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Thanks to jamessal’s prodding, I’ve been working to free myself of my compulsion to read every single piece in the periodicals I subscribe to, and with judicious skimming and skipping (a ten-page essay on the privatization of the NHS? No thanks!) I’ve managed to get the backlog of TLSs and NYRBs down to a reasonable two each (one being read, one on deck). This frees me to devote my full attention to those articles that remind me why I subscribe, like Denis Feeney’s LRB review of Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations of the Late Republic by Peter White. Feeney starts off with Petrarch’s discovery in 1345 of a manuscript of Cicero’s letters, which “enraptured” him, “providing him with a moment of first contact not unlike that of Howard Carter peering through the hole into Tutankhamun’s tomb and murmuring that he could see ‘wonderful things’.” He then corrects that naive impression:

As Peter White demonstrates, however, in his characteristically incisive and learned book, Cicero’s letters do not provide a window into his soul, any more than the numerous letters from his many correspondents provide a window into theirs (some of them seem to have lacked souls altogether). The letters are more unfamiliar than they appear at first, and less like the unguardedly candid outpourings that Petrarch thought they were. We don’t ‘hear’ Cicero speaking as we read; the letters require patient interpretation before we can understand the kind of artefact they are and the kind of environment from which they arose…

The letters as we have them may well have been arranged in order to shape our sense of Cicero’s persona and significance, but we also have to allow systematically for what White calls ‘the letter-writing habits of a particular Roman milieu’. Those represented in the collection are almost exclusively the great beasts of the Roman political jungle, men for whom every aspect of every interaction had potential political resonance. These people lived in a goldfish bowl, always on view, always being assessed, and our partitions between the public and the private worlds are not ones that mean very much in this environment. White deploys his encyclopedic knowledge of the collection and its personnel to re-create a world in which letters had a crucial role to play in keeping the gears of political interaction oiled and smoothly connecting. What look like confiding moments regularly turn out to be quasi-formulaic techniques for mutual status grooming; the references to contemporary literature, for example, are not the random leavings of a well-stocked literary mind but part of a system of relationship management.

I still had that eye-opening last sentence in my mind when I turned to another chunk of reading material, Late Soviet Culture from Perestroika to Novostroika, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Gene Kuperman, a heterogeneous collection of essays, mainly written for a 1990 colloquium; I was in the middle of Evgeny Dobrenko’s “The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon,” in which the author manfully grapples with the dreadful pseudoliterature of the late ’40s and early ’50s, which he freely admits that no normal person would choose to read but which he thinks it the duty of literary historians to analyze. After pointing out that any real criticism had been ruled out of bounds by the demands of politics, he writes that “It must always be remembered that in the criticism of these years there was nothing accidental — ‘private’ opinions were practically absent here.” I thought that was a remarkable confluence of ideas concerning two very different eras and situations.

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I am a great lover of footnotes, and I find a fellow footnoteophile in Alexandra Horowitz, author of the NYT Book Review essay Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote? As you see from the title (the broadsheet equivalent of E-BOOKS: THREAT OR MENACE?), publishers love apocalyptic prophecies, but in fact the idea is silly—footnotes, at least on my Kindle, are prominently linked, and if you’re too lazy to click on a link you’re too lazy to read footnotes in any form. But the essay is full of good stuff; here’s a sample:

But I champion another species of footnote: the wandering footnote. These digressive notes, seeing a sentence that some might consider complete, determine to hijack it with a new set of ever more tangential facts. In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author’s mind seem to be laid plain on the paper. I came of intellectual age hearing the author’s sotto voce asides in the philosophy essays I loved. I still recall footnotes that begin, enticingly, “Imagine that . . . ”; “Consider . . . ”; or even, in one of J. L. Austin’s famous thought experiments, “You have a donkey. . . . ” I had the feeling of being taken into confidence by a wise fellow during an erudite lecture, and being told something even more clever and lucid.

In fiction, I was spoiled by Nicholson Baker, whose novel “The Mezzanine” is largely footnotes — including a four-pager that starts: “And escalators are safe. . . . ” (A door has popped up unexpectedly and opened! I’m going in!) Smitten with the small type, I sought out the broader history of the footnote, covered to within a millimeter of its life in Anthony Grafton’s study “The Footnote: A Curious History” and Chuck Zerby’s “Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes” (both are heavily footnoted). Grafton led me to such rollicking footnoters as Edward Gibbon, whose judgmental, conversational and explicatory notes in “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” lighten a weighty read. Such digressions and asides were so enthusiastically used in the 18th century that one satirist wrote a mock dissertation consisting entirely of footnotes. Pierre Bayle’s best seller “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” first published in the 1690s, charmingly used footnotes to point out the errors in the scholarship of others. I’ll take Grafton and Zerby’s word for it that John Hodgson’s mighty “History of Northumberland,” published a century and a half later, is at least worth flipping through for its footnotes on footnotes on footnotes, including one traversing 165 pages.

