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Dedovshchina (дедовщина) is an extreme form of hazing that has been one of the more shameful aspects of the Russian military for decades. Some say it developed during World War Two, when prisoners were taken from penitentiaries straight into the army, others think it was a product of the ’60s, when the term of service was shortened and soldiers started punishing newcomers who had to serve a year less. Whatever the origin, it seems impossible to eradicate, despite horror stories like that of Andrei Sychev (see-CHOFF); Sunday’s NY Times had a story by Steven Lee Myers describing the situation, with depressing quotes like “By the military’s own count, disputed as conservative, 16 soldiers were killed by dedovshchina last year, while an additional 276 committed suicide” and (from the minister of defense) “I think nothing serious happened… Otherwise, I would have certainly known about it.”

However, none of this is Languagehat-related. This, from the sixth paragraph of the story, is:

The trial, however, has cast doubt on the military’s prosecution and showed how deeply rooted dedovshchina (pronounced de-DOV-she-na) remains in Russia’s barracks, still largely filled with conscripts despite overwhelming opposition to the draft.

The parenthetical information I have put in bold is wrong [or at least inadequate]. The simplification of shch to sh is reasonable anglicization, but the damn stress is on the wrong damn syllable: it’s di-duhf-SHCHEE-nuh [in standard Russian]. The accent is indicated at the Russian Wikipedia article from which I drew my information about the history of the practice. Now, I don’t expect Times reporters, editors, and proofreaders to know Russian, but is it asking too much that they check with a Russian before embarrassing themselves with an incorrect pronunciation? If you’re not going to bother finding out the facts, at least don’t make something up.

(It may be, of course, that there is an alternate pronunciation, in which case I’m sure one of my Russian-speaking readers will so inform me.)

Update. In the comments, the estimable mab informs me that there is indeed an alternate pronunciation, which was presumably used by whoever the Times consulted. Sorry, Times: my outrage was excessive. But if you didn’t deserve it today, you’ll deserve it tomorrow, as the parent told the naughty child.

Renee of Glosses.net has been preoccupied lately by having a baby; having accomplished that (mazel tov!), she’s now wondering how many languages might be too many. She writes in her LJ:

The kid calms down beautifully to Fáfnismál. The moment I sing the opening lines, he stops crying, listens attentively, and eventually dozes off or settles to eat… Oren and my mom beg me not to confuse the child with Old Norse. It is true that as a potential trilingual he has enough on his plate. I am truly not sure about the mechanics of this; my intuition tells me that it will work out more than fine, but there is no evidence either way (except Sybilla’s). To appease the grown-up audience, I temporarily switched to Beethoven.

As I told her, my immediate response is “the more languages the better,” but that’s not much help. Anybody have any actual knowledge about the effects of exposing a helpless infant to multiple languages? (Oh, and Sibylla is the protagonist of this book; go buy it if you haven’t yet!)

A correspondent sent me an International Herald Tribune article by Matthew Brunwasser about various linguistic issues that will arise when Bulgaria joins the EU:

With Bulgaria scheduled to enter the European Union along with Romania on Jan. 1, Cyrillic is becoming the bloc’s third official alphabet, after Latin and Greek; by the end of the decade, if Bulgaria succeeds in joining the euro zone, it may even appear on euro banknotes.

Although Bulgaria has no commitment to reciprocate by displaying signs in the Latin alphabet, “We are doing it,” says Nikolay Vassilev, minister for state administration and administrative reform. “More slowly than I would like.”…

Rusana Bardarska, a Bulgarian translator, said the hardest part of introducing Bulgarian was EU terminology, for which Bulgarian words may not exist. “Should we translate ‘communitarization,’ ‘convergence,’ ‘flexsecurity’ and ‘cohesion,’ or rather introduce them as new words in Bulgarian?” she asked….

Back in Bulgaria, however, spelling is a major problem, according to Vassilev, the government minister. Many Cyrillic letters have no Latin equivalent, or several possibilities. The result, he says, is that some Bulgarian cities are spelled seven different ways in Latin – even on signs within the same city.

“There is no other country in the world with a problem of this magnitude,” Vassilev said.

