languagehat.com

A decade or so ago I read and enjoyed a bunch of Vladimir Odoevsky’s stories from the 1830s (see this 2014 post); now, quite by accident, I’ve wound up reading another one and enjoying it as well: Сильфида (1837), translated as “The Sylph” by Joel Stern in Russian Romantic Prose: An Anthology (Translation Press, 1979) and by Neil Cornwell in The Salamander and Other Stories (Gerald Duckworth, 1992). It starts off as a series of letters by Mikhail Platonovich, an urban gentleman who, to cure his case of “the spleen,” has moved to his late uncle’s country estate (a nod to Eugene Onegin), where at first he is charmed by his neighbors and their simple, ignorant existence. Eventually they too bore him, but he discovers his uncle’s hidden library of alchemical and Kabbalistic works and begins reading and experimenting, at first skeptically. In the meantime he gets engaged to his neighbor’s daughter Katya, and invites his correspondent to the wedding. But then, by dissolving a turquoise signet-ring in a vase of water placed in the sunlight, he creates “an amazing, indescribable, unbelievable creature: in short, a woman, barely visible to the eye” — this is the titular sylph. She takes him on some sort of metaphysical voyage and shows him a better world, and he loses interest in the one he’s living in, including his fiancée. When his alarmed friend brings him back to reality (with the aid of a doctor and “bouillon baths”) he is resentful; he goes ahead and marries Katya, but tells his friend (in Cornwell’s translation; for the Russian, click on the Сильфида link and search on “Так довольствуйся же этими похвалами”):

– Then be satisfied with their praise and gratitude, but don’t expect
mine. No! Katia loves me, our estate is settled, the revenues are collected
on time – in a word, you gave me a happiness, but not mine: you got the
wrong size. You, such reasonable gentlefolk, are like the carpenter who
was ordered to make a case for some expensive physics instruments: he
didn’t measure it properly and the instruments wouldn’t go in – so what did
he do? The case was ready and beautifully polished. The tradesman re-
ground the instruments – a curve more here, a curve less there, and they
went into the box and fitted nicely. They were a pleasure to look at, but
there was one problem: the instruments were wrecked. Gentlemen! instru-
ments are not for cases, but cases are for instruments! Make the box
according to the instruments and not the instruments according to the box.

– What do you mean by that?

– You are very pleased that you have, what you call, cured me: that is to
say, blunted my perceptions, covered them with some impenetrable shell,
made them dead to any world except your box…. Wonderful! The instru-
ment fits, but it is wrecked: it had been made for a different purpose….
Now, when in the midst of the daily round I can feel my abdominal cavity
expanding by the hour and my head subsiding into animalistic sleep, I
recall with despair that time when, in your opinion, I was in a state of
madness, when a charming creature flew down to me from the invisible
world, when it opened to me sacraments which now I cannot even express,
but which were comprehensible to me… where is that happiness? Give it
back to me!

That was unexpected, and I liked it. Anyone who wants to explore the story further (and has access to JSTOR) should read Christopher R. Putney’s “‘The Circle That Presupposes Its End As Its Goal’: The Riddle of Vladimir Odoevsky’s ‘The Sylph’” (Slavic and East European Journal 55.2 [2011]: 188-204), which focuses on the philosophy of Schelling and the mysterious reversal of the protagonist’s name — for a summary, see Erik McDonald’s 2011 post.
[Read more…]

I ran across a reference to Adelbert von Chamisso [ˈaːdl̩bɛʁt fɔn ʃaˈmɪso] (who came up here in the context of “translingualism” in 2021) and suddenly wondered what kind of name Chamisso was. A little trawling produced this footnote from the Transactions of the English Goethe Society VII (1891-92), p. 109:

* Einem alten Hause entsprossen. Chamisso’s words. Works (2nd edition in 6 volumes), Vol. I., S. 5. This edition will be used for all subsequent quotations. The name Chamissot occurs ᴀ.ᴅ. 1305. Other forms are found : Chamizzot, Chemizzot, Chamisso, perhaps also Chamesson. In Oporto there is living a Senhor Chamiço.

I don’t know whether anyone has traced it farther back, but I love that final line “In Oporto there is living a Senhor Chamiço.” I wonder what his story was?

John Bartlett reports for NPR about another attempt to revive a language on the verge of extinction, this one in Chile:

Ckunsa, the language of the Lickanantay people who have lived in the Atacama Desert for more than 11,000 years, was declared “extinct” in the 1950s. But it is still very much alive in the depths of the desert.

