languagehat.com

An LA Times story, “To Know You Is to Love You” by K. Connie Kang [archived], discusses the Korean-born reporter’s love affair with the English pronoun you (and the difficulties others have with it):

You was an ally that empowered me.
It freed me from the encumbrances of my mother tongue, which is one of the world’s most complicated and nuanced languages, laden with honorifics. You pushed me out of the confines of Confucian-steeped, hierarchal Korean language into a world of egalitarian impulses…
Korean has no fewer than six speech levels — each with a unique set of verb endings to indicate the degree of formality, ranging from extremely polite to actively impolite — and many gradations in between…
“You represents the essence of democracy,” said attorney Tong S. Suhr, a community leader. “You liberates us from that [Korean] caste system, and it makes life so much easier.”
Korean-born Kay S. Duncan, director of production with Jarrow Formulas in West Hollywood, says you helped transform her from a shy Asian woman who preferred to sit in the back of the room to an assertive executive equal to those around her.
“You can say, ‘You did this, or you did that,’ even if you’re addressing the CEO of your company,” Duncan said.
By contrast, Ho-min Sohn, professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, says he has never felt at home with this three-letter word.
Sohn, who came to the U.S. in 1965 from South Korea to work on a doctorate in linguistics, managed to get his degree without once using you when addressing his professors. It seemed so out of place for a student to claim equality with his professor.

There’s further discussion of Korean and its pronouns, and a pleasing anecdote about a mixed couple’s solution to the problem (“Dangshin sounded cold and distant” to him, while Honey gives her shivers). Thanks for the link, Eric!

A NY Times article by Alexander Osipovich brings to our attention Russian microbiologist Dmitry Sokolenko:

Mr. Sokolenko has organized an exhibition in the Vladimir Nabokov Museum here [in St. Petersburg] that explores the links between the author’s art and his science. Titled “The Nabokov Code,” a riff on “The Da Vinci Code,” it juxtaposes quotations from Nabokov’s books with images of butterfly parts.

The images, taken under a microscope, are the sort of thing that Nabokov would have seen every day while researching lepidoptera at Harvard. The quotations, meanwhile, are filled with allusions to insects. Mr. Sokolenko organized the show to advance his hypothesis: that Nabokov’s meticulous, masterly prose style grew out of his love of science.

“When you do what Nabokov did, when you shift your focus from entomology to literature, you hold onto all the methods and research tools that you’ve been using for years,” Mr. Sokolenko said in an interview just before the exhibition opened on July 3. “I think that his painstaking attention to detail could only have come from his profession, from what he was doing in entomology.”

He clearly goes way overboard in his thesis, but it’s interesting stuff, and I’d like to see the exhibit. (Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)

1) In Russia:

…So the main task is survival. Mr Heinapuu and his colleagues try to bolster their kinsfolk’s language and culture and highlight Russian chauvinism. The first is difficult. In the two-room world headquarters of the Finno-Ugric movement in Tallinn, Mr Heinapuu proudly shows a shelf of newly published poetry in Mari and other languages. It is a drop in the ocean. “What we really need is the ‘Da Vinci Code’ in Udmurt,” a colleague ruefully complains.

A more promising idea is to bring students from the Finno-Ugric bits of Russia to study in Estonia. That initiative, the Kindred Peoples’ Programme, began in 1999. It was meant to create expertise, expose students to western society, and boost morale.

It hasn’t worked out like that, though. Half the 100-odd students decided to stay. “These were the first towns they had ever lived in. They adapted too well, and those that went back had problems with Russian life,” says Mr Heinapuu. Now the focus has shifted to graduate education. And the money involved in the student programme is tiny: just 3m Estonian kroons ($230,000). Rich Finland gives only a bit more, Hungary almost nothing.

(From The Economist, where you will find a nice map of the Volga minority-language republics and some history of the “Idel-Ural” separatist movement; via georgeland: the blog.)

2) In Canada:

With only eight competent speakers left, the Ditidaht language is on the verge of vanishing, along with half of the languages now spoken around the world…
So the Ditidaht are fighting back.

The survival of their language now hinges, perhaps, on three tiny bodies crammed together on a couch in the Asaabus daycare. The giggling children are the first to take part in a Ditidaht language-immersion program that begins in early childhood.

“Qaatqaat, hiihitakiitl, hi7tap7iq, kakaatqac’ib,” recites four-year-old Krissy Edgar, singing and doing actions to a Ditidaht equivalent of Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

It has been three years since the band council approved construction of the $4.2-million Ditidaht Community School to teach students their language and culture from kindergarten to Grade 12. Previously, village students were bused out to an English-language school.

