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Simin Daneshvar has died at the age of ninety. Stephen Kinzer calls her “the most potent surviving symbol of the vibrancy of 20th-century literature in Iran” in his NY Times obit:

Iran’s turbulent modern history, defined above all by foreign exploitation, framed Ms. Daneshvar’s life. During World War II she witnessed the Allied occupation of her country. It provided the backdrop for her masterpiece, the sprawling family saga “Savushun,” published in 1969. …
After obtaining her doctorate with a dissertation titled “Beauty as Treated in Persian Literature,” she married the leftist writer and social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad. … In the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Daneshvar became known as a translator of Chekhov, Shaw, Hawthorne, Schnitzler, Saroyan and other writers. She also published short stories, including several that focused on the oppression of Iranian women. Until the publication of “Savushun” in 1969, however, she was generally assumed to be living under her husband’s literary shadow. No one ever thought of her that way again.

I’m embarrassed to say that her name meant nothing to me when I saw the obituary, even though I was very familiar with that of her husband, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and further embarrassed that I eventually realized I actually owned a copy of her magnum opus (under the title A Persian Requiem), though of course I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I intend to remedy the omission eventually. (Thanks, Eric!)

Adam Nicolson (whose God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible I wrote about here) is working on a series for BBC Four about “Britain’s original information revolution” of the seventeenth century, and that is the title of a piece in The Telegraph in which he discusses an amazing survival from that era:

Townend is a smallish limewashed 17th-century yeoman’s house at the southern end of the Westmorland village of Troutbeck… Not only is it miraculously full of carved 17th-century beds and chests, with rushlight holders and all kinds of carved stools and chairs (some real, some 19th-century bodge-ups). It also still contains the books that the Brownes kept and treasured. That is its glory. Nowhere else in England does a yeoman’s library survive, but in Townend, now carefully housed in a room at the back, on bookshelves made and carved by a 19th-century antiquarian Browne, is an extraordinary cache of the sort of books that his 17th-century ancestors spent their lives collecting.

There are a couple of 16th-century books here, including, amazingly, a 1548 copy of Erasmus’s paraphrase of the New Testament – Erasmus in a Lake District farmhouse! – and several legal books. But then comes the 17th-century explosion: more than 170 17th-century books, here since they were bought, either in London and sent up with the carrier, or in local auctions, and bound locally. (The minister in late 17th-century Troutbeck, when not preparing his sermons, liked to bind books.)

There are all the preoccupations of the yeoman here: some farming manuals, books on case law, how to write wills, great sermons and commentaries on the Bible. But the Brownes’ horizons were not as close as you might have thought. William Camden’s True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland (c. 1625) is here. A foot away is George Herbert’s The Temple (1667), the most beautiful book of poetry written in the 17th century. Alongside a 1623 printing of the King James Bible are works by the great theorist of the Anglican church Richard Hooker, by Francis Bacon, Michael Drayton and Sir Thomas Browne. There are books in Latin and even two in Greek. Fresh streams of metropolitan culture were flowing through this dark farmhouse in a part of the world which in the 1720s Daniel Defoe would call “all barren and wild, of no use to either man or beast”.

I like Nicolson’s emphasis on the revolutionary implications of the collection (“How would the Brownes of Townend tolerate being looked down on by anyone when they were reading by their rushlights on a winter evening the universal truths of The Temple or even the language of the King James Bible?”) and on the “remnants of a far older, magical attitude to the written word”; here’s his conclusion: “Francis Bacon and Abracadabra, Greek texts and stallions breathing into children’s mouths: isn’t that confusion, the lack of clarity and coherence at any one moment, the pulse of history, the quality that allows you to recognise that you are in touch with the real thing?” And you can see some beautiful photos of the house here.

I’ve been ignoring the whole minifuror over the recent Atlantic article “The QWERTY Effect: The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language!” by Rebecca J. Rosen, and the paper by Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto it was based on, because it was (to my mind) so self-evidently silly it didn’t bear thinking about, much less writing about. (The idea, in case you missed the furor, is that, in Rosen’s words, “because of the QWERTY keyboard’s asymmetrical shape …, words dominated by right-side letters ‘acquire more positive valences’ — that is to say, they become more likable.”) Mark Liberman at the Log has been doggedly investigating, giving the idea more benefit of the doubt than I would have (The QWERTY Effect, QWERTY: Failure to replicate) but ending up with the results to be expected, that there’s no there there, and Geoffrey Pullum has (as one would expect) done a bang-up job of summarizing it all with the appropriate mockery at Lingua Franca: The Bad Science Reporting Effect. Here’s an excerpt:

