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From the Swiss Review (thanks, Paul!), a report by Miriam Hutter (English, French, German) on a National Library exhibition on the country’s dialects; it’s superficial but has interesting bits:

In Grisons, for example, 40 years after its introduction as a common written language for the five Romansh dialects, Rumantsch Grischun is still not accepted as such by everyone. Dialects attempt to outdo one another in ­German-speaking Switzerland. The most beautiful, popular or attractive Mundart is chosen using surveys that are not always very well-founded. […] Hardly anyone now speaks dialects in French-speaking Switzerland but that does not mean that the French-speaking Swiss do not have anything to contribute to the debate on dialects. Many of them find it disappointing and frustrating that their knowledge of German acquired at school can barely be used in conversation with their compatriots in German-speaking Switzerland. The calls by politicians from French-speaking Switzerland for the use of more standard language in public life and in particular in German-language national television and radio programmes were buried without a trace this spring – by the mainly German-speaking parliament.

Don’t miss the links at the bottom right, where you can hear samples, and for heaven’s sake don’t miss the translation (click on the display between the introduction and the start of the article proper) of some dialogue from Some Like It Hot into Italian dialect (“Ho cambia nom, a ma ciamávi «Zúcchero. Kandinski»./ Polacca?/ Sí! Sum nassüda in una famiglia da sonadò”)!

A month ago I posted on Rachel May’s The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, which I had just started; now that I’ve finished it, I’m basking in the pleasure of having found a book that explains in such detail a strong but inchoate feeling I’ve had for as long as I’ve been reading Russian literature: that Russian is strikingly, perhaps uniquely, ill served by its translators. When I’ve tried to talk about this, I’ve babbled to people about the “feel” of Russian dialogue, which seems to be so hard to reproduce in English, but it’s not just the dialogue—everything but the most formal writing has something of that feel, something of the sound and affect of spoken Russian. The basic concept is that of the “personal narrator,” the voice that tells the story and partakes of the rhetorical devices of the spoken language, a voice which is almost always muted or done away with in translation, replaced by the impersonal narrative voice that translators seem more comfortable with. May starts off Chapter Two with this very apposite quote from Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (I presume in her own translation): “You must know that for the most part Akaky Akakievich expresses himself in prepositions, adverbs, and, finally, the kinds of particles of speech that have positively no meaning whatsoever.” She continues:

Little words that have “positively no meaning whatsoever” abound in human speech and, often, in literary narration. These are the fillers and signals of register; terms of endearment, respect, condescension, or disrespect; markers of phatic and conative functions; or simple idiosyncracies that distinguish living speech from expository prose. Generally defined as lacking semantic content but fulfilling some communicative function, these elements of language rarely advance a plot but immeasurably increase the richness of the telling. Unlike the pristine diction of expository prose, prose with an abundance of “meaningless” sounds and phrases suggests palpable human voices and allows them to interact and interpenetrate one another’s spheres. As a literary device, they have had great proponents in many languages (William Faulkner, Laurence Sterne, Mark Twain, to name some anglophone examples). But nowhere have they had so rich a flowering as in Russian literature, where they are used to set up layer upon layer of meaning within the narration and between narrator, character, and reader. Why “must we know” that Akaky Akakievich used meaningless particles in his speech? First, because they establish the insecurity and insignificance of his character, but also because they identify the narrator with this pathetic creature. After all, the narrator, too, uses an abundance of fillers (you must know; for the most part; and, finally; positively; whatsoever). Thus Akaky Akakievich becomes Everyman, his voice merely a somewhat less articulate echo of the generalized voice that tells of his miserable condition.

Unfortunately, translators tend to consider semantics first, and “meaningless” phrases suffer as a result…

The bulk of the book consists of examples from Russian literature given in the original and one or more translations, with discussions of exactly what the translators have failed to preserve; I’ll quote here some of the general passages that describe the kind of things at issue. On deixis:

When used in third-person narration, such expressions as “now,” “here,” “many years ago” pinpoint the narrator as present at the scene. They also suggest that the audience is physically accessible to the narrator and that it has a definite viewpoint. The effect is to imitate the oral speech situation, in which a gesture is enough to establish a place and time. Although English has most of the same deictics as Russian, this is a feature of narrative language that is often omitted or changed in translation. […]