“I don’t accept that my native language is extinct,” spits 50–year-old Tomás Vilca under the patchy shade of an awning.[…]

However, Chile is multilingual. Alongside Spanish, Aymara and Quechua are spoken in the north of the country and up into Peru, Bolivia and northern Argentina. Down in picturesque Patagonia, there are a handful of Kawésqar speakers; and Mapuzugun, the language of the Mapuche people, Chile’s largest Indigenous group, is spoken widely in the forests and valleys around the Bio Bío River. Out on Easter Island, which has been part of Chilean territory since 1888, Rapanui is spoken by the Indigenous population. […]

“At school they’d tell me I was speaking ‘Bolivian’ – that I wasn’t talking like a Chilean,” remembers Vilca. “They stamped Ckunsa out of us from an early age. After that, my parents started to teach me Spanish so I didn’t suffer any more discrimination.”

[Read more…]

Back in April I posted about bumbershoot, pointing out that it was not, despite what Americans tend to think, a Britishism; at the end of the post I said “Ben posted it in connection with his forthcoming book Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English, which I’m sure will be well worth reading.” Well, the book is now out, and the Guardian has run a long excerpt from it that discusses the terms bit, cheeky, clever, early days, and gutted. But it begins thus:

I am an American, New York-born, but I started to spend time in London in the 1990s, teaching classes to international students. Being interested in language, and reading a lot of newspapers there – one of the courses I taught was on the British press – I naturally started picking up on the many previously unfamiliar (to me) British words and expressions, and differences between British and American terminology.

Then a strange thing happened. Back home in the United States, I noticed writers, journalists and ordinary people starting to use British terms I had encountered. I’ll give one example that sticks in my mind because it is tied to a specific news event, and hence easily dated. In 2003, it became clear that the US would invade Iraq. Months passed; we did not invade. Then we did. Journalists faced a question: what should we call that preliminary period? In September 2003, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman chose a Britishism, referring to “how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war”.

Run-up, previously unfamiliar in the US, quickly began to be very widely used. I know because of the app Google Books Ngram Viewer, the online tool that can measure the relative frequency with which a word or phrase appears in the vast corpus of books and periodicals digitised by Google Books (including separating out British and American use). Ngram Viewer shows that between 2000 and 2005, American use of “the run-up to” increased by 50%. […]

I date the run-up (that’s an alternate meaning of run-up: “increase”) in Britishisms to the early 1990s, and it’s surely significant that this was when such journalists as Tina Brown, Anna Wintour, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens moved to the US or consolidated their prominence there. The chattering classes – another useful Britishism – have a persistent desire for ostensibly clever ways to say stuff. They have borrowed from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, teen culture, African American vernacular, sports and hip-hop, and they increasingly borrow from Britain.

I liked the opening nod to Saul Bellow, but what really struck me was that I had no awareness of the fact that run-up was a Britishism. I must have realized it at the time, but I guess I’ve seen it (and used it) so often since that it’s simply become an unremarkable part of my dialect. (I asked my wife, and she had the same reaction.) Does this still smack of the UK to any of my American readers?

(A tip of the Languagehat hat goes to that great link-finder Trevor.)

It’s time once again to play What Did That Writer Mean? Elizabeth Kolbert (who often reports in the New Yorker) is one of the best popular science writers around, and she knows how to grab and hold your attention; witness the start of her latest piece, “When the Arctic Melts” (archived):

In the middle of the night in the middle of the summer in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet, I woke to find myself with a blinding headache. An anxious person living in anxious times, I’ve had plenty of headaches, but this one felt different, as if someone had taken a mallet to my sinuses. I’d flown up to the ice the previous afternoon, to a research station owned and operated by the National Science Foundation. The station, called Summit, sits ten thousand five hundred and thirty feet above sea level. The first person I’d met upon arriving was the resident doctor, who warned me and a few other newcomers to expect to experience altitude sickness. In most cases, he said, this would produce only passing, hangover-like symptoms; on occasion, though, it could result in brain swelling and death. Belatedly, I realized that I’d neglected to ask how to tell the difference.