Publicity for the unresult of their paper in Psychonomics Bulletin and Review has garnered them some appallingly stupid press coverage (“The Keyboards Are Changing Our Language!”; “Just Typing ‘LOL’ Makes You Happy”; etc.). The worst I saw was in the Metro, a free tabloid in Britain: “SEX is depressing—but only if you use your left hand,” they began. “Typing letters with your left hand conveys more negative emotions than typing with your right, British and U.S. scientists say.” (The authors say nothing about what “conveys more negative emotions,” of course.) And in conclusion: “despite their meaning, words such as ‘lonely’ cheer us up more than, say, ‘sex’.” (If there was ever a worse example of illicit inference about particular cases from aggregated results, don’t show it to me, I might cry.)

One might argue that the two young psychologists are not responsible for jokey press reports. But they are not blameless. Jasmin told Wired: “Technology changes words, and by association languages. It’s an important thing to look at.” All of this is false. There has been no demonstration that technology “changes words.” If connotative valences of some words did alter slightly for some reason, that wouldn’t change the language at all. And above all, this is not “an important thing to look at”: No scientific importance would attach to a very weak correlation between spelling and affective attitudes toward isolated words, even if there was one.

Follow the link for the URLs I’ve left out of my quote, and of course for more of Geoff’s righteous smiting.

I ran across a reference to Yeats’s (repellent) play The Herne’s Egg and naturally wondered what a herne might be. Turns out it’s an archaic spelling of hern, an alternate form of heron which the OED says “is archaic, poet., and dial.; but the word is often so pronounced, even when spelt heron.” It is? Or rather, was in 1898, when that section was published? I don’t suppose anyone knows anything more about this bygone oddity of English pronunciation. (Conrad?)
Incidentally, the ultimate etymology of heron is unknown; it’s immediately from Old French hairon, itself ultimately from Old High German haiger. This survived into Middle High German as heiger but ultimately lost out to its rival reiger, which is why Germans today say Reiher. According to Lutz Mackensen, the form is borrowed from Low German rei(j)er; the Dutch word, however, is reiger, and etymologiebank.nl says Proto-Germanic *hraigara– (the source of the r- forms) gave rise to *haigarō– (the source of the h- forms) by dissimilation. Etymology is a messy business.

The NY Times has a good article by Simon Romero on the indigenous language of Paraguay, Guaraní:

To this day, Paraguay remains the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks one indigenous language: Guaraní. It is enshrined in the Constitution, officially giving it equal footing with the language of European conquest, Spanish. And in the streets, it is a source of national pride.
“Only 54 of nearly 12,000 schools teach Portuguese,” said Nancy Benítez, director of curriculum at the Ministry of Education, of the language of Brazil, the giant neighbor that dominates trade with Paraguay. “But every one of our schools teaches Guaraní.” …
In Paraguay, indigenous peoples account for less than 5 percent of the population. Yet Guaraní is spoken by an estimated 90 percent of Paraguayans, including many in the middle class, upper-crust presidential candidates, and even newer arrivals.

There’s a useful description of the history (“When Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767, more than 100,000 Guaraní speakers spread throughout Paraguay”) and great quotes, some in Guaraní. I just wish I’d learned the language when I was living in Argentina and had access to native speakers. At least I have the grammar I bought in Asunción forty years ago. (Thanks, Eric and Mark!)

I wanted to write a general appreciation of Kuzechkin’s novel now that I’ve finished it (see the earlier posts: I, II), but I’m copyediting two books at once and am pressed for time, so I’ll just copy the brief review I wrote for LibraryThing:

I just finished this book, which I enjoyed a great deal more than I expected to. At sixty, I have little in common with the angst-filled young protagonists, and if the book were primarily an expression of their worldview I would have given up on it early. But it’s a witty and wise presentation of their world at arm’s length, written with a heavy larding of slang and anglicisms but also an appreciation of well-used Russian that makes it a pleasure to read.

I’ll just add a couple of lines from facing pages that made me laugh heartily. From p. 266:
– Я твоя фурри! – сказала панда. [“I’m your furry!” said the panda]

And from p. 267: И немедленно выпил. This is the most famous line from the funniest Russian novel of the late 20th century, Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-Petushki; it has been translated both “And then I had a drink” and “And I drank it straight down,” and Erofeev explains in his preface that these are the only words in one chapter because the entire rest of the chapter consisted of “nothing but pure obscenity” and he considered it better omitted. The subject of the sentence is singular but otherwise unspecified, as usual in Russian, and in Kuzechkin’s novel it is third-person (“And he immediately drank it”). I realize it’s an obvious quote and a cheap laugh, but hey, I’m a cheap date.

