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I am inordinately fond of interviews with translators, and Asymptote has one with Susanna Nied:

A giant in world poetry and experimental text, much of Inger Christensen’s influence can be seen cascading to many generations of writers, in several languages. Her book-length poem, Det (1969) shook the foundations of Danish poetry, and in its translations, continues to startle and affect readers profoundly. Her essays have been translated into English and collected into a volume for the first time. To mark this literary event, poet and former Asymptote team member Sohini Basak spoke via email to Susanna Nied, who has translated into English Christensen’s poetic oeuvre as well as the forthcoming book of essays The Condition of Secrecy (New Directions).

SOHINI BASAK: For those of us bound by the English-language, it is because of you that we’ve come to know of Inger Christensen’s poetry. And as you’re the translator of her complete poetic oeuvre, it’s very interesting that you started with her first book (Light), and then the sequence almost coincides with the order in which the original collections were published … although not entirely. How did you decide your working order?

SUSANNA NIED: I actually didn’t do anything like choosing a working order. When I started on Light, in the 1970s, I didn’t know Inger had written anything besides Light and Grass. I didn’t even know who Inger was, and I certainly didn’t know that I was going to become a translator, much less her translator. I was just a university student browsing the library stacks for something Danish to read for pleasure, and I happened upon this little bibliography of contemporary Danish poets. When I got to “C” I found “Christensen, Inger”.

Her only two listed volumes were Lys and Græs – (Light and Grass). I liked the titles, ordered the books from Interlibrary Loan, was both grabbed and mystified, and started translating them just to try to understand what this unknown writer was doing and how she did it. (Of course, she was unknown only in the U.S.; in Germany and France she was already well known, thanks to her excellent translators.)

I am charmed by the anecdote, which fires me with nostalgia for my own days wandering library stacks looking for unknown pleasures. Here’s a nice passage on what it was like working with Christensen:
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One way I know I wasn’t cut out to be a philosopher is that I can never keep the concepts/vocabulary in my head. To me, metaphysics is “all that weird shit that doesn’t have anything to do with the world I can see and touch” (cue Johnson/Berkeley), epistemology is “how we know stuff,” and ontology is… what the fuck is ontology? The OED (entry revised 2004) says “The science or study of being; that branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence.” Well, yeah, ὄν is ‘being,’ I can see that, but “the nature or essence of being or existence” just floats up over my head and recedes into the distance like a balloon whose string has slipped my grasp on a windy day. Now I learn of the existence of Object-Oriented Ontology from Dylan Kerr at Artspace:

Ask yourself: what does your toaster want? How about your dog? Or the bacteria in your gut? What about the pixels on the screen you’re reading off now—how is their day going? In other words, do things, animals, and other non-human entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness? It’s precisely this questions that the nascent philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology (arising from ὄντος, the Greek word for “being,” and known to the cool kids as OOO) is attempting to answer or at least seriously pose, and they’re setting certain segments of the art world on fire.

Now, this raises a number of questions, like “is it a philosophical movement or an art movement?” and “is the use of an acronym an infallible sign of coolness?” But my question is this: Is it a legitimate use of the word ontology, in the sense that it makes some sort of sense according to the standard definition (to those who understand that definition, of course), or is it a cheeky appropriation of a technical term for an entirely different purpose? That’s a question I can’t even begin to answer, because a clue is not something I have. If anyone can shed light on this, feel free to try to enlighten me, but I don’t promise to understand a word of it. (Thanks, Nick!)

Oh, and for amusement’s sake I have to mention M. R. James’s Professor of Ontography.

Apparently 3:AM Magazine (“Whatever it is, we’re against it”) has an occasional “Minute 9” series of essays discussing the ninth minute of a movie, and the latest is “Minute 9: Blade Runner” by Des Barry. It begins:

Torrential rain and flickering neon, pedestrians of miscellaneous ethnicities bump umbrellas, struggle through tight alleyways between a downmarket electronics store and a line of crowded street-food stalls. Seated at the counter of a sushi bar, close-up on his face and open shoulders, an unnamed man in a noir-style classic trench coat rubs the splinters off his chopsticks. Behind his right shoulder appears a uniformed torso with a police badge pinned to a bulky stab-vest. The cop has a deep bass voice:

—Hey, idi-wa.

