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Victor Mair ended a recent Language Log post by mentioning that “upon his retirement after teaching in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University for nearly a quarter of a century, Hiroshi Kumamoto (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1982) was recently gifted with a magnificent Festschrift by his colleagues. This substantial Festschrift has papers on Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Pwo Karen, Kurux, Latin, Georgian, Arabic, Tocharian, Hittite, Japanese, English, Mongolian, Talaud, Sanskrit, Sogdian, and other interesting subjects.” He’s not kidding about interesting subjects; a few of the titles are “Latin Metals” (Kodama, Shigeaki), “Relative Time Reference in a Conditional Construction in Georgian” (Kojima, Yasuhiro), “Epistemic Modality and Conditional Sentence : On the Presentative Particle of an Arabic Dialect of Tunis (Tunisia)” (Kumakiri, Taku), “Terms of Ornithomancy in Hittite” (Sakuma, Yasuhiko), and “When Did Sogdians Begin to Write Vertically?” (Yoshida, Yutaka). I mean, how can you resist “Terms of Ornithomancy in Hittite”? I know I can’t.

Update (Oct. 2024). The Festschrift link is dead; the Internet Archive has many captures of it (example), but all of them appear blank to me below the university header. However, the UTokyo Repository page sorted by the keyword Kumamoto is here, and it looks like you can download pdfs of the papers from it.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a post about a great etymology that I’d forgotten if I ever knew it:

Originally a noun (and still a noun in some isolated uses), the adjective dismal comes into English, like many of our words, with the Normans, a compound formed from the Old French phrase dis mal, which in turn is from the Latin dies mali or “bad days.” The noun dismal, meaning bad or unlucky days, appears in English c. 1300. […] The dismal, also called the Egyptian days because they were first calculated by Egyptian astrologers, consisted of two days per month on which it was unlucky to start a journey or begin a venture. […] By the fifteenth century the association with the Latin dies, “days,” had been sufficiently forgotten that people started referring to them with the redundant dismal days […] By the sixteenth century, dismal was being used as an adjective meaning unlucky or disastrous. By the seventeenth century it was being used to mean dark, gloomy, or cheerless.

(Visit the link for supporting quotes.) The American Heritage Dictionary adds that in the South Atlantic states of the U.S., “a swamp or marsh can be called a pocosin or a dismal, the second term illustrated in the name of the Dismal Swamp on the border of North Carolina and Virginia. The word pocosin possibly comes from Virginia Algonquian.”

I’ve been working my way through my latest acquisition in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series (see this LH post), Russian Literature in the Age of Realism, and I just read the entry on Sofya Engelgardt (Софья Александровна Энгельгардт, 1828-1894), which provides a telling illustration of how hard it was to make a mark as a woman writer in nineteenth-century Russia. Engelgardt published in all the important “thick journals” of the day and was friends with many of the important (male) writers, but she’s been so thoroughly forgotten there’s hardly anything online about her (and most of it is taken straight from the condescending Brockhaus and Efron entry, which says she wrote “in the manner of the second-rate female writers of the [18]40s and ’50s, almost exclusively on the themes of love and family relations,” as if those subjects were damning in and of themselves). The author of the DLB article is Mary F. Zirin, herself an admirable figure, an independent scholar who’s been working for decades to raise the profile of Russian women writers and, if necessary, rescue them from oblivion (she was responsible for the existence of the remarkably thorough Dictionary of Russian Women Writers and has had a prize named after her); she writes that Engelgardt “never took the final step toward professionalism by arranging to republish her works in collected editions. Left moldering in journals and slender volumes, her talented tales were soon forgotten, as was she: no obituaries marked her passing in 1894.” Someone should do a Selected Works and/or translate her into English; I’d love to read her, and I’ll bet others would too. At any rate, I want to quote here Zirin’s vivid description of her Francophone upbringing:

[Engelgardt and her three sisters] were educated by governesses and grew up immersed in French culture. In one of Engel’gardt’s stories the female narrator explains that “at seventeen I knew the name of Pushkin only by hearsay, and in our house Gogol was called an ‘izba [peasant-hut] writer.’ . . . Our children’s library comprised, as if selected on purpose, extremely boring books, mostly French. Particularly memorable to me is one entitled Les annales de la vertu (The Annals of Virtue). . . . Oh, virtue! how early our instructors, in all innocence, taught us to hate you.” In “Vospominaniia na dache” Engel’gardt includes an anecdote about her young narrator’s first encounter with Russian as a drawing-room language: after Iuliia sees a performance by the famous St. Petersburg-based actor Vasilii Andreevich Karatygin, she sneaks out to a neighbor’s home to attend a soirée in his honor. To her horror she discovers that “Karatygin was speaking Russian, and I couldn’t assemble two Russian phrases and, for the first time in my life, was vexed at my ignorance of my native tongue and realized that in Russia it might possibly be of use.” Engel’gardt learned the Russian language rapidly once she set her mind to the task. Although editors had to correct her grammar at first, her fiction was packed with closely described realia and aphoristic turns of phrase, and she had a keen ear for adages, idioms, and colloquial speech. She continued including French passages in her stories to indicate the prevalence of that language in Moscow society; in a couple of tales, too, she poked fun at social climbers for their bad French. In 1860 Engel’gardt put her Francophilic upbringing to journalistic use and contributed three “Zagranichnye pis’ma” (Letters from Abroad) on current events in France to a Moscow newspaper. Her translation into French of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin’s dramatic works appeared in Paris in 1875.

I love “was vexed at my ignorance of my native tongue and realized that in Russia it might possibly be of use.”

Update (August 2017). Last year Erik at XIX век translated an Engelhardt story as “The Old Man,” and he’s now translating another as “It Didn’t Come Off”: introduction here, first installment here.

I’m reading Странник [The wanderer], by Alexander Veltman (see this LH post), and I’ll have a good deal to say about it (and its undeserved obscurity) when I’ve finished it, but for the moment I want to highlight this typically out-of-nowhere passage from section СХХІІІ (the narrator has just announced that he’s going to change the dedication of the book to a simple Вам [‘to you’] and compares it to the Ishvara Shiva’s laconic “Humm! – Om!” to his wife):

The word “Humm!” contains within itself the entire plenitude of a project or proposal for creation, and the question of agreement. The word “Om!” contains praise, corrections, supplements (especially to entities of the female sex) and finally agreement, confirmation, and the like.

Thus are these words elucidated by the glossarists of Indian words: the sage Father Paolino da San Bartolomeo and Langlès, basing themselves (?) on rebelling against the philologists William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and so on, who say that the mysterious word “Om!” is a representation of divinity and consists of three devanagari letters: A and U, which fuse to produce O, or with the addition of M – Om!, that is, the creator, the maintainer, the destroyer.

This is understandable. The Sanskrit language is that nothing out of which are created all other earthly languages; or that sea out of which flow the rivers of the word.

(Russian below the cut; I’m not at all sure I’ve correctly understood “восставая на,” hence the question mark.) Both “om” and “hum” are familiar from the mantra Om mani padme hum. If you get impatient with all the whale stuff in Moby-Dick, you probably won’t care for this, but if you enjoy (as I do) a healthy helping of encyclopedic brio with your fiction, Veltman is definitely your guy.

Слово Гумм! заключает в себе всю полноту прожекта, или предположения о создании, и вопрос о согласии. Слово Ом! заключает похвалу, поправки, дополнения (особенно в существовании женского пола) и, наконец, согласие, подтверждение и т. п.

Так изъясняют значение сих слов толкователи санскритских индейских слов: премудрый патер Паолино ди Санто Бартоломео и Ланглес, восставая на филологов Виллиама Джонса, Вилькинса и проч., которые говорят, что таинственное слово Ом! есть изображение божества и составлено из трех деванагарийских букв: А и У, кои сливаясь, производят О или с прибавлением M – Ом! т. е. творителя, хранителя, рушителя.

