languagehat.com

Erin Maglaque, last seen here in 2023 discussing Aldus Manutius, reviews several books on the Renaissance — Nine Hundred Conclusions by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver), The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Sublime Language by Edward Wilson-Lee, and Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer — for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 18 · 9 October 2025; archived), and it’s full of good things. Some excerpts:

Giovanni Pico​, count of Mirandola and Concordia, was 23 when he travelled to Rome to become an angel. It was 1487. Christendom’s most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last, e.g. ‘251. The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul’ and ‘385. No angel that has six wings ever changes’ and ‘784. Doing magic is nothing other than marrying the world’ and ‘395. Whenever we don’t know the feature that influences a prayer that we pray, we should fall back on the Lord of the Nose.’ In an ecstatic trance he was going to leave behind his worthless, handsome body and ascend a mystical ladder to join with the godhead, the transcendence of his soul so absolute that his body might accidentally die. This was the Death of the Kiss. […]

Pico’s life touched much of what made the Renaissance the Renaissance. There were the people: Lorenzo de’ Medici, a Borgia pope (Alexander VI), Savonarola. There was the arcane classical scholarship: before Pico, no Christian had studied the Jewish Kabbalah. There was his reputed physical beauty: in paintings he looked like one of Botticelli or Raphael’s angels, pale and androgynous, with intricate golden curls. There was his immersion in the utterly bizarre world of Florentine Neoplatonism. He was friends with Marsilio Ficino, who taught his students to hallucinate by chewing laurel leaves while playing the lyre, who dressed up in a cape made of feathers so that he could be ‘a true Orpheus’. There were love affairs with men and women; there was intrigue and – finally – murder.

The speech with which Pico planned to open his performance in Rome is popularly known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. The text, with its emphasis on human freedom and the intrinsic value of the individual, has been taught to generations of students as the canonical expression of the Italian Renaissance; it was ‘one of the noblest legacies of that cultural epoch’, according to the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. […]

Pico never delivered his Oration. And it turns out that this most famous speech of the Renaissance isn’t really about the dignity of man at all. It’s about destroying personhood in pursuit of a melting with the One. It’s a script for mystical self-annihilation, the opposite of a humanist argument for man’s distinction in a secularising age. The Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

[Read more…]

Bianca Giacobone and Guido G. Beduschi report on an intriguing acquisition:

In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.

It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of facts contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva could offer guidance on how to navigate the moment, demonstrating that “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing,” Havens said.

His pitch was successful. Johns Hopkins University acquired the collection for an undisclosed amount and housed it in the wainscoted library room of the Evergreen Museum and Library, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore.

The sellers were Arthur and Janet Freeman, a couple of book merchants who made their name in the tight-knit world of antiquarian booksellers by collecting fascinating literary forgeries. Their venture started in 1961, when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama at Harvard University, began acquiring sources on John Payne Collier. Collier, a well-respected 19th-century scholar, had caused a ruckus among his contemporaries when he claimed to have found thousands of annotations to a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which he said had been penned by a contemporary of Shakespeare — but was in fact forged by Collier himself.

In the decades that followed, Freeman, who died in 2025, assembled a vast array of literary fakes, collecting books whose content is deceiving in nature. These included poetry purported to have been written by Martin Luther, who was not much of a poet, or reports of Pope Joan, a woman who, in the Middle Ages, disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only to be caught out when she suddenly gave birth in the middle of a procession in Rome. The latter myth was perpetuated for centuries and was not firmly debunked until the 17th century.

There’s more at the link; we’ve discussed imaginary books (not quite the same thing) in 2014 and 2024. Thanks, Nick!

