languagehat.com

I just ran across the Finnish word lounas, which means both ‘lunch’ and ‘southwest’ (this was in the context of the former dacha community Lounatjoki northwest of St. Petersburg, since 1948 called Zakhodskoe; there is some dispute over whether the name originally meant ‘southwest river’ or ‘lunch river,’ the argument for the latter being that workers ate meals there while they were building the railroad that was the community’s raison d’être). On a whim (the kind of whim that comes naturally to me) I looked up “southwest” in my Estonian dictionary to see what the sound correspondences looked like, and was mildly disappointed to see it was an entirely different word, edel. But wait: just above it, under the rubric “south,” was lõuna! I looked up “south” in the Finnish dictionary, and sure enough, it was etelä. It seemed odd that the two words would have exchanged senses; a little googling got me this passage from p. 216 of Basic Aspects of Language in Human Relations: Toward a General Theoretical Framework, by Harald Haarmann (Mouton de Gruyter, 1991):

The kind of “oscillation” in the meaning of basic terms which has been illustrated for the Lappish terminology finds its equivalent when comparing other Finno-Ugric languages. As an example, I refer here to contrasts in the corresponding Finnish and Estonian terminology: [Here he gives a table with the above words.] These and other variations are, as in the case of Lappish terms, a reflection of orientation according to weather conditions and the profile of the surrounding landscape, rather than an orientation in terms of the position of stars in the sky.

I thought that was interesting, so I’m passing it along. (The book sounds interesting; anybody know anything about Haarmann?)

I am surprised to discover, via the search box on the right (between the calendar and the archives), that I have never mentioned Christine Brooke-Rose here. I found her critical study A ZBC of Ezra Pound endlessly provocative and illuminating when I read it many years ago (you can apparently read the whole thing at Google Books), and she’s one of those people (like John Berger and Gene Wolfe) I’ve always meant to read more by but haven’t gotten around to yet. But I always enjoy her words when they catch my eye, and I was saddened to learn of her death last March. Here‘s a Guardian appreciation by Natalie Ferris (“If she has taught us anything, it is that shifting curiosity is the very lifeblood of language”); here‘s a useful collection of links by Kristi McGuire, with a nice paragraph from her writings about Pound (“There is a timeless, apocalyptic quality in Mr Pound’s poetry which one suspects even his adverse critics find disturbing, but which most poets respond to, even if they do not understand”); and here is a Waggish post providing excerpts from a number of her essays—I particularly like this, from “Palimpsest History”:

Now knowledge has long been unfashionable in fiction. If I may make a personal digression here, this is particularly true of women writers, who are assumed to write only of their personal situations and problems, and I have often been blamed for parading my knowledge, although I have never seen this being regarded as a flaw in male writers; on the contrary. Nevertheless (end of personal digression), even as praise, a show of knowledge is usually regarded as irrelevant: Mr X shows an immense amount of knowledge of a, b, c, and the critic passes to theme, plot, characters and sometimes style, often in that order. What has been valued in this sociological and psychoanalytical century is personal experience and the successful expression of it. In the last resort a novel can be limited to this, can come straight out of heart and head, with at best a craftsmanly ability to organize it well, and write well. […]
The novel took its roots in historical documents and has always had an intimate link with history. But the novel’s task, unlike that of history, is to stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking point. Because palimpsest histories do precisely that, mingling realism with the supernatural and history with spiritual and philosophical reinterpretation, they could be said to float half-way between the sacred books of our various heritages, which survive on the strength of the faiths they have created (and here I include Homer, who also survived on the absolute faith of the Renaissance in the validity of classical culture), and the endless exegesis and commentaries these sacred books create, which do not usually survive one another, each supplanting its predecessor according to the Zeitgeist, in much the same way as do the translations of Homer or the Russian classics.

A couple of years ago, in this thread, Gilbert Wesley Purdy wrote of the word shambles (which came up in Betty Kirkpatrick’s discussion of the Scots word boorach, which she defined as “mess” and “shambles” as if they were equivalent): “To me the most interesting fact here is that neither Kirkpatrick nor at least one of the commenters would seem to have the vaguest idea what a ‘shambles’ is. Of course, ‘boorach’ could never properly come to mean ‘a shambles’.” When John Cowan pointed out that “A shambles has been a mess, per the OED2, since at least 1926,” GWP responded, “Exactly, JC. Of course, while most of the English speakers in the world do not remember what ‘a shambles’ actually is, it might be worthy of clarification when students of the language-group do not remember.” I ran across the word today in a text I was editing, which talked about a theater being “in a shambles” after a revolution; I wanted to delete “in,” but realized that that was because my antiquarian mind retained the image of a shambles as an actual building (specifically, a slaughterhouse), and current usage was very different, which I confirmed with a quick straw poll and expect to further confirm in this thread. I also agree with GWP that the history of the word’s usage is worthy of clarification. So I’ll clarify it, and then turn the floor over to the assembled multitudes.