(Fear not, she survived the experience.) But later on, in describing a museum in Ilulissat, the “iceberg capital of the world,” she writes: “From the outside, the Icefjord Centre looks like a cross between a milking barn and a concert hall, with lots of metal beams and a roof that meets in a swale instead of a peak.” I knew I had seen the word swale at some point, but I had no idea what it meant; I asked my wife, and she said she thought it was a sort of swamp, which turns out to be the general idea — if you google it the first result is “a low or hollow place, especially a marshy depression between ridges.” But how would that describe a roof? So I investigated further, and it turns out the OED has four separate nouns of that spelling: swale³ ‘A hollow, low place,’ swale¹ ‘Timber in laths, boards, or planks,’ swale² ‘Shade; a shady place,’ and swale⁴ ‘A small broom or brush without a stick for a handle.’ They’re all described as either local or dialect, but swale³ has more citations and seems more widespread, so here’s the full definition:

A hollow, low place; esp. U.S., a moist or marshy depression in a tract of land, esp. in the midst of rolling prairie. Also (U.S.) a hollow between adjacent sand-ridges.

Any idea how that might apply to the Kolbert quote? If you’re curious to see the building itself, voilà.

Daniel A. Rabuzzi sent me a link to his Strange Horizons review of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (edited by Dennis Wilson Wise); he has interesting things to say:

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology deepens and nuances my understanding of what speculative poetry is and how it relates both to speculative fiction and to wider poetic traditions in English. In the course of this book, Dennis Wilson Wise demonstrates convincingly how the structural alliteration that was central to Old English poetry (and that of other old Germanic languages) remains vital today, drawing a line from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Poul Anderson to Patrick Rothfuss, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Jo Walton. Wise carefully lays out his definition of “speculative poetry,” taking an ecumenical view that includes “SF, horror, and the weird as well as fantasy, plus “other kinds of imaginative writing with a generic kinship to fantastika” (p. 14). […]

First, the nuts and bolts: Wise has curated 166 poems by fifty-five poets, with author biographies, detailed end notes, and a bibliography, bracketed by a forty-six-page introduction (combining a thorough-going literary history with a thoughtful statement of aesthetic principles) and an eighteen-page “Metrical Essay on Three Alliterative Traditions.” He is a careful and generous scholar, making clear and considered arguments in an undogmatic way. He engages with the most influential scholars of Old English meter (including Thorlac Turville-Petre, Roberta Frank, Eric Weiskott, and, of course, Tolkien), with leading researchers into modern reception of OE texts such as Heather O’Donoghue, Tom Shippey, and Chris Jones, and with Ted Hughes, Rahul Gupta, Paul Douglas Deane, and other practitioners who have weighed in on OE matters metrical.

Wise is an able guide to the demanding intricacies of OE alliterative structure, which is alien territory for speakers of modern English. To start, he distinguishes between “ornamental” and “structural” alliteration: “However many pickled peppers Peter Piper may have picked, Mr. Piper’s exploits only teach us about the ornamental kind of alliteration, not the structural kind” (p. 377). The structure in question is based on “primary alliteration across an ax/ax or aa/ax pattern; two lifts [the heavily stressed long syllables] and two dips in each verse, and a medial caesura” (p. 380). Of course, as Wise informs us, several patterns were possible and discrepancies abound that highlight, in their contravention of them, the rules. More to his immediate point, “contemporary revivalists range across a wide spectrum of metrical fidelity [including] purists … who accurately imitate more known features of the alliterative meter than not [and] impressionists [who are] less engaged with replicating a historical alliterative tradition and instead prefer medieval ‘flavoring’ to one degree or another” (p. 12). Wise’s sliding scale of purist-to-impressionist is useful, and facilitates a broad church.

I hadn’t been familiar with either the revival of alliteration or the useful term fantastika (defined here), and I’m all for a broad church. Furthermore, Rabuzzi gave me pleasure by quoting a poet I like and don’t think many people know about:
[Read more…]

I was wondering where the term “chuck wagon” came from, so I started looking. That Wikipedia article says Charles Goodnight, a Texas rancher, introduced the concept in 1866:

Goodnight modified a Studebaker-manufactured covered wagon, a durable Civil War army-surplus wagon, to suit the needs of cowboys driving cattle from Texas to sell in New Mexico. He added a “chuck box” to the back of the wagon, with drawers and shelves for storage space and a hinged lid to provide a flat working surface.

But what was this “chuck”? I went to the OED’s chuck wagon entry (from 1933) and found it was their chuck n.⁵, which is “perhaps the same as chuck n.⁴”: “A lump; a large awkward-shaped piece of wood for burning, a chock n.¹; also of bread, meat, and the like, a chunk n.¹” (sense 2: “a cut of beef extending from the horns to the ribs, including the shoulder-piece”); unfortunately, the entry is from 1889, and the etymology is simply “apparently originally the same as chock n.¹” So we go to chock n.¹ “A piece or block of wood; a log, a stump”; this entry was revised in 2015, and the etymology is more discursive, even if it ultimately wanders off into a swamp:

Apparently < Middle French (northern) choque (also chouque; French regional (northern) choque, chouque), apparently originally a variant of soche, souche log, block of wood (11th cent. in Old French in Rashi as çoce; French souche), further etymology uncertain and disputed; compare Italian ciocco log, block of wood (14th cent.).

