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Gasan Guseinov (in Azeri, Həsən Hüseynov) is a Baku-born classical philologist who teaches at Moscow State University and writes not only about ancient literature but about contemporary culture and politics (he has, for example, an article about “the anthropology of the Russian internet”). I had never heard of him until the Russian Dinosaur (whose new book I am enjoying greatly and will be reviewing soon) sent me a link to this piece for the Russian version of Radio France Internationale, which made me laugh harder than anything has in a while. I imagine you all know that Gerard Depardieu has gotten a Russian passport in his quest to avoid French taxation; Guseinov has nothing to say about the financial, political, or ethical aspects of the situation, but he has much to say about how the name should be naturalized in Russian: депардьё [depard’yo]? депардье [depard’e]? And how will this new Russian word be used? If you press the white triangle in the red circle above the text, you can hear him read the piece, which is well worth it. And I’ve already added his blog to my Google Reader.

For those of you who don’t know Russian, here’s a squib about what happened when they tried to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. (In the end, they had to wipe it from its memory.)

Last year, over at Stan Carey’s Sentence first, I jovially commented, in response to one of those “Let’s try to preserve the English language” people, “Congratulations, I think you’ve filled out your Peever’s Bingo card completely!” Now Stan has taken that idea and run with it, producing an actual Bingo card with entries running from “literally” to “comma splices.” As he says:

I’ve avoided common misspellings and variant pronunciations, but you could easily compile cards based on those, too – or a set of completely different usage peeves.* As for this table, Scott [Huler] notes ironically that which ones are important is an “obvious question, with the obvious answer: the ones I personally think are important”.

The card can be used for drinking games, but (obviously) at one’s own risk.

Last year I posted about the International Translation Center/Cardinal Points annual Compass Award contest, which was dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva; this year the award (webpage) is dedicated to the work of Maria Petrovykh:

Petrovykh was a poet of exquisite precision and subtlety – a friend of Osip Mandelstam, serving as an inspiration for his famed “Masteritsa vinovatykh vzorov,” and of Anna Akhmatova, who called her “Naznach’ mne svidan’e na etom svete” a “lyric masterpiece.” Yet, unlike her fellow masters, she hasn’t attained universal recognition. In part, this is due to her own humility; she published only one collection in her lifetime, and devoted most of her professional life to editing and translating the work of others. We feel it is high time for Petrovykh’s own verse to benefit from the attention of translators as gifted and inspired as she herself was.

I discovered Petrovykh a few years ago and was impressed enough to create that Wikipedia article; I’m very pleased she’s getting this recognition, and I thank Irina Mashinski (a wonderful poet herself) for letting me know about it.

I mentioned Benjamin Schmidt’s Prochronisms site here, but now that I’ve been following it a while I thought I’d give it its own post. Here‘s a Wondermark appreciation, with links (thanks, Sven!), and here‘s the Prochronisms FAQ (“I tend to call a word an anachronism if it’s extraordinarily unlikely that a person would have used it at the time, even if it’s not completely impossible”—makes sense to me). He has gone into detail about anachronisms in movies about Lincoln, and he’s currently working on Downton Abbey (which my wife and I are hopelessly addicted to). If you’re interested in the language of historical dramas, you’ll want to bookmark it.

Update (Nov. 2022). The site is dead (the URL has been bought by an annoying company), but the Wayback Machine, though it has a lot of snapshots, only brings up an image of gears turning endlessly if you click on one. Annoying!

Update (Sept. 2023). It turns out the site is still there, but at a different URL, which I have substituted above (though the FAQ doesn’t seem to be there any more); the layout is annoying, but at least it’s accessible.

For many years I’ve known, enjoyed, and occasionally used the expression “This is Liberty Hall, you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!” For almost as many years I’ve vaguely wondered where I got it, and it finally occurred to me to ask Professor Google, so now I know, thanks to this web page:

John Grimes often welcomed his guests with the phrase “Come In. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”. There seems to be some interest in the origin of this quote.

One of the earliest variations of this quote seems to comes from the Oliver Goldsmith play “She Stoops to Conquer” written in 1773. The quote goes “Mr. Marlow—Mr. Hastings—gentlemen—pray be under no constraint in this house. This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here.”(www.bartleby.com/18/3/2.html)

A. Bertram Chandler used the phrase and it is used in nearly all the John Grimes books. It is first used in “The Road to the Rim” published in If magazine in 1967.

