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I’m too full of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and three kinds of pie to post anything that would demand thought and effort on my part; fortunately, a correspondent has sent me this link, in which six writers discuss their book-collecting habits, so that I need only point you to it and perhaps quote the beginning of Gary Shteyngart’s entry:

I’m big on sniffing books. The old Soviet ones really have this strong smell, reminding me, for some reason, of tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria.

Thanks, Paul!

Marc Adler (of adlerpacific.com), who comments here as marc, sent me a link to Volokh’s post A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States, which begins:

Gene Fidell (Yale Law School) and some of his students are putting together an article tentatively titled A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States, which will basically help people know the standard ways of pronouncing Supreme Court case names (such as City of Boerne v. Flores and Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada). They have a list of cases to include, but if you have some suggestions, please post them in the comments. The requirements, of course, are that (1) it’s not obvious what the standard pronunciation is, and (2) the case comes up often enough to make it worth knowing the standard pronunciation. I should note, of course, that the query isn’t about the right pronunciation in some etymological sense; and even the party’s own pronunciation of his own name may not be relevant in some cases, especially if the case is old enough.

This is an excellent idea, but I can see already, from the comment thread over there, that some people are confused; one says, “My law prof pronounced [Giglio] phonetically (‘JIG-lee-oh’), but under standard Italian pronunciation, the second ‘g’ should be silent” and another says “In the case of getting Giglio correct, probably the most important part is getting it to be two syllables rather than the three that many English speakers would get. So, it’s not jzhee-lee-oh, it’s more like jzhee-lyoe.” Italian pronunciation is of course irrelevant. And it should go without saying that Fidell et al. should not take any one respondent’s word for standard pronunciation.

I was surprised to learn from the thread (and from this Safire column, linked from it) that amicus, in America, is universally pronounced either uh-MEE-kuss or AM-uh-kuss; no one except Justice Stephen Breyer uses my version, uh-MY-kuss, learned (I suppose) from UK-oriented dictionaries like the OED. But (not being a lawyer) I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.

The etymology of the word pie (in the edible sense) has been something of a mystery; the American Heritage Dictionary cautiously says “Middle English” and leaves it at that. Alison Richards, at NPR’s food blog, takes the occasion of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday (in the U.S.) to cite the OED’s entry—and links to it in such a way that you can read it even if you’re not a subscriber, which is great. As she says, it “may well derive from the Latin word pica, meaning magpie”; here’s how the OED puts it (in the new third edition):

The dish, which originally consisted of any variety of ingredients, may have been named by association with the bird, either after the bird’s spotted appearance or after its tendency to collect miscellaneous articles. In this context, the similarity between the words haggis n. and haggess n., a name for the magpie, has been pointed out; compare also chewet n.1, a dish of mixed ingredients, and chewet n.2, a name for the chough.
For an alternative etymology < an unattested variant *pis of Anglo-Norman puz and Old French puis pit, well (Middle French puis, French puits; < classical Latin puteus: see pit n.1), and thus an assumption that sense 2 is in fact the original sense, see C. H. Livingston History and Etymology of English “Pie” (1959 ).
Compare post-classical Latin pia (1303, 1317 in British sources), which is perhaps < English. […]
Compare also post-classical Latin pica pie, pastry (c1310, 1419 in British sources; perhaps identified with classical Latin pīca magpie: see pie n.1) .

Ms. Richards expands entertainingly on those suggestions (and links to some other OED entries); she ends her essay: “So as you eat this year’s slice of pumpkin or apple pie, I hope you’ll enjoy the thought that each sweet mouthful of fruit and spice carries the memory of an ancient magpie treasure trove.” I add my own hope that everyone who celebrates the holiday Thursday gets through it without either heartburn or family drama. (Pro tip: Using a butterflied, or spatchcocked, turkey cuts down on cooking time and makes it easier to get all parts to the proper degree of doneness.)

I always enjoy David Crystal’s writing about language, and he’s got a new book, The Story of English in 100 Words, that sounds well worth reading (it’s just come out in the U.K. and will appear in the U.S. next spring). Crystal’s piece in the Telegraph explains what he’s up to (and gives a complete list of the words):

If you can tell the history of the world in 100 objects, as the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor did last year, then it ought to be possible to tell the history of a language in a similar number. But, as with objects, it isn’t enough for each word to be interesting in its own right. It has to represent a whole class of words. It has to tell a story. And each of these individual stories should add up to the history of the English language as a whole. …
But words are more than just linguistic objects. They are windows into the world of those who use them. Part of the challenge, then, is to find words that best give us a real insight into social history. For the Anglo-Saxons, my choice included loaf and mead, street and lea. For the medieval period, swain and pork, dame and royal. For the time of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, alphabet and dialect, shibboleth and potato. For the next centuries, gazette and fopdoodle, lunch and tea. And so to modern times, with jazz and Watergate, PC and apps, LOL and unfriend. They make interesting bedfellows.