In brief, a shambles (plural in form, treated as singular) was originally a meat market (etymologically, it’s the plural of Middle English schamel ‘vendor’s table, footstool,’ from Old English sceamol ‘stool,’ from Latin scamillum, diminutive of scamnum ‘stool’); it was then used for a slaughterhouse, which is its earliest meaning that is within even vaguely current memory. The metaphorical extension was originally to “place of mass bloodshed” (e.g., a battlefield) and then to “scene of great destruction” (a city after being bombed), and finally our weak modern “mess.” Here are some representative OED citations:

2. †a. In Old English, a table or counter for exposing goods for sale, counting money, etc. Obs.
b. spec. A table or stall for the sale of meat.
1577 V. Leigh Science Surueying D iij b, And in like maner of profites of Bothes, standinges, shambles and tolles or other profits of a wekely market..kept within.
3. a. pl. A place where meat (or occas. fish) is sold, a flesh- or meat-market. ? Now local.
a1410 in York Myst. Introd. 24 (note), All the folks of the salsemaker crafte..without the Flesshchameles.
1636 R. Basset Lives Rom. Emperors 64 He was called of many Macellinus, of the Latine word Macellum a shambles, or butchery.
4. a. pl. The place where animals are killed for meat; a slaughter-house.
1548 N. Udall et al. tr. Erasmus Paraphr. Newe Test. I. John x. 1–5 They bee called to their foode, and not to the fleshe shambles to be killed.
1607 B. Jonson Volpone i. i. 35, I..fat no beasts To feede the shambles.
1726 Swift It cannot rain but it Pours, A Flock of Sheep, that were driving to the Shambles.
1841 Dickens Barnaby Rudge lxxi. 354 He was felled like an ox in the butcher’s shambles.

And in metaphorical senses:

5. a. A place of carnage or wholesale slaughter; a scene of blood.
1641 J. Jackson True Evangelical Temper i. 48 That it may appeare indeed, what bloud-hounds the Papists are, what a Shambles their Church is, consult a grand Witnesse of their own.
1794 S. T. Coleridge Fall Robespierre i. i. 79 I’ve fear’d him, since his iron heart endured To make of Lyons one vast human shambles.
1901 ‘Linesman’ Words by Eyewitness ix. 177 What a shambles the deep valley between Inkweloane and Spitz Kop would have been!
b. pl. In more general use, a scene of disorder or devastation; a ruin; a mess. orig. U.S.
1926 P. H. de Kruif Microbe Hunters iii. iv. 83 Once more his laboratory became a shambles of cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants.
1942 E. Waugh Put Out More Flags ii. 150 Alastair learned, too, that all schemes ended in a ‘shambles’ which did not mean, as he feared, a slaughter, but a brief restoration of individual freedom of movement.
1966 M. R. D. Foot SOE in France viii. 184 Helped the commandos to make a thorough shambles of the main dockyard.
1979 Daily Tel. 5 Sept. 6/6 Haiti remains a dictatorship, its economy in a shambles.

So that’s the history. (Don’t miss the splendid Evelyn Waugh quote from 1942!) Now for the poll: do you prefer to say a very messy place is “a shambles,” “in a shambles,” or “in shambles”?

D-AW in this thread (on tweets from Dinneen’s Irish dictionary) linked to the poem “From The Irish” by Ian Duhig, and it seemed to make an excellent follow-up post. So without further ado:

According to Dinneen, a Gael unsurpassed
in lexicographical enterprise, the Irish
for moon means ‘the white circle in a slice
of half-boiled potato or turnip’. A star
is the mark on the forehead of a beast
and the sun is the bottom of a lake, or well

Well if I say to you your face
is like a slice of half-boiled turnip,
your hair is the colour of a lake’s bottom
and at the centre of each of your eyes
is the mark of the beast, it is because
I want to love you properly, according to Dinneen.

I recommend going to the link so you can read the amusing introduction and hear the whole thing pleasingly read by the author in an accent I am not familiar with.

I mentioned Dinneen‘s Irish dictionary here, and I still mourn my copy gone these thirty years and more, so it’s some consolation that the late lexicographer has a Twitter feed, @AnDuinnineach: “Irish lexicographer, historian, caped-crusader. I’ve got words for things you didn’t even know you needed to say. First published in 1904. WORD.” A recent entry: “sclogtha, a., unable to gasp. Táim sclogtha leis an dtart, I am unable to gasp from thirst.” Enjoy!