Another intriguing Facebook post by Nelson Goering (I’ve added itals where appropriate):

Einar Haugen has this to say about the fate of ð/d in later Scandinavian:

“In all Sc except Ic it normally disappeared after vowels, e.g. CSc veþr weather > veðr > NW vær/Sw dial vär… In Da Sw NN DN it was later restored in the spelling of a number of words, and from this developed a spelling pronunciation with d… In its function as a preterite suffix -ð- was often preserved, or even sharpened to -t-, e.g. CSc svaraði > Da svarede/Sw svarade/DN svārte, but NN svara (older svarade).” (The Scandinavian Languages, pp. 266-7, Sect. 11.3.15)

My question is about the last part, the “sharpening”. Is this usually regarded as a phonological development (and if so, are there any parallels from other morphological contexts), or as (like I’ve sort of vaguely been assuming, without having ever given any real thought to it) an analogical generalization from those verbs in which -t- developed regularly (e.g. vakþi/vakti > vakte). I grant that such verbs aren’t all that numerous in the grand scheme of things, but there are a certain number, and if speakers were looking for a more characterized preterite at the time of d-loss, they’d be a ready source.

I’ll copy Nelson’s conclusion: Any thoughts, or pointers to interesting discussions?

A University of Copenhagen press release reports on what could be an exciting discovery:

Christophe Helmke and Magnus Pharao Hansen have taken the first steps toward solving a major archaeological mystery surrounding the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. Until now, the language of Teotihuacan has been unknown. […] By analyzing the signs on Teotihuacan’s colorful murals and many other artefacts, they have concluded that the signs constitute an actual writing system, and they believe that this writing records an early form of the Uto-Aztecan language, which a thousand years later developed into the languages Cora, Huichol, and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

The paper, “The Language of Teotihuacan Writing,” is paywalled, but a free preprint, without the commentaries, is here; there’s Reddit commentary here (“Magnus is an excellent scholar and Nahuatl linguist and I take his ideas seriously”) and here (“it is the first time i see an abstract with a version in nahuatl (beside english and spanish). neat”). Thanks for the great collection of links go to Y, who adds:

The crux is that the rebus principle which has been tried before to interpret the script had assumed a language similar to Classical Nahuatl. Pharao Hansen has been working for a while on strengthening the evidence for a Nahuatl-Corachol subfamily. They argue that the protolanguage yields a better fit for the Teotihuacan rebuses than the Nahuatl of a thousand years later.

I hope it turns out to work as well as the Linear B decipherment!

I had occasion (I think because of the bizarre Finnish video I linked to here) to investigate the Finnish word koti ‘home,’ which led me back through successive etymological retreats to Proto-Uralic *kota, where I found the following Wortgeschichte:

Probably akin to Proto-Iranian *kátah (compare Avestan 𐬐𐬀𐬙𐬀 (kata, “house/home, pit”), Persian کده (kade, “house”)), in which case it is a loan in one direction or the other, but the direction is not entirely clear. Many researchers have supported an early loanword from pre-Indo-Iranian into Uralic, but this is not certain, as the Iranian word has no known cognates in Indo-European, not even Indo-Aryan. The similarity may simply be a coincidence.

Moreover, the root may have been a widespread Wanderwort across Eurasia; compare Abkhaz ақыҭа (akəta), Azerbaijani qutan (“(dialectal) dugout for lambs”), Proto-Mongolic *kotan (Mongolian хот (xot, “town”)), Turkish kodak (“(dialectal) home”), Ainu コタン (kotan, “village”), Japanese 鶏 (kutakake, kudakake, “rooster”, hybrid Ainu-Japanese word, literally “house rooster”), Tamil குடி (kuṭi, “house, abode, home, family, lineage, town, tenants”). Borrowings from Iranian (specifically Scythian) include Proto-Germanic *kutą, *kutǭ (whence English cot, Dutch kot, German Kate) and Proto-Slavic *xata (“house”).

Some of those Wörter would have had to do a lot of wandern (I know, that’s not good German, tut mir Leid), but it’s good to have all the possibilities laid out; we discussed Mongolian хот earlier this year. As for *xata, it is indissolubly linked in my mind with one of my favorite Russian sayings, моя хата с краю, я ничего не знаю.