Это понятно. Санскритский язык есть то ничего, из которого созданы все прочие земные языки; или то море, из которого истекают реки глагола.

Ben Yagoda has been on a quest:

I have for some time tracked the pluralification of sports-teams names. I am referring not to issues of what to do when the name itself is a singular or collective noun, such as Miami Heat or Utah Jazz, or to the British custom of using plural verbs for seemingly singular names. (“Manchester United are playing tomorrow.”) Rather, in the case of a team called the Cityname Nouns, historically (roughly pre-1980), it was customary to refer to “a Noun fan,” a “Noun game,” or a “Noun player.” This was analogous to other situations, where one would call someone who loved cookies “a cookie [not cookies] lover” or a place where shoes were sold “a shoe [not shoes] store.”

However, things started to change dramatically in the ’80s. Today, the norm is to talk of (for example) a Yankees game and a Yankees fan; the use of “Yankee” in those contexts is pretty much limited to the over-50 set. I’ve discussed this change, and the possible reasons for it, at greater length in my Chronicle essay “The Elements of Clunk” and in my book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse, but if you don’t care to read those texts and are at least moderately curious about the issue, you could take a look at the Google Ngram chart below, which graphs the use of the phrases Cubs fan and Cub fan in American English between 1950 and 2008 (the most recent year for which Google has data). Until the ’70s, Cubs fan was virtually nonexistent, but it overtook Cub fan in 1979 and by 2008 was more than three times more common. […]

I have been waiting for the day someone will talk about a ballplayer being “a Yankees.” Such a locution may seem absurd—but in 1930, talking of “a Yankees game” would have probably seemed absurd, too. And it made sense that either the Red Sox or the Chicago White Sox would have been the pioneer. “Sox” is obviously meant to be plural of “sock,” but the spelling obscures the etymology. And further, where it might make a certain sense for a player for other teams to be called a Giant, a Cub, or even a Cardinal, it’s kind of cuckoo to think of any human being as a “sock.” As a result, references to a Red Sox [as opposed to Sock] fan or a Red Sox game became common before such formulations were the norm for other teams.

He thought he’d found his Great White Whale when Kevin Youkilis, the new New York Yankee, was quoted as saying “I’ll always be a Red Sox.” Alas, it turns out he actually said “I’ll always be a Red Sock”: “The writer of the article I read had taken it upon himself to change the number of the s-word.” This is a change I had vaguely noticed but had not realized had become so universal so fast. As a traditionalist baseball fan, I deplore it (along with the designated hitter, interleague play, and teams changing leagues whenever they feel like it—I’m looking at you, Houston Astros), but as an observer of language, I note it with interest and only a minimum of teeth-gnashing. In any case, do look at his Google Ngram chart; it’s quite convincing.

Kevin Mathews has a story about an interesting linguistic development:

Swedes are shaking up their language with a new gender-neutral pronoun. The pronoun, “hen,” allows speakers and writers to refer to a person without including reference to a person’s gender. This month, the pronoun made a big leap toward mainstream usage when it was added to the country’s National Encyclopedia. […]
“Hen” (pronounced like the English word for chicken) is a modified version of the Swedish words “han” and “hon,” which mean “he” and “she” respectively. The pronoun first emerged as a suggestion from Swedish linguists back to the 1960s. Though it has taken a while for the word to catch on, some Swedish magazines and even a children’s book have now adopted it in their texts. […]
The push to make “hen” mainstream could face challenges. Even for those sympathetic to the plight, after a lifetime of saying “han” and “hon,” switching to “hen” requires breaking a force of habit. Still, even if the majority do not adopt “hen” into their everyday speech, having an accepted alternative available is yet another step toward Swedish gender-neutrality.

