languagehat.com

The wonderful German site Lyrikline showcases poets reading their own poetry in many languages: currently Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-romanic, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Wayuunaiki, and Welsh. I’m afraid the translations offered are mostly in German and French, which won’t help many Anglophones, but even if you don’t understand the words, it’s great to hear the varied voices of the poets. (Via MetaFilter.)

1) A correspondent writes that she was at a Farmers’ Market, where

a Turkish woman in powder-blue hijab came up to my booth and lovingly fingered the tarragon while asking me if I had any “merzhe.” She explained to me that this herb was commonly used in conjunction with rosemary in meat-based dishes in both Turkey and Iraq… I know nothing about it, other than the fact that it looks rather like tarragon… As near as I can tell, it sounded like “merzhe” (MARE-zhe; stress on the first syllable, and the schwa of the second falling off so as to be nearly unheard)… She said that this was the word for the herb in Iraq.

In trying to investigate this I did google up a nice Turkish herb page, but no luck on the merje (which is how it would be written in Turkish if it’s a Turkish word). Can any herbologists out there provide an identification, preferably with Latin binomial?

2) As I approach the end of In Parenthesis, the allusions and difficulties come thick and fast. Here’s one that’s bothering me. On page 161 Jones is describing the motley crew that marched forward with him (or rather his stand-in Pvt. Ball) into German machine-gun fire at the Battle of the Somme, in the insanely slow and formal manner insisted on by the commanding officers:

and two lovers from Ebury Bridge,
Bates and Coldpepper
that men called the Lily-white boys.
Fowler from Harrow and the House who’d lost his way into
this crush who was gotten in a parsonage on a maye.
Dynamite Dawes the old ‘un
and Diamond Phelps his batty,
from Santiago del Estero
and Bulawayo respectively,
both learned in ballistics
      and wasted on a line-mob.

Now, I know Ebury Bridge (that’s EE-bery) is a street in Westminster and the Lily-white boys are from Green Grow the Rushes, O and Santiago del Estero is in Argentina (I’ve been there) and Bulawayo is in Zimbabwe (then, of course, Southern Rhodesia and part of the Empire)… but what is batty? Jones has this note: “Interchangeable with ‘china’ [Cockney rhyming slang for mate]… but more definitely used of a most intimate companion. Jonathan was certainly David’s ‘batty’.” Well, that’s intriguing, but none of my dictionaries, slang or otherwise, sheds light on this. It is, of course, strikingly similar to batty ‘a person’s buttocks; the backside’ and battyman ‘(derogatory and offensive) a homosexual man’ (OED), but those are not only attested significantly later than WWI but of Afro-Caribbean origin—the first citation for batty is:

1935 H. P. JACOBS Coll. Notes Jamaican Lang. (MS) in F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page Dict. Jamaican Eng. (1967) s.v., Wen breeze blow, fowl batty show.

I don’t think this can be the word Jones is using, but I don’t have any other clues. Anybody know? Oh, and while I’m at it, what’s the “House” Fowler’s from?

A nice tidbit I did solve: Jones refers to “rooty and bully,” and while I knew bully was canned (usually corned) beef, I had no idea what “rooty” might be. This time the OED came through; it’s military slang for ‘bread,’ and it’s from (duh!) Hindi-Urdu rōtī ‘bread,’ a word very familiar from Indian restaurants.

1883 SALA in Illustr. Lond. News 7 July 3/3 At least eight years ago I heard of a private soldier complaining.. that he had not had his ‘proper section of rooty’. 1900 KIPLING in J. Ralph War’s Brighter Side (1901) xv. 253 And the ‘umble loaf of ‘rootey’ Costs a tanner, or a bob. 1900 ‘M. THYME’ in Ibid. xx. 316 Bully beef and rooty, and Something’s give me a pain. 1957 M. K. JOSEPH I’ll soldier no More (1960) 14 Hey, Antonio, where’s me rooty? And make it juldy, see? 1959 Listener 5 Mar. 406/1 Eight ounces of ‘rooty’—that is bread.

