languagehat.com

Last year I wrote about Sarah Ogilvie’s Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary on the basis of a (sloppy, as it turns out) newspaper story; now that Cambridge UP has sent me a review copy, I can report on it firsthand, and I am happy to say that it is an excellent book, well represented by its subtitle and very poorly by the reviews that stressed a trumped-up controversy about Burchfield (one of the editors).

Ogilvie begins by describing how she came to work at the OED in 2001; I found her account charming and convincing, and it’s a good example of personal reporting at its best—it gives you a real sense of the place and its traditions. Then she proceeds to the history of the dictionary that takes up the first, and more important, half of the book (the second half goes into perhaps excessive detail about a couple of controversies and the “case of the missing tramlines”); I’ve read a number of books about the OED, and this is the one I would give to someone curious about the subject. Not only is it well told, but it’s told by a lexicographer, which makes all the difference; she’s not looking in from the outside, and she is able to convey what lexicography in general is about and what is particular to the OED. Her portrait of James Murray, the great early editor, and the obstacles he confronted is superb; I will quote a longish passage that made me want to stand up and cheer:

Murray had stressed that the English language was dynamic, and that no one person’s English was all of English:

The ‘English language’ is constantly spoken of, and written of, as if it were a definite number of words and constructions; and the question, whether a particular word or construction is ‘English’, is constantly settled by each man according to his own feeling and usage, as if his English were all of English. Then we find absurd statements in books, such as that the English language is calculated to contain 100,000 words (when 50,000 or 200,000 would be just as true), followed sometimes by a calculation as to how many of these are of native English origin, and this without definition of what is included either under ‘word’ or ‘English word’ […]

This was a common theme present in his lectures and writings throughout his life. A few years before he died, he said in a lecture at Oxford, ‘How often have I heard from a man or seen a newspaper confidently assert that such a word or phrase was not English, or perhaps that it was a vile Americanism, when the fact was merely that they were not acquainted with it, it was no part of their English, and in their ignorance they assumed that their English was all English.’ When asked by correspondents for advice on standard usage, Murray always replied that a speaker’s individual free choice gave life and variety to language. He wrote:

Language is mobile and liable to change, and . . . a very large number of words have two or more pronunciations current . . . and giving life and variety to language . . . it is a free country, and a man may well call a vase a vawse, a vahse, a vaze, or a vase, as he pleases. And why should he not? We do not all think alike, walk alike, dress alike, write alike, or dine alike; why should not we use our liberty in speech also, so long as the purpose of speech, to be intelligible, and its grace, are not interfered with?

That’s a rare enough attitude today, and to encounter it so forcefully stated over a century ago boggles my mind. There’s not a word I would change.

[Read more…]

Ben Zimmer sent me this YouTube clip of Tolstoy (recorded October 31st, 1909) reading from his book For Every Day in four languages, English, German, French, and Russian! Each language gets a segment of different length, and unfortunately the Russian is so scratchy I can’t make out enough to google and find the original text, but it’s absolutely amazing to hear his voice. Here’s the English text:

That the object of life is self-perfection, the perfection of all immortal souls, that this is the only object of my life, is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is essentially a new object. Therefore, the question whether thou hast done what thou shouldst have done is of immense importance, for the only meaning of thy life is in doing in this short term allowed thee, that which is desired of thee by He or That which has sent thee into life. Art thou doing the right thing?

If anyone can find the Russian, I’ll be grateful.

An interesting piece by Jennifer Howard from the Chronicle of Higher Education: “In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us.” It deals with dictionaries tracking what words readers search for, the third edition of the OED (“it’s far too early to say whether there will or won’t be a print incarnation”—Howard points out that Macmillan Education “announced in November that it would no longer make print dictionaries at all”) and the OED’s integrating its historical thesaurus (“That ‘puts all of the enormous content of the OED into a taxonomic structure… So if you wanted to see all the terms for, say, a loose woman that were used in the 19th century, with a couple of clicks you could get all that information'”—I wrote about it here), crowdsourcing, and other topics; towards the end, it includes this important admonition:

Dictionaries are not created equal, though, and the most readily found definition will not always be the most robust or up-to-date. Who’s behind the definition that turns up on a quick Google search or embedded in your digital device? Online it can be very hard to tell how reliable a source is. Berglund serves as the executive secretary of the Dictionary Society of North America, and she thinks it’s more vital than ever to equip students with the literacy skills to be able to distinguish a good source from a mediocre one. Whatever form future dictionaries take, she wants professors as well as their students to take them seriously. “We tend to forget that the dictionary is one of the most valuable tools for humanistic study,” she says.