Thanks, Paul!

Victor Mair has a post at the Log about the use of pinyin in China without either translation or characters; he begins:

I just passed through security at the Xi’an airport (in northwest China) and was surprised to have my belongings searched by a young woman on whose snazzy black uniform, instead of an ID number as a regular worker would have, there was a label that said only SHIXI (“in training; practice”), with no trace of the corresponding characters 实习 anywhere about her. When I read out the pinyin with correct pronunciation and indicated that I knew immediately and exactly what it meant, the young woman and her co-workers were obviously pleased that I could do so.
Even more thought provoking is the fact that many Chinese police cars and uniforms have written on them GONGAN (“public security”) rather than “police”, and sometimes not even 公安.

It’s an interesting phenomenon with a number of possible explanations, currently being hashed out in the comment thread. I am, of course, interested in your thoughts.

My wife was reading Joyce Carol Oates’ piece “The Cure” (a review of Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing, by Tim Parks—subscribers only, I’m afraid) in the NYRB, and she drew my attention to the following snippet of Beckett (which Oates quotes from Parks):

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps….

(From Watt; the NYRB version has “the Monday mourns [not “morns”], the Monday morns,” but that’s clearly a typo, so I’ve corrected it.) We both loved the quote and wondered about the word “skelps”; on investigating (it’s another word that’s in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary but not in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate), it turns out to be a Scottish and Northern English word for ‘strike, slap, or smack’ (and is probably imitative in origin). Any readers familiar with it?

That’s the subject line on the e-mail frequent commenter Zackary Sholem Berger sent me with the link I’m about to quote, and I can’t improve on it. Check out this 2006 post from the wonderful site Balashon—Hebrew Language Detective (which I’ve finally gotten around to adding to my RSS feed), featuring Mike Gerver’s impressive etymology for Hebrew אתרוג etrog (the fruit of the hadar tree):

Etrog, on the other hand, is listed in the same book [Ernest Klein’s Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for English Speakers] as borrowed from Persian turung or Mandaic trunga. (The form etrunga is found in Kiddushin 70a.) The Persian word, according to Chaim Rabin’s article “Lexical Borrowings from Indian Languages as Carriers of Ideas and Technical Concepts” (in Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism, page 25, edited by Hananya Goodman, SUNY Press) comes from Tamil, and is related to matulankam and matulai which mean pomegranate or lemon. (In modern Tamil, pomegranate is matulanpazham, where pazham means ripe fruit.) Rabin says that there is no similar word in Sanskrit, suggesting that etrogs were originally found only in southern India where Tamil and other Dravidian languages are spoken, and only spread to northern India and Persia in a later period (after Sanskrit). I’m not sure what this implies about the question of whether pri etz hadar always meant only the etrog, and whether the etz hadaat could have been an etrog. It is quite possible, of course, that trunga did not mean an etrog, but a different kind of fruit, at the time the word was borrowed from Dravidian, and that it was this other fruit that was only found in southern India. The kam at the end of matulankam (and hence the nga at the end of trunga) are presumably related to kaay meaning “fruit” in modern Tamil. The same root is apparently found in the Persian word naranga (source of naranja in Spanish and hence orange in French and English), which was also borrowed from a Dravidian language. In modern Tamil, naru means “smelly,” so naranga could mean “fragrant fruit.” (Words that mean “fragrant” tend to evolve to mean “smelly” in any language.) Oranges are thought to have come to the Middle East and Europe from northern India, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and to there from southern China and Indochina, so the question arises as to why the word would be borrowed from a Dravidian language. One possibility is that the word dates back to the period before the Indo-European conquest of India, when Dravidian languages were spoken in Northern India as well. So the g in etrog would be cognate with the g in orange.

Zackary said confidently “you will like this,” and of course I do. (I thought either MMcM or I had done a post on the tangled history of orange, but apparently not.)

I’d like to offer fervent thanks to commenter MOCKBA, who in this thread wrote that the Strugatskys‘ 1962 Попытка к бегству (Escape Attempt; the translation is apparently hard to come by) “is kind of developing the ground for their later, deeper works. The short novel, deeply tragic as it is, has many embedded funny linguistic, language-reconstruction, and machine-translation sorts of cross-cultural blunders.” I recently finished it, and it astonished me—there was very, very little American sf in 1962 that even attempted to be as adult as the Strugatskys, who (apparently effortlessly) combined the tropes of sf with the style and themes of what I suppose we must call “real literature” (though, as a proud sf fan, I say it with slightly gritted teeth). The first thing that surprised me was how much it reminded me of Aksyonov, both in its colloquial style and in its lighthearted young characters. But then an older and somewhat mysterious character shows up, and they all go off to an unknown planet, and all hell breaks loose (and I am putting more emphasis on “hell” that is usual for that phrase). It’s a scarifying tale with deep moral resonance (reminiscent of, say, Blish‘s Case of Conscience) but told in a manner completely free of the heaviness one would expect from such a story. I’m very much looking forward to working my way through the rest of their output (Sashura has given me some useful recommendations).

