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Having finished The Lion and the Throne (see this post), I thought I’d follow up with Mary Lee Settle‘s novel I, Roger Williams, simply because it was also set in the seventeenth century (and had come highly recommended). Imagine my surprise when it turned out Williams had as a youth been an assistant to Coke, the subject of the previous book! I do love serendipity. At any rate, I haven’t gotten very far, but I’ve already noticed a distressing feature. Back in this 2006 post about Jane Stevenson’s The Winter Queen, I complained it was “written in standard Historical Novelese, with solemn avoidance of contractions and use of musty words and turns of phrase.” This isn’t as bad, but it exhibits the same phenomenon, a quaint, even-flowing prose with a musty air—over the course of several chapters, it has a similar effect to that of hearing too much of the music accompanying a Ken Burns special. Here’s a sample, so you can see what I’m talking about (this is the start of chapter IV):

How well the year dies, and with what holy grandness and pomp! On yonder hill beyond the river the frost has painted the tops of the maples bright red. The virgin tree beside the water is decked with yellow leaves, and I will go down to it from Foxes Hill slowly, with my stick with the wolf’s head on it. How smooth it has grown under my hand. Well, I too have grown smoother with age, under the weight of Providence, and Providence. I promise myself this fine morning no railing at circumstance, no judgement, no decision, no quarreling with Papists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, Boston saints, drunken sinners, land grabs, land deals, money, power, Mr. Harris, Mr. Whipple, or any other of the thousand things that goad me. I will simply take my morning walk along the woods, skirting the meadows lest one ear of grain be lost to my foot.
I have walked by the waterfront before the new houses that still after a winter have the smell of pine resin where the sun rests on the log walls. We have tilled more fields, girdled more trees with more invasions of that primeval barrier of forest that stretches uphill behind us all the way to forever.

I could go on quoting indefinitely to show you how little it varies, but that “all the way to forever” stops me in my tracks and makes me think “I’m sorry, but that’s just a terrible phrase, Hallmarkish today and unthinkable for someone supposedly writing in the seventeenth century.” This is the kind of writing that makes people who don’t really dig good writing go “Wow, great stuff!” I don’t want to be too hard on it—it’s well above the level of Jane Stevenson—but why do authors feel the need to make historical people sound like animatronic figures in a museum display?

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I confess I knew almost nothing about Isaac Casaubon except that, as Ingrid D. Rowland writes at the beginning of her NYRB review of a book about his scholarship, he “lent his name to the dismal Edward Casaubon of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” But Rowland makes him sound like someone I’d like to have known, and I was particularly impressed by his linguistic attainments:

As we read in Grafton and Weinberg’s book, it was this transitional period of late antiquity and early Christianity, so mysterious and so eventful, that became Isaac Casaubon’s particular obsession in the waning years of the sixteenth century, when his curiosity drove him to learn the “Holy Tongue” and then push beyond it. Like most European Christians then and now, he had come to his faith through translations of the Bible: for Protestants like himself, this meant first a vernacular translation, then, as his education proceeded, the Latin of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate. Learning Greek allowed him at last to read the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament more or less as they had been written. He could also read the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, drafted in Hellenistic Alexandria (begun in the third century BCE, finished before 132 BCE) by a team of some seventy scholars (septuaginta is Latin for seventy) to serve the Greek-speaking Jews of that cosmopolitan city (many of them as shaky in their Hebrew as their modern counterparts).

Casaubon, like many Protestant scholars, had made a study of Hebrew in his youth, but in his early thirties, as a more established professional, he began to pursue the language in earnest, driven by his inexhaustible curiosity and what must have been a considerable physical vigor. As he gained confidence in Hebrew, that curiosity took him still further: into Aramaic, the colloquial language of Judea that was spoken in early Christian times, into the more contemporary Aramaic of the Talmud, the body of commentaries preserved and expanded by rabbis through the ages, and at last into contemporary Yiddish.

She then goes on to a charming excursus on marginalia:

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Jan Freeman, who used to write an excellent Boston Globe column on language and now writes the equally excellent blog Throw Grammar from the Train, has a post making what should be an obvious point, but one that I have rarely seen put so explicitly:

At Grammarphobia, Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wandered into the “confusion” quagmire and couldn’t get unstuck. A reader asked whether using its for it’s was a grammatical error or a spelling error; here’s their answer,* with my objections:

A: On a superficial level, this qualifies as both a punctuation error and a spelling error.

But on a deeper level, it’s a grammatical error, because it represents a failure to distinguish between (1) the possessive pronoun and (2) the contraction.