Since I was a loyal reader of If in those years, I think I can say with confidence that that is my source. And I’m glad to know about the prehistory in Goldsmith.

Anatoly sometimes introduces his posts with “(вряд ли кому-то будет интересно)” [unlikely to be of interest to anyone], and I could say the same of this post, but sometimes when I’ve figured out some obscure linguistic fact, I can’t resist putting it out there, and who knows, maybe someone else will get something out of it. So: I’ve been reading Narezhny’s Два Ивана, или Страсть к тяжбам [The two Ivans, or A passion for lawsuits] (see this post on Narezhny), and I got to a passage where Khariton, who is involved in the tangle of retaliations and lawsuits with the titular Ivans, is drunkenly exchanging Bible quotes with his pal Дьячок Фома [D’yachok Foma], the sacristan. At first they are bellowing «Блажен муж, иже не идет на совет нечестивых!», which is a slight variation of the opening of Psalm 1, “Блажен муж, иже не иде на совет нечестивых” (or in the old spelling “Блаженъ мужъ, иже не иде на совѣтъ нечестивыхъ”), in the King James Version “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.” A bit later the household is frightened by a loud «Векую смятошася язьщы, вскую поучашася, тщетным?», and this is the point at which I had to call for help. Fortunately, the internet was at hand!

The first problem, which unnecessarily increased the difficulty of solving the puzzle, is a typo that apparently crept into the text at some point; the first word should be Вскую [vskuyu], just like the fourth, so my time spent trying to figure out how the first person singular of вековать [vekovat’] ‘to spend one’s time/life’ fit in was time wasted. But what was vskuyu? It turns out it’s a Church Slavic word for ‘why,’ and the line is a variant of the beginning of Psalm 2, “Вскую шаташася языцы, и людие поучишася тщетным?”—in the King James Version, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” But why does vskuyu mean ‘why’? Vasmer tells me the answer:

вску́ю “почему”, церк. (также у Салтыкова-Шадрина), др.-русск., ст.-слав. въскѫѭ – то же, из *vъz- (см.воз-) и kǫjǫ – вин. п. ж. р. от кой, ст.-слав. кыи.

In other words, въз [vъz] is an OCS preposition meaning ‘(in exchange) for,’ and the last part of the word is the accusative of кыи (later кой) ‘which.’ So it’s basically the same formation as modern зачем [zachem] ‘why,’ with за [za] ‘for.’ Isn’t that neat?

I also like very much the proverb I found in Dahl: По бороде блажен муж, а по уму вскую шаташася: ‘By his beard he’s “Blessed is the man,” but by his mind he’s “Why do the heathen rage.”‘

It’s been almost half a year since my last report on my nightly reading, so I thought I’d update you all with a particularly fine quote from our current volume of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, The Commodore (the seventeenth of twenty!—we’re trying to avoid thinking about the abyss that awaits us in a few months, when we’ve finished the lot). The context is the case of a little girl named Brigid, who at first seemed speechless and virtually inhuman but thanks to the care and attention of the almost monoglot Irishman Padeen (i.e., Páidín), the loutish but lovable servant of the Irish/Catalan doctor Stephen Maturin, has blossomed and become reasonably talkative (though mainly in Irish) and outgoing. Maturin is talking:

[Read more…]

I’ve long been a fan (from a respectful distance) of Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, ‘workshop of potential literature’; I posted about it here and here), so I was pleased to see Paul Grimstad’s LRB review of Daniel Levin Becker’s recent book on the subject. Herewith a few tidbits of LH interest:

The newest member of the Oulipo, Daniel Levin Becker, born in Chicago in 1984, opens his Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature with a description of a beau présent read at the funeral of François Caradec (an Oulipian and biographer of Roussel) at Montparnasse cemetery in 2008. A beau présent, or ‘beautiful inlaw’, is a version of the lipogram in which only the letters of the addressee’s name – in this case f, r, a, n, c, o, i, s, d, e – are used (in the inverse constraint, the ‘beautiful outlaw’, the letters of the person’s name are missing). […]