(I’ve added italics where I’m sure Crystal intended them.)

[Read more…]

As I was passing by our pasta shelf, my eye fell on a box of macaroni that carried, below the legend ELBOWS, the Italian equivalent CHIFFERI. Wondering what this meant other than ‘elbow macaroni’ and wanting to make sure my tentative pronunciation /’kifferi/, with initial stress, was correct, I looked it up; I confirmed the pronunciation but could find nothing more about the word. Having dug around in Google Books, I’ve come up with the answer, and in the best traditions of Languagehat I am sharing it here so future generations will not have to hack their way through the uncharted jungle.

In the first place, unlike other pasta names (e.g., farfalle ‘butterflies’), it does not in fact mean anything other than ‘elbow macaroni.’ According to somebody writing in the Universidad de Chile’s Boletín de filología Vol. 32-34, p. 429, chiffero is the standard Italian equivalent of the Lombard dialect form chifel ‘croissant,’ and according to Giovan Battista Pellegrini, “Noterelle linguistiche bisiacche” in Günter Holtus, Z̆arko Muljac̆ic̆, and Johannes Kramer (eds.), Romania et Slavia Adriatica (Buske Verlag, 1987), p. 229, that is borrowed from the German (Austrian, according to my large German dictionary) Kipfel, also meaning ‘croissant,’ which in turn is from Latin cippus, which according to Robert Sedlaczek, Das österreichische Deutsch: wie wir uns von unserem grossen Nachbarn unterscheiden, p. 197, meant ‘stake, post.’ I’m pleased that Google has allowed me to assemble these obscure sources and present a coherent story, but once again I shake my head at the lack of scholarly attention paid to food and cooking terminology.

Anatoly’s latest post is about a usage he ran across in his rereading of War and Peace; Prince Vasily is talking about his sons, and says, “Ипполит, по крайней мере, покойный дурак, а Анатоль — беспокойный.” What he means by this is “Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an unquiet [restless] one,” but since then покойный has lost the sense ‘quiet’ and now means only ‘late, deceased.’ Anatoly points out that the ‘quiet’ sense was unusual even in 1805, when the scene is supposed to take place, and had become vanishingly rare by the 1860s, when Tolstoy was writing; his question is whether Tolstoy meant it as a pun on the prince’s part or simply as an archaism. It’s an interesting question, and the resulting thread is interesting too, not least for this striking example (pointed out by kraiukhin) of change in meaning: Lomonosov uses “распущенный подонок,” which now can mean only ‘dissolute scum/riffraff,’ in the earlier sense ‘dissolved precipitate.’

“What Middletown Read is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 5, 1891 through December 3, 1902. It documents every book that every library patron borrowed during that period, with the exception of one gap from May 28, 1892 to November 5, 1894.” (The use of “Middletown” for Muncie is a result of Robert and Helen Lynd’s famous sociological studies of the city: Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, 1929, and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts, 1937.) I don’t have time to investigate it at the moment, but I highly recommend the Slate article by John Plotz describing how he used it to try to recreate something of the life of Louis Bloom (“Born in Muncie, Ind. in 1879, … died in San Francisco in 1936 a government engineer”); Plotz went so far as to “read, or at least to sample, all 291 books Louis Bloom had checked out.” The discussion of Muncie reading habits a century ago is absolutely fascinating, and the (rather bizarre) attempt to replicate Bloom’s reading is charmingly described. I have to point out, though, that “I was oddly delighted to learn that like a French king, he pronounced his name without a final ‘s'” is off the mark; “like a French king” should be replaced by “like everyone in those days”—”Louie” is the traditional pronunciation of the name, and still the first one given in the thirteenth (1967) edition of Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary.

Language and Location: A Map Annotation Project looks quite interesting; from their About page:

LL-MAP is a project designed to integrate language information with data from the physical and social sciences by means of a Geographical Information System (GIS). The most important part of the project will be a language subsystem, which will relate geographical information on the area in which a language is or has been spoken to data on resources relevant to the language. Through a link to the Multi-Tree project, information on all proposed genetic relationships of the languages will also be made available and viewable in a geographic context. Ultimately, the system will include ancillary information on topography, political boundaries, demographics, climate, vegetation, and wildlife, thus providing a basis upon which to build hypotheses about language movement across territory. Some cultural information, e.g., on religion, ethnicity, and economics, will also be included.