I ran across the word spillikins today (in Virginia Woolf, who spelled it with one l); unfamiliar with it, I looked it up to find it defined as “the game of jackstraws.” This too was unfamiliar, but the way it was defined (“A game played with a pile of straws or thin sticks, with the players attempting in turn to remove a single stick without disturbing the others”) made it clear that both words referred to the game my wife and I know as pick-up sticks. I was glad to see Wikipedia has it under that familiar name, and interested to see that the only other-language articles listed in the left-hand column were for Spanish (palitos chinos), Hebrew (דוקים), Polish (bierki), Russian (бирюльки), and Swedish (plockepinn). I presume there are plenty of other language communities that play this simple and absorbing game; do you know of the words in any of them? And if your native language is English, what name do you know the game by?

You know, as much as I love learning new things, and even discovering that what I thought I knew was wrong or too simplistic, there are times when I find myself guiltily wishing the world would just let me keep my old mumpsimus. A minute ago I ran across a line of Eliot quoted as “Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow,” and I thought smugly “Ha, some sort of weird typo; it’s ‘uti chelidon.'” I got down my good old Complete Poems and Plays to make sure, and yes, it had “Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow.” But could I leave it at that? No, I had to google it, and here’s what I discovered, to my horror (The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, p. 50):

Line 428 of the Boni and Liveright edition reads, “Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow.” The text reads the same in every early printing: in the Dial, in the Criterion, in the 1923 Hogarth, and in the 1925 Faber edition of Poems, 1909–1925. It also reads that way in the 1932 American edition of Poems, 1909–1925. Only in 1936, in Collected Poems, 1909–1935, does the text suddenly undergo a change, with the first words now reading: “Quando fiam uti chelidon.” But the authority of that edition is deeply suspect, as we have already seen. Moreover, there can be no doubt whatever about which version of this passage Eliot had in mind when he wrote the poem: in both his autograph fair copy of part V and the typescript fair copy of it which he prepared for Ezra Pound while he was in Paris in early 1922, Eliot unequivocally wrote and typed “ceu chelidon,” not “uti chelidon” (see TWL:AF, 80–81, 88–89).

I imagine this is old news to Eliot fans, but it came like a thunderclap to me. Sure, ceu and ut(i) are interchangeable in the context (‘When shall I become like the swallow,’ a famous quote from the last stanza of the Pervigilium Veneris), but I learned it as “uti” and that’s how I have it in head and heart: QUANdo FI(am) uTI cheLIdon? No, I’ll not change my old uti for your new ceu.

I just got back from the latest Copeland Colloquium at Amherst College, “Translation in the Age of Google Translate,” with languages and literature faculty members Cathy Ciepiela, Laure Katsaros, and Andrew Parker. It was convenient (it was in the Frost Library, which I was familiar with from my afternoon with Cowan, and they ended it just before one so people could get to classes, which meant I could leave to meet my wife without missing any of the discussion) and quite interesting, but I was a bit annoyed by the tone of it, which was largely negative: not only are the results of Google translation unreliable, but it’s done (shudder) for profit! To illustrate how bad it was, one of the panelists quoted a passage from Flaubert as translated by Google: ha, Google used “it” instead of “she”! During the discussion period, I pointed out that people, by and large, do not use Google Translate on Flaubert but on more mundane documents like news stories, and they are not so much concerned about grammatical perfection as about getting the gist, at which Google Translate is usually pretty good. Another audience member pointed out that many people around the world do not have the kind of access to human translators and translation services that “we at Amherst” have, and Google Translate is their only means of accessing the world outside of their own language. The panelists were gracious enough to concede these points and admit that they were, inevitably, looking at it from their own perspective as translators and language teachers. It was an enjoyable way to spend the lunch hour (and the lunch was excellent!); I expect I’ll be going to other such talks.

According to this BBC News story, “Folk group the ‘Buranovo Grannies’ will compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, after winning a televised contest in Moscow to represent Russia.” Why do I care? Because:

The lyrics to the song, which feature a mixture of English and Udmurt – a language related to Finnish – were written by the grandmothers.
Buranovskiye Babushki became known in Russia with covers – sung in Udmurt – of classics including the Beatles’ Yesterday and the Eagles’ Hotel California.

Needless to say, I will be rooting for them, and I would love to hear “Hotel California” in Udmurt. (Thanks, Trevor!)