I hope I don’t sound too much like a fuddy-duddy when I say that it bothers me to think of students treating, say, Urban Dictionary as equivalent to Merriam-Webster or the OED. (Thanks, Paul!)

The Financial Times has a “Lunch with the FT” series, and in a recent one, John Thornhill interviews one of Russia’s most interesting contemporary writers, Boris Akunin (real name Grigory Chkhartishvili; the pen-name is a play on Bakunin, among other things). The piece has a good brief description of his writing—”he started to write the kind of novels that he and his wife would like to read: wry, fast-paced, intricately plotted detective stories that toy with the conventions of classical Russian literature, yet resonate with our own times”—and some good quotes, like “There is a place close to the Yauza river where I walk where the air is thick with culture and energy. Moscow is wonderful for energy. But when it comes to writing the text it needs discipline and order and that is awful there. St Malo is rainy and windy. It is perfect.” And of course there’s lots about Russian politics (Akunin is not fond of Putin). But towards the end it says he ordered “a gin and a tonic to complete his meal”: separately? Is that a Russian thing? (Thanks go to Bruce for the link and to Paul for a copy of the physical article, on the FT’s famous orange paper.)

An Ask MetaFilter question that I’m hoping some LH reader can help with:

I found some stone tablets written in a strange alphabet amongst a bunch of graves from different eras at the city museum of Tire, Turkey. The guy working the desk at the museum didn’t know what they were. […] The museum had gravestones from many different eras of the city’s history — Roman, Selçuk, the Beylik period, Byzantine and Ottoman graves, and also some Armenian writing and some Jewish gravestones (seen in the first picture). As far as I can tell, it’s none of these. It seems that all the stones there were collected from around the area. 2 of the stones had this strange alphabet; here are some pictures:
The first
Close-up
The second stone
Does anyone have any idea what they might be?

There are various guesses in the comment thread—an archaic Semitic language, Khutsuri, and Nomyte’s suggestion, Armenian (cf. this image); so far, I’d say that’s the most plausible, but everybody’s just guessing, and I’m hoping somebody who actually recognizes it will weigh in. (Just ignore the stones with Hebrew lettering in the first image; there’s no reason to think they’re relevant.)

I just ran across a French word I’d been unfamiliar with, cheptel ‘livestock’ (though technically ‘livestock’ is cheptel vif, cheptel mort being ‘farm equipment’). I immediately identified it as being from Latin capitalis, the adjective of caput ‘head,’ but how exactly was it derived? The che- clearly indicated a direct (“popular”) descendent, but the –p– was out of place and suggested a learned formation. Upon consulting my Nouveau dictionnaire étymologique du français by Jacqueline Picoche (Hachette, 1971), a very useful work, I discovered I was right on both counts; it was listed s.v. chef under “mots demi-savants”: “Cheptel XVII^e s. : réfection, par adjonction d’un p étym. de l’anc. fr. chetel (pop.) XI^e s. : lat. capitale, adj. neutre substantivé, « le principal (des biens possédés) ».” So the –p– was added by savants who knew the Latin derivation.

I also used the Advanced Search interface of the online OED to see if it would turn up anything of interest, and it pointed me to the entry for another word hitherto unknown to me and quite interesting in its own right, steelbow (Sc. Law. Obs. exc. Hist.) “A quantity of farming stock, which a tenant received from his landlord on entering, and which he was bound to render up undiminished at the close of his tenancy.” (Here’s the Dictionary of the Scots Language entry.) The OED etymology (unchanged since 1916) reads:

< steel n.¹ + bow n.³
It corresponds to the French cheptel de fer (see Littré), lit. ‘iron farm-stock’, and to early modern German stählin vieh, eisern vieh (in German Law Latin pecora chalybea, ferrea), and obsolete Danish jernfæ. These terms denote the quantity of live stock which a farming tenant receives from his landlord on entering, under a contract to restore the same quantity and value at the end of his tenancy. This is precisely the sense of steelbow, exc. that the Scots term seems to have been extended to apply to dead as well as live stock. The French cheptel de fer is also used, like steelbow, for the species of tenure or contract under which cattle are so held by a tenant. In early modern German there were other legal terms containing the adjs. stählin ‘made of steel’, eisern ‘made of iron’, in the figurative sense ‘rigidly fixed in amount’: e.g. stähline gült, a fixed regular payment or income: stähline pfründe, a church living subject to no deductions. The figure of speech doubtless comes down from very early Germanic legal formulæ; but evidence is wanting. See Schilter Glossarium, s.v. Stal; also Grimm Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (ed. 4, 1899) II. 131.