Regular readers of LH will know that I have a particular interest in Russian swearing, or mat (1, 2), and through a comment by tellurian in a thread at AskMetaFilter I was pointed to a long article by S.A. Smith called “The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia” (originally in Past & Present, August 1998). For those who don’t want to work through all 20 pages (some of which are quite short), here’s the conclusion:

Mat was a key element in the shifting discourse of kul’turnost’ through which educated Russians reflected on the state of society. Though its particular connotations changed, as Russia changed its rulers—from moral degradation of the common people, to sedition, to hooliganism, to political backwardness—neither the late imperial nor the Bolshevik authorities looked on mat as politically neutral. Moreover, those who fought to overthrow the tsarist order, including the ‘conscious’ workers, viewed mat in the same negative way as the educated elites in general. Although peasants and workers might utilize mat to insult their social superiors, revolutionaries showed no inclination to vindicate it as a ‘weapon of the weak’. Towards the end of the Soviet regime, mat did acquire a politically subversive function, as obscene chastushki or anekdoty, puncturing the pretensions of the party-state, grew in popularity. One writer has recently described the use of mat in the post-Stalin era as a ‘rebellion against the semantically ruined, mendacious language of official propaganda’ and a ‘little island of freedom in the kingdom of totalitarianism’. Pointing to the explosion of anecdotes about Lenin, Radio Armenia and the Civil War hero, Chapaev, in the 1960s, V. Gershuni has argued that that decade marked the ‘triumphal march of language that had been in disgrace’ (opal’noi slovesnosti) when the (male) intelligentsia for the first time ‘armed itself’ with mat as weapon of social satire. But that is another story.

But half the fun is in the details. From page 18:

While many cogent reasons were adduced to justify Bolshevik objections to swearing—the need for young people to acquire ‘cultured speech’, the need to combat hooliganism, the unacceptability of male chauvinism, and so forth—at the deepest level much of the distaste may have sprung from a revulsion at the intimate association of mat with what Bakhtin called the ‘grotesque body’. Mat celebrated gross corporeality, the lower physical faculties, fecundity and decay, nature and excess, things that sat uneasily with Bolshevik asceticism and horror of being engulfed by nature. Eric Naiman has drawn attention to a dread of the female body that haunted Bolshevik ideology during NEP, which, he suggests, was a projection of wider fears of loss of political and ideological control. If he is correct, it is possible to see in the efforts to discourage mat a defence mechanism against the disorderly excess of popular speech, the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature, which threatened to overwhelm the orderly, rational and controlling will of the party-state.

And from page 8, this odd Dostoevsky quote (from a newspaper article of 1873):

My intention was to prove the chastity of the Russian people, to show that even if the people use foul language when they are in a drunken state (for they swear incomparably less when they are sober), they do this not out love of bad language, not out of the pleasure of swearing, but simply out of nasty habit so that even thoughts and feelings that are quite distant from obscenity become expressed in obscene words. I further argued that to find the principal reason for this habit of foul language one must look to drunkenness. When drunk, one’s tongue moves with difficulty yet one has a powerful desire to speak, and I surmised that one resorts to short, conventional, expressive words. You may make what you will of this conjecture. But that our people is chaste, even when it is swearing, is worth pointing out.

Incidentally, anyone interested in the relations between the workers and the intellectuals who have presumed to lead them should read Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic Of The Russian Intelligensia And Socialism (review), by Marshall S. Shatz. Machajski (1866-1926) was a Polish revolutionary who has long been forgotten (except by Leszek Kolakowski) and who never achieved much in his lifetime aside from annoying tsarists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks alike (though he managed to eke out a living as a copyeditor in Moscow for the last eight years of his life), but the theory he developed in Siberian exile in the late 1890s, known as “Makhaevism” after a Russianized form of his name, is the earliest and perhaps still the most thoroughgoing analysis of the inherent gulf between the intelligentsia (which he defined in practice as anyone with a diploma) and the working class. He had no positive goal in view (except a vague idea that workers should educate themselves so the gap could be eliminated), but his stubborn insistence that knowledge is power and that those with such power can never be trusted to wield it in anyone’s interests but their own is still bracing and retains its ability to discomfit the bien-pensant intellectual.

