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Barbara Newman, in her LRB review of Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475, edited by Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, has a nice passage on the medieval idea of grammar:

Grammar, the foundation of the medieval curriculum, covered far more ground than moderns understand … under that rubric. It extended from memorizing phonemes through morphology, syntax, figures of speech, and the avoidance of solecisms all the way to ethics, poetics and literary criticism. … ‘Grammatica’ herself was personified as a matron, sometimes warm and nurturing but more often wielding the birch. In a bizarre but enduringly poplar textbook, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Martianus Capella portrayed her as a dental hygienist with sharp metal instruments: ‘by gentle rubbing she gradually cleaned dirty teeth and ailments of the tongue’ picked up through careless speech. By the late Middle Ages grammar had developed at its furthest reach into a theoretical discipline, called ‘modist’ or ‘speculative grammar’, that treated the modes of signification. Akin to such contemporary fields as linguistics, semiotics and the philosophy of language, it anticipates the theory of universal grammar, more controversially developed by Chomsky.

She goes on to compare medieval grammarians teaching Latin, nobody’s mother tongue, to “the fresh-faced college graduates who today fan out across the globe, teaching English as a Second Language in Tokyo, Budapest or Dubai. But … Latin as a textual language always took priority over speech, even though a more colloquial Latin remained the sole lingua franca by which Germans and Irishmen, Parisians and Bohemians could communicate. … When early grammarians felt the need to compare a Latin construction with examples from another language, they chose Greek (though they seldom really knew it) rather than their own vernaculars.” She has fun with Donatus, who “explained in his elementary textbook that Latin has four genders: masculine, feminine, neuter and common. His sole example of common gender is the noun sacerdos (priest), as every Catholic priest in training learned for a thousand years — but I have yet to find the form haec sacerdos ‘this (female) priest’ in a medieval Latin text.”

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My favorite archivist has appealed to the collective polyglottery of the Languagehat readership and is hoping one of you can translate the Armenian on this lovely document (pdf), a diploma in Armenian from a school Mount Holyoke used to run in Bitlis. She and I will be deeply grateful for any assistance!

Bemused observation. I can’t believe I have all these readers who know obscure Native American languages and Slavic tongues, and not one who can read Armenian!

In the Volitary thread there was some discussion of the merits of Ian McEwan’s prose, focusing on his story in last week’s New Yorker—which I’m happy to say the magazine makes available to the public at large—”Hand on the Shoulder” [archived]. I loved the story and am looking forward to the novel from which it is excerpted (and jamessal, horrified that I hadn’t read McEwan, has sent me a couple of his earlier books for my edification); I provide a paragraph here as a sampler so you can see if you want to read it yourself:

It was a decent summer by English standards, and Tony set a stately pace to the day. We often ate our lunch in the shade of an ancient cotoneaster in the garden. Generally, when he woke from his after-lunch nap, he took a bath and then, if it was warm, he read in a hammock slung between two birch trees. And if it was really hot he sometimes suffered from nosebleeds and had to lie on his back indoors with a flannel and ice cubes pressed to his face. Some evenings, we took a picnic into the woods, with a bottle of white wine wrapped in a crisp tea towel, wineglasses in a cedarwood container, and a flask of coffee. This was high table sur l’herbe. Saucers as well as cups, damask tablecloth, porcelain plates, silverware, and one collapsible aluminum-and-canvas chair—I carried everything without complaint. We never went far along the footpaths, because Tony tired easily. In the evenings, he liked to play opera on an old gramophone, and though he urgently explained the characters and the intrigues of “Aida,” “Così Fan Tutte,” and “L’Elisir d’Amore,” those reedy, yearning voices meant little to me. The quaint hiss and crackle of the blunted needle as it gently rose and fell with the warp of the album sounded like the ether, through which the dead were hopelessly calling to us.

If you’re not fatally put off by a phrase like “high table sur l’herbe,” I urge you to give it a try.