I was reading Jennifer Wilson’s NYkr puff piece on former prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin (archived) and was rewarded with a few morsels of Finnish, for example the phrase at the end of this passage:

A few months later, Marin shocked foes and supporters alike by resigning from Parliament. It turned out that living like someone her age included experiencing millennial burnout, or, as Finns call it, palaa loppuun (“burn to the end”).

Googling it led me to this Finnish cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” called “Loppuun palaa,” which features a bearded man in a bathrobe staring phlegmatically at the camera while two recorders (?) tootle in his ears; after a minute and a half it takes a turn that I won’t spoil, and by the end many mysteries remain. Later, I hit this sentence:

She lived, funnily enough, in the same co-op that Marin and Räikkönen used to, and she and her neighbors were having what Finns call a talkoot, a sort of community-gardening-and-cleanup event.

So I looked up talkoot, which is defined as “(usually in the plural) bee, dugnad (gathering for carrying out a major task, such as harvesting, construction or cleaning)”; the mysterious “dugnad” threw me for a loop, and though Wiktionary claims it’s English, a Google Books search suggests it’s used only when discussing Norway. In Norwegian (where the final -d is silent [not any more — see Trond Engen’s comment below]) it means ‘unpaid voluntary, orchestrated community work’; it’s derived from Proto-Germanic *duganą and is thus related to German taugen ‘(chiefly in the negative) to be fit’ and Scots dow ‘to be able; to be willing, to dare; to thrive, to prosper.’ “That pretty building’s storeys five; May all about it dow and thrive!”

Michael Marcus has an extraordinarily interesting Medium post on Borges and his translators; after some introductory paragraphs about Borges himself and disagreements over the different translations of his stories, he points out that “Borges himself was fluent in English, and was prolific in translating English works into Spanish” and asks: “Why didn’t he translate his stories on his own?”

When trying to determine which translation is ‘best’, more insight into Borges’ mind is found than was bargained for — a rabbit-hole pursuit, uncovering discovery after discovery that surprises us with his tastes and his views. In a way that is perhaps typical of Borges, he provided an answer before many of us even came to ask the question.

He then compares four versions — by Anthony Bonner, James E. Irby, Andrew Hurley, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni — of the opening sentence of “Las ruinas circulares” (The Circular Ruins), commendably giving it first in the original: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche…” He discusses each translation in some detail; of Bonnier’s, for example, he says:

Infinitas aldeas is translated as numberless villages, suggesting that the villages in the South are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable when looked at collectively.

Readers of this version may pick up on an authoritative tone, almost biblical in its rendering. This is cemented when we come to the point where the man is described as having an invincible intent: the original describes him as having ‘su invencible propósito’. Propósito is one of those words that be interpreted in different ways — Irby’s later translation will call it an invincible purpose; Hurley goes so far as to change it to unconquerable plan — just one example of how variation of a key phrase can affect how the story is received.

[Read more…]

I was considering the word mall, thinking vaguely that it had something to do with Pall Mall, and when I investigated I found such an interesting mess I thought I’d share it. The OED’s entry (revised 2000) starts with “Senses deriving from the place where pall-mall was played” (c1660 “The Mall [at Tours], which is without comparison the noblest..in Europ… Here we play’d a party or two,” J. Evelyn, Diary anno 1644 vol. II. 145); these lead to “A fashionable assembly in the open air; a sheltered walk serving as a promenade; in some towns adopted as a proper name” (1710 “The intrigues of the mall and the playhouse,” S. Palmer, Moral Essays Prov. 203), and this to the modern sense:

I.2.c. Chiefly North American, Australian, and New Zealand. A shopping precinct or street closed to vehicles; a large (usually covered) shopping centre; = shopping mall n.

1959 Kalamazoo’s permanent downtown mall..is an expression of the great need to do something to pull the central business districts of our nation out of the low estate in which they have fallen.
Chain Store Age October e3

1963 The central paved avenue, or ‘mall’ [in a shopping centre], wider than any street, with booths in the middle.
Observer 15 September 23/6
[…]

1980 I’ll paint myself bright green all over and walk down the Mall in the nuddy!
E. Metcalfe, Garden Party 43
[…]

The etymology was surprising:

Probably a specific application of maul n.¹ [‘a hammer’] (compare form mall at that entry, and form maul in quot. 1706 for the Mall n. at sense I.2a), after 17th-cent. senses of French mail (see mail n.⁵ [‘the game of pall-mall; a place where the game was played’]). Compare also pall-mall n.