The last three examples in 2.3 have in common one Russian deictic term that does not have an English equivalent. The Russian word vot is defined as indicating proximity or immediacy or adding expressiveness to a phrase. It can mean “right here,” or “there,” or even “look” or “see,” or it can simply be emphatic. Twice I have used “now” in its place, to reflect the sense of immediacy vot imparts. This term is so common in Russian and so difficult to approximate in English that translators tend to ignore it. The evidence seems to show, however, that along with it they discard other deictic expressions and the entire sense of a narrator’s presence. In isolated instances translators are probably right to omit it, because the English alternatives often sound stilted. But when vot is used as part of a larger tendency to personalize the narrative voice, translators need to plumb the expressive resources of English.

On “interjections and parentheticals”:

Trifonov’s narrator’s use of vprochem (“however,” or, here, “of course”) is an example of another set of intrusive elements available to authors wishing to personalize narrative voice. These include such signals of subjectivity as modal particles, parentheticals, interjections, and some qualifiers (the last three are known, collectively, in Russian as vvodnye slova, or “parenthetic words”). […] Thus, they are all essential to narrative voice. However, because many of the modal particles appear frequently in prose without any apparent semantic content, it is common practice in translation simply to omit them. In isolated instances their omission makes little difference, but if they disappear throughout a text this can have profound effects on “the definition of communicative relationships.”

And perhaps the most basic of all, “colloquial register”:

The most colorful signal of a personal narrator is the use of colloquial language. In contrast to standard “literary” Russian, the colloquial register carries the suggestion of an oral, speaking storyteller. Soviet literature of the post-Stalin era essentially reintroduced this register into Russian literature after a long hiatus, and as an innovation it had both artistic and political impact. However, it has been one of the hardest features of this literature to capture in translation. Kornei Chukovsky lamented the loss of prostorechie (common or substandard speech) in translations of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day: “As you see, it’s a pattern. It turns out that not only Ralph Parker but all, positively all, of the translators flatly refused to translate prostorechie. And their Italian colleagues joined them in this” […]

The English language contributes to this trend because it lends itself less well to approximating oral speech in writing. The absence in English of an equivalent for vot, for example, removes an essential tool for expressing immediacy. Russian shifts tenses and even person more easily than English does, making for a more natural range of interjections and syntactic breaks. And there is evidence that the colloquial register is more accessible to Russian writers, since Russian has a more live sense of the distinction between oral and written styles. […] A typical page from a Russian dictionary has frequent notations of register, with nearly a third of the definitions or examples marked “colloquial” or “common.” In sum, the colloquial register is well recognized and readily available to Russian writers who wish to create a casual atmosphere for their narration without using idiosyncratic or regionally distinct terms; it is possible to evoke a generalized storyteller who imparts a sense of oral narration but does not interfere personally in the story.

By contrast, English has a rich dialectal system but generally lacks a standard, or at least standardly acknowledged, colloquial vocabulary. (We even lack a satisfactory term for prostorechie, since “vulgar” has come to mean “obscene.”) The Oxford English Dictionary does not distinguish colloquial from literary terms, combining them all under the rubric of “common words” (“which belong to the language common to literature and everyday speech”). Slang, dialectal, and specialized terms may be singled out, but the register of unconstrained speech is not recognized. This may explain, in part, why translators often do not seek to use it[…].

That’s just the second chapter; the third and fourth are equally rich, and of course I’m omitting all the examples that give weight to the generalities, but I hope I’ve given some idea of how valuable the book is. One can quibble with some of the details of her discussion of individual sentences, but I don’t think one can successfully argue with her main point: translators need to do more to use the resources available in English to convey the feel of the Russian text.

Back in 2007 I posted about a site that had “a plan to put online the entire run of Sovremennye zapiski [the most important emigré “thick journal,” in which Nabokov published his great Russian works]. Right now only the first issue is available, but it’s enough to whet my appetite.” Alas, not only did they never put any more issues online, but now the entire site is gone. Nothing daunted, I am now placing my hopes on archives de l’émigration russe, which has (so far) no Sovremennye zapiski, but some wonderful periodicals from between the wars—Сатирикон, Дни, Иллюстрированная Россия, Рубеж… I supplicate whatever gods there be to prosper this venture and expand its reach.