But as you will have discerned by the title of this post, I was struck by one word in particular, cotoneaster. In the first place, I had no idea how to pronounce it, or rather I had a vague idea that turned out to be utterly wrong once I looked it up; it’s /kəˈtoʊniːˈæstər/, either kəTOEnee-aster or kətoenee-ASSter. I don’t know how anyone could conceivably get that from what looks like a jammed-together version of “cotton Easter.” The etymology is equally surprising; historically, it means ‘quince-like,’ the cotone- part being from Latin cotoneum, a variant of cydoneum (malum) ‘quince,’ literally ‘Khaniá (apple),’ as I explained at the end of this post (nine years ago!).

I learned another word here, or rather two:

The United Kingdom had succumbed, one letter announced, to a frenzy of akrasia—which was, Tony reminded me, the Greek word for acting against one’s better judgment. (Had I not read Plato’s Protagoras?) A useful word. I stored it away.

I thought akrasia must be from Greek ‘lack of mixing,’ but it turns out that’s a different akrasia—the OED has it as acrasia “Intemperance, excess (in early use personified); irregular or disorderly behaviour; = acrasy n.”: Etymology: < post-classical Latin acrasia intemperance (1546 or earlier) and its etymon ancient Greek ἀκρασία bad mixture, applied by Hippocrates to meats < ἄκρατος unmixed, untempered, intemperate. The word McEwan is using is the OED’s akrasia “Lack of physical or (esp. in later use) mental strength; weakness of will. Also: the state of tending to act against one’s better judgement”: Etymology: < ancient Greek ἀκρασία impotence, want of self-command < ἀκρατής powerless, without authority, without self-command, incontinent ( < ἀ- a- prefix + κρατός power, strength: see -cracy comb. form) + -ία –ia suffix. They add: “In quot. 1853 Mayne apparently confuses this word and ancient Greek ἀκρασία acrasia n.; compare discussion at that entry.” Well, no wonder—it’s virtually impossible not to confuse them! I can’t say I find it, or them, a useful word, or two useful words.

Via MetaFilter (the post has many other things besides language learning), a Lifehacker essay called “I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How,” by Gabriel Wyner, that you may find interesting. He links to this Foreign Service chart of how hard various languages are to learn; I presume it reflects their vast experience with teaching people those languages, and thus that the times given for language-learning are more or less accurate, but it bothers me that Hebrew is put in Medium (“languages with significant differences from English”) and Arabic in Hard (“languages that are difficult for native English speakers”), the only explanation for the latter being that Arabic “has very few words that resemble those of European languages” and “uses fewer vowels, which can be difficult for those learning to read the language.” Hebrew uses just as few vowels; is there really such a difference in European loanwords that Arabic should take twice as long to learn?

My brother sent me a link to a recording of Cavafy reading reading one of his most famous poems, Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους (“Waiting for the Barbarians”); you can get to it from this page, below the second picture, where it says “The simultaneous recording of Cavafy reading this poem cannot be heard with a Firefox browser, but can be heard independently by clicking here.” He sounds just as one might hope this most tonally complex of poets would sound, both majestic and gossipy. (There follows a translation by Anthony Weir which I don’t especially care for—”Because the Barbarians are expected today/ And the Emperor is waiting to welcome their Führer”? Come on now. Here’s the Edmund Keeley translation, and here’s the Keeley/Sherrard. But, to be fair, it’s very hard to translate Cavafy, as I showed back in 2002.) Thanks, Eric!

Unrelated but not worth a separate post, and I can’t resist pointing it out: the German translation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest is Das Wort für Welt ist Wald. What a great title!

My brother pointed me to a letter in last Sunday’s NY Times Book Review, and since it warmed my heart, I’m sharing it here:

What grabbed my attention in John McWhorter’s review of “Language: The Cultural Tool,” by Daniel L. Everett (April 8), wasn’t the continuing argument about genetics versus culture as the main shaper of language. It was the description of “Language” as “that rare thing: a warm linguistics book.”
Really? Who doesn’t love reading about language? McWhorter himself has written many entertaining volumes about creoles, pidgins and language evolution. Another linguist and popular writer is David Crystal. Then there is Steven Pinker, who writes about mind-language connections.
The list goes on. Right- versus left-branching syntax and arguments about recursion might not sound sexy, but linguistics is full of page-turning stuff. Really.
SUSAN J. BEHRENS
Brooklyn
The writer, a linguist and professor at Marymount Manhattan College, is a co-editor of “Language in the Real World: An Introduction to Linguistics.”

