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I once sort-of-followed Japanese baseball; I didn’t keep up with it on a weekly basis, but I knew who was doing well and could have named most of the teams in each league. One of my favorite team names was the Yakult Swallows (my favorite name, of course, was the Nippon Ham Fighters); there’s just something appealing about the combination of the lovely word “swallows” with the Cthulhu-like “Yakult.” Now, years later, I have learned from an Ask MetaFilter thread that the team is named for Yakult, “a yogurt-like beverage made by fermenting a mixture of skimmed milk and sugar with a special strain of the bacteria Lactobacillus casei.” And according to a Yakult FAQ, Yakult is derived from the word jahurto, meaning ‘yoghurt’ in Esperanto. How ’bout that! (The accepted word for ‘yogurt’ in Esperanto, however, is apparently jogurto.)

The current item on my WWI reading list is Solzhenitsyn’s November 1916, a thousand-page tome that will probably give me massive biceps by the time I’ve finished lugging it around. People complain about its “long passages providing historical background,” but I eat that stuff up; I’m probably the ideal reader at the moment, since I already know who all the historical characters are. What I’m complaining about is the bizarre set of choices made by the translator, H.T. Willetts, when it comes to rendering place names. The first chapter begins: “Birds don’t like some forests. There were fewer birds in skimpy, stunted Dryagovets than in Golubovshchina, three versts to the rear.” This is a perfectly decent rendering of the original: “Птицы любят не всякий лес. В жиденьком слабеньком Дряговце было их куда меньше и скучней, чем в Голубовщине, три версты в тыл.” What I am here drawing attention to is the rendering of the Russian names as (transliterated) Russian. Normal, you say? Sure, but a few paragraphs later we get: “…allow the Germans to cross the Szara, occupy the Torczyc Heights, and convert the manor house on the hill at Michalowo into a fortress.” The “Szara”? “Torczyc”? What the hell? I checked the Russian, and found “…а немцам дать перейти Щару, занять Торчицкие высотки и обратить в крепость возвышенный фольварк Михалово.” Any sane translator would render the place names as Shchara, Torchits, and Mikhalovo. But the good Mr. Willetts has for some reason lapsed into Polish. From there on, it’s what seems to be a random mix; “Baranowicze” (normally known as Baranovichi, where the Russian HQ had been earlier) and “Stolpce” (Stolbtsy) are followed by “Sablya,” which is followed by “Lake Koldyczew,” which is followed by “Melikhovichi.” Sometimes he yokes the two in the same phrase: “No Stwolowicze [i.e., Stvolovichi], and no Yushkevichi.” What is going on here?

Now, I grant that there are Polish names for all these geographical features in the part of the former Russian Empire that adjoined Poland, just as there are (say) Greek names for many places in Turkey and German ones for places in Eastern Europe. And I grant that Belorussia/Belarus (where these early scenes are set) was once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). But that was many centuries ago, and during WWI the area was part of the Russian Empire, and the official language was Russian, and the local populace presumably spoke either Russian or Belorussian for the most part, and though there were doubtless Poles as well I’m completely at a loss to understand why a random sprinkling of place names should be given in Polish (which, among other things, makes them harder to look up). Any light that can be shed on this irritating mystery will be much appreciated.

I’ve linked to it before, but I decided it was high time I gave bulbulovo (“bulbul’s online notebook”) its own post and added it to the blogroll—there’s just too much good stuff to ignore. Thursday the “Philologist in making” listed some wonderful books he got at what sounds like a wonderful Bratislava bookstore; earlier he bitched about the poor quality of Slovakian translators while providing his own versions of some colloquial usages from Law and Order (a show I also enjoy) and explained the derivation of the language name Bislama from beach-la-mar, an edible sea slug much traded by the Vanuatu islanders who use the language (and may I add that the inhabitants of Vanuatu must get tired of jokes about their national anthem, “Yumi, Yumi, Yumi,” continuing “…I’ve got love in my tumi”). And check out this post from last week, which not only links to a Swedish site for minority languages but gives his own analysis of the dialect features of “meänkieli (meidän kieli = ‘our language’), also known as Tornedalen Finnish,… a dialect of Finnish spoken in the area around and including the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda on the Swedish-Finnish border in Lappland.” Keep it up, O Slovak songbird!
Apropos of nothing, by the way, here’s a sign I encountered in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport last time I passed through there; it adorned the location that had apparently been 360° Gourmet Burritos (gourmet burritos??):
“This concept is closed at this time. For service, please visit one of our other concepts in the Marché.”
What I want to know is, are these concepts a priori or a posteriori?