It goes on to discuss the mishmash of languages known as “Cityspeak” which I posted about back in 2003; alas, much of the discussion is vitiated by Barry’s apparent ignorance of the page I posted then (which is, commendably, still there) — he uses absurdly mistranscribed versions of the dialogue (e.g., “aduanon koverhsim angam bitte” for azonnal kövessen engem bitte). But I liked his final reflection on modern urban life:

Now I live in another Pacific Rim city with a mixed — but not identical — ethnic make-up. It’s only 2023 — not so far from 2019 — but when I walk the streets of Naarm/Melbourne, the streets of Chinatown in the early evening winter darkness, umbrellaed under the steady rain and the flashing neon, with electric delivery bikes weaving crazily through the foot traffic, I get regular flashes of scenes from Blade Runner. I hear Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, English, various versions of South American and European Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian, versions of Arabic and African languages; and on more formal occasions Woiwurrung, the local Indigenous language. Languages mixed with English insertions, yes, but no hybrid language. Not yet. But I can imagine it coming.

(I still remember the thrill of that linguistic mix coming from the screen when I first saw the movie, over four decades ago now.)

Via Ionuț Zamfir’s Facebook post, I present “A comparative wordlist for investigating distant relations among languages in Lowland South America,” by Frederic Blum, Carlos Barrientos, Roberto Zariquiey, and Johann-Mattis List (Scientific Data 11:92 [2024], open access):

Abstract

The history of the language families in Lowland South America remains an understudied area of historical linguistics. Panoan and Tacanan, two language families from this area, have frequently been proposed to descend from the same ancestor. Despite ample evidence in favor of this hypothesis, not all scholars accept it as proven beyond doubt. We compiled a new lexical questionnaire with 501 basic concepts to investigate the genetic relation between Panoan and Tacanan languages. The dataset includes data from twelve Panoan, five Tacanan, and four other languages which have previously been suggested to be related to Pano-Tacanan. Through the transparent annotation of grammatical morphemes and partial cognates, our dataset provides the basis for testing language relationships both qualitatively and quantitatively. The data is not only relevant for the investigation of the ancestry of Panoan and Tacanan languages. Reflecting the state of the art in computer-assisted approaches for historical language comparison, it can serve as a role model for linguistic studies in other areas of the world.

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Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin write for Raidió Teilifís Éireann about Irish names for food:

Languages are a window into different cosmologies, a way of looking at the world differently. This especially applies to Irish food history and much can be learnt from the Irish language about our ancestors’ cattle-based economy and transhumance traditions, influenced by Ireland’s temperate climate, where regular rain meant grass grew nearly all year round. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive. […]

In his iconic book Cladaí Chonamara, Seamus Mac an Iomaire gave Irish names and descriptions for 43 different types of seaweed from his native west Galway. Extending this descriptive profusion, rabharta means a spring tide (which provides an abundance of cast-up seaweed), and the word garbhshíon or scairbhín na gCuach (rough weather of the Cuckoos) refers to a particular time between late April and early May when rough or harsh weather throws up seaweed on the coastline, which is also gathered for fertilising potato beds. […]

The triad ‘Turscar, Prátaí, Páistí’ (cast-up seaweed, potatoes, children) reinforces the historical interconnectedness between the weather, cast-up seaweed / wrack, potatoes, and population growth in coastal parts on this island. The adoption of the potato as a staple food directly influenced the dramatic population growth in Ireland from one million in 1590 (roughly coinciding with the introduction of the potato) to 8.4 million in the 1840s. […]

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Thomas Jones’s LRB review (6 December 2018; archived) of Brutus: The Noble Conspirator by Kathryn Tempest has lots of biographical and historical details, but this is the tidbit I couldn’t resist:

When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son’ but more along the lines of ‘See you in hell, punk.’

I sure hope that’s plausible to classicists, because I want to believe!