What is Food for Language? (言語にとって食とはなにか) is a new blog (by Brian of New Haven) that focuses on things Japanese, including Tanizaki on Japanese Orthography, a Tokyo cafe tthat’s a “conceptual mess” but has a great breakfast special, and Japanese approaches to Chinese poetry. The last displays Brian’s nicely judged rhetorical style:

As is well known, Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry” is the single most fantastic, least accurate thing that has been written on the subject…

Of course, the best part about the Japanese school, as others before me have noted, is that Fenollosa’s essay (or at least Pound’s recension of it) contains only one complete poem, and it is Japanese. The poem (which begins 月耀如晴雪) is the first item in the collection of Sugawara no Michizane, who records that he wrote it for a class assignment when he was eleven.

A quick hook to the jaw, and it’s all over. I’d be glad to share a pizza (at Pepe’s, of course) with this guy next time I’m in New Haven, and I thank No-sword for bringing the blog to my attention.

An essay by Karl Young (originally published in Open Letter, Spring, 1984) discusses “how poetry was read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and time” (Mexico, 1500; China, 810; and England, 1620) and goes on to “describe some forms of notation in contemporary poetry and how they can be read.” I’m sure scholars specializing in each of those cultures would shoot down some of his details, but I like this kind of wide-ranging essay, bringing together things one wouldn’t have thought to connect and drawing interesting conclusions. Here’s a portion of what he has to say about Jacobean England:

For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer’s intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of fixed parts that could be precisely interchanged. A written poem was essentially a record of spoken verse and a score that could enable a reader to recreate it. The elaborate and inconsistent abbreviations and symbols current in script and print also underscore the oral orientation of writing. When a text is just a form of notation, “&” (a symbol that is still with us) could easily stand for “and,” and “ye” could be an acceptable abbreviation for “the” (the “y” stood for “th” as in “thorn,” not “y” as in “year” as some people now pronounce it in an attempt to sound old fashioned). Punctuation of this period often seems illogical to us for the same reason: we punctuate according to fixed notions of sentence construction, whereas the Jacobean poet punctuated by ear: his punctuation was a form of notation, often indicating a pause where the normal construction of a sentence would not suggest one. A number of conventions, create ambiguities somewhat similar to those in Chinese verse. The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like “worlds” he may have primarily meant “world’s,” but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno’s notion of infinite worlds). Letters like “I” and “J” or “U” and “V” were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech.

And here he applies those thoughts to the present (well, the early ’80s):

One of the most positive things contemporary poets have going for them is the total lack of standardization at all levels of notation. In writing about Donne, I pointed out that standardized spelling reduced the sense of fluidity and magic in language. Many poets of the last two centuries have reacted to this on a gut level by simply not learning to spell “correctly”—William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound have been among their company. More recently, poets like bill bissett have completely rejected standardized orthography and have spelled by intuition and their sense of how the words sound, look, and feel. When bissett writes “seek / sum priva see its wintr fr reel now sins ystrday,” notions of correct spelling are completely irrelevant. Though people inured to inflexible orthography cringe at this sort of thing, feeling that some immutable law of the universe has been violated, intuitive spelling returns poetry to its oral base: readers must work out the sounds of words to be able to read the poem at all.

I love it when poets meditate on history. (Via wood s lot.)

David Jones (discussed here and elsewhere) uses both archaic words gleaned from writers like Malory and modern slang he heard in the trenches of World War One, and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. A short way into Part 4 of In Parenthesis (page 68 in my edition) occurs the line “Put the fluence on,” and fluence had the air of one of those Renaissance obscurities he loved so. Indeed, the first entry in the OED under that rubric is “A flowing, a stream” (c1611 CHAPMAN Iliad XVI. 224 That he first did cleanse With sulphur, then with fluences of sweetest water rense). But that didn’t quite seem to fit. The second entry cleared things right up:

aphæretic form of INFLUENCE n., occurring esp. in phr. to put the fluence on (a person), to apply mysterious, magical, or hypnotic power to (a person).
1909 J. R. WARE Passing Eng. 203/2 Put on the flooence, attract, subdue, overcome by mental force. 1923 WODEHOUSE Inimitable Jeeves iii. 31 She was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven’t come out from under the ‘fluence yet. 1937 D. JONES In Parenthesis IV. 68 Put the fluence on.. drownd the bastards on Christmass Day in the Morning. 1957 A. E. COPPARD It’s Me, O Lord! ii. 21 It was avouched.. that if you rubbed the juice of a lemon on the palm of your hand you were armoured against suffering.. and as long as the ‘fluence’ lasted other canes broke too. 1958 M. PROCTER Man in Ambush vii. 82 If ever I saw a girl trying to put the ‘fluence on a fellow it was Tess. 1965 E. BRUTON Wicked Saint viii. 105 Put the ‘fluence on him and we’ll be away.