Joel of Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from A Story of Vietnam, by Truong Buu Lam (Outskirts, 2010), and his post on the “Late Demise of Classical Chinese in Vietnam” was very interesting to me—I hadn’t realized Chinese was used as late as it was. He starts out talking about how the French encouraged the use of quoc ngu to replace Chinese characters, then says:

It was, however, only toward the beginning of the 1920s that the Vietnamese warmed up to it and used it readily in their every day activities. In the early years of the twentieth century, Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chau Trinh still wrote all their works in classical Chinese. Even in 1924, in Paris, Phan Chau Trinh composed his many letters asking the French minister of Colonies to allow him to go home in the purest style of classical Chinese. The Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc [東京義塾 Eastern Capital Free School, named for Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Tokyo Gijuku (later Keio)] published their classic material in Chinese. The proclamation of the Thai Nguyen mutiny was written in Chinese. Classical Chinese survived at least to the middle of the century for two reasons. The last Confucian examinations were held only in 1918 in Hue, and the royal court of Annam will continue to use Chinese in its official documents until 1945, naturally with a great deal of translations into quoc ngu and French, for, to my knowledge, the last Vietnamese emperor had an exclusively French education.

(See Joel’s post for Wikipedia links and some examples of Vietnamese renditions of Classical Chinese.)

Ben Yagoda has a very interesting investigation (at the Lingua Franca blog) of the history of the suddenly popular phrase “the long game” (as in “He was not someone with a flair for the long game—for the week-in, week-out slog of bringing colleagues around to his views”). His findings:

Using Google Books as my Wayback Machine, I came upon this 1860 quote, in the journal The Athenaeum: “… to continue speculations, in the soundness or unsoundness of all who play ‘the long game’ are interested.” The quotation marks around the phrase were a smoking gun, indicating recent coinage. And sure enough, when I went back just a little farther, I hit pay dirt in Bohn’s New Hand-book of Games, published in 1856. In the section on whist, the book notes, “In playing the long game, when both sides mark five, they are precisely in the same position with those parties who are beginning the short game.”

It turns out that the long game and the short game are variants of whist. Chamber’s Encyclopedia explains: “About 1785 the experiment of dividing the game into half was tried, and short whist was the result. The short game soon came into favour; and in 1864 the supremacy of short whist was acknowledged.”

Apparently, just as the long game was losing its popularity as a game, it came into its own as a metaphor.

Rarely do investigations of phrase origins have such satisfying answers!

One of Languagehat’s favorite lexicographers, Erin McKean, has a post at the NY Times Opinionator blog expanding on her ideas about the dictionary not being the be-all and end-all of the lexicon (see this 2006 LH post), including a startling statistic with which I’ll begin my excerpt:

Scholars recently analyzed more than five million digitized books, about 4 percent of all the books ever printed. Publishing their findings in “Science,” the researchers discovered that, by their estimation, “52 percent of the English lexicon – the majority of the words used in English books – consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.” Some of the undictionaried words in the article were more or less morphologically transparent ones, like aridification or deletable, but others, like slenthem (a musical instrument), can’t be puzzled out from recognizable roots.

Writers constantly add to the lexical dark matter of the linguistic universe, either by writing about things so new that the terms used to discuss them are still hot from the mold, or just through pure wordsmithery, the coining of words that need to exist for evocative, rather than technical, reasons….

Even words that seem as if they would have been around for the dawn of the language can be traced back to writers who felt a need for them and didn’t stop to do an existence proof: Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the word agasp (meaning “eager”) way back in 1800. Emily Dickinson is cited for resituate more than 80 years before it was found in the Lubbock Morning Avalanche, and Charles Dickens used scrunched in “Sketches by Boz,” in 1836: “He had compromised with the parents of three scrunched children, and just ‘worked out’ his fine, for knocking down an old lady.” Now, these words are all found in the OED.

I think slenthem is an excellent example of a word that’s unquestionably necessary (pronounced /’slʌntəm/ [SLUHN-tuhm], it’s the name for an instrument in a gamelan orchestra, and discussions of Javanese music are full of statements like “the slenthem plays the demung part delayed by a quarter of a balungan beat”), and if gamelan music were as popular in English-speaking countries as jazz, it would be in dictionaries just like saxophone (and would lose the itals), but as things are, it’s such a specialized word that it’s unlikely to find a place in any but the OED (which will probably add it when they get around to revising S). I was initially startled by the “th,” but Wikipedia explained that “Javanese, together with Madurese, are the only languages of Western Indonesia to possess a distinction between retroflex and dental phonemes…. These [retroflex] letters are transcribed as ‘th’ and ‘dh’ in the modern Roman script.” So now I know.

