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daily-russian-saying-2 doesn’t actually post new sayings every day, but every few days is good enough for me. They tend to go for the pungent and funny:

Мужчина как загар – сначала пристаёт, а потом смывается ‘A man is like a suntan – at first he sticks [to a woman], and then he fades away’
Лучше перебздеть, чем недобздеть ‘Better to over-fart than to fart incompletely’ [i.e., better safe than sorry: “fart” = “be afraid/cautious”]

And while I’m at it, it’s high time I posted Sashura’s Achtung, or Why job-is-done sounds offensive (Russian office slang), which is also pungent and funny:

Асап – [asʌp] from English abbreviation ASAP (as soon as possible). It has acquired verbal forms (проасапить – to do smth asap) and has become part of a paraphrase of the Russian proverb “поспешишь – людей насмешишь” (haste and make yourself a laughing stock, close to ‘no haste, no waste’) – “ноу асап – ноу факап” (no asap – no fuckup). The rhyming here comes from phonetic pronunciation of asap.

A few years ago I wrote about Tomasz Kamusella’s book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe (which sparked quite an interesting discussion); now he has an article in Acta Slavica Iaponica called “The Change of the Name of the Russian Language in Russian from Rossiiskii to Russkii: Did Politics Have Anything to Do with It?” It’s available as a pdf file at this link, where it’s followed by a response (in Russian) by Oksana Ostapchuk, “Русский versus российский: исторический и социокультурный контекст функционирования лингвонимов” [Russkii versus Rossiiskii: Historical and sociocultural context of the functioning of language names]. He explains the genesis of the article in this passage:

As remarked above, between the 1750s and 1830s, the name of Russia (Rossiia) corresponded unambiguously to the name of the Russian language (Rossiiskii), as is the norm in the case of other states across Central and Eastern Europe. I do not know why the name of this language changed to Russkii and why this occurred in the 1830s. Until 2007, I worked at one of Poland’s best centers of Russian studies. I thought that colleagues more knowledgeable than I in the history of Russian and other Slavic languages would have readily provided an explanation. To my surprise, no answers were forthcoming. It appeared that they either did not know of this issue or considered it unimportant. I was flabbergasted […]

And he lays out the essence of the situation here:

The gap between Russkii and Rossiiskii was never very wide in the early modern period, because at that time, it was bridged by intermediary forms that are not current (at least in standard Russian) today. They included the following forms for the Rus’/Muscovian male, namely Rossiianin, Rosiianin, Rusianin, Rusin, Rus, Ruski, and Russkii. A similar series can be extended between Rus’ and Rossiia, namely, Rus’, Rusiia, Rusa, Russa, Roseia, Rosiia, and Rossiia. And likewise, a similar net of words may be hung between the adjectives Russkii and Rossiiskii, that is, Russkii, Rus’kii, Ruskii, Ruski, Roskii, Rosskii, Rosiiskii, and Rossiiskii.
This plethora of forms and their varied and variously overlapping meanings are a testimony to the natural variability of a language before a standard form is imposed on it with authoritative dictionaries and grammars that constitute the normative basis for any printed matter in a standard language (in the Western meaning of this word) and for school textbooks published in it. […]
But as evidenced by the titles of the Russian dictionaries recorded by Stankiewicz, in the course of the standardization of Russian during the second half of the eighteenth century, a consensus was reached. The state was dubbed Rossiia, its population, Rossiiane, and the language, Rossiiskii. This consensus began to unravel in the 1830s and 1840s, and was definitively broken by the 1850s. It was replaced with Russkii for the empire’s population and its language, while the polity’s name remained the same as before, Rossiia.

His proposed solution involves the Russianization of Poland after the Uprising of 1830, and I won’t try to summarize it here; I’ll just quote a couple of footnotes so you can see how much fascinating detail is involved (if, of course, you’re fascinated by this kind of detail). Here’s one:

[Read more…]

Frequent commenter Zythophile is an expert on (and fan of) beer, as his nom de blog implies (Wikipedia: “The word zythos is a Greek version of an Egyptian word for beer”), and his website is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and arcana of that delicious beverage. His latest post begins with the mystery of “a pub in the small market town of Baldock called the Pretty Shades” (it turns out that shades is, to quote the OED, “a name for wine and beer vaults with a drinking-bar, either underground or sheltered from the sun by an arcade”) and goes on to an exhaustive catalog and explication of the various terms for the parts of a traditional British drinking establishment; it includes a 1960 “glossary of bars” (divided into “Southern Usage” and “Northern Usage”) and has glorious illustrations. Many thanks to AJP for linking it in this thread.

I happened on the OED entry for Marrism (revised December 2000), and I thought it was so well done, concisely presenting a fairly difficult concept, that I wanted to share it here (along with the first few, very well chosen, citations):

The body of Marxist linguistic theories put forward by Marr and his followers (esp. I. I. Meshchaninov), in which language was regarded as monogenetic (with all languages developing from four elements, sal, roš, jon, and ber) and as belonging to social class rather than nationality (being, in Marxist terms, part of the social and economic superstructure rather than the base); advocacy of such theories.

