya Decipherment, “a weblog devoted to ideas and developments in ancient Maya epigraphy and related fields, overseen by Dr. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin.” Another great use of the internet; my only (very mild) gripe is that the URL seems to bite off all of “decipherment” for the Mayan field.

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes has put its results online (link is to a mirror site, since the original crashed due to, presumably, unexpectedly massive interest):

The composite map gives a picture of the overall distribution, coloring each cell according to whichever answer is estimated to be most likely at that location. The more clearly one answer dominates, the darker the color. Individual maps show estimated probability of each particular answer at a given location, with larger probabilities shown in red and smaller probabilities shown in blue. At the moment, only the four most popular answers for each survey question are displayed.

The linked page shows the soda/pop/coke map; use the pull-down menu at the upper left (labeled “Question:”) to see the others. There’s a selection here.

Only vaguely related, but I can’t resist passing it along: here‘s “Chaffinch Map of Scotland,” a poem by Edwin Morgan (quondam Poet Laureate of Glasgow and since 2004 Scottish National Poet) showing “the different names used in Scottish dialects for chaffinch, varying from chaffinch in the north over shielyfaw in the middle to britchie in the south.” As the site says, “a cleverly multilayered combination of poetry, cartography, ornithology, linguistics, and maybe just a hint of Scottish nationalism.”

“Pleiades gives scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create, and share historical geographic information about the ancient world in digital form. At present, Pleiades has extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world, and is beginning to expand into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography.” Great idea; thanks for the heads-up, Paul!

Vissarion Belinsky‘s “Литературные мечтания” [Literary musings] has been called “the beginning of Russian intelligentsia journalism”; he wrote this, his first major essay, at the age of twenty-three, and when it was published at the end of 1834 it attracted immediate attention. It’s a long survey of the history of Russian literature, which he divides into four periods; the third, dominated by Pushkin, ended in 1830, but the new prosaic period has as yet no leaders, though Veltman and Lazhechnikov are promising talents. His main claim, which he keeps returning to, is that there is no truly national literature in Russia, by which he means authors who “fully express and reproduce in their works the spirit of that people among whom they are born and raised, by whose life they live and whose spirit they breathe” [вполне выражающих и воспроизводящих в своих изящных созданиях дух того народа, среди которого они рождены и воспитаны, жизнию которого они живут и духом которого дышат]. He says of Pushkin that any European poet could have written “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” or “The Gypsies,” but only a Russian could have written “Eugene Onegin” and “Boris Godunov”: “Absolute national character [narodnost’] is available only to people free from foreign influences” [Безотносительная народность доступна только для людей, свободных от чуждых иноземных влияний]. This was, of course, an expression of the spirit of nationalism that was spreading all over Europe at the time, and it might have been harmless enough as a passing fancy, like the philosophy of Schelling which was so popular in those days; unfortunately it took root to such an extent that it’s never really been dislodged, and combined with the insistence on socially useful literature espoused by Belinsky and his fellow radical critics Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, it created an entirely new environment for Russian writers, one in which that brilliant fantast Gogol was pressed into service as an analyst of social ills and every new novel was scrutinized for its service to the cause of the People. This, of course, is exactly what Nabokov reacted against so strongly (and what got him condemned as un-Russian when he was publishing his early novels), and the more I read what was published in the first third of the nineteenth century, the more I realize what was lost.

Don’t get me wrong: Belinsky and his ilk didn’t ruin Russian literature; it went from strength to strength, and by the end of the century Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were seen everywhere as giants of world literature. But they, and the intellectual climate they produced, closed off avenues that were reopened only briefly in the 1920s, before Stalin closed them off again with his ungentle grip. It’s comparable to what happened in European classical music; after Beethoven, nobody could write symphonies that were simply pleasant to listen to, they had to storm the gates of heaven and express new Truths about Life. Well, I don’t always want to see gates stormed; sometimes (often, in fact) I just want to see artistic magic worked by artists who are enjoying themselves and their art and surprising me with the results. Let me give you a couple of examples from my recent reading, both published in 1833 (Russian at the end of the post).

Vladimir Odoevsky‘s “Сказка о том, как опасно девушкам ходить толпою по Невскому проспекту” [Tale of How Dangerous It Is for Girls to Walk in a Crowd along Nevsky Prospect] describes eleven young women walking down the street accompanied by three nannies. Unfortunately, the nannies lose count and leave one of them behind in a fashionable store whose proprietor turns out to be a wizard (and a “foreign infidel” [заморский басурманин]) assisted by a brainless French head, an English belly, and a German nose; he puts a glass bell jar over her and considers how to proceed:

[Read more…]

A couple of years ago I posted about “an enjoyable and useful vocabulary test that gives you a bunch of words, asks you to check whether you know them, and extrapolates your total vocabulary size”; now they’ve put online a summary of their results, and I thought I’d pass it along, since the original test attracted quite a bit of interest. Some of the bullet points:

• Most adult native test-takers range from 20,000–35,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 8 already know 10,000 words
• Average native test-takers of age 4 already know 5,000 words
• Adult native test-takers learn almost 1 new word a day until middle age
• The most common vocabulary size for foreign test-takers is 4,500 words
• Foreign test-takers tend to reach over 10,000 words by living abroad

There’s more info, and links to details, at the site. (Thanks, Paul!)

