languagehat.com

I know, I know, another dying-language story, but Lee Romney’s Los Angeles Times piece about Herbert Purnell and his Iu Mien dictionary is well worth reading. It’s full of drama (“For [Purnell], there was the murder of a daughter, a house fire that consumed his nearly finished work and the gentle assistance of collaborators on three continents who helped him pick up the pieces”) and tragic history (“the Mien, like the Hmong, began to be recruited to assist in covert military operations in the Indochinese wars — first for the French and later the CIA”), and the dictionary (“which includes 5,600 entries, 28,000 subentries, 5,000 example sentences, 4,500 notes on usage, register and idiom, and about 2,000 cultural notes”) sounds like a fascinating work:

Purnell included riddles, folk tales and accounts of cultural practices tied to a way of life largely erased by war.
“Use this to talk to your children,” Purnell — lanky and wearing a red necktie adorned with elephants — implored the older Mien gathered at the Sacramento event. “Use it to tell them: This is how we made the baby hats. This is how we dyed the cloth. This is how we made paper.”

Thanks, Stan and Eric!

From the introduction to Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial’s Forgotten Rivals, by Gideon Nisbet:

This, then, is a book about short, funny poems. Classicists have tended to ignore them, which I think is a pity; then again, it is only in recent years that the notorious Martial has begun to attract serious attention. Classicists of an older style are visibly uncomfortable around Martial; they wish he had written something with a little more gravitas, and certainly with much less sex in it. From this point of view it is odd that they have not made more of his Greek models, whose preserved output in Book 11 of the Byzantine-era Palatine Anthology is noticeably less rude (although recently published papyri indicate that their minds were at least as filthy as Martial’s own). This book aims to shed light on a whole corpus of ancient humour which will come as a surprise even to many professional students of antiquity.

I haven’t set out to offer a comprehensive survey, merely an open-ended investigation into what is out there, how it works, how one author’s approach differs from another, and where the form seems to be headed. The foundation of this endeavour is rough and ready: I grabbed a bunch of poems. I offer a translation of each poem to give a broad idea of what its sense might be, along with minimal notes on any textual difficulties…. One thing I do not set out to do is close down signification within texts that (in my view) intentionally resist it. I’m not much of a deconstructionist, but I do take it as fairly evident that language is slippery in use, and anyone who reacts badly to the milder deconstructionist/postmodern ideas will probably not enjoy what follows. Also, some of the moves I make with material culture — in particular, the way I read the cheapness and nastiness of the Nikarkhos book fragments as something significant that we can work with, figuring out a model readership so to speak via the back door and maybe even politicising them — may not strike everybody as a proper way to do classics. Sorry. But I think more classicists should spend more time with zinesters and Webmonkeys before they write this sort of thing off.

Why can’t more academics write like that? I have been known to react badly to deconstructionist/postmodern ideas, but I can deal with them as long as they’re presented as helpful avenues of approach rather than as a revelation from the academic equivalent of Mount Sinai, and reading Nisbet’s prose makes me want to read more of it, even if he’s going to lead me through the Valley of the Shadow of Deconstruction. But maybe most academics prefer to be read only by fellow initiates.

A correspondent wrote (apropos of this post) wondering if I knew about “Logeion, an online Greek & Latin dictionary-searching site put together by the Chicago Classics department (I think mainly Helma Dik). It is more comprehensive in terms of having a lot of words, and less comprehensive in terms of spanning a lot of different resources (relying heavily, for instance, on your ‘outmoded’ Lewis & Short…). It allows its user to compare different dictionary definitions, which I find valuable, and also offers a list of the classical authors who use the word in question most frequently.” I told her I didn’t, and thanked her for the valuable tip, which I now pass on to you; I’ll add that if you type in “logos,” you get a pull-down menu offering λόγος as well as the Latin-alphabet version. (Also, as I wrote her, “I shouldn’t get so snippy about L&S, which is, after all, still a useful book, but it irritates me that people still cite it as if it were the last word in Latin lexicography, completely ignoring the OLD — presumably because it’s expensive and they don’t own a copy, which is perfectly understandable, but still.”)

John McIntyre’s latest column demolishes a reader who insists that decimate must be limited to reduce by a tenth”:

There you have the etymological fallacy at its finest. Because CanSpeccy can cite a handful of examples of the limited use of the word, the loose or rhetorical sense of “to subject to severe loss,” for which the OED has examples dating back to 1663, must be ignorant and anyone who uses it should get fifty of the best.

