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In hopes of enticing slawkenbergius to share more of his hard-won knowledge, herewith a couple more language-related anecdotes from Benson Bobrick (see yesterday’s post). First, on the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689:

The talks got under way on August 12, and were conducted through interpreters in Latin, with the Chinese relying on two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Francis Gerbillon and Thomas Pereyra (both long resident in Peking), and the Russians (for form’s sake) on Andrei Belobotskii, a university-educated Pole, although Golovin was fluent in Latin himself.

(Russian Wikipedia says that Belobocki, as his name would be spelled in Polish, was actually named Jan, but Google says “Your search – Jan Belobocki – did not match any documents.”) It makes sense that Latin was used for an international conference in the seventeenth century, but I’ll bet not many people would have guessed the Russians and Chinese would have so employed it. And here’s a bit on the unfortunate Dembei, a Japanese merchant clerk who was shipwrecked and floated to Kamchatka, where he was rescued from the Kamchadals by Vladimir Atlasov:

Atlasov brought him to Anadyrsk, from where he was conveyed under escort to Moscow in 1701 and presented to Peter the Great. Peter made him the nucleus of a Japanese language school in the capital, but despite a promise to the contrary, never allowed him to return home. Eventually, he was baptized under the name of Gabriel, but lived out his days in profound melancholy in St. Petersburg — the first casualty of Russia’s chronically troubled relations with Japan.

(I imagine slawkenbergius will object to the editorializing about “Russia’s chronically troubled relations with Japan.”)

From my latest reading, Benson Bobrick’s East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia, this striking anecdote about early Russian contacts with China:

In pursuit of the commercial bounty that might flow from relations with such a highly developed state, Ivan Petlin, Russia’s first envoy to China in 1618, had returned with a letter of invitation to trade. But unfortunately the Russians were unable to find anyone to translate it until 1675! That lapse in linguistic competence within the Russian foreign service had such drastic consequences for their later relations that seldom has the lack of a little academic knowledge meant so much. For even as hostilities arose, the negotiation of a bilateral trade agreement — the Kremlin’s original objective — remained the principal motive behind Russia’s bellicose acts.

A correspondent writes, apropos of teaching kids songs like “Frere Jacques” and “Alouette”:

The latter (Alouette) is bringing back memories: specifically, I recall vaguely from my childhood in l’Acadie that speakers of Quebecois French would often end a long list with “alouette, alouette” (which is how the verse ends, after a long list of the parts of the bird that the singer plans to pluck), as a humorous way of saying “well, that was a long list, wasn’t it?” In this respect, the phrase “alouette, alouette” could be considered the Quebecois French equivalent of “and a partridge in a pear tree,” which you hear used in English for exactly the same thing, and which has its origins in a similarly structured counting-rhyme.
In our house, the Aramaic phrase “chad gadya, chad gadya” (“one little goat, one little goat”) often serves the same function. It comes from the Passover song of the same name, and it holds the same position in the song as the phrases “alouette, alouette” and “and a partridge in a pear tree,” i.e., that of last term in a long list of counted items; but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else do this, in English or Hebrew, so I don’t know whether it constitutes a third example. I suppose it would be too much to ask for there to be other counting-rhymes in other languages which have given rise to similar phrases – but maybe you could poll the LH readership to see, assuming you think it’s an interesting question too?

I do, and I welcome all contributions.

A nice post by Ben Dolnick (on the NY Times Opinionator blog [archived]) describing how he overcame a Vonnegut-inspired contempt for the semicolon and learned to appreciate it: “But I can’t agree that semicolons represent absolutely nothing; they represent, for me anyway, the pleasure in discovering that no piece of writing advice, however stark, however beloved its deliverer, should ever be adopted mindlessly.” Thanks, Paul! (Semicolons previously on LH: 2004, 2008, 2009.)

John McPhee’s New Yorker piece “Editors & Publisher: The name of the subject shall not be the title” [archived] is a delightful reminiscence, and the magazine’s blog has Mary Norris’s “Dropping the F-Bomb,” which points out that McPhee “broke new ground in this piece by using ‘fuck’—as verb, noun, adjective, and interjection—fourteen times in a single paragraph” and discusses other aspects of the magazine’s battle (now, happily, over) against profanity, as well as the proposed “‘activating’ hyphen” in star-fucker (which I would, in any case, write as one word).

And on the Russian front, don’t miss Sashura’s post on the jargon used by Russian office workers, which includes this classic:

Фуй – fui, from FYI (for your information) read phonetically, with the English ‘y’ read as the similarly looking “у” [u, or u:]. This one is wonderful, because ‘fui’ is not only a slightly archaic interjection of disapproval or disgust, but also a mask-word for the very powerful, unprintable swear-word “хуй” (khui – cock). BFM says фуй is widely used in office correspondence.