OK, let’s compare pall-mall:
[Read more…]

David Wright Faladé’s “Amarillo Boulevard” (New Yorker, September 28, 2025; archived) is the best short story I’ve read in a while, dealing with family, race, friendship, Texas, and other large matters with no apparent effort and packing a surprising emotional punch. What leads me to post it is a phrase I had to look up, the last one in this paragraph:

Miss Sammie asked, “Do Atlanta Juneteenths be like we do around here, with the collards and the mac ’n’ cheese and the rest? You know, putting your foot in it.”

To me, to put your foot in it means (to quote the Cambridge Dictionary site) “to say something by accident that embarrasses or upsets someone,” which is clearly not the sense here. Fortunately, I found this Reddit thread:

I used to cook food at a shelter and one time a guest told me “you must have put your foot in this!” I had never heard the saying before and thought he was accusing me of adulterating the food. I tried to apologize, but he told me that it was a compliment. Apparently, it is usually used to express satisfaction with a meal/dish, “you put your foot in that” is a compliment to the chef in the southern U.S. Does anybody have any insight on this idiom? From what I can gather by the context of the situation it has to do with preparing a meal with care/dedication, similar to “you put your heart into it.” But why the foot?

whatcarpaltunnel
“You’ve stumpd your toe in this” or “You stuck your thumb in this” are the ones I’m most familiar with being from the south. These two can refer to a range of expression from being too sweet or complementing the chef(cook) on his mastery, in my experience. I’m hoping someone can chime in on the saying for a more detailed history.

zsluggiest1
I was a chef throughout Louisiana for about 20 years and worked with several mid 60-65 year old black women that all said the same thing. They said it came from the days of slavery when there were very limited ingredients left over for the slaves to feed themselves. When someone would get a dish just right they would say that the cook must have “stuck their foot in it” as to say it had a flavor that was better regardless of using the exact same ingredients as everyone else. It makes a lot of sense given how much more common the phrase is in deep south black culture.

It’s pretty much unusable if you’re not part of the relevant cultural group, but I’m glad to know about it. (Yeah, yeah, the folk history of the phrase is probably not accurate, but people love to find satisfying explanations for opaque idioms.)

I’m only on the first chapter of Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919, which I can already tell is going to be endlessly informative and thought-provoking (thanks, NWU Press!), and the section “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy Weigh the Two Cultures” is so interesting I thought I’d quote some chunks of it:

While incarcerated in Omsk from 1850 to 1854, Dostoevsky had experienced a range of behavior generally unknown to Russian writers or readers of the cultured classes. He presented House of the Dead as fragments of a manuscript left by a recently deceased landowner who had spent ten years in penal servitude in Siberia. The chapters, written in the first person, purport to be selections from a larger text made by an editor who introduced the work. The memoir rests squarely on the premise that the Westernized classes have no idea how abysmal their ignorance of the peasant is.

[The gentry] are divided from the peasants by the deepest abyss, and this is fully evident only when a member of the privileged class suddenly finds himself, due to the action of powerful external circumstances, completely deprived of his former rights, and turns to the common people. It does not matter if you have dealt with peasants all your life, if you have associated with them every day for forty years in a businesslike way, for instance in regularly prescribed administrative transactions, or even simply in a friendly way, as a benefactor, or, in a certain sense, a father-you will never really know them.

The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that it took imprisonment at close quarters with peasant convicts to make him see how much he took accustomed social roles and privileges for granted. He experienced the greatest difficulty in being treated by the peasants as a person. “The hatred which I as a member of the gentry, continually experienced from the convicts during my first few years became intolerable, poisoning my whole life” (176).

[Read more…]