The giveaway is CanSpeccy’s sneer at “misuse on the basis of common usage.” Common usage is what determines language, which is an arbitrary set of sounds or letters that means only what the users agree they mean. That is why in English we can use decimate in a way that Caesar did not,* why we can appropriate words from Scandinavian languages and alter their pronunciation to suit ourselves. Common usage is why we no longer speak Anglo-Saxon or Norman French.

But that asterisk after “Caesar did not” goes to an interesting question: “Not a Latinist myself. Are we sure, really sure, that no classical writer of Latin ever used decimare in a loose or rhetorical sense?” Jan Freeman wrote me to suggest that “this seems like a question for your erudite band of readers,” and I agree, so: anybody know?

Michael Adams, editor of the excellent collection From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (reviewed in this LH post), has a nice piece in Humanities on the subject, starting out with a long and interesting discussion of John Wallis (“all but forgotten except among historians and mathematicians”) and proceeding to Volapük and Esperanto, Francis Godwin’s 1638 The Man in the Moone, Frédéric Werst (discussed at LH here), and Joyce, among others. I was amused by this bit on Cornish:

Revitalized languages, like Cornish, can cause political strife within the heritage group. As Romaine summarizes in From Elvish to Klingon, “In 2004, the installation of a welcome mat in Cornish at the Camborne county offices in southwest Cornwall sparked a heated dispute over how to spell ‘welcome.’ Although the county government tried to defuse the tension by installing signs using all the different spellings (e.g., dynnargh on the welcome mat outside the county offices, but dynargh on another sign inside the building), this approach did not bring the community to consensus.” Paradoxically, then, inventing language in order to define, enact, and empower a community, can fracture said community in the course of its creation.

Thanks, Paul!

Sashura sent me a link to Dmitry Sukhodolsky’s piece in Russia Beyond the Headlines (an offshoot of Rossiyskaya Gazeta) about the many languages of Russia and the difficulty many are having in surviving. There’s an interesting discussion of Karelian (“Karelians living in the more distant areas of Tver Region and other spaces have kept their language alive until the present, even though they live closer to Moscow than Valdai”) and a sad reference to “the Kerek of Chukhotka, of whom there are just four people,” but what prompted me to post it was the last section, on Dagestan. Apparently “speakers of unwritten languages are treated with flagrant scorn” there:

Those who speak the non-written languages – who might amount to everyone in a village, or at least half a village – are traditionally calculated as being members of one of the more numerous linguistic groups (the Avars being the most numerous). Thus, they do not benefit from the slightest relief from taxes, cultural-fund or other social benefits. […]

One example is that of the Botlikhs. There have been countless meetings and endless petitions in the Botlikh village to recognize the cultural autonomy of Botlikhs and their language belonging to the Andi group of Avar-Andi-Tsez languages of the Nakh-Dagestanian family.

Yet they continue to be classified as Avar speakers, just as they were under Stalin, the Soviet Union’s Commissar for Nationality Issues, in the 1920s. The result is that only 200 Botlikhs, out of a population of 6,000, know their own language.

Yes, I realize there are more pressing issues in Russia in general and Dagestan in particular, but I wish the languages of small groups of powerless people wouldn’t get swept quite so brutally into the dustbin of history. (By the way, the comment thread on that article is amazingly civilized and full of useful information.)

I’ve finished Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, which I wrote about here, and I guess I’m glad that there’s a severe falling-off in quality in the last couple of stories, because that enables me to move on to something else—Bestuzhev-Marlinsky‘s «Испытание» [The Test] as it happens—without too much gritting of teeth, but still it’s hard. Bestuzhev-Marlinsky is a very enjoyable writer in the European tradition, the “I say, old chap, let me tell you a story…” style I mentioned in the previous post; I laughed out loud when his narrator described the tobacco habit as spreading “от мыса Доброй Надежды до залива Отчаяния, от Китайской стены до Нового моста в Париже и от моего до Чукотского носа” (from the Cape of Good Hope to the Bay of Despair, from the Wall of China to the Pont Neuf in Paris and from my [nose] to the Chukotka Promontory [literally ‘nose’]), but the play on the word “nose” took me right back to Gogol and his infinitely greater comic genius.

But Gogol’s comedy would not be as powerful as it is without the flip side, and one thing that kept calling itself to my attention as I was reading these stories is that every one, even the most apparently silly or jolly, ended in a minor key. The first story, “The Fair at Sorochintsy,” is about as fluffy a story as you could ask for, focusing on the plot hatched by a young man to get the father of the girl he loves to let him marry her. The Wikipedia summary says it ends with their wedding, and so it does in a plot sense, but here are the last two paragraphs, the image the story leaves you with (Russian below the cut):

The noise, laughter, and songs became quieter and quieter. The [violin’s] bow died away, weakening and losing the vague sounds in the emptiness of the air. Somewhere you could still hear the stamping of feet, something like the murmur of a far-off sea, and soon everything became empty and indistinct.