A correspondent writes:

I am fascinated by the way chador has entered other languages but with different meanings, eg in Serbian it means tent (šator), in Indonesian bed-linen (cadar). Does anyone have or know of a comprehensive list?

An excellent question! The sources of all these far-flung words are Turkish çadır ‘tent’ and its etymon, Persian chādor ‘tent; chador‘; the first cousin that came to my mind was Russian шатёр [šatyor] ‘tent,’ about which Vasmer says:

шатёр, род. п. -тра́, укр. ша́тер, шатро́, др.-русск. шаторъ (Нестор, Жит. Бориса и Глеба; см. Абрамович 10), шатьръ (Ипатьевск. летоп., Георг. Амарт.; см. Истрин 3, 346), сербск.-цслав. шатьръ σκηνή, болг. ша́тър, сербохорв. ша̀тор “шатер, палатка”, ша̑тра “прилавок, лавка”, словен. šátor, слвц. šiator, польск. szatr м., szatra ж. “цыганский шатер”.
ORIGIN: Древнее заимств. из тюрк.; ср. казах. šаtуr “палатка”, тур., азерб., уйг., тат., алт. čаdуr “шатер, палатка”, шор. šаdуr, саг., койб. sаdуr (Радлов 3, 1903 и сл.; 4, 387, 969, 972). Первоисточником является перс. čаtr “заслон, палатка”, др.-инд. cháttram “заслон”; см. Мелиоранский, ИОРЯС 10, 4, 134; Мелих, ZfslPh 4, 96 и сл.; Бернекер I, 133; Мi. ТЕl. I, 270; Гомбоц 115 и сл.; UJb. 8, 271. Ввиду наличия š- Мелих (там же) предполагает венг. посредство.

What puzzles me is that he derives the Turkish word from Persian čаtr, which my dictionaries say means ‘umbrella’ but which he defines as ‘screen, tent,’ rather than from chādor, and that he derives the Persian word from Sanskrit cháttram, which he defines as ‘screen’ but which my Sanskrit dictionary says is an alternate reading of chāttram ‘spindle’—other sources say or imply that the Persian word is of unknown origin.
Other cousins I’ve turned up are Hungarian sátor ‘tent,’ Greek τσαντίρι [tsa(n)díri] “[a gipsy’s] tent” (which makes me wonder if Kalderash Romani tsera ‘tent’ is related), and Albanian çadër ‘umbrella.’ With that, I throw the floor open and welcome further variants as well as elucidation of the interrelationships of all these words.
Addendum. Earlier discussion (thanks, MMcM!).

My eight-year-old grandson was over here playing Scrabble this afternoon; we let him use the Scrabble dictionary to look for words because it’s good for his vocabulary, and when I walked in he had just played the word zoril (and was winning handily). Not knowing the word, I looked it up in Webster’s Third New International and discovered that it was either a striped muishond or a North African muishond related to the striped muishond. This was not a great help, so I looked up muishond and learned that it was “either of two southern African weasels that are black with white stripes and that emit a fetid odor when disturbed.” All right then! But the interesting thing is that both odd-looking names are perfectly transparent when you know their etymologies; zoril, more commonly zorilla, is from a diminutive of Spanish zorro ‘fox,’ and muishond (pronounced /ˈmeɪs(h)ɔnt/ “MACE-haunt” because it’s Afrikaans in origin, from “transferred and spec. uses of Dutch muishond weasel, stoat”) is literally “mouse-hound”—in fact, the OED sends you to a separate entry mouse-hunt “An animal that hunts mice; spec. a weasel, a small stoat,” an earlier borrowing from Dutch (< muus mouse n. + hont dog; apparently altered after hunt) that goes back to the fifteenth century and was used by Shakespeare (“Moth: I you haue beene a mouse hunt in your time”).

As is traditional while I’m digesting my birthday curry, I’ll post about the gifts of possible interest to LH readers. Pride of place goes to Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which I’ve been wanting to read for years. Serge is one of the few revolutionaries I genuinely respect as a person (I’ve posted about him here and here); I totally understand the anecdote with which Adam Hochschild opens his foreword:

Some years ago I was at a conference of writers and journalists from various countries. A group of us were talking, and someone asked that each person around the room say who was the political writer whom he or she most admired. When my turn came, I named Victor Serge. A man I did not know abruptly leapt to his feet, strode across the room, and embraced me.