Melville said, “To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” Oksana Zabuzhko took for her theme the history of Ukraine from World War II to 2004 (when the “now” sections of the novel are set) as reflected through the life and thoughts of her central character, a journalist named Daryna Goshchynska born in 1965 and trying to find out as much as she can about a resistance fighter who died not long after the war. This could easily have gone badly wrong; the historical elements could have been didactic (as in the less gripping parts of War and Peace) or simple-mindedly nationalistic, the tying of the historical to the personal could have been awkwardly done, the characters could be cardboard figures created purely to illustrate the author’s ideas. None of this is the case. The Museum of Abandoned Secrets justifies its length (almost 700 pages in translation) and ambition with a mix of elements that are convincing in isolation and when mixed together produce a story as complex and unforgettable as any I’ve read in a long time.

This is especially impressive because as far as my ignorant mind was concerned, it came out of nowhere. I knew little about Ukrainian history and nothing about Ukrainian literature beyond the name of Taras Shevchenko. I couldn’t have named a Ukrainian novelist to save my life (one who wrote in Ukrainian, that is—Gogol, of course,wrote in Russian). I started the book (sent to me by the good people at AmazonCrossing) out of curiosity, to see what a Ukrainian novel was like; I had no idea whether I would even finish it. Within thirty pages, after reading about the fate of Daryna’s father (“I was the only evidence that the man had ever existed on this planet”), I was hooked. The convincing first-person voice, moving from one thought to another, from memory to immediate experience, in a vital, eloquent, and earthy way (profanity is frequently and expertly deployed) kept me riveted. I was momentarily disconcerted when the point of view shifted to her lover Adrian, and even more so when his dreams were used as the basis for the wartime elements of the novel, but it turned out she can do a male viewpoint just as convincingly, and the dreams, which might seem an intrusive element of magical realism, do the job well—better, I think, than simply jumping back and forth between past and present (which doesn’t respect the essential mystery of the past) or having the past presented through the memories of a very old person (which would lessen its impact and involve all sorts of distracting “Let me see now, was it … would you like some more tea?” business).

The novel ranges from wartime Lviv to twenty-first century Kiev (making me want to visit both cities), it deals with female friendship and male-female relations (there’s lots of steamy sex) and wartime horror (a primary focus is the hopeless armed resistance against Soviet occupation for some years after the end of the war, something most non-Ukrainian readers, like me, will know nothing about) and the violence and corruption of newly independent Ukraine; it’s a mix of thriller and love story and war story and historical novel, with plot elements cleverly brought in from unexpected sources; but what really makes it work is its strong backbone, a passionate need to bring past and present together in a way that makes sense of individual lives. Here’s a passage that expresses this well:

But Goddammit, shouldn’t someone make it her work to find a story in Vlada’s life? You can’t just let it break and scatter like a string of pearls from a torn thread, can you? No human life should scatter like that, because it would mean that no life was worth anything, not anyone’s; if that’s the way it is, then why are we all still taking up space on the planet?

Again, this taste of insoluble sorrow on my lips—the same as three years ago—and tomorrow the hungover heartburn will parch my lips just like it did then—soda and salt. And this recasting, three years later, of the same plot with different actors in the original roles, strikes me, for some reason, as something incredibly significant, filled with an all but mystical meaning. Lord, what if our whole lives are made up, without us ever noticing, of precisely such repetitions, like a geometric pattern, and that’s where the answer is—the main secret locked in every human life?

I could go on for a long time pointing out excellences, but I’ll just say this novel is more than worth the time it will take to read it, and at $8.97 ($4.99 for the Kindle edition), it’s a downright steal.

Thomas Meaney’s LRB review [archived] of The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, by E.M. Butler (a reprint of her influential 1935 attack on the German worship of Ancient Greece), discusses various German Hellenists; I particularly enjoyed this brief takedown of Heidegger:

No philosopher besides Nietzsche mentioned the Greeks more often in his works, and no one else made such peculiar use of them. He believed the Greek language had privileged access to the nature of reality as it was before its wholeness was fractured by the travesty of Socratic rationalism. He attributed near talismanic properties to certain Greek words – aletheia, noein, legein – and used Greek vocabulary and grammar as tools to displace a modernity that had forgotten the nature of Being. If Germans could cast off 2400 years of error, he suggested, they might find a way back to Being through their own language, using the buried grammar of the Greeks as a guide. Like a Christian preacher parsing the gospels, Heidegger preferred fragments to whole works, and single words to fragments. For him, a word like aletheia contained the hidden sense of knowledge as unforgettingness, something the Romantic poets had intuited. ‘Heidegger’s Greeks do not so much compose literary or philosophical texts,’ the classicist Glenn Most has written, ‘as rather simply enounce to one another these primal philosophical terms. They look at one another, say phusis, and nod slowly.’