I should point out that the “bow n.³” refers to the original numeration; in the current online OED, the sense intended—”The stock of cattle on a farm, a herd” (from Old Norse bú farming, a farm, farm stock)—is bow n.⁴, so the link is misleading; I’ve e-mailed them to that effect.

Anatoly Liberman, author of the Oxford Etymologist blog, has a post titled “How come the past of ‘go’ is ‘went?’” He doesn’t actually answer the question, because a real answer is impossible (at one point he says “I consulted numerous books on the history of the Indo-European languages … and discovered to my surprise that all of them enumerate the forms but never go to the beginning of time,” as if it were possible to go to the beginning of time), and he does some fancy rhetorical dancing (“No fully convincing explanation of this phenomenon exists, but some facts can be considered with profit”), but he does provide a handy introduction to the topic with a good set of examples. A warning: though you might think from reading his post that suppletion is an Indo-European thing, it’s not in the least restricted to that family; in Georgian, for example, the verb “to come” has four different roots.

Last month I wrote about the experience of coming at Pushkin from the other side (the early 19th century); now I’m having a similar experience with Gogol. The Ukrainian background that I used to think he had introduced into Russian literature now seems utterly familiar from Narezhny and Pogorelsky, both of whom centered their stories around the same northeastern corner of Ukraine (basically, Chernigov and Poltava gubernias); actually, I suspect Ukraine was more familiar to the Russian reader of the day than anyplace in Russia proper outside the capital cities. But the language! It’s not a matter of playing games with framing and narration; everybody had been doing that ever since Sterne and the Gothics. But the voice of other narrators had been reasonable, like that of a well-educated fellow you met in the better sort of coach while traveling: “I say, old chap, let me tell you a story…” Gogol’s narrators are importunate and perhaps drunken guys in flea-bitten coats with ragged, droopy mustaches who come up to you, throw an arm around your shoulder, and start yammering at you in ways that seem repetitious and irrelevant until you find you’re hanging on every word. His first published collection, Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки (Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka), begins like this:

“Это что за невидаль: “Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки”? Что это за “Вечера”? И швырнул в свет какой-то пасечник! Слава богу! еще мало ободрали гусей на перья и извели тряпья на бумагу! Еще мало народу, всякого звания и сброду, вымарало пальцы в чернилах! Дернула же охота и пасичника дотащиться вслед за другими! Право, печатной бумаги развелось столько, что не придумаешь скоро, что бы такое завернуть в нее”.

I don’t even know how to go about translating that; maybe Mark Twain could have done it. But I do know how not to translate it:

“What oddity is this: Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka? What sort of Evenings have we here? And thrust into the world by a beekeeper! God protect us! As though geese enough had not been plucked for pens and rags turned into paper! As though folks enough of all classes had not covered their fingers with inkstains! The whim must take a beekeeper to follow their example! Really there is such a lot of paper nowadays that it takes time to think what to wrap in it.”

I don’t want to pick on Leonard J. Kent, the translator [actually Constance Garnett—see Update below]; he was an academic and doing the best he could. But does that sound like a human voice at all, let alone somebody you’d want to listen to all evening? “What oddity is this” forsooth! A passage like Gogol’s begs you to stop looking at the dictionary and instead spend your time creating a voice in English that might have at least something of the same effect. I don’t know: “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka—never seen anything like it! What kind of ‘evenings’ are we talking about here? And shoved in our faces by a beekeeper, of all people?” But that doesn’t work either. I don’t know, I only know that whereas I zoomed through the other authors eager to find out what happened next, I keep going back and rereading Gogol’s sentences, reading them out loud, often laughing, always admiring. How did he do it?

