languagehat.com

Zahra Fatima reports for BBC News about the sort of contretemps that I can imagine myself falling victim to, should I ever take up a life of crime:

A would-be burglar in Rome was caught after stopping to read a book on Greek mythology in the middle of a robbery, Italian media report. The 38-year-old reportedly gained access to a flat in the Italian capital’s Prati district via the balcony but became distracted after picking up a book about Homer’s Iliad on a bedside table.

The 71-year-old homeowner is said to have awoken and confronted the alleged thief, who was engrossed in the book. News of the failed robbery attracted the attention of the book’s author, who told local media he wanted to send the man a copy so he could “finish” his read. […]

Giovanni Nucci, the author of The Gods at Six O’Clock, which explains the Iliad from the perspective of the gods, told Il Messaggero: “It’s fantastic.”

“I’d like to find the person caught red-handed and give him the book, because he’ll have been arrested halfway through reading it. I’d like him to be able to finish it. It’s a surreal story, but also full of humanity.”

Thanks, Bonnie!

Stan Carey at Sentence first has a post about the word coolth, which I’ve always liked and used; Stan starts by quoting a use by Edna O’Brien (“I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar”), then continues:

The word’s meaning is simple: ‘coolness’. Or, per Merriam-Webster, ‘the state or occasion of being cool’ – referring, like coolness, to temperature or style: mainly temperature. Its connotations are rangier: it’s labelled ‘chiefly literary, archaic, or humorous’ by the OED and ‘chiefly humorous’ and ‘usually facetious’ elsewhere.

Edna O’Brien’s lines clearly fall under the ‘literary’ label, but the word’s humorous/facetious side is more to the fore in other places, leading the Columbia Guide to Standard American English – rare among usage dictionaries in covering the word – to dismiss it as ‘tiresomely jocular’. 100 years ago J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that coolth ‘shows signs of losing its facetiousness, and may claim part of the territory of cool’.

Whatever about the first prediction, the latter has not occurred. Coolth has minimal currency and is omitted from most dictionaries – even online ones, which are far less concerned with space. That’s not a criticism. Editorial resources are finite and so cannot attend to all marginal words.

He lists other ­–th terms, adding: “Anyone who so chooses can still generate new words with –th: see the modern statistical term shorth.” But in the (very interesting) comment thread, mollymooly says:

Quibble: “shorth” is not “short” + “-th”, it’s from “shortest half”. (Not “shorter half” BTW; there are more than two ways to choose half of the available datapoints.)

Which is a very odd way to create a word, and makes me wonder: how do those who use it say it? Wiktionary doesn’t give a pronunciation.

I recently read Négar Djavadi’s much-praised novel Disoriental (translated by Tina Kover from the French Désorientale); I can see why people like it, but it didn’t work for me in my present literary mood — it’s an awkward combination of family saga, coming-of-age story, and history lesson (Djavadi clearly wants to educate ignorant westerners about the Iran her family escaped from). As I wrote Lizok:

It reminded me somewhat of Ulitskaya’s Веселые похороны, with its stifling atmosphere of winking complicity (“we all know people like this, don’t we, and we all do these wacky things?”). And the writing is so stodgy and earnest, with long lumbering passages about what people are like (and she seems to think all Japanese are the same, all Flemish people, all Parisians, etc. etc.). I have the feeling it’s heavily autobiographical, and the author doesn’t have nearly enough distance. I’m not sorry I read it, mind you, I learned about some parts of Paris I wasn’t familiar with (and learned that Parisians still call the place Léon Blum “place Voltaire,” even though that hasn’t been its name for decades, much like New Yorkers and Sixth Avenue) and got to familiarize myself a bit with Brussels, but still, not my favorite book.

But what brings it to LH are the footnotes. (Yes, that sentence reads poorly from the standpoint of school grammar, but it sounds right and that’s how I would say it.) Back in 2008 michael farris wrote:

I dislike footnotes in fiction, the wordier, more explanatory the worse.
That said, I’m less likely to find them intrusive if it’s for a US edition of a anglophone novel (sort of like quicombo for a brazilian reader).
But in translated fiction (or English fiction set in a non-English speaking environment) they rankle. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, but it is for me.

I don’t feel that way about footnotes in general, but in this case I am in total agreement. Here’s the first (there are quite a few scattered through the book):

¹ To make things easier for you and save you the trouble of looking it up on Wikipedia, here are a few facts: Mazandaran is a province in northern Iran, 9,151 square miles in area. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and surrounded by the Alborz mountain range, it is the only Persian region to have resisted Arab-Muslim hegemony and was, in fact, the last to become Muslim. To imagine it, you have to picture the lush landscapes of Annecy, Switzerland, or Ireland—green, misty, rainy. Legend has it that when they first arrived in Mazandaran, the Muslims cried, “Oh! We have reached Paradise!”