Other gifts: Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, The Uncensored Boris Godunov (an edition with translation and notes of Pushkin’s original version of the story, not the famous one Mussorgsky set as an opera), Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms (Aragon, Etruria, the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies, the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine! I love that kind of thing), and Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd. Among the movies are a couple of recent Romanian comedies (12:08 East of Bucharest and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), not to mention Kieslowski’s Dekalog, which I saw every chance I got when I was living in NYC and am thrilled to own. Oh, and a wonderfully contemplative and soothing piano-trio CD called Rruga, which is the Albanian word for ‘the street/road/path’ (the liner notes say “Not wanting to call it ‘The Journey’ or ‘The Path’, too many of those in the discography, Vallon asked Albanian singer Elina Duni … for translation suggestions”). And here, as a true LH lagniappe, is the etymology of rrugë as given in Basic Albanian Etymologies, by Martin E. Huld:

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Ben Zimmer has a Boston Globe column on a phrase and a custom both unknown to me, and I’m glad to know about them now. The phrase, “parade of horribles,” is used by lawyers “typically as a put-down used by one side in a dispute to dismiss opponents’ concerns about a ruling’s negative effects,” and it derives from an actual parade:

It all goes back to the country’s oldest military organization, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, chartered in 1638. Members of the company, colloquially known in the Boston area as “the ancients and honorables,” would parade around in uniform, though the dress code used to be a bit lax: Members could wear the uniforms of any regiments to which they were once attached. As a result, as Steven T. Byington explained in a 1940 article in the journal American Speech, “The variegated display of diverse uniforms on unathletic figures looked comic to a visitor who had not been brought up to reverence the Company’s high status.”

All the pomp and circumstance of the company was ripe for satire, and in the mid-19th century “the ancients and honorables” began to receive the burlesque treatment, with their name playfully transformed into “the antiques and horribles.” The first “antiques and horribles” parade that I can find mentioned in the newspapers of the time took place in Lowell on July 4, 1851. As the Boston Daily Atlas reported afterwards, the mock military company wore outrageously varied uniforms, featuring “everything that was grotesque and ludicrous.” As news got around, other towns were inspired to put on their own processions of “the antiques and horribles,” though the name was frequently shortened simply to “the horribles.”

Both the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and the “horribles” that they inspired, persist in Boston-area festivities to this day. The company will be seen marching proudly through the streets of Boston this Fourth of July, in uniforms that are much more presentable than in the old days.

Isn’t that great? Zimmer goes on to explain that the legal use was begun by a New Englander: “Thomas Reed Powell was born in Richfield, Vt., in 1880 and went on to Harvard Law School, becoming a noted legal observer. One of his favorite expressions was ‘parade of imaginary horribles,’ which appeared in his writing as early as 1921.” There’s much more at the link, which I encourage you to visit.

I was irritated, while reading the “Talk of the Town” section of the latest New Yorker, to see Nick Paumgarten start his piece thus: “Last week, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, deployed her considerable leverage, as the euro-zone Zuckermutter, to persuade Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, to move up by several hours their big Friday whither-Europe meeting in Rome so that she could make it to Poland in time to attend that evening’s quarter-final match in the European soccer championship, between Germany and Greece.” I was irritated because I didn’t know what he meant by Zuckermutter; morpheme by morpheme, it translates as “sugar-mother,” but such a word does not appear to be a part of German any more than it is of English—it is not in my unabridged dictionary, and the only hit Google Books finds is from “Prinzessin Ilse: ein Märchen aus dem Harzgebirge” (1887), by Marie Petersen: “Vor mehr als zwanzig Jahren eine Rübe Zuckermutter! — das mußt Du erst beweisen!” My guess is that Merkel is being portrayed as a woman who doles out sweets (i.e., bailouts), but where did he get the idea of conveying this concept via a nonexistent German word that will be a mystery to 99.9% of his readership, and why did the magazine think it was a good idea to indulge him in it?

And in the process of googling, I found this story (pdf) from the New York Times of February 25, 1901:

“ZUCKER MUTTER” IS DEAD
East Side Tradition Has It that She Was 114 Years Old.
Little Old Candy Seller Long a Familiar Figure to Hester Street School Children.
There will be mourning in Hester Street when the little boys and girls of the east side troop to school to-day. A familiar figure that always greeted them from the door stoop opposite the schoolhouse will be missing. For the little “Zucker Mutter,” as they called her, is no more. She was buried yesterday in Washington Cemetery, and so to-day the little boys and girls will have to go without their “Ingbus” and the candied orange peel that she knew so well how to make.

The story goes on to tell how Leah Abrams (for that was her name) had come over from “Kovner” (presumably Kovno, in the Russian Empire, now Kaunas, in Lithuania), where she had married the prosperous Abraham Abrams: “But oppression came, and the family were forced to leave the land of their fathers.” He and their son both died, but their daughter married Isaac Drukmann, “and for a while the family had some comfort.”

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