As I’ve said a number of times here at LH, we live in a golden age of well-written books by linguists aimed at the general public, and I’m glad to see it publicized.

Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An have published a very intriguing paper in Psychological Science (April 18, 2012); here‘s the abstract:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

Brandon Keim discusses it at Wired Science; the results make intuitive sense to me, but of course intuition plus whatever they charge for a subway ride these days will get you a ride on the subway, and like the correspondent who sent me the link (thanks, Stuart!), I’m curious to know what the assembled multitudes make of it.

The Japan Times has a nice piece (archived) by Roger Pulvers on the great early Soviet writer Boris Pilnyak (I wrote about him here, and I see I promised to write about his masterpiece, The Naked Year, which I still haven’t done). The Pulvers piece focuses on his visit to Japan and the book he wrote about it, Корни японского солнца (Roots of the Japanese sun), which I’ve been wanting to read ever since Sashura told me his Japanese professor had recommended it. I hadn’t realized he made such a splash in Japan:

The impact of Russian literature on Japan in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) had been immense and was still being felt at the time of Pilnyak’s visit. The Japan-Russian Art Society stated in March 1925: “Cultural intimacy between our two peoples, we are profoundly convinced, will bring enormous good not only to both our countries but also to the whole world.” The society dedicated an entire issue of its journal to Pilnyak’s visit.

Anyway, it’s a nice rundown on Pilnyak’s life and career for those who are unfamiliar with him. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Back in 1947, in a letter to Edward Weeks, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, which was publishing a piece he’d written on Hollywood, Raymond Chandler included a message to be passed on to the copy editor (“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split…”). The copy editor in question turned out to be a woman named Margaret Mutch; she apparently wrote him back, inspiring him to produce the very enjoyable “Lines to a Lady With an Unsplit Infinitive” (“Miss Margaret Mutch she raised her crutch/ With a wild Bostonian cry.// ‘Though you went to Yale, your grammar is frail,’/ She snarled as she jabbed his eye…”). You can read both missives in full at Letters of Note, and I hope you will. (Thanks, Zhoen!)

A Reluctant Babel, by Maxim Edwards, is a somewhat depressing look at the linguistic situation in Russia today. It’s heavy on anecdotes and light on statistics (and given to silly remarks about “languages such as Abaza, Ingush or Kabardian, rightly called some of the most complex in the world,” which “may simply be unteachable except for the most motivated and dedicated of students,” not to mention the even sillier attribution of James Nicoll‘s famous statement that “English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary” to Booker T. Washington, of all people), but it’s still worth a read for bits like “Leysan Khasanova, owner of a Tatar music shop in Tatarstan’s capital of Kazan, is confident that ‘Tatar will always be spoken on the streets of Kazan,’ before pointing out that many young Tatars prefer to speak in Russian amongst each other, and that her own children are not proficient in the language,” and insights like this:

Alyena Ivanova, a Mari language journalist and activist, is proud of the fact that her “entire professional and personal life is conducted in Mari.” This certainly is a remarkable achievement for a language which UNESCO believes faces some serious problems over the coming decades. Yet, the fact remains that Ivanova is only able to do so because her career is intricately linked with Mari cultural and linguistic activities. The day when a factory worker or forester in Mari El can live his life and access all the services he needs completely through the medium of the Mari language is a long way off, if in sight at all. The Irish writer Flann O’Brien wrote in his novel The Poor Mouth of the arrival of Gaelic-language enthusiasts in the protagonist’s impoverished rural village. “‘What,’” they ask, “‘is the point of speaking Gaelic unless one uses it exclusively to discuss Gaelic matters, Gaelically?’” The danger in making the daily use of minority languages an over-politicised issue can be alienating.

Frankly, I’m glad to support anyone who quotes Flann O’Brien.

Oh, and there’s a poster with a legend that might be translated: “Too few words? Don’t be curt!/ Go and study some Udmurt!”

Update. For an even more depressing look at one region (Mari El), see Christopher Culver’s latest post.