Marrism dominated Soviet linguistics after Marr’s death until it was denounced by Stalin in 1950.

1950 Archivum Linguisticum 2 116 The quintessence of Marrism, he [sc. B. Serebrennikov] tells us, resides in four fundamental theses, viz. the four elements as the source of the world’s vocabularies, linguistic growth by hybridisation, stadial evolution, and the semantic transformation of primitive totem-names.

1950 Archivum Linguisticum 2 118 It is he [sc. V. Vinogradov] who summarises the three existing attitudes to Marr among Soviet scholars, viz. (1) that Marrism is Marxism in linguistics, [etc.].

1963 V. Kiparsky in Current Trends in Linguistics 1 94 From 1925 to World War II, when the only officially accepted linguistic school in Soviet Russia was Nikolaj Marr’s ‘Japhetology’, later simply called ‘Marrism’, there was no interest..in Slavic languages.

1966 B. Collinder in H. Birnbaum & J. Puhvel Anc. Indo-European Dial. 199 Marrism, which was officially encouraged in Russia for political reasons, has raged as a kind of Asiatic flu in some European universities west of the Iron Curtain.

The etymology is excellent too:

< the name of Nikolaj Jakovlevič Marr (1865–1934), Georgian-born Russian linguist, archaeologist, and ethnographer + –ism suffix, probably after Russian marrizm (c1930).
Until the correspondence in Pravda that led to the discrediting of Marr, his theories were officially referred to in Russian as novoe učenie o jazyke the new teaching on language; Marr himself had called his approach jafet(id)ologija Japhet(id)ology or jafetičeskaja teoriija Japhetic theory. The term marrizm does not appear to have been used by Stalin in his contributions to the debate in 1950.

The one (mild) criticism I would make is that they don’t explain why the theory was called “Japhetic” (to quote Wikipedia, “Marr adopted the term ‘Japhetic’ from Japheth, the name of one of the sons of Noah, in order to characterise his theory that the Kartvelian languages of the Caucasus area were related to the Semitic languages of the Middle East (named after Shem, Japheth’s brother)”), but that’s more than made up for by their unparsimonious decision to include the four primordial syllables, one of my earliest memories from the study of linguistics (I remember them in the order “sal, ber, yon, rosh”) and a truly inspired piece of crackpottery. The sad thing is that Marr (whose father was a Scot and his mother a Georgian; according to Wikipedia, neither of them understood Russian) was a perfectly good Orientalist scholar before a newfound obsession with language cracked his pot, as it has done for so many.

I’ve just started Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents, by Boris Gasparov, and it’s already looking like an excellent read. Saussure was started on the path to linguistics by Adolphe Pictet, a pioneer I must have heard about when I was first learning the history of Indo-European studies but whom I’d long forgotten; since I myself was set on that same path by my fascination with dictionary etymologies, I thought I’d pass along this paragraph from page 20:

When Saussure first met Pictet—during summers in Vufflens, where they were neighbors—he was full of enthusiasm for the “magic” of etymology. According to Saussure’s own account, he caught the etymological fever from his maternal uncle, whose two hobbies—pursued “without a method, but with a wealth of ideas”—were building yachts after a mathematical system of his own devising and making etymologies; as Saussure noted wryly, both tended to sink equally fast (Saussure 1960 [1903]: 16-17). (This healthy irony notwithstanding, Saussure never lost his own passion for venturesome etymologies.)

He goes on to discuss the fifteen-year-old Saussure’s attempt to reduce all Proto-Indo-European syllables to twelve proto-roots (e.g., RAK represented a proto-idea of “violent power,” on the basis of Latin rex ‘king,’ German Rache ‘vengeance,’ etc.); he adds, “It is curious the extent to which this naive exercise recalls Velimir Khlebnikov‘s attempt to create a universal poetic language some forty years later, an intellectual event that (alongside Saussure’s Course) had a major impact on Jakobson‘s theory of phonological universalia,” which shows the value of having a Russian write this book.

One odd toponymic note: on page 16, Gasparov says the Saussure family “originated in Lotharingy”; I had never encountered this anglicized form of Lotharingia [or rather Lorraine] before, and as far as Google Books can tell, this is only the fifth time it’s been used in English (the others being in 1913, 1975, 1999, and 2009).

This twelve-minute YouTube clip (from Mun2tv—”mundos tv,” get it?) is one of the best filmed accounts of language use I’ve seen, and it’s got Edward James Olmos and Gloria Trevi to boot. The first half is about naco ‘common, vulgar, tacky (person)” or ‘real Mexican,’ depending on your point of view, and the second half about pocho ‘person of Mexican descent perceived as identified with the U.S. rather than Mexico.’ Both terms are offensive unless used as self-identification; it’s great to hear ordinary people parsing the subtleties of how class intersects with language, and especially great to hear people proudly claiming their own identity. I especially love the closing line: “Yeah, I’m a pocho, y qué? or: y what?” Via MetaFilter, where commenter Joakim Ziegler points out:

I’ve heard people use just plain “indio” as a synonym for “naco”, even as an adjective (adjectives and noun tend to have fluent boundaries in Spanish), so people say “¡Qué indio!”. Which I find incredibly offensive.