I’m pleased to report that wood s lot turns six today. I’m astonished at Mark’s ability to keep up a steady stream of superb posts over so long a time; his is one of the very few sites I refuse to miss even when I’m having a busy day. He never, ever phones it in, and his coverage is both wide and deep. Hell, I’d go there for the photographs alone, and I’m not ordinarily a big fan of the photographic art. Congratulations, and keep it up!

Here’s a wonderful (and seasonally appropriate) poem he quotes today:

End of Summer

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
the roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
that part of my life was over.

Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their population forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

– Stanley Kunitz

Andrew Leonard has a Salon article called “Choosing Giles over Wade” (you’ll have to look at an ad for a moment before the “continue to article” link appears in the lower right-hand corner) that begins with an amusing description of being “attacked as an imperialist for spelling the name of the Chinese province Sichuan as Szechwan” as a lead-in to the multiplicity of romanizations for Chinese (“Street signs in Taiwan are a mad mix of Wade Giles, and at least three other systems: Postal System Pinyin, Yale and Gwoyeu Romatzyh”) and a very silly excursus on how wonderful it is that Chinese has such a complicated writing system (“It is not just the depth and richness of thousands of years of culture and history that are embedded in the many thousands of intricate ideograms. It is in the very fact that I am not sure which dictionary to reach for, or which method to use for identifying a given character. This is not the place to discourse on such techniques—the point is, there is no right or even sure way to proceed…”) before getting to what is to me the most interesting part:

Anyone interested in the Chinese language, whether an expert or novice, would do well to read the transcript of a lecture that Herbert Giles gave at Columbia University in 1902. It is a fascinating introduction to the Chinese language that at once illustrates both its awesome complexity and its enduring powers of seduction. The occasion of the speech is Columbia’s decision to endow a professorship in Chinese studies, something that Giles considers quite admirable, given the small number of scholars in the field at the time. He even notes that “Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of Chinese in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even that one spent his time more in adorning his profession than in imparting his knowledge to classes of eager students.”

I sat bolt upright in my cubicle upon reading that statement. The only person Giles could possibly be referring to would be Wade—the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, and the original creator of the Romanization system that Giles later modified into its enduring form. I immediately went looking for more information.

Alas, there are still limits to the Internet’s capabilities. David McMullen’s “Chinese studies at Cambridge—wide-ranging scholarship from a doubtful start”, from the Magazine of the Cambridge Society, is not yet available online, and the initially promising “The Formation and Development of Sinology at Cambridge” by Que Weimin of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, turned out to be in Chinese, and I am currently without my dictionaries. But I did find a speech given by Giles’ great grandson, Giles Pickford, in Taiwan in 2005, on the occasion of the founding of a new museum. Pickford observed that Giles had made many enemies in his life, including…. Thomas Wade.

The plot thickens! Thomas Wade may have been a soldier in the infamous Opium Wars, giving heft to any theories of Wade-Giles Romanization as a tool of neocolonialist ideological oppression. But Giles, apparently, was something else. According to Pickford, “Giles was also disliked by the Christian Missionaries whose work he despised. This antagonism was contrary to British Government policy, which saw the work of the missionaries as entirely legitimate and beneficial. Giles disagreed, and made his disagreement very open and public… Giles was also unpopular with the British traders because he opposed the overcrowding of emigrant Chinese on British ships. In 1881 he was presented with a Red Umbrella by the Hsiamen Chinese Chamber of Commerce in recognition of this service to the Chinese people.”

All my adult life, the names Wade and Giles, the first two professors of Chinese at Cambridge, have been linked inseparably in my head, as I am sure is true for countless other students of Chinese. But how many know that the two men were enemies, or that one was opposed to missionary evangelization (also a sin in my book,) or was a powerful advocate for better treatment of Chinese by the British?

I didn’t, and I’m glad to find out. (Thanks go to Language Log’s Ben Zimmer for the link.)