The LL-MAP system will encourage collaboration between linguists, historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, and geneticists, as they explore the relationship between language and cultural adaptation and change. We hope it will elicit new insights and hypotheses, and that it will also serve as an educational resource. As a GIS, LL-MAP has the potential to be a captivating instructional tool, presenting complex data in a way accessible to all educational levels. Finally, as a free service available online, LL-MAP should increase public knowledge of lesser-known languages and cultures, underlining the importance of language and linguistic diversity to cultural understanding and scientific inquiry.

I haven’t really had a chance to explore it yet, but I figure it’s worth putting out there.

Also, I have to share the Turkish Suffix Dictionary that Vasha linked to in this thread. What great language-study resources there are on the internet these days!

It’s a long wait between Helen DeWitt novels; I’m happy to report she has a short story, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in Bullett magazine that you can read online at a link in DeWitt’s post (which I cannot reproduce in a way that doesn’t lead to a 404 page; also, she says, I’m sure accurately, that “the print edition is much nicer”). Anyone who enjoyed The Last Samurai (my rave) will enjoy this, as you can see from this snippet:

They have a shelf of paperbacks by Orhan Pamuk. He read one once. He’d like to buy it.
If Kitap = Buch then Kara Kitap =? Black Book. 15,50.
He does not know Turkish, but he opens the book and looks at the words. He feels closer to this writer, probably, than to any writer in any language he knows, read only in sentences with meanings tangled up with other encounters with the language.
The back cover has:
“Pamuk’un şaheseri.” THE TIMES
LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, İNGİLTERE
“Bir şaheser.” LIBÉRATION, FRANSA
“Zengin, yaratıcı, modern bir ulusal destan.” THE SUNDAY TIMES, İNGİLTERE
“Büyüleyici, çetin ve esrarlı bir işaretler girdabı. Bitmeyen bir enerji, çok nadir birşşey…” LIRE, FRANSA
He looks up “şaheser” in a Turkisch- Deutsch dictionary he does not mean to buy. Meisterwerk. A masterpiece.

(Typo warning: “смерь” should be смерть; the Polish quoted later on has “niezwzkąe” for niezwykłe in the version I see on my laptop, but that may not reflect what the magazine has on its site.)

I recently finished Soviet Freedom (Picador, 1988), Anthony Barnett’s account of his trip to the Soviet Union in 1987, and was very impressed by his insight into the changing situation and the wide range of interesting people he talked to; I’d recommend it to anyone interested in what that time and place were like. Here I want to pass on an extended quote from Alexander Yakovlev that expresses very well my own sense of the relation between politics and psychology:

Democratization is needed first and foremost, second and third too.[…] We have not got used to really arguing, and what is more, arguing honourably, listening to one another’s opinions. Yet this is essential, since collective wisdom is always stronger than the view of one person. For this reason, the issue does not consist of the perfection of the system of political institutions alone; what is at issue is that we should shape human thinking itself, that we should get people used to a democratic outlook, to a kind of democratic way of thinking.

I mentioned a few days ago here that we have overthrown the tsars, but we have not yet overthrown the petty monarchs hidden within ourselves. Within all of us there sits some kind of khan, tsar, I might say God almighty, in other words a sort of power-hungry being. When this starts to take hold of one, there straight away appears this inner-being, who starts to give out orders, to administrate. It starts to walk not upon our sinful soil but hovers somewhere above it. Such a person already thinks he is more clever, more learned; he starts to make pronouncements and everyone is obliged to attend in awe to his wise thoughts.

Therefore, we have got to get used to spiritual, human equality; we have to understand that a person, in the last resort, is only one among millions. If he attains greater or smaller office, then this only means that people trust him and have honoured him with their trust. To a certain extent, perhaps, it shows that they recognize one of his abilities or talents, but it in no way authorizes him to detach himself from the millions of human beings, to put himself above them.

The passage is from an interview with Andras Sugar for the Hungarian television program Face to Face, broadcast July 30, 1987; I’d love to have it in Russian, but Google hasn’t turned it up for me.

Update. No original has turned up, but Sashura has provided the next best thing, a translation back into Russian, in this post (which also links to a recent hour-long talk by Yakovlev at Berkeley).