Already, the village is astounded by the program’s success, Elsie Jeffrey, the language co-ordinator for the 70 children enrolled in the school, said.

“We’re doing whatever we can to document what’s left. We’ve put out CDs, DVDs; we’re working on digitizing the language on FirstVoices.ca,” she said, referring to a website that holds audio records for 15 endangered native communities.

“We just have to do what we can because we’re endangered.”

(Matthew Kwong, reporting in The Globe and Mail. Thanks, Derryl!)

Incidentally, Ditidaht used to be called Nitinat:

The indigenous name is /di:ti:dʔa:ʔtx/. This was originally the name of the group around Nitinat Lake. It was later extended to include all Ditidaht-speaking people. The currently favoured English name Ditidaht is an adaptation of the indigenous name. The more widely used English name Nitinat reflects the fact that the indigenous name used to be pronounced /ni:ti:n?a:?tx/. After the name was borrowed into English, Ditidaht /n/ changed to /d/.

The Ethnologue considers Ditidaht a dialect of Nuuchanulth (which it calls Nootka). This view is not generally accepted among specialists in Wakashan languages.

I hereby unleash the awesome power of the internet on a puzzle that’s bothered me for more than a dozen years—or, to be more precise, one that bothered me when I first read Charles Doughty’s wonderful Travels in Arabia Deserta, and is bothering me again now that I’m reading it to my wife in the evenings. On p. 352 occurs the following passage:

In the Nefûd, towards El-Hŷza, are certain booming sand-hills, Rowsa, Deffafîat, Subbîa and lrzûm, such as the sand drift of J. Nagûs, by the sea village of Tor in Sinai : the upper sand sliding down under the foot of the passenger, there arises, of the infinite fretting grains, such a giddy loud swelling sound, as when your wetted finger is drawn about the lip of a glass of water, and like that swooning din after the chime of a great bell, or cup of metal. — Nagûs is the name of the sounding-board in the belfry of the Greek monastry, whereupon as the sacristan plays with his hammer, the timber yields a pleasant musical note, which calls forth the formal colieros to their prayers ; another such singing sand drift, El-Howayrîa, is in the cliffs (east of the Mezham,) of Medáin Sâlih.

When I came across that word colieros, of course I checked all the reference sources available to me in the early ’90s, to no avail. When I again encountered it, I thought “Google will clear this up in a jiffy.” Google only turned up one hit, but it was to a selection from Tales of Travel, by Lord Curzon, and I thought “Aha, if anyone will know, it’s Lord Curzon.” Alas, it turned out Curzon was simply quoting this passage of Doughty for its evocation of the “singing sands”; he had nothing to say about colieros. So I turn to you, my readers; surely your collective experience and wisdom will solve the mystery and allow me to erase the question mark that’s been in the margin all these years.

Update. The awesome power of the internet, and more specifically of my readership, has come through once more. The learned EJP, in the comments, suggested what (once it was mentioned) made me slap my head and say “Of course!”: it’s meant for Greek καλόγερος [kalóyeros] ‘monk,’ formerly (and still in katharevousa) spelled καλόγηρος. I’m not sure whether Doughty misremembered the Greek word or whether he was using the i to indicate an “eye” pronunciation (which would give an inaccurate but comprehensible “ka-LYE-er-ohz,” with an anglicized plural), but that’s definitely the explanation.

The relevant OED entry is interesting and confusing:

caloyer
(kaloje) [a. F. caloyer, ad. It. caloiero (pl. –ieri), ad. late Gr. καλόγηρος, f. καλός beautiful + γηρο-, -γηρος in comb. old, aged, i.e. ‘good in old age, venerable’. The It. caloiero, whence Fr. and Eng. immediately come, has i for palatal γ (= y cons.). The accentuation is shown in Byron quots.]

A Greek monk, esp. of the order of St. Basil.