As I said here, my wife and I are now reading the Edinburgh mystery novels of Alexander McCall Smith, and we’re about halfway through the second one, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate. The opening scene has a man standing in Canongate Kirkyard and reading a 1962 poem by Robert Garioch, “At Robert Fergusson’s Grave,” which is such a lovely Scots sonnet I thought I’d post it here:

Canongait Kirkyaird in the failing year
is auld and grey, the wee rosiers are bare,
five gulls leam white agin the dirty air:
why are they here? There’s naething for them here.
Why are we here oursels? We gaither near
the grave. Fergusons mainly, quite a fair
turn-out, respectfu, ill at ease, we stare
at daith – there’s an address – I canna hear.
Aweill, we staund bareheidit in the haar,
murnin a man that gaid back til the pool
twa-hunner year afore our time. The glaur
that haps his banes glowres back. Strang, present dool
ruggs at my hairt. Lichtlie this gin ye daur:
here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.

Rosiers are rose bushes, leam is ‘gleam,’ haar ‘mist,’ glaur ‘mud,’ haps ‘covers,’ dool ‘sorrow,’ ruggs ‘tugs,’ and mool ‘earth’ (in my Scots dictionary s.v. muild, cognate with English mo(u)ld ‘earth, topsoil’; cf. Alexander Fenton’s “it was said of Birsay parish that old men would seat themselves naked on mother-earth to see if the mould could be trusted with the bere-seed”); the most surprising (to me) word is lichtlie, which looks like “lightly” and means “lightly”—but in Scots it’s also been turned into a verb meaning ‘make light of, disparage,’ so that “Lichtlie this gin ye daur” means “Disparage this if you dare.” Offhand, I can’t think of an -ly adverb that’s been verbed in Standard English.

I just learned a fine old expression which Brewer explains efficiently: “To break Priscian’s head (in Latin, Diminuĕre Priscia’ni cap’ut). To violate the rules of grammar. Priscian was a great grammarian of the fifth century, whose name is almost synonymous with grammar.” The locus classicus is Samuel Butler’s long poem Hudibras, in which Quakers are said to “hold no sin so deeply red,/ As that of breaking Priscian’s head” (sc. by using the plural pronoun you in the singular, hence their thee-ing everyone). You can see it in action in the Edinburgh Dramatic Review (Feb. 15, 1825, No. LXXV, Vol. II, p. 298):

People speak of breaking Priscian’s head; but were Priscian in life, we strongly suspect he would break our author’s head for certain glaring solecisms in style,—such as, “as my strongest wishes could expect;” “chaste virginity,” (a phleonism;) “my most sanguine expectations could expect;” “a place vacant;” pro vacated, by some one or other.

I discovered it via Google Books, which brought to my attention J. Y. T. Greig‘s 1929 book Breaking Priscian’s Head: Or, English as She Will Be Spoke and Wrote, which Greig apparently wrote in reaction to an essay by Basil de Sélincourt:

I am not a typical Englishman, but a Scotsman born abroad, and in all the ninety-odd pages of Mr de Sélincourt’s essay on the future of the English language I can find scarcely a paragraph to agree with. Inevitable, that. To nine Scotsmen, ten Americans, and eleven Irishmen, his essay breathes just that spirit of Englishry — rather insular, but oh how gentlemanly ! — which has always infuriated them.

One of his points is that the English should not be so worried about encroaching Americanisms, and in a lively passage on page 83 he says “Certain modern American slang terms are so appropriate and necessary that only incorrigible purists will deny them entrance into good English,” listing, among others, “Bellhop (a page in a hotel, a far better word than page, if only because its use would reduce the number of homophones),” “Blurb (an indispensable word that I am glad to see coming into general use,” “Get one’s goat,” “Junk (which combines into four letters the notions of rubbish and odds-and-ends),” “Movies (a great improvement on cinema),” and “Rubberneck (one of the best words ever coined),” admitting that there are unfortunate terms as well (“the use of mortician for undertaker is ridiculed by the Americans themselves”) but concluding “to cry out for a barrier against all Americanisms as such — that is sheer imbecility.” He then goes on to canvas other sources for “the freshening and replenishment of our language”: “I am not overlooking sources in the British Isles. We have the local dialects, for example, and in particular the virile local dialects of the North, which have been quite absurdly neglected by Southern Englishmen for more than two centuries.” I like his attitude.