Judging by Google hits, it’s still in use; the Cassell Dictionary of Slang qualifies it as “Aus./N.Z.,” which is presumably why I haven’t run into it before, but if Jones and Wodehouse used it, it clearly used to have wider circulation.

Addendum. In reading G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (see this post), I have come across the following passage on page 191 (he’s discussing the highly sexual wife of a friend): “I don’t say she would have done anything, if it had come to the point; but the fluence was on, and she got me hot. I was glad to get out of that house.”

Addendum (April 2015). Veltman uses инфлюэнция (an obsolete variant of инфлюэнца ‘influenza’) in a similar sense in his 1848 novel Salomea: “Машенька бросилась к окну, взглянула, и все жилки ее затрепетали, кровь приступила к сердцу, дыхание заняло: это был начальный, безотчетный момент инфлюэнции гражданственности на нежные чувства и на национальнее неопытное еще сердце…. – Господи! Что с тобой! – проговорила с испугом няня и, схватив ее на руки, отнесла от окна. Но инфлюэнция уже совершилась…. Когда он, пораженный субъектом, дрожащими руками пощупал пульс Машеньки, Машенька открыла глаза, взглянула па Ивана Даниловича, вздрогнула … а в эту минуту рефлекция, или воздействие пораженных ее чувств совершило обратную инфлюэнцию на Ивана Даниловича, и он, как окаменевший, безмолвно, бездыханно держал руку Машеньки.”

A letter in Sunday’s NY Times Book Review section made me wince, smile ruefully, and then wince again:

To the Editor:
Caroline Weber’s interesting review of “Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon,” by James Sullivan (Aug. 20), fails to mention the foreign origin of one name for bluejeans.
History tells us that Mr. and Mrs. Levi Strauss spent their summers in Provence, France — specifically at Nîmes, where the heavy blue fabric was made. Because the dye was famous and was found nowhere else, the French called it “bleu de Nîmes.” Strauss anglicized the name to “blue denim.” The rest is history.
Ita Aber
New York

The first wince was at the completely false assertion about the Levi Strausses inventing the word, which has been around since the 17th century (1695 E. HATTON Merchant’s Mag. 159, 18 Serge Denims that cost 6l. each). The rueful smile was an acknowledgment of the irrepressible human need to connect stories with famous people (mixed with gratitude that the basic etymological fact, that denim comes from the phrase de Nîmes, is correct). The second wince was at the thought that the Times, once again, didn’t bother to check up on an assertion about language.
By the way, another letter in the same section added a sad detail to the story of the death of the great science fiction writer known to the field as James Tiptree, Jr. (her “real” name was Alice B. Sheldon): “Sheldon revealed that she had struggled against suicidal urges since her childhood. The handwritten suicide note found beside her corpse in 1987 had been written years earlier; she had carefully saved it until she was ready to use it.”

Some languages acquire a standardized literary language more easily than others. I had not realized that Igbo (sometimes called Ibo, which is how you should say it unless you’re a whiz at coarticulated labial-velar stops) had such a long and contentious history of attempts at standardization; Achebe and the Problematics of Writing in Indigenous Languages, by Ernest N. Emenyonu, lays out the whole sorry history:

The Igbo language has a multiplicity of dialects some of which are mutually unintelligible. The first dilemma of the European Christian Missionaries who introduced writing in Igbo land in mid-19th century was to decide on an orthography acceptable to all the competing dialects. There was the urgent need to have in native tongue essential instruments of proselytization, namely the Bible, hymn books, prayer books, etc. The ramifications of this dilemma have been widening over the centuries in complexity.