I don’t know how you get choque, chouque from soche, souche, but it looks like that’s the best that can be done for now. (In case you’re wondering, they didn’t serve chuck steak at a chuck wagon: “The meats were greasy cloth-wrapped bacon, salt pork, and beef, usually dried, salted or smoked.”)

“Language evolves” is a truism of linguistics and a phrase that has often appeared on this site as part of an effort to convince people that their beloved shibboleths are useless; it is also the name of a website:

Language Evolves is a free service that helps authors in the science fiction industry research and develop stories based on language evolution research. This includes an online crash-course, interactive workshops, and one-to-one sessions.

Are you a Science Fiction author? Do you need some inspiration for your next big story? We can help you write stories about some of the hardest questions in science:

How did humans evolve to be able to speak?
What was the first language like?
How does society shape the language we speak?
How does our language shape our thoughts?
What will language be like in the future?

You can start learning right now by visiting our Online Resources page.

The Resources page consists of “video primers on key questions in language evolution,” and I confess I haven’t investigated them (I don’t really do videos); I can only hope they present sensible ideas. At any rate, it’s a worthwhile project, and they sponsor a competition for sf stories in both English and Welsh!

The MeFi obit post for Robin Malan introduced me to that ebullient South African educator, collator, editor, actor, director, writer, and publisher, well remembered for his Ah Big Yaws? A Guard to Sow Theffricun Innglissh, by “Rawbone Malong.” The post provides “a few examples of common Innglissh”:

Daze off the Wick: Munnay, Chooseday, Whenceday, Thirsty, Frarday, Sarrarray, Sunnay.

Martyr’s Horse [known as Ketchup in other parts of the world]

At the cinema
A: ‘Thus nufe fillum’s got Stief Makween innit. Jew larkkim?”
B: ‘Yers. Klunt Eastwards eggshi mah fafe-rit, bit Stief’s orso kwart narse.’

If someone wanted to loan my copy of Malan’s book they might use the term: Fur kips, meaning in perpetuity. As in: ‘Issue borrowurn ut tomb-ie orkin Ahhaffit fur kips?”. But my response would probably be: Goat a yell!

You can learn more at Carol’s Blog:

Rule of thumb: do not pronounce any vowels or diphthongs as you believe you should – this would be wrong. Most are pronounced further forward in the mouth with the lips much more rounded that you expect. Here are some of the most important STI vowel sounds […] Then there are the consonants […] h (house) is pronounced y (zis yaw yeeouss? – Is this your house?) or as Rawbone Malong says in his classic curse: Goat a yell!

She provides examples of words that “have been changed completely in the STI idiom” (e.g., robot ‘traffic light’ and lekker ‘nice’) as well as “some of Robin Malan’s classic phrases.” It all reminds me of Afferbeck Lauder and Let Stalk Strine, discussed here in 2003.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org posted a Big List entry for tarot focusing, as always, on its history in English, but he says “The name is a borrowing from the French tarot, which in turn is from the Italian slang/dialectal *tarocco (plural tarocchi) meaning fool or foolish,” and I wondered if it could be taken farther back. Wiktionary told me that the Italian word was “Borrowed from Sicilian taroccu (‘Citrus sinensis’), from Arabic تُـرُنْج (turunj, ‘citron’),” the Arabic entry said it was “أُتْرُنْج (ʔutrunj) with epenthesis,” and that link said:

Borrowed from Aramaic אַתְרוּגָּא (ʾaṯruggā, ʾaṯrungā), from Old Persian [script needed] (turung), from Sanskrit मातुलुङ्ग (mātuluṅga). Cognate to Classical Syriac ܐܛܪܘܓܐ (ʾaṭruggā, ʾaṭrungā).

And the Sankrit word was “Borrowed from Dravidian, compare Tamil மாதுளம் (mātuḷam), மாதுளங்காய் (mātuḷaṅkāy, ‘pomegranate, citron lemon’).”

I thought that was interesting enough to pass along; note that only the t is left of the etymon.

Update. As Giacomo Ponzetto and Nat Shockley point out in the comment thread, the Wiktionary etymology is very implausible. See below for details.