1615 G. SANDYS Trav. 82 This mountaine is only inhabited by Grecian Monks whom they call Coloieros, vnintermixed with the Laity.
1635 E. PAGITT Christianogr. I. ii. (1636) 47 Dedicated in honor of St. Basil, to the Greeke Caloiers.
1676 F. VERNON in Phil. Trans. XI. 582 Now there is a Convent of Caloieri’s there.
1682 WHELER Journ. Greece II. 194 His usual Habit differeth not from the ordinary Caloyers, or Monks of the Order of St. Basil.
Ibid. VI. 450 They consist of above a hundred Caloiroes.
Ibid. 479 Here is also a Convent of Caloires, or Greekish Monks.
1812 BYRON Ch. Har. II. xlix, The convent’s white walls glisten fair on high. Here dwells the caloyer, nor rude is he, Nor niggard of his cheer.
1813 — Giaour 786 How name ye yon lone Caloyer?
1884 W. CARR Montenegro 29 The Vladika, the black caloyer of the Czernagora.

Now, the entry form and pronunciation suggest that this should include only examples of the French borrowing pronounced “kah-loh-YAY,” but the Sandys and Vernon quotes, at least, clearly indicate a form derived from Italian or Greek. The OED should either change the entry to explicitly include both or create another into which the latter, and the Doughty, would fit.

Since Lord Curzon has come up, I cannot forbear to quote the quatrain that was appended to him during his days at Oxford and that he was never able to shake:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

A miscellany:

1) A recommendation of scythes as a grass-cutting tool brought to my attention the fact that the shaft of a scythe is called a snath (description and picture here). I don’t know why, but I really like the word. Snath, snath, snath.

2) The OED has an entry “razoo Austral. and N.Z. slang. [Origin uncertain.] A (non-existent) coin of trivial value, a ‘farthing’. Also in phr. brass razoo. Used in neg. contexts only.” (First two cites: 1930 Bulletin (Sydney) 5 Nov. 21/1 The useless graft on patch and flat! They never think a bloke has earned a darned razoo for that. 1931 W. HATFIELD Sheepmates xxx. 268 Richards never has a rahzoo.) They give the pronunciation as RAH-zoo. I looked it up in my Australian Oxford and found the same definition but the pronunciation rah-ZOO, with the stress on the final syllable. How do Aussie/Kiwi readers pronounce it?

3) I recently finished my reading of Dead Souls in Russian (and of all great Russian prose, Gogol is most untranslatable, so I urge readers with any knowledge of Russian to give it a try). To help with difficult passages I kept the Andrew MacAndrew translation handy—it happened to be what I had left over from college days. It’s no worse than any other, but in the final chapter I found a real howler (comparable to Nabokov’s mistaking Khazars for Hazaras). Chichikov’s background is finally being described, and we have reached the moment when he comes up with his brilliant scheme of buying up deceased serfs and mortgaging them to the government. He is considering where he can “resettle” them (since serfs couldn’t be transferred without land); the Russian says “теперь земли в Таврической и Херсонской губерниях отдаются даром, только заселяй. Туда я их всех и переселю!” [They’re giving away land in the Crimea and the Kherson province free to anyone who will settle it; that’s where I’ll resettle them!] But the good Mr. MacAndrew mistook Таврический ‘Tauride, Crimean’ for Тебризский ‘of Tabriz‘ and translated “Today one can get land in Kherson and Tabriz Provinces free,” moving Chichikov’s undead serfs to a hypothetical Russian guberniya in Iran! (I should note for the sake of historical pickiness that Russia did occupy Tabriz in 1827, but they gave it back the next year at the end of the war with Persia.)

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I recently acquired Richard Stites’ Russian popular culture: Entertainment and society since 1900 and am working my way happily through the first chapter, “In old Russia 1900-1917.” I was reading about the superstar Alexander Vertinsky, the “Russian Pierrot” (bio in Russian), when I was thunderstruck by the offhand parenthesis in this sentence: “His rendition of ‘Endless Road’ (‘Dorogoi dlinnoyu,’ known in English as ‘Those Were the Days’) is one of the classics of his repertoire.” “Those Were the Days” is a Russian song?! Turns out that indeed it is. (This page has the text in Russian and English.) It was written by the composer Boris Fomin (stress on the final syllable of each name) in collaboration with the forgotten poet Konstantin Podrevsky circa 1917, and according to this Russian page on the history of the song:

[Vertinsky’s] first benefit performance (of whose program “Endless Road” could have been a part) took place October 25, 1917. In the newspapers of those days announcements and notices of the Vertinsky benefit are cheek by jowl with reports about revolutionary bandits seizing the telephone, telegraph, and Winter Palace. But it’s not surprising that on the day of the coup it was not that song that called forth an ovation but “To, chto ya dolzhen skazat'” [What I must say] (“I don’t know why, or who needed it, who sent them to death with an untrembling hand…”). But it was around then that “Endless road” became one of the biggest “hits” in Russia (unfortunately, then as now there were no Russian hit parades, and it’s impossible to verify the fact).