What I want to know is, is this just a pie-in-the-sky initiative with no hope of actually succeeding, like the infamous English “ze,” or do people (other than zealots) use it?

From Katherine Arcement’s LRB Diary on reading and writing fanfic: “But by the time I told her I had stopped spending so much time online. I got bored with having to scroll through tens of misspelled summaries to find just one story that sounded appealing.” To me, “tens of misspelled summaries” sounds wrong, like something a non-native-speaker used to words like French dizaines or Russian десятки would come up with, but the author “will graduate from the College of William and Mary in May with a bachelor’s degree in English,” so I think we can rule that out as an explanation; it’s more likely that, as happens increasingly often, I am behind the curve of a changing language. And, as usual, I turn to you, the Varied Reader: does “tens” in place of the traditional “dozens” sound OK? (It’s hard to google for examples because of the prevalence of phrases like “tens of thousands.”)

I have not actually read any books by Mikhail Shishkin yet, but I have his novel Взятие Измаила and am very much looking forward to it—everything I’ve heard about him makes me sound like my kind of writer. And I’m further confirmed in that opinion by this essay (translated by the superb Marian Schwartz) about what it’s like writing in Zurich rather than Moscow, what’s been happening to the Russian language (“When everyone lives by prison camp laws, the mission of language is a cold war between everyone and his neighbour”), and how Russian literature developed (“It was a colony of European culture on the Russian plain – if, by European colonisation, we mean the softening of manners and defending the rights of the weak before the mighty, and not the importation of Prussian gunners”); I’ll quote the last few paragraphs here, but the whole thing should be read:

The language of Russian literature is an ark. A rescue attempt. A hedgehog defense. An island of words where human dignity might be preserved. […]

There is a legend about a prisoner sentenced to a life of solitary confinement. He spent years scratching out the image of a boat on the wall with the handle of a prison spoon. One day, they brought him his water, bread and gruel as usual, but the cell was empty and the wall was blank. He had climbed into the boat on the wall and sailed away.

The novel is a boat. Words must be revived in order for the boat to be genuine, so that I may climb aboard and sail out of this solitary life to a place where they love us and are waiting for us all. Save myself. And take all of my characters with me. And the reader too.

(Apologies for the bandwidth problem that kept the site inaccessible for a while; it’s those blasted spammers. InsiderHosting.com handled it with their usual efficiency, and I’m as happy with them as I was when I started using them a decade ago.)

My wife and I are on the very last of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (which we have been reading since July 2011), Blue at the Mizzen, and I was pleased with this linguistic description (on pp. 42-43 of my paperback):

Stephen bowed: but when they had put on formal clothes he said, ‘Interpret, is it? As I told you before I do not speak – not as who should say speak – Portuguese. Still less do I understand the language when it is spoke. No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese, without he is a native or brought up to comprehend that strange blurred muffled indistinct utterance from a very early, almost toothless, age. Anyone with a handful of Latin – even Spanish or Catalan – can read it without much difficulty but to comprehend even the drift of the colloquial, the rapidly muttered version. . .’

This has been my experience with Portuguese as well, and it was nice to see it set out so forcefully. (No knock on Portuguese, of course; it sounds very pleasant indeed. It is merely unintelligible and in fact unidentifiable. It is one of the few languages—Armenian is another—I’ve heard spoken on the NYC subway and been unable to name.)

I was flabbergasted when I saw the headline on this Independent story: “School in Essex bans triangle shaped flapjacks after pupil is hurt.” How on earth could you hurt someone with something as soft and floppy as a pancake, thought I? And how would you make triangular pancakes, anyway? Well, it turns out (as you can see from the picture in the linked story) that in the UK, a flapjack is not a pancake at all, it is (to quote the Concise Oxford) “a chewy, thick biscuit made from oats and butter.” Consider this my little contribution to international understanding. (Also, now I want to try a UK-style flapjack.)