To address this, Vassilev developed “Comprehensible Bulgaria,” a transliteration system created by linguists so that all Bulgarian proper names would be rendered the same way in the Latin alphabet. The transliteration software is available for free on the ministry’s Web page.

The new spellings are now obligatory for state institutions, but people are free to continue transliterating their names as they like, and Vassilev expects it to take years for the public to adopt the new system…

The “no other country” thing is silly, of course (everybody always thinks their own language is uniquely unique), but I’d be curious to know which cities are spelled seven different ways. And I love “the Day of Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture and of the Slavonic Alphabet”; I’ll have to remember to celebrate it next May 24.

Christophe Strobbe wrote to me as follows:

I am a member of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and one that came up in a comment on our documents (more specifically this section) is if there are languages in use on the Internet that don’t use paragraphs. I found your web log and noticed that you discuss languages from different language families and with different writing systems, so I wondered if you could shed some light on this or point me to a relevant resource. (Punctuation has not always existed, so there used to be more languages that didn’t use sentences or paragraphs, e.g. Classical Greek, but I’m looking for current examples.)

I told him I didn’t know of any, but I’d ask the assembled multitudes. So: any thoughts?

I’ve allowed my love of gravy to distract from my prescriptivist linguistic crusade!
And now you know how to improve your chances of getting into heaven. (Many thanks to John Emerson, also known to be operating under the alias of The New Yorker, for the tip.)

I just discovered that vindaloo (the name of a curry I only recently dared try because of its reputation for extreme spiciness) is not of native Indian origin, but comes (according to Merriam-Webster, the OED having a similar but abbreviated etymology) “from Konkani vindalu, from Indo-Portuguese (Portuguese creole of India) vinh d’alho, literally, wine of garlic, from Portuguese vinho de alho.” (No wonder I liked the vindaloo, since I like both wine and garlic!)

I’m inured to the standard grounds for complaint about the Decline of the English Language: poor grammar, sloppy punctuation, IM-speak, and the like. I accept that people have an irrational devotion to the forms of what they perceive as “the language” (ignorant as they are of the unavoidable diversity and mutability of all languages), and I have learned to view such jeremiads with a tolerant, if wry, smile. But the recent controversy in the Boston City Council over the spelling of council(l)or floors me. According to a Boston Globe story by Matt Viser, “the question of one L or two is very serious”:

About half of the council’s 13 members say the word should be spelled with two Ls, a British spelling that has been used in city documents for more than a century. Tradition dictates it, they say.
Some, like Council President Michael Flaherty and Councilor John Tobin, defend the position with some ferocity. Boston officialdom appears to support them, with most signs and placards in City Hall spelling it with two Ls, as does the city charter and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Webster’s New World Dictionary prefers the one-L version, however, and newer, younger councilors are using one L as a symbol of breaking from an old, hide-bound kind of politics…
For new members of the board, it is a rite of passage, among the first decisions they make when coming into office and requesting their business cards. Will they accept tradition, or try and chart a new course?…
“Those new young guys, they’ve just got no respect,” said Tobin, whose staff for several years mocked him by giving him the nickname “Double L.”
“I will not be part of the dumbing down of the English language,” he said.

Spelling it councilor is “the dumbing down of the English language”? I truly cannot wrap my head around this concept. Ah well, at least the fact they’re arguing about something so trivial shows they have nothing more serious to worry about.

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The latest post at the-kurdistani discusses what is apparently an accelerating displacement of Kurdish by Turkish in some areas of Turkey:

until the end of 1980s the kurdish language was still preserved, because the kurds were still in their villages, and mountains back then. and they had their own little worlds, most of them would not know one single word turkish and the women, in specific, did not know one single word turkish! even though there are some bad sides to this, such as they were not connected to the outer world in any way or this kind of things, it was still good because the kurdish language was still living and it was being passed to the younger generations by our holy mothers! but at the beginning of 1990s, and since then going on, we have been losing the kurdish language…
all the kurds started to go to school, where they would only speak turkish, and if, in any way someone were to speak kurdish s/he would punished for speaking kurdish and this way it would have a deterring effect on the other children (students) as well! kurdish students were despised and made fun of because of their accent so the families of those kurdish students thought that if they spoke only turkish at home it would help their children and they would be able to speak turkish better, and nobody would be able to fun of them…
they only watched the turkish tv channels! and especially the mothers were very badly affected by this, because they wree the ones who would stay at home and when they did not have anything to do they would watch the tv and improve their turkish, but after a while they started to use turkish words while speaking kurdish…

It’s an old, sad story and probably inevitable, but as Lameen (from whose post I got this link) says, “I had no idea the last decade or two had made such a difference.”