Update (Mar. 2025). I’ve added a link for the Que Weimin article and provided an archived one for the Pickford speech, but The Magazine of the Cambridge Society is still stubbornly offline. Come on, Cantabrigians, get with the 21st century!

Last week’s New Yorker has a Burkhard Bilger article called “The Path of Stones” about the gem industry in Madagascar. I was skimming through it when I hit a reference to “a low-grade sapphire known as geuda” that the Thais learned to turn into genuine-looking sapphire in the ’70s. This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I can tell, so I have no idea how it’s pronounced or where it’s from. This irritates me. Once again, I turn to the assembled multitueds, with confidence in your collective experience of the world. Surely some LH reader has hung out with enough gem dealers to know how they say the word: gooda? gyooda? gee-ooda? If you know the etymology, that’s definitely a plus.

As part of my ambitious attempt to understand what happened in Russia in the years before 1917, I’m reading The Years by Vasily V. Shulgin, the memoirs of an aged reactionary looking back on his Duma days from a distance of half a century. I thoroughly disapprove of his principles, but he’s a charming writer and was probably a lot of fun to hang out with. In the chapter “War,” he describes how he heard about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand on June 15(28), 1914; he was interrupted by a telephone call from the newspaper he edited while he was in the middle of a drinking bout at a Kiev cabaret. He had just been having the following interaction with one of the gypsy singers:

Then the gypsy with the high cheekbones, who was awfully nice, a stranger, but already a close friend, would smile broadly and repeat something over and over in the gypsy language.
Ah, in the gypsy language? I’m no worse than she. And I answered her in the gypsy language with the only phrase I knew: “Tu nadzhinəs someə takə norakirava. A mə takə ser-so səu mussel.”
The first words mean: “You, dear friend, do not understand anything.”
The rest is in such an old dialect that many gypsies nowadays do not understand it. And it is better that the reader not understand it. But Ducia, the gypsy with the high cheekbones, understood it, and Niura also. And they, and the others after them, began to carry on so, that I decided I must put an end to it….

I, dear friends, do not understand anything. And you can imagine my frustration. I know it’s a long shot, between the “old dialect” and the octogenarian memory, but can anyone decipher those tantalizing sentences, with their oddly exact-looking schwas?

A correspondent sent me a Prospect Magazine story by Stephen Oppenheimer about the ethnic origins of modern Britons. Now, I’m very suspicious of attempts to apply biology to linguistics, and I’ve bashed Oppenheimer before, but what the hell, I’ll toss an excerpt up and see if anyone has anything useful to add:

So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”
The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.
Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.
A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

Oh, and he thinks Brits are really Basques: “But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots.”

Thanks for the link, Paul!

Just dropping by for a quick visit—I’ve managed to get myself stuck with too much work and too little time—but I wanted to call attention to Mark Liberman’s exegesis of the phrase “new wine in old bottles” (and its confusing newer variant “old wine in new bottles”). Just keep the word “goatskins” in mind and your confusion should be minimized.
Also, if you have any interest in science fiction, don’t miss the Tensor’s discussion of Robert Sheckley’s “Shall We Have a Little Talk?”—an early classic of linguistic sf, and funny as hell.

A charming essay by Jay Parini discusses a vicarious pleasure known to many bibliophiles:

In restaurants I always want to eat whatever someone else at the table has ordered, even if it’s not something I would normally consume. Along similar lines, I find myself thoroughly intrigued by other people’s books. I want to borrow them and read them. Sometimes I go so far as to mimic other people’s collections, adding my own copies of their titles to my shelves at home.
I still remember going to visit a friend in Scotland, long ago. He lived in a tiny house in a back alley in St. Andrews, where I spent many years as a university student. He had a pristine row of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, then and now. I often used to go to his house for afternoon tea, and the conversation was absorbing. But it was hard to keep my eyes off that uniform edition: the colorful spines, the remarkable titles (Ada, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). I liked the elegant typeface, and the sense of a complex international life captured in a shelf of books. Decades later, when I got my own house, in Vermont, I went to some trouble to acquire from British booksellers that exact row of Nabokov, recreated volume by volume at considerable expense…

Thanks for the link, Paul!