So the song, which for members of my generation calls up that magical year 1968, for an earlier Russian generation brought World War One and the Revolution to mind. Nostalgia is what it used to be, but its objects keep changing.

Jonathan’s Boring But Useful Site (not boring at all!) makes this point: “Consider how much cash has been made from the 1960s hit Those were the days my friend (Mary Hopkin, 1968), and then ask yourself how much of it found its way to the family of Boris Fomin 1900-1948 who wrote the song on which it was based (called Дорогой длинною, with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii).” Jonathan also mentions a recording by Vertinsky, but the link is to a defunct webpage; anybody have a working one? I’d love to hear the voice that first made the song a hit.

A correspondent sent me a link to a fascinating story (at Ioram’s blog A pair of eyes in the Middle East, which seems to have gone silent since May). It starts:

It’s no big secret that nobody likes the newcomer. In this land one can say it has been a long-standing tradition, perfected with each turn of History. A famous sketch known to practically any Hebrew-speaking Israeli, done by the now-defunct comedy group “Lool” (“Coop”) shows how each wave of immigrants arriving since the beginning of Zionism is received with contempt by the previous immigrants, who now regard themselves as “locals”. The first Zionist pioneers, singing folk-songs in the Russian style are looked down at by the local Palestinian Arabs who express their anger and scorn by spitting the insult “Il’an babour illi jabak”, which means, literally “Curse the ship that brought you”.
The classic sketch then shows how the first Jewish settlers show their contempt at the next wave of Jewish immigrants, coming from Poland, how the Polish Jews are then quick to curse the German Jews coming in the 1930s. The German Jews (nicknamed “Yekes”, maybe for their propensity to cling to their jackets, stiff and stifling in the local heat) then curse the Yemenites who are quick to learn the drill and curse the Moroccans who then curse the Jews from the Georgia and so on. Each group curses the previous one, and the sketch is funny not only in painting the characters, accents, quirks and stereotypes, but in that they all use the same curse in Palestinian Arabic: “Curse the ship that brought you.”

It goes on to discuss the history of the Arabic word babur (from French vapeur), of steamships, and of inter-ethnic resentment, and concludes with a moving tribute to “one of the best Arab restaurants in the country,” called Al Babour, “The Steamer.” Well worth the read.

Of mother tongues and other tongues is the blog of a young man living in Finland and learning the language—and when I say “learning the language,” I mean doing it up right: he’s got nearly the complete set of the Finnish etymological dictionary (and I’m jealous). He has a post comparing Finnish and its cousin Hungarian:

There’s a sentence that gets quoted a lot showing relations between Hungarian and Finnish, as each language retains similar words. It and more such sentences can be found here, along with more of those fancy -v- words. Pretty nifty!

Hun.: Jég alatt télen eleven halak úszkálnak.
Fin.: Jään alla talvella elävät kalat uiskentelevat.
‘In wintertime living fish swim under the ice.’

Ki ment mi előttünk?
Ken meni meidän edessämme?
‘Who went before us?’

Thus, I must suggest the possibilities for Northern Sámi: jieŋa vuolde dalvet ealli guolli vuodjala, and gii manai min ovddas.
The first sentence (or at least my version) is not so transparent/related. In NS, alde is probably actually related to Finnish yllä ‘under, below’; similarly vuodjalit ‘to swim (freq.)’ might well come from another root (relating to Finnish ajaa?).

Fun stuff!

Update (Oct. 2020). I tried to replace the dead links, but it turns out the Wayback Machine has only a single record of the site, from 2008; I’ve substituted it for the first link, and the others will just have to stay defunct. I guess we can be grateful it was archived that once…

At least according to an unbelievably silly BBC story from the year 2000:

An American professor has developed a theory that Germans are bad-tempered because pronouncing German sounds puts a frown on the face.
Professor David Myers believes that the facial contortions needed to pronounce vowels modified by the umlaut may be getting the Germans down in the mouth…
Saying “u” [ü?—LH] – one of German’s most recognisable sounds – causes the mouth to turn down. But the English sounds of “e” and “ah” – expressions used in smiling and laughing – have the opposite effect.
Professor Myers told the Royal Society of Edinburgh on Thursday that frequent use of the muscles which the brain associates with sadness can adversely affect a person’s mood…
“This could be a good