Unrelated, but I have to recommend a brief, moving memoir by Patti Smith in the latest New Yorker; I suspect I’m not the only one who will recognize themselves in her desperate childhood longing for a book.

I’m a sucker for writers reminiscing about cities they know and love, and this issue of Eurozine feeds that craving. Levente Polyák in “Coherent fragmentation” provides a good summary of what’s special about Central Europe:

If a city is text, then the Central European city is hypertext. Street names and even parts of cities have no choice but to bear the names of other parts of the region – think of the Krakovo district of Ljubljana or the Praga district of Warsaw. It is the Central European mix of languages, words, signs and melodies which crystallizes in urban space, with the theatres scattered over the territory of the Monarchy in the style of the Fellner and Hellmer workshop, or the startling buildings of Joze Plecnik. Perhaps it’s the notion of “radical eclecticism”, which the architect László Rajk used to try to put into words Budapest’s architectural traditions and sources of inspiration, refers to these temporal and spatial wanderings of symbols. An alternative city guide describes Warsaw as an “eclectic cocktail”.

I particularly recommend Jirí Trávnícek’s article on “Brno and its literary image,” which suggests that Brno has poetry but not much else in the way of literature (the two stories that native son Milan Kundera devoted to it were removed from his collected works), and Juraj Spitzer’s “Castle, cathedral and river: The soul of Bratislava,” which laments the destruction of much of the old multicultural Prespork and describes the author’s astonishment on coming to the city from mountainous central Slovakia some sixty years ago. (If you can’t stand urban nostalgia, please ignore this post!)

Michael Adams, the author of Slang: The People’s Poetry (which I reviewed here), has an excellent essay in Humanities, Words of America: A Field Guide, about the history and originality of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), whose fifth and final volume is expected to appear in March 2012. Adams starts by giving a nice example of polysemy:

According to this dictionary, a Wisconsin native may know a flower called a maybell, and so may a Michigander, but if they talk flora over a drink in Chicago, it may take awhile before they realize they are, in a sense, speaking different tongues. In Wisconsin, maybell means ‘lily of the valley’; in Michigan, it means ‘marsh marigold.’ The dictionary knows this because fieldworkers surveyed Wisconsin speakers with the question, “What are other names in your locality for the lily of the valley?” and Michigan speakers with the question, “What do you call the bright yellow flowers that bloom in clusters in marshes in early springtime?” Maybell was an occasional answer, a word some of us share that nonetheless underscores differences in how we know and name the world around us.

He goes on to describe the beginnings of DARE, undertaken by Frederic G. Cassidy, who was appointed editor in 1962, and then the history and importance of such projects in general:

Calvin Thomas observed the central role of dialect or, more broadly, variation in language structure and history: “Most persons are prone to look upon these variations simply as the errors of the ignorant—‘bad grammar’ to be avoided, ‘bad usage’ to be suppressed. The truth is, however, that these variations represent one of the most important groups or classes of facts on which the scientific study of language rests.” The significance of dialects was established long before the founding of ADS, by the New Philology of Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and others in the early nineteenth century. That movement initiated comparative historical linguistics, which articulated relations among extensive language families beginning with Indo-European. William Dwight Whitney, one of the founders of ADS, was America’s preeminent representative of this discipline at the time.

Dialectology thus developed alongside historical comparative philology and historical lexicography. In 1876, Georg Wenker (1852–1911) sent a set of forty passages of literary German to some 50,000 schoolteachers and asked them to translate them into the local dialect. Nearly all the teachers responded (44,251), and Wenker plotted some of the data onto maps in Sprachatlas das Deutschen Reichs, the first linguistic atlas, published in 1881. ….

He describes the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, an “immediate and significant influence on DARE,” and the differences between them:

But even more effective mapping cannot quite bring linguistic geography down to a human scale. As Louise Pound concluded, “Workers for the American Atlas record with scholarly vigilance the speech of the regions they canvass, endeavoring to preserve faithfully for posterity our twentieth-century regional distinctions; yet their results are no substitute for an exhaustive dialect dictionary.” That is because, as Jacob Grimm put it, “every word has its history and lives its own life,” a sentiment that leads inevitably to a historical dictionary. As Cassidy acknowledged, “It should be obvious that the model for DARE was the Oxford English Dictionary, with some innovations, chiefly the use of maps and oral data specially gathered throughout the country in a single five-year period.” The modesty of “some innovations” belies the importance of the maps and oral data.