What “deeper level”? You’re saying the writer doesn’t know the difference between the actual words its and it’s? That he mistakenly writes “it’s tires are flat” because he thinks it’s OK to say “it is tires are flat”? Of course you don’t think that. Sometimes a mixup — reign in for rein in — could be either a simple spelling goof or a genuine confusion (resulting in an eggcornish reinterpretation of the metaphor). Not so with its and it’s. We could drop the apostrophe entirely and we’d still know which was which, because in fact we don’t confuse them grammatically.

And here’s the footnote attached to “answer*” above:

*I actually first wrote “here’s there answer,” though I caught it immediately. And no, I am not confused about the difference between their and there.

Brava! (Of course, the people who make such claims aren’t actually making intellectual points, they’re just slinging whatever mud comes to hand to express their revulsion—which reminds me of the nasty verbal tics in the later reviews of Pauline Kael, so memorably analyzed by the austerely eloquent Renata Adler in this classic 1980 takedown [archived], which everybody who cared about movies read and argued about back in that time when people actually cared about movies.)

I dearly love reading about bookstores I’ll never visit, and Christopher Culver feeds this appetite in a couple of recent posts at his weblog (as he quaintly calls it). Minority-language books in Kazan—”If you visit Kazan and want to buy books in Tatar, the place to go is the intersection of Bauman (ул. Баумана) and Astronimičeskaja (ул. Астрономическая) streets”—has a couple of exterior photos of the bookstore in question, and New Chuvash resources in Cheboksary—”Located on Egerskij bul’var near the intersection with prospekt 9-j Pjatiletki (just across the street from the Šupaškar shopping mall and McDonalds), this bookshop offers seemingly every recent publication from the Chuvash state publishing house”—has an enticing interior shot, along with this depressing conclusion:

Gennady Aigi’s complete poems have recently been issued in a two-volume set. I was able to purchase the second volume, which collects his poems in Russian…. However, the first volume, which collects his poems in Chuvash, is sold out. I heard a rumour from a trusted source that almost the entire print run of that volume went to Chuvash politicians and is gathering dust on their shelves.

Linguistically, though, the most exciting post is Tuqay in Volga-Kama languages, which presents a half-dozen versions of the two-line poem “Kazan” by Ğabdulla Tuqay (1886-1913); here are the Tatar original and a Russian translation, and you can see the Bashkir, Chuvash, Udmurt, and Meadow Mari versions at Chris’s site:

Tatar
Ут, төтен, фабрик-завод берлә һаман кайный Казан;
Имгәтеп ташлап савын, сау эшчеләр сайлый Казан.
Russian
Огнем заводов дни и ночи людей ты жжешь, Казань.
Здоровых погубив рабочих, ты новых ждешь, Казань.

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I recently ran across the Southern term benne (pronounced “Benny”) for ‘sesame,’ and of course wondered about the etymology. Merriam-Webster says it’s “of African origin; akin to Malinke bĕne sesame,” and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Foodways concurs (“The term itself seems to confirm the African origin of the plant as the word bene means sesame in the language of the Bambara peoples of Mali and among the Wolof of Senegal and Gambia”). But I’m never content until I’ve double- and triple-checked something like that, and I was also curious to see if this specifically U.S. term would be in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, so I looked it up and found it was there, but the etymology said “from Malay bene.” Now, I suppose it’s possible that there is a competing etymology deriving it from Malay, but it seems far more likely that someone on the Concise Oxford staff misread an abbreviation for Malinke as the more familiar Malay. If anyone at Oxford reads this, you might want to revisit this for the next edition.
By the way, power has been restored here at the Hattery; thanks for your patience and good wishes!

The Languagehat residence is experiencing a multi-day power failure. Please stretch your legs and purchase something from the snack counter during this brief intermission.

Still reading The Lion and the Throne (see the previous post), I have come to Chapter Seven, which begins with the following epigraph:

      Anthony Bacon to his mother, Lady Bacon

18 July, 1593Our most honorable and kind friend the Earl of Essex was here yesterday three hours, and hath most friendly and freely promised to set up, as they say, his whole rest of favour and credit for my brother‘s preferment before Mr. Cooke. . . . His Lordship told me likewise that he hath already moved the Queen for my brother.