Oh, and there’s also the brief, hilarious “How to Curse Like a Mexican.”

At Slate, “Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo discuss the widespread belief that other languages are spoken more rapidly than your own”; it’s a podcast, but they sensibly provide a full transcript for people like me who prefer to take in information visually. I’ll give you the key paragraph and let you read the rest over there:

What they found was that the languages with the longer blocks of text, like Spanish, were spoken faster and the languages with the shorter blocks of text, like English and Chinese, were spoken slower – so that the rate of communicating information was approximately the same.

Makes sense to me.

I can’t resist passing on this wonderful piece by David Bentley Hart about “the inimitable Irish writer Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939)”:

There has never been another literary figure remotely comparable to “the divine Amanda” (whose real name was Anna Margaret Ross, née McKittrick). She was, many discriminating readers believe, at once the single most atrocious writer who ever lived and also one of the most mesmerizingly delightful. She was supremely talentless—she was wholly incapable of producing a single intelligent or well-formed sentence—and yet her incompetence was so sui generis that it constituted a kind of genius.

Most bad writers, after all, tend to be bad in only the most boringly conventional and drearily predictable ways. But the joy of reading Amanda McKittrick Ros is all but inexhaustible. In the realm of bad literature, she was a pioneer of the spirit, tirelessly exploring new frontiers: a true innovator, prodigious and unique. No mere hack could have perfected a style of such horrendous and delirious originality.

“Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”

(Irene Iddesleigh)

A prose master to rival the genius of William McGonagall—it’s a dream come true! Read the whole thing, and don’t be one of those of those “critic crabs” she called “evil-minded snapshots of spleen.” If you can’t say anything nice, let your frame shake to chorus a thirsty sob.

I haven’t had time to investigate this as much as I’d like (curse these 92-page bibliographical articles I have to edit!), but I wanted to share it with the assembled multitudes; anyone interested in Pushkin and his era will want to bookmark Pushkin Review / Пушкинский вестник, a bilingual journal put out by the North American Pushkin Society (“an international association of scholars who are engaged in research on the life and works of Alexander Pushkin” and “a constituent member of the International Pushkin Society”). A look at the titles under the headings “Latest” and “Popular” on the upper right should give you an idea of the scope. (If someone sent me the link, I’m afraid I’ve lost track of who it was, but my hat is off to you!)

BBC News had an uncharacteristically good piece on language by the delightfully named Cordelia Hebblethwaite; it discusses how “British English is invading America” without trying to hype the subject excessively, including sensible quotes by Jesse Sheidlower (who calls it a “very small, but noticeable” trend) and Bill Kretzschmar, professor of English at the University of Georgia (“while the spike in use of some British terms may look dramatic, it is often because they are rising from a very low base. Most are used ‘very infrequently’, he says”). There are quite a few quotes from that personable lexicographer Kory Stamper (don’t miss her blog harm·less drudg·ery):

One new entrant into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2012 was gastropub (a gentrified pub serving good food), which was first used, according to Kory Stamper, in London’s Evening Standard newspaper in 1996, and was first registered on American shores in 2000.

“The British pub is a very different critter from an American bar,” she says, but bars with good beer and food are springing up in many cities in the US, and the British term is sometimes used to describe them.

Twee (excessively dainty or cute) is another “word of the moment”, says Stamper, as is metrosexual (a well-groomed and fashion-conscious heterosexual man) which “took off like wildfire”, after it was used in the American TV series Queer Eye. There was even a backlash against it – a sure sign, she says, that the word had “absolutely made its way into the American vernacular”.

There are lots of good examples, and even some historical background. Frankly, the only thing that bothered me was the (to me, very surprising) objection to such borrowings on the part of Geoffrey Nunberg, who as a linguist should surely take a more detached view. What on earth is wrong with borrowing, a process that is as inevitable as sound change? Even Jesse Sheidlower (American editor at large of the OED), while not objecting to them en masse, says anyone who says bespoke is just “showing off” (assuming, of course, he was accurately quoted). Hey, people are like magpies, they pick up words that strike their ear and insert them into their conversation; you can call it “showing off” if you like, but that seems peculiarly hostile to me.

I should point out that Nunberg has a Language Log post complaining about the journalist’s talking about him “snapping” and “quivering” with “revulsion”; I understand his irritation at being presented in that way, but since he says she described him, “accurately, as generally deploring the practice,” my point is not affected.

While I’m on the subject of journalism about language, remember Quentin Atkinson’s Science paper about how language came out of Africa (see my irritated post about it)? Well, there’s a nice short takedown by Magnus Pharao Hansen in Anthropology News; don’t miss it if you have any interest in the subject.