Isn’t that the way joy, that beautiful and inconstant guest, flies from us, and a lonesome sound thinks in vain to express merriment? In its own echo it already hears sorrow and wilderness and heeds it in fright. Isn’t that the way the playful friends of our wild and free youth, one by one, one after the next, disappear to the ends of the earth and in the end leave in solitude their brother of old? It’s depressing to be left behind! And the heart is heavy and sad, and there’s no help for it.

Ho ho ho, right? “May Night, or the Drowned Maiden” has a very similar plot—the young Cossack Levko’s father won’t let him marry the woman he loves, but winds up agreeing—and ends in a similarly downbeat way: “The earth was just as lovely, in the marvelous silver gleam [of the moon], but nobody was intoxicated by it any more: everything was plunged into sleep. The silence was interrupted only by the rare barking of dogs, and for a long time yet the drunken Kalenik staggered through the sleeping streets, looking for his house.”

Of course Gogol would intensify both the humor and the sadness in his later, greater stories—”The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” Dead Souls—but there’s no call for Nabokov to have been as dismissive of these first stories as he was (“operatic romance and stale farce”); they are written with superb brio and a deeply felt sense of lacrimae rerum, and frankly I suspect Vladimir Vladimirovich’s aristocratic tastes made him turn up his nose at good honest Russian skaz.

[Read more…]

A correspondent has sent me the sad news that Calvert Watkins passed away in his sleep last night. I met him only once, forty years ago or so, on a memorable evening when the Harvard Indo-Europeanists (of whom he was the fearless leader) came to New Haven to visit the Yale Indo-Europeanist contingent (of which I was an aspiring acolyte); he was so much fun to hang out with that I envied my Cambridge counterparts. The general dictionary-reading public knows him for his appendix of Indo-European roots for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (an abridged version of the introduction is available here); his more specialized work is described briefly in the Wikipedia article I linked to his name, and hopefully an appropriate obituary will be provided by one of those who knew and worked with him. Meanwhile, I doff my hat to the memory of a fine scholar.

Last year I posted a quote from Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 about language in what’s now Lithuania; now I want to quote a section about Ukraine which is equally interesting and enlightening (I went back to the book to get some background for Gogol’s “Страшная месть” [“A Terrible Revenge/Vengeance”], which I’ve begun reading):

As Reform raised religious disputation in Poland to a very high level, Orthodoxy in Ukraine continued its long intellectual decline. Its limitations inhered in the language created to spread eastern-rite Christianity among the Slavs. Old Church Slavonic, the remarkable creation of Cyril/Constantine, had allowed the spread of the Gospel throughout East and South Slavic lands. Although Old Church Slavonic served the medieval purposes of conversion from paganism to Christianity very well, it was insufficient for the early modern challenge of Reform. It provided no link to classical models. As centuries passed, it was ever less able to provide Orthodox churchmen with a means of communication among themselves — or with their flock, when this idea arose. As the various Slavic languages emerged (or diverged), Church Slavonic lost both its original proximity to the vernacular and its universal appeal. By the early modern period it had declined into local recensions which neither matched local speech nor represented a general means of communication among Orthodox churchmen.

[Read more…]

Hearty congratulations to Beth of The Cassandra Pages, who has been blogging for ten years as of today. I know it’s not easy to keep blogging for that long, even though I sometimes just toss up a link to a news story when I don’t have anything of interest to say (or don’t have the time to do it justice); Beth keeps putting up thoughtful posts full of art and life, and as she says in her latest post, it is “the body of artistic work accomplished in my lifetime which most closely represents me”:

For as much as I sometimes have wished to be otherwise, I am not first and foremost a novelist or a painter, a writer of non-fiction books or a photographer or printmaker. I’m a reader, and observer, and an integrator, whose chosen form is the informal essay, illustrated with my own photographs or artwork, and whose perfect medium of expression is the blog. Being a blogger became an intrinsic part of my identity: like someone who works in watercolors or oils, I see the world and my daily life through an intimacy with this medium. It used to feel a bit weird, like constant translating; now it’s so normal I don’t even think about it, even though I’ve become a lot more choosy about what to base my posts upon.

I wish her and her blog many more years!