I’m sure someone who knows more about philosophy than I do will tell me this is terribly unfair, but I confess I don’t really care. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

I’m almost finished with the Oksana Zabuzhko novel I mentioned here, and it not only makes me want to study Ukrainian, it got me interested enough in Ukrainian history to buy Paul Robert Magocsi’s A History of Ukraine. I remember when the first edition came out and I saw it in a bookstore near Rockefeller Center, where I worked; I was tremendously impressed, but $35 was way out of my price range, so I just paged through it admiringly. Fortunately, Amherst Books had a used (but unmarked) copy for $10, which happens to be exactly my limit, so I grabbed it. (There is a new edition from 2010, but at $54.95—used copies from $42.72—I’m not even going to waste time thinking about it.) Not only is it comprehensive (784 pages) and well written, it has a wide scope (“While this book also traces the evolution of ethnic Ukrainians, it tries as well to give judicious treatment to the many other peoples who developed within the borders of Ukraine, including the Greeks, the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, the Russians, the Jews, the Germans, and the Romanians”). The Amazon page has a quote from Nicholas Riasanovsky’s review that so succinctly sums up some of the book’s virtues that I’ll just reproduce it:

Professor Magocsi overcame these [problems associated with writing history texts] and still other difficulties extremely well, indeed at times brilliantly. His forty-two unobtrusive, usually page-long maps establish a better graphic setting for history than any other textbook I am acquainted with, thus confirming the distinction the author had already earned with his historical atlases. A remarkable, quite unusual, and very successful aspect of the book is the daring inclusion right in the text (although on a distinctive light grey rather than white background) of numerous documents, eyewitness accounts, and other primary sources as well as occasionally some more specialized explanatory material. The marvel is how well these insertions blend with the basic narrative and support it.

One of those light-gray insertions is an essay on “The Meaning of Rus'” that I’ll quote here to give an idea of the magisterial thoroughness and impartiality with which he discusses contested topics:

Whereas controversy continues to rage over the origin of the term Rus’, there is some consensus as to how the term came to be applied to the territory and inhabitants of the Kievan realm. Initially, the term Rus’ was associated with the ruling Varangian princes and the lands under their control. This meant, in particular, the cities of Kiev, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav together with the surrounding countryside. The lands within this larger Kiev-Chernihiv-Pereiaslav triangle become the Rus’ land par excellence.

Beginning with Volodymyr the Great in the late tenth century and, especially, Iaroslav the Wise in the eleventh century, there was a conscious effort to associate the term with all the lands under the hegemony of Kiev’s grand princes. To the concept of Rus’ as the territory of Kievan Rus’ was added another dimension by the Christian inhabitants’ description of themselves collectively as Rus’ (the singular of which term was rusyn, sometimes rusych). Nevertheless, while political and cultural leaders from the various principalities (Galicia-Volhynia, Novgorod, Suzdal’, etc.) may have spoken of their patrimonies as part of the land of Rus’, they often referred to Rus’ as simply a roughly triangular area east of the middle Dnieper River surrounding the cities of Chernihiv, Kiev, and Pereiaslav.

[Read more…]

I regret that my habitual dilatoriness has meant that most of the foreign-language plays at the Globe to Globe site (“Performances of the Globe Theatre’s season of Shakespeare plays interpreted by companies from around the world”) are no longer available, but you can still watch Cymbeline in Juba Arabic, The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Shona, and Pericles in Greek. (I had Measure for Measure in Russian already cued up in a tab from the other day, so I can still watch it, but you probably can’t.) Via MetaFilter.

Frequent commenter Paul sent me a link to Sam Leith’s “In defence of the smiley” (“It is time to give the emoticon the praise it deserves”) and quoted the following paragraph:

Why shouldn’t we speak in praise of emoticons? They have some unique virtues. For a start, they introduce a pictorial element into the written language: something western languages have not had since the days of illuminated manuscripts. That is pleasing. Users of kanji or, ancestrally, hieroglyphics are spoilt in this regard; we have been scanted.

Paul finds the use of “scanted” very peculiar. It seems OK to me (definition 4 in Merriam-Webster is “to provide with a meager or inadequate portion or supply : stint”), but I thought I’d check with the Varied Reader; maybe it’s a US/UK thing?