The Little Professor has a fascinating post discussing William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, which argues that “copyright laws have exerted considerable force on the literary canon”:

For the purposes of St. Clair’s project, perhaps the most significant epoch in the history of British intellectual property laws stretches from 1774-1808. St. Clair dubs this the “copyright window”: perpetual copyright was officially disallowed, prompting a sudden spill of older texts onto the market. (The window closes again with a series of laws passed between 1808 and 1842, each lengthening the copyright period.) Once the first window “opened,” publishers began marketing large-scale anthologies of the English (or British) “classics.” In fact, the Scots, operating under a differents set of copyright laws, jumped the gun in 1773 with The British Poets—soon followed by the various anthologies published by John Bell… For St. Clair, this window produces what he calls the “old canon,” which would persist well into the Victorian period [basically, Samuel Butler, Chaucer, Collins, Cowper, Dryden, Falconer, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Spenser, Thomson, and Young; no Drayton, Herrick, Lovelace, Marvell, or Herbert, and no women writers]…
St. Clair uses the phenomenon of the “old canon” to make several points of interest to literary historians. First, he argues that publishers formed and replicated the old canon without much regard at all to critical considerations; to the contrary, the old canon consisted, by and large, of what was out of copyright and easily available. Second, he shows that there was a “generation gap” separating readers in different economic strata. Less well-off readers during the Romantic period had access to the old canon, but not to the now-canonical “Romantics.”…
St. Clair further contributes a number of case studies, some of which correct academic received wisdom. Thus, he shows that below a certain economic range, post-Shakespearean readers didn’t read Shakespeare—because for years there was no affordable Shakespeare for them to read. Along the same lines, far from being a best-seller, Frankenstein was unavailable for much of the nineteenth century; many Romantic and Victorian readers knew the story only from its multitudinous stage adaptations… Ditto the Vindication of the Rights of Woman—most references to Wollstonecraft were made by people who had never seen, nor were likely to be able to see, the rare surviving editions of her work.

She has much more to say, all of it interesting; I urge you not to miss her blackly ironic final paragraph.
Via Avva, who also links to her post on a jaw-dropping book ad:

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A correspondent sent me a story by Jon Stokes from the New Zealand Herald about a project “for the development of a pan-Pacific language”:

[Maori Language] Commission chief executive Haami Piripi said the commission was in discussions with a number of Pacific nations including Hawaii, Rarotonga, Samoa and Niue to develop a language database that would be used to develop a common “Meta-Polynesian” language.
He said the initiative was required to halt the declining use of Polynesian languages driven by the dominance of the English language and high numbers of Pacific peoples settling in other parts of the world.
“There are networks of languages that share a common ancestry, from Fiji across to Tahiti, it is important to chronicle the changes to the language as it spread across the Pacific and to recognise the family of languages that exist.”
He said the end result would be a database that would assist in developing greater uniformity among the various languages, driven by a need to ensure Polynesian languages are maintained.
“There is a merge point, the point where the languages merge will get greater and greater until it becomes a language of its own.”…
However, the proposal has been met with scepticism by senior lecturer in Samoan studies at Victoria University Galumalemana Alfred Hunkin.
He said language and culture were intertwined and strong opposition would follow moves for change, especially from another culture.
“When we talk about language loss it is a very emotional issue. Language is about identity and pride and your culture if you have someone who comes along and says ‘hey let’s use this word’, you are going to have some very healthy debate aren’t you?”
Mr Hunkin applauded moves to compile a database and protect Pacific languages, but said initiatives to ensure the survival of a native tongue had to be driven from within the community and embraced by those at the grass-roots.

I’m afraid I agree with the skeptical Mr. Hunkin (and with Pita Sharples, who said “I support the attempt to proliferate the languages and to share, but Samoan is Samoan and Maori is Maori”), but the database is an excellent idea, and anything that promotes the study of threatened languages is OK with me.