And the differences from other dictionaries:

Another feature that sets DARE apart is its unprecedentedly pluralist approach to evidence. The OED and some related dictionaries rely almost exclusively on quotations from printed texts. Their entries have a certain sheen; differences among sources are subtle. In the English Dialect Dictionary, Wright relied on material collected by the English Dialect Society and his own field research, but not on printed sources. While the texture of entries in Wright’s dictionary is different from that of OED entries, it similarly offers readers a “smooth” reading experience.

By contrast, DARE entries have a homespun texture, demanding more of a reader, who must reconcile various types of information in order to understand what DARE has to say about a word or phrase. But if they pay attention, readers come away marvelously informed. A DARE entry might include any combination of quotations from regional literature, diaries, small-town newspapers, material from WELS, the various linguistic atlases (published and unpublished), other accounts of dialect in scholarly literature, substantial personal collections donated to the project by scholars at the ends of their careers (like the Gordon Wilson collection, from which DARE illustrated dew poison), and, of course, questionnaire responses, identified by informant, so that the curious reader can refer to the “List of Informants” to discover his or her community, community type, year of birth, level of education, occupation, sex, and race—all types of information that can be overlooked in other historical dictionaries, but not in a twenty-first-century Dictionary of American Regional English.

He finishes with the stirring peroration: “Whatever transformative project in the humanities you may have in mind, dare to do it.” (If, that is, you can find the funding in these penurious times…)

Matt at No-sword has a post describing the remarkable process by which Buddhist sutras were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese a bit over a millennium ago. It began with a Lead Translator who read the Sanskrit original aloud, included what Matt translates as a “Meaning Certifier,” a “Text Certifier,” a “Scribe Learned in Sanskrit,” a “Receiver via Brush,” a “Text Composer,” and a “Translation Barger-into,” and was finished off by a “Trimmer/Finalizer” and the following ultimate touch:

潤文官 (“Text-Juicing Official”): Determined whether the translation was appropriate as Chinese text, and added rhetorical flourish as necessary. For example, the “度一切苦厄” (“he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty”) of “照見五蘊皆空 度一切苦厄” (“he illuminated the five skandhas and saw that they were all empty, and he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty”) was not in the original; it was added at this stage. The previous eight steps were performed by monks, but this step was performed by a lay official.

When that sutra was done, it had been translated to a fare-thee-well, let me tell you. (Of course, then the efficiency experts got involved and now they just shove it into Google Translate and let the chips fall where they may.)

Thomas Laqueur has a thoughtful and thought-provoking LRB review [archived] of Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq, by John Dower; while the substance of the review is not LH-related, this paragraph prompts me to ask the assembled multitudes about something that’s bothered me for a long time:

While Dower’s instances of these failures are historically specific, the failures themselves are not. One could map much of what he rails against onto the ‘idols of the human mind’ that Francis Bacon identified in The Advancement of Learning, his great call for a new inductively and empirically grounded way of thinking. Bacon’s ‘idols of the tribe’ – the ‘false mirror’ of human understanding – distort the world just as what Dower sees as false history distorts the politics of our day; the ‘idols of the cave’ (doctrines and ideas based on personal prejudice and experience) are not unlike Dower’s ‘faith-based’ policies; the ‘idols of the market’ (errors we fall into as our minds make unwarranted connections between words and ideas) include the way we treat Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero, Hiroshima; and the ‘idols of the theatre’ (prejudices that stem from religious and philosophical systems) are what we would call ideology, racism and, still, religion. The cultures of war addressed by Dower may be contemporary, but they display long-recognised kinds of muddled thinking.

Now, I must have first encountered the phrase “idols of the tribe” when I was in high school, and I’ve seen it and his other categories used frequently in the many years since. (You can get a different summary of them at Wikipedia.) Yet I’ve never come close to assimilating them; there’s something about the phrases “idols of the X” that makes my mind go as blank as when I try to read Derrida. What I want to know is whether this is a personal peculiarity or a general problem (which would presumably imply that our habits of thinking and categorizing have changed to some extent since Bacon’s day). So: when you read “idols of the tribe” do you automatically translate that to “humans’ tendency to perceive more order and regularity in systems than truly exists,” or do you think (as I do) “Oh lord, it’s one of those Baconian categories I can never keep straight, guess I’d better look it up yet again”?

Also, hearty congratulations to wood s lot and its creator Mark Woods, who’s been sharing great links for eleven years now (and lately his excellent photography as well). Keep up the good work!