An important distinction in the early phase of Oulipo was the difference between what they called anoulipism, devoted to discovery, and synthoulipism, devoted to invention. It wasn’t a hard and fast distinction: ‘from the one to the other there exist many subtle channels,’ as Le Lionnais put it in the First Oulipo Manifesto. Given the group’s concern with tradition, it is worth pointing out that the emphasis on potential rather than actual works is not at all a new idea. Borges is always imagining, even reviewing, potential works. Think of that wonderful list of Pierre Menard’s Nachlass with its Oulipian sounding experiments in French metrics and Boolean logic, essays on modifying the rules of chess, and ‘monograph on the possibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary … which would be ideal objects created according to conventions’ (this is not to overlook that astonishing exercise in potential literature where Menard, in copying out Don Quixote to the letter, ends up creating an entirely different work). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov, another of Perec’s heroes, described a fictional country-house murder mystery which the narrator tells us is not so much about particular characters as about ‘methods of composition’. And in his sublime memoir Speak, Memory, Nabokov compared the taste in the head he got from composing chess problems to ‘various other, more overt and fruitful operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules’.[Footnote: Nabokov was briefly considered for induction into the Oulipo but the idea was scrapped, perhaps because, as he admitted in the preface to the screenplay of Lolita, there is ‘nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity’. Paul Braffort nevertheless makes a case for l’oulipisme nabokovien, in part by considering Nabokov and Queneau’s shared love of Martin Gardner’s Scientific American articles on puzzles and logical paradoxes.] […]

Becker makes clear what is exciting about the Oulipo: the discovery and application of constraints; the annihilation of cliché; the setting up of encounters between literature, mathematics, music and computers; analysing and exploring, but also broadening and generalising, the dynamics of composition (Le Lionnais, Becker tells us, went so far as to devise the formulation ‘Ou-X-Po’ to stand for the way any practice might be submitted to constraints – OuCuiPo might be the name of a group of constraint-based chefs).

I like “Ou-X-Po” a lot. But I confess I don’t understand “beau présent, or ‘beautiful inlaw’”; does anybody have any enlightenment to shed?

Geoff Pullum has a good Lingua Franca post about a sentence he found in the preface to Interpreting Imperatives, by Magdalena Kaufmann: “Arnim von Stechow … has never stopped to present me with thought provoking questions.” As he says, she clearly meant what has to be expressed in English by either “has never ceased to present me” or “has never stopped presenting me”; the interesting point is the subtle difference between the verbs and the implications for language learning:

I have no idea how a native speaker of German learning English can be expected to detect that one of two almost-synonyms forbids the following infinitival clause from being interpreted as a complement (i.e., from denoting the activity that is discontinued), while the other permits it.

Indeed, I have no idea how you or I learned it when we were toddlers. Nobody explains to kids which verbs take which types of complements. Hardly anyone has an adequate conscious grasp of the necessary facts. There are thousands of verbs, and at least half a dozen very different kinds of complement clause. The crucial fact here is recorded in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language on Page 1228 (note that cease is on the list in example display [10], but stop is not). But The Cambridge Grammar runs to over 1,750 pages excluding end matter. Nobody is explicitly taught everything that appears that it covers. A huge majority of what they learn is acquired through some natural process of absorption, on the basis of simply observing people say things to each other (and, after a certain point, perhaps also reading things that people have written down). We don’t understand this process.

The astonishing thing to me is not that a highly intelligent semantics Ph.D. should have fallen into the stop/cease trap. The astonishing thing is that foreign adults like Professor Kaufmann learn English so well and make so few mistakes.

I had read Tim Parks’s NYRB complaint about “an edit that transforms my English prose into American”; it was nicely written and brought up some valid issues (“But where I had written mamma and papà, the edit had transformed to ‘mamma’ and ‘pappa'”), but for me it basically fell into the “authors sure hate to be edited” file, and when he said “On sending in my observations on the proofs, my commissioning editor turns out to be more than ready to negotiate,” I said “Well, there you are, then,” and moved on. But frequent commenter Paul (thanks, Paul!) sent it to me with the observation that it was “one of those times when the added comments made its web version more interesting,” and sure enough, they do. I particularly liked a comment by linguist Thomas Wier, who I hope is this Thomas Wier (a Kartvelianist at the Free University of Tbilisi!); he starts off by saying “Speaking as a linguist who takes empirical evidence of language use very seriously, some of these problems are clearly just an editor’s whim”—alas, speaking as an editor, I have to acknowledge that editors exercise their whims all too frequently—and ends with “The bottom line is that more editors would do well with a course in introductory linguistics” (hear, hear!), in between sharing some interesting thoughts on got vs. gotten.