I was thinking about that when I read this passage in Andrew O’Hagan’s recent NYRB piece about Jack Kerouac:

Walter Salles’s film of On the Road comes to us more than fifty years after the book’s publication. […] The film cannot control its lust for the tang of actuality, forgetting what it takes to dream a prose narrative into being. Yes, Kerouac’s novel was very close to his life, but On the Road is really its prose. One might say the prose is the main character. How quickly it was written and under what conditions, who knows, any more than one can say what was really behind the tone of Charlie Parker when the sound came flowing out of his horn?

The film never finds a way to embody the sound. It just can’t hear it and so we watch a kind of beat soap opera[…]

A jazz musician responded to someone who asked about the title of Parker’s “Klacktoveedsedsteen” by saying “It’s a sound, man. A sound.” Nobody ever captured Bird’s sound, and nobody can capture Gogol’s, but dammit, you’ve got to at least try.

Update. The latest post at XIX век points out that the translation I quoted is not Leonard J. Kent’s but Garnett’s, revised only in punctuation; that doesn’t make it any better at rendering Gogol’s tone, but it makes it more understandable why it sounds that way, and one should give credit and blame where due.

Addendum (Jan. 2025). Russell Scott Valentino has posted his own translation of the Gogol passage, doing about as good a job as can be done in English:

What in the world? Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka? Um, Evenings? And some kind of beekeeper plopping himself out front of the world! Bless his heart! Seems there’s still geese to pluck for pens and rags for paper! Seems there’s still folks of every rank and kind hankering to stain their fingers with ink! Must have taken this beekeeper’s fancy to follow in other folks’ footsteps! God’s truth, there’s so many printed pages these days that a fella’s hard pressed to come up with something to wrap up in it.

Click through to see what he does with the following paragraph; he adds a brief discussion of the issues, beginning:

The trick, I think, would be to give him a distinctive, folksy idiom with some elements of dialect (double negatives, distinctive lexicon) without making him sound like he’s from any particular place, e.g., Kentucky, Brooklyn, Venice Beach. And this is just one of several distinctive narrative voices in the collection.

I hope he does a full translation. (Via XIX век; that post has links to other things as well, including my recent post on Kuprin.)

The first edition of The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles is now online. I will add the requisite caution via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org:

Making this resource freely available is a good thing, but the dictionary does have its limitations. Most notably, it is from 1967, so many recent Canadianisms are not to be found in it. There is no entry for poutine, for example. Also, the DCHP only includes citations from Canadian sources. While this policy is great for tracking Canadian usage, users must remain aware that many of the terms are older in other dialects. For example, the OED has a British use of Chesterfield a decade before the word appears in Canada, and use of toque goes back to the sixteenth century. And in a bad web design choice, users must click on each citation to see the bibliographic data, which is annoying and time consuming.

That aside, it’s a great resource—thanks for the link, marie-lucie!

No matter how jaded I think I’ve gotten, no matter how sure I am that I’ve seen it all, something is bound to come along to throw me for a loop. This time it’s Lucy Ferriss’s latest Lingua Franca post. I’ve long been accustomed to hearing things like “He gave it to John and I”; I used to make the common mistake of thinking it was hypercorrection before it was explained to me that it was a special case of coordinate construction (see Philipp S. Angermeyer and John Victor Singler, “The case for politeness: Pronoun variation in co-ordinate NPs in object position in English,” Language Variation and Change 15, July 2003, pp 171-209; abstract). But Ferriss takes us all the way down the slippery slope from that to Colin Powell’s “I’ll be voting for he and for Vice President Joe Biden” to… well, I’ll let her tell it:

Which brings us to this week. Although I’ve given examples from public figures, my attention on a daily basis goes to my students. And for reasons I haven’t investigated, this past week I received two student stories with new examples of the nominative pronoun used in the objective position. The first wrote, “I didn’t think I was in love with he, but I couldn’t be sure.” The second wrote, “For they, it wasn’t that important.” No coordinator in either example. And then, at a social gathering, I overheard a woman say, “She gave it to I—I mean to me—oh, I don’t know any more.”

I never in a million years would have guessed that native speakers of English, in my lifetime, would be confused as to whether to say “She gave it to I” or “She gave it to me.” Language change can happen fast!

(I think we can take it as read that this is not acceptable English and will not be acceptable English in the foreseeable future; I realize many readers of this post will have the automatic bristling “see, it’s all going to hell” reaction, but frankly that’s not a very interesting reaction even if it’s harmless and inevitable.)