Since 1841 three proposed solutions have failed woefully. The first was an experiment to forge a synthesis of some selected representative dialects. This Igbo Esperanto ‘christened’ Isuama Igbo lasted from 1841 to 1872 and was riddled with uncompromising controversies all through its existence. A second experiment, Union Igbo, 1905-1939, succeeded through the determined energies of the missionaries in having the English Bible, hymn books and prayer books translated into it for effective evangelism. But it too, fell to the unrelenting onslaughts of sectional conflicts.

The third experiment was the Central Igbo, a kind of standard arrived at by a combination of a core of dialects. It lasted from 1939 to 1972 and although it appeared to have reduced significantly the most thorny issues in the controversy, its opposition and resistance among some Igbo groups remained persistent and unrelenting.

After the Nigerian independence in 1960, and following the exit of European Christian missionaries, the endemic controversy was inherited by the Society for the Promotion of Igbo Language and Culture (SPILC) founded by F.C. Ogbalu, a concerned pan-Igbo nationalist educator who also established a press devoted to the production and publication of educational materials in Igbo language.

Through his unflinching efforts a fourth experiment and seemingly the ultimate solution, Standard Igbo was evolved in 1973…

But some are not happy with Standard Igbo either, notably Chinua Achebe, who delivered a furious denunciation at a pan-Igbo annual lecture in 1999.

Perhaps what was most revolutionary in Achebe’s Odenigbo Lecture was not what he said but rather what he did. Two decades after his initial condemnation of Union as well as Standard Igbo, Achebe had not shifted from his position that Igbo writers should be free to write in their various community dialects unencumbered by any standardization theories or practices. Then as now, he resented attempts to force writers into any strait jackets maintaining unequivocally that literature has the mission “to give full and unfettered play to the creative genius of Igbo speech in all its splendid variety, not to damn it up into the sluggish pond of sterile pedantry.” In keeping with this principle, therefore, Achebe wrote and delivered his Odenigbo lecture in a brand of dialect peculiar only to Onitsha speakers of the language and almost unintelligible to more than half the audience.

I fully support the right of every writer (or other user of a language) to use whatever dialect they choose, but there should surely be a standard language available for public purposes that is intelligible to all, and I hope the problems involved can be overcome.

Anyone interested in Latin kisses (and come on, you know you are) should hurry over to Varieties of Unreligious Experience, where you will find a thorough literary/philological investigation into the words osculum, basium, and suavium, sometimes said to mean ‘a friendship kiss on the cheek,’ ‘a kiss of affection on the lips,’ and ‘a lovers’ deep kiss’ respectively. Turns out “the distinction between these words cannot be primarily one of meaning (whether social or anatomical), but must rather be one of register.” And the reason basium has had far too prominent a place in my image of Latin and suavium none at all is that I’ve read too much Catullus and too little Plautus. You know what they say: it’s all who you know.

On the second page of In Parenthesis, the following passage occurs:

From where he stood heavily, irksomely at ease, he could see, half-left between 7 and 8 of the front rank, the profile of Jenkins and the elegant cut of his war-time rig and his flax head held front; like San Romano’s foreground squire, unhelmeted; but we don’t have lances now nor banners nor trumpets. It pains the lips to think of bugles—and did they blow Defaulters on the Uccello horns.

When I first read this, many years ago, it must have been quite frustrating. Sure, there’s a footnote to tell me “San Romano” refers to “painting, ‘Rout of San Romano’. Paolo Uccello (Nat. Gal.),” but not being in London, I couldn’t trot down to the National Gallery to have a look. Of course I could have scoured the art section of the library for a reproduction, but you can’t really go to that kind of trouble for every passing reference. The OED would have told me that defaulter (in military use) is “A soldier guilty of a military crime or offence,” but that doesn’t go very far in explaining the reference. Now, with the wonders of the internet, I can google “San Romano, Uccello” and find any number of reproductions—this page provides a nice large image, if somewhat dark, while this one is considerably brighter—as well as the start of an article explaining who the “foreground squire” is (the Florentine Captain-General, Niccolo Mauruzzi da Tolentino, who, Wikipedia informs us, was in his 80s when he led his troops at the Battle of San Romano in April of 1432!).

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