Bowen then writes: “To set up a rest’ meant to build a platform from which to shoot one’s heavy cannon. (‘The Spaniard hath set up his rest for England,’ Robert Cecil said in Parliament.)” But is this the correct explanation? The OED has, s.v. rest 1 (“repose or relief from daily activity”), 11.a., “A support for a fire-arm, employed in steadying the barrel to ensure accuracy of aim, esp. that used for the old heavy musket, which was forked at the upper end, and provided with a spike to fix it in the ground.” But this says nothing about heavy cannon, and has no quotes involving a phrase “set up one’s rest.”
However, under rest 2 (“”that which remains over; a remainder or remnant”) we find sense 6, “In primero, the stakes kept in reserve, the loss of which terminated the game; the venture of such stakes.” After several citations, there follows the phrase “to set (up) one’s rest, to venture one’s final stake or reserve” (e.g., c. 1597 “The kinge, 55 eldest hand, set up all restes”), and then (as a separate sense of the noun) “7. To set (up) one’s rest, in fig. uses … a. To stake, hazard, or venture one’s all on or upon something; to set one’s final hope or trust upon or in something” (1587 “we set our rest on the hazard”; 1599 “to set upp his rest upon these men”; 1635 “set up her rest in hope of England”). It seems clear that Bowen misunderstood the phrase; let this serve as a reminder to us all not to set our rest on an apparently satisfactory explanation but to make sure it is steadied by a secure rest.

I’m finally getting around to another of those books I’ve been wanting to read for decades, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke by Catherine Drinker Bowen. I’ve just started it and already found a Latin tag I have to pass along, at the end of this passage about Coke’s appointment by Elizabeth as Speaker of the Commons in 1593:

The Speaker was responsible for procedure. And none knew better than Coke that in Parliament as in the law courts, procedure was vitally important to the liberties of the electorate. When a bill came to the vote, how were the voices counted? Should the Noes keep their seats during the count, and had the Speaker himself a vote? Small matters, but they could make the difference between freedom and tyranny, between an independent Commons and a Commons controlled by faction or by clique. In the previous Parliament (1589), Coke, sitting as Burgess from Aldeburgh in Suffolk, had noted these things, noted also how the Speaker’s attitude and bearing affected every corner of the House. He had acquired a rare and helpful little book, still in manuscript. Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, it was called; The Manner of Holding Parliaments. It would be convenient to have at hand during sessions. And though Coke considered it more ancient than it later proved to be, its rules were clear and explicit. In such matters men prefer the authority of print. Coke himself confessed to the scholar’s adage of non lego non credo — if I don’t read it I don’t believe it.

Like so many of my favorite books, it tosses out eye-opening nuggets almost as asides: “In pre-Tudor days it had been looked on as a calamity to be sent to Parliament. To leave one’s farm or shop or tavern and ride halfway across England, merely to vote a tax against one’s community — what was gained but tired buttocks and an empty purse? … Two knights from Oxfordshire fled the country on hearing of their election. Torrington in Devon managed to secure by charter perpetual exemption from representation in all Parliaments henceforth.” Quite a leap to “No taxation without representation”! (By the way, in case you didn’t know, Coke is pronounced “cook.”)

Back in 2009, when I wrote this post (don’t miss the Vienna/Bratislava anecdote!), I said I was “thunderstruck” that in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, Birobidzhan, Yiddish written in Hebrew script is still used; as I said, I thought the whole “Jewish Birobidzhan” thing was a Stalinist initiative that failed half a century ago. Now I’ve been sent a link to the website of a local publisher whose newspaper Birobidjaner Shtern (“Birobidzhan Star”) [Wikipedia] publishes mostly in Russian but has quite a fair amount in Yiddish, as you can see using the idish tag. I wish I knew enough Yiddish to actually read the articles, but I was able to make my way through a few headlines, and perhaps some of my Yiddish-speaking readers will enjoy the link. Thanks, Paul!

Commenter and Lojbanist komfo,amonan sent me a link to this article in Spanish on attempts to preserve Chavacano (a/k/a Philippine Creole Spanish), summarizing it as “The language is showing signs of decay, but plenty of under-30s speak it, so it looks like they’re nipping it in the bud.” I knew nothing about Chavacano, but Wikipedia has a long and interesting article on it (with the requisite obtrusive tut-tutting boxes at the top complaining about too few citations and too many quotations). Here’s a bit on the spelling:

Zamboangueños usually, though not always, spell the name of the language as Chavacano to refer to their language or even to themselves as Chavacanos, and they spell the word as chabacano referring to the original Spanish meaning of the word or as Chabacano referring also to the language itself. Thus, Zamboangueños generally spell the name of the language in two different ways. Caviteños, Ternateños, and Ermitaños spell the word as it is spelled originally in the Spanish language – as Chabacano.

Apparently it’s the only Spanish-based creole in Asia, which is a bit surprising.