Jesse Will writes about a promising use for what I suppose we must call AI, annoying as that name is:

Indigenous languages are facing a steep decline: 90% are at risk of not being passed on to younger generations, while 70% are spoken by only a handful of individuals, predominantly elders. “Essentially, we’re racing against time. Within five to 10 years, we risk losing a significant part of the cultural and linguistic heritage in the United States,” explains Michael Running Wolf, a software engineer with roots in the Cheyenne community.

Running Wolf is one of a small but growing number of researchers who believe AI has the potential to safeguard endangered languages by simplifying the learning and practice process for speakers. As a co-founder of the First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) Initiative at Mila Artificial Intelligence Institute, he is at the forefront of efforts to update the way indigenous languages are taught and preserved. “The ideal outcome is that we reverse this pendulum of language loss,” says Running Wolf. We discussed his Cheyenne roots and how his work experience as an engineer in AI speech recognition blossomed into a bigger calling.
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Via Alex Foreman’s Facebook post, I discovered Tania Notarius (who studies ancient Northwest Semitic verbal syntax) and her paper “Lexical Isoglosses of Archaic Hebrew” (Hebrew Studies 58 [2017]: 81-98), which represents the kind of philological study (based on historical linguistics) I love. It focuses on Archaic Biblical Hebrew, which she describes as “a stage of the linguistic development that chronologically precedes the Biblical Hebrew of the formative period (Classical / Standard or Early Biblical Hebrew); in this sense it can be called proto-Hebrew.” After a couple of introductory sections, she says “In what follows, I will deal with words that belonged to Classical Biblical Hebrew vocabulary, but in a meaning different from their archaic usage,” and turns to פְּלִילִים in Deut 32:31:

The verse has a long history of interpretation. The LXX translates it as “lacking in understanding” (ανόητοι). Targum Onkelos translates “judges, arbiters” […] However, the interpretation of פְּלִילִים as “judges” is doubtful even for Exod 21:22. Speiser made a strong case for the meaning “estimate, considerations” in both cases: Exod 21:22—“according to estimate (of the miscarriage harm)”; Deut 32:31—“even in our enemies’ estimation.” His interpretation of the latter case, however, looks forced (why should the speaker care about the enemies’ estimation?), as was noticed by Tigay.

The etymology of the root pll, however, has not been systematically considered in this respect. The root pll belongs to the oldest layer of the Semitic lexicon and is attested in all the branches of Semitic, but with broad semantic scope, disclosing the depth of semantic splits.

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My wife and I are fans of the Morse/Lewis/Endeavour cop shows, and we’ve been going back to Season 3 of the latter (which is, frankly, a disappointment compared with the earlier and later ones). In the episode “Prey” (featuring an escaped tiger as a particularly absurd plot point) Fred Thursday, young Morse’s superior, says “You want something to mither [/ˈmaɪ.ðər/] about with that brain of yours,” which of course intrigued me, and after the show I looked it up, discovering (scroll down to mither²) that it’s a Northern English dialect verb (“of unknown origin”) meaning ‘to fuss over or moan about something.’ A site search revealed that AntC brought it up a couple of years ago, but confused the issue by yoking it to this mither, meaning ‘take care of, act as a mother to,’ which of course is just the Scots form of mother and has a short i. The verb in question here has a long i, and happily the OED added it in 2002:
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Stefan Fatsis (seen here repeatedly, e.g. in 2015 and last year) writes for Defector about an amazing guy:

In competitive Scrabble, there’s Nigel Richards and everyone else. The 57-year-old New Zealander has won 11 North American and world championships combined; no one else has won more than three. He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words. He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots. He’s a gentle, mild-mannered, private, witty, unflappable enigma—the undisputed Scrabble GOAT, and one of the most dominant players of any game ever.

Nigel—one name, like Serena or Michelangelo—went viral in 2015 after winning the French world championship even though he didn’t speak French. He inhaled some large chunk of the 386,000 words on the Francophone list, and did it in a mind-boggling nine weeks. That same year, he won a tournament in Bangalore, India, with a 30-3 record. In one of those games, Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS (the plural of a Latin American dance). In another, he threaded ASAFETIDA (a resin used in Indian cooking) through the F and the D. Those words likely had never been played in Scrabble before, and likely won’t be again.

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