I’m sorry, but that’s just lazy and (I can’t think of a better word) unprofessional. If the information is vital in context, work it into the text; if it’s not, let the interested reader look it up. That’s what Wikipedia is for!

We discussed the notorious Voynich Manuscript back in 2013 (at which time slawkenbergius pointed out that the theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in Manchu led to the digitization of Jerry Norman’s Concise Manchu-English Lexicon); now Ariel Sabar (who has been featured here a number of times, e.g. 2013) has a useful roundup in the Atlantic (archived) of the many crackpot theories about it, as well as the theoretically better-grounded recent work by medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis and those who have come out of hiding in her wake: linguist Claire Bowern, computer scientists at the University of Malta, etc. It makes for fascinating reading, but I still prefer the conclusion of the Batya Ungar-Sargon article I linked back in 2013: it was Voynich what done it. (Thanks, rozele!)

A discussion of literature by Jorge Mario Bergoglio (as was) includes this nice bit on his compatriot:

When I think of literature, I am reminded of what the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges used to tell his students, namely that the most important thing is simply to read, to enter into direct contact with literature, to immerse oneself in the living text in front of us, rather than to fixate on ideas and critical comments. Borges explained this idea to his students by saying that at first they may understand very little of what they are reading, but in any case they are hearing “another person’s voice”. This is a definition of literature that I like very much: listening to another person’s voice. We must never forget how dangerous it is to stop listening to the voice of other people when they challenge us!

That resonates with me as well; I enjoy a good analysis of a literary text, but the primary pleasure and benefit is that of simply listening to it.

Stu Clayton pointed me to the DNB entry on Mark Ridley, who led an interesting life:

Ridley, Mark (b. 1560, d. in or before 1624), physician and writer on magnetism, was born on 2 August 1560, and baptized on 18 August, at Stretham, Cambridgeshire, the second son of the six children of Lancelot Ridley (d. 1576), rector of Stretham, and his wife, Mary. Having matriculated as a pensioner from Clare College, Cambridge, at Easter 1577, he graduated BA in 1581 and MA in 1584. On 25 September 1590 he was licensed by the College of Physicians to practise medicine, and from 26 June 1592 he is shown in the annals of the college as MD. On 28 May 1594 he was admitted as a fellow of the college, having been appointed the day before by Queen Elizabeth to serve the tsar of Russia, Feodor Ivanovich, who had written to the queen requesting the services of an English physician. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was instrumental in the appointment.

Ridley remained in Moscow for five years. Another of the tsar’s physicians in 1594–7, simultaneously with him, was Baldwin Hamey the elder. Following the death of Tsar Feodor on 7 January 1598 Ridley was appointed to the service of his successor, Boris Godunov. At the request of Queen Elizabeth, however, he was given leave to return to England in 1599 and was present in London at a meeting of the College of Physicians held on 1 October that year. […] Ridley’s scientific interests extended beyond medical matters into magnetism, a subject on which he published two books: A Short Treatise of Magneticall Bodies and Motions (1613) and Magneticall Animadversions: made by Marke Ridley, doctor in physicke, upon certaine magneticall advertisements, lately published, from Maister William Barlow (1617). […]

I’ll pass over the accusation of plagiarism and get to the part of Hattic interest:

To Ridley are attributed two manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MSS Laud misc. 47a and 47b): one is a Russian-English dictionary containing 7203 entries, entitled ‘A dictionarie of the vulgar Russe tongue‘, the other an English-Russian dictionary (8113 entries), entitled ‘A dictionarie of the Englishe before the vulger Russe tonnge‘. The attribution depends primarily on comparison with an inscription by Ridley on the flyleaf of a Russian printed book (now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge), presented by him in 1599 to Thomas Neville, dean of Canterbury and master of Trinity College. Being composed of words collected from the vernacular and uninfluenced by church Slavonic, the dictionaries often anticipate the evidence of other sources. They are not only the earliest dictionaries of Russian words with English equivalents, but also the first Russian dictionaries of any kind in the full sense, that is to say, arranged alphabetically and with the Russian words written in Cyrillic letters. A rudimentary Russian grammar on the first eight folios of the Russian-English dictionary is the earliest recorded. Both dictionaries also contain specialized vocabularies of words for birds, fishes, plants, and diseases.

A Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tongue: Edited from the Late-sixteenth-century Manuscripts by Gerald Stone was published in 1996 and is available on Amazon for a mere $53.88 (Other Used from $53.88). Thanks, Stu!

The omnivorous Bathrobe sent me these links:

1) How to Choose the Best Translation of the Iliad.

John Prendergast writes:

The one and only Iliad of Homer, the primordial, Western masterpiece of epic adventure about a pivotal battle during the Trojan War should transport readers through the mind of its long-dead composer to an earlier world, where heroes and heroines perform glorious deeds that have lived forever after in our collective memory, and where gods are indivisible from natural things. How well readers become transported depends on the quality and fidelity of translation. But how do you decide which translation of the Iliad to choose? Are you really reading what Homer said? Comparing the words of one against those of another leaves a reader blind. Choice must rely on taste or on which one seems to sound better. This critique is intended to open the eyes and reveal the quality and fidelity of eleven leading English translations by comparing passages from each to the original Homeric Greek.

2) MachineTranslation.com by Tomedes. Bathrobe writes:

It’s a site that compares translations by online machine translation services (such as Google Translate, DeepL, etc.), and gives each translation a score (by which they are then ranked). You can choose from quite a range of languages to translate from and to. I thought it was rather interesting.

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I was investigating the word gandoura ‘A long, loose gown worn mainly in the Near East and North Africa’ (OED) because its Russian equivalent гандура (or rather гондура, which sounds the same in standard Russian) shows up in the epilogue to Bely’s chef d’oeuvre Petersburg (see this 2010 post); the OED says “< Algerian Arabic gandūra, classical Arabic ḳandūra, and Wikipedia gives the Arabic form as قندورة (although Arabic Wikipedia has كندورة — what’s up with that?).

But when I found it on p. 195 of The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary by Garland Hampton Cannon and Alan S. Kaye (Harrassowitz, 1994) I noticed a more interesting etymology just above it:

gamashes, pl. (1596) Cloth. (Archaic, Scotland) Infrequent var. gamash, sing. + 10 [MF gamaches, pl. < OProv garamacha, galamacha < OSP guadameci colored or embossed leather < Ar ghadāmasi of the Tripoli town of Gadàmes, where this ornate leather was produced] Leggings or gaiters worn by horseback riders.

The OED (entry revised 2013) agrees, adding “The forms gamashoes, gammashoes show alteration by folk-etymological association with shoes, plural of shoe n.” Great stuff; what puzzles me a bit is why the unstressed third syllable in ghadāmasi, with its short -a-, wound up stressed in the Romance forms. (For English, the OED gives British /ɡəˈmaʃ/ guh-MASH, U.S. /ɡəˈmæʃ/ guh-MASH.)

Hilaire Belloc was a nasty piece of work, but I have to agree with this reactionary lament (via Laudator Temporis Acti):

The first thing that so arises in my mind, my ignorant mind, is the soft, suffused air of delight evoked by the word ‘Livy.’ It is one of the very few left of those idiomatic English names, transformed from the Latin, which we can still boast.

Our fathers used to call Cicero ‘Tully,’ and we still talk of Ovid and of Virgil and of Horace. But for the most part the Latin names have broken back upon our tradition and have re-established themselves. It is an evil and the symptom of an evil; for an idiomatic form given to classical names betrays a familiar and intimate knowledge with the work for which they stand: makes them part of the furniture of an English house.

We can appreciate Roman culture without pretending that we’re Romans!

Hilary A Smith, Honorary Research Fellow (Linguistics) at Massey University, writes for The Conversation:

From the beginning of the 2025 school year, all schools [in New Zealand] will be required to use structured literacy – also known as “phonics” or the “science of reading” – to teach children how to read. But the very nature of this approach to reading could cause bilingual children to lose their second language.

Structured literacy teaches children to decode the relationships between sounds and letters. Readers use decoding to “sound out” words they don’t recognise.

But teaching children decoding in English is different from teaching reading in other languages, which have different sound systems. Losing these second languages will be to the detriment of students, with research repeatedly highlighting the benefits of bilingualism.

According to the 2018 Census, the four most common languages after English were te reo Māori, Samoan, Northern Chinese including Mandarin, and Hindi. These all have different sound systems, and in the case of Chinese or Hindi, their writing scripts represent sounds in a completely different way from the English alphabet.

There’s more, of course, but you get the general idea. Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says “I’m frankly left scratching my head over it,” and I have a similar reaction — how could phonics cause children to lose their second language? But he and I may be missing something. Fire away!