Loebolus is, in the words of mattitiahu at Memiyawanzi (where I found the link), “a website dedicated to collecting and making easily available in one place all the old and out-of-copyright Loeb Classical Library volumes… Useful stuff if what you need is available in one of these older translations, and you can’t be bothered to go down to the library to check a reference, or simply if you don’t mind bowdlerized translations of Plautus.” (If you’re really into old Loebs, “You can also download a .zip containing all 245 PDF’s [3.2GB].”)

Somehow the word zebu came up, and I thought “That’s an odd word, I wonder where it came from?” Turns out nobody knows; the OED says (in an unrevised entry) “< French zébu (Buffon, who states that it was shown under this name at a fair in Paris in 1752).” I thought surely more must be known by now, but no, the latest Merriam-Webster Collegiate and the latest American Heritage Dictionary both just say it’s from zébu. There are more details at Hobson-Jobson, which takes a sensible attitude:

This whimsical name, applied in zoological books, English as well as French, to the humped domestic ox (or Brahminy bull) of India, was taken by Buffon from the exhibitors of such a beast at a French fair, who perhaps invented the word, but who told him the beast had been brought from Africa, where it was called by that name. We have been able to discover no justification for this in African dialects, though our friend Mr. R. Cust has kindly made search, and sought information from other philologists on our account. Zebu passes, however, with most people as an Indian word; thus Webster’s Dictionary, says “Zebu, the native Indian name.” The only word at all like it that we can discover is zobo (q.v.) or zhobo, applied in the semi-Tibetan regions of the Himālaya to a useful hybrid, called in Ladak by the slightly modified form dsomo. In Jäschke’s Tibetan Dict. we find “Ze’-ba . . . . l. hump of a camel, zebu, etc.” This is curious, but, we should think, only one of those coincidences which we have had so often to notice.

There’s discussion of one of my favorite obscure historical entities, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), in a couple of LH threads from 2005 (here and here); I’m now (finally) reading a birthday present I got last year, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, by Timothy Snyder (thanks, bulbul!), and finding lots of meaty discussion of that part of the world and its complicated history. Snyder has no truck with modern nationalist simplifications, and he warms my heart by referring to each town and region by the name appropriate to the period under discussion, with a “gazetteer” to help orient the confused reader (Vilnius = Wilno = Vil’nya, Lviv = Lwów = Lemberik = Lemberg, Volhynia = Volyn’ = Wolyń = Wolynien, and so on). I’ll quote some of his fascinating discussion of language in what’s now Lithuania. At the start of Chapter 1, “The Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1569-1863),” he says:

For half a millennium before 1991, Lithuanian was neither the language of power in Vilnius nor the language spoken by most of its inhabitants. Before the Second World War, the language spoken in a third of its homes was Yiddish; the language of its streets, churches, and schools was Polish; and the language of its countryside was Belarusian. In 1939, almost no one spoke Lithuanian in Vilnius. In that year, the city was seized from Poland by the Soviet Union.

Then, on pages 19-20, he surveys a wider area:

The last grand duke to know the Lithuanian language was apparently Kazimierz IV, who died in 1492. When Kazimierz IV confirmed the privileges of Lithuania in 1457, he did so in Latin and Chancery Slavonic; when he issued law codes for the realm, he did so in Chancery Slavonic. During Kazimierz’s reign the printing press was introduced in Poland; Cracow publishers published books in Polish and Church Slavonic, but not in Lithuanian…. In the early sixteenth century we also find biblical translations into the Slavic vernacular, Ruthenian, though not in the Baltic vernacular, Lithuanian. Unlike Skaryna’s, these involved direct translations of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. These Old Testament translations were apparently executed by Lithuanian Jews, who knew Hebrew and spoke Ruthenian. …

[Read more…]

An enjoyable little quiz: 7 questions on less-spoken languages. Don’t get cocky if you’re six for six going into the home stretch; the last one is almost impossible unless you happen to be familiar with the very obscure language in question (or are, of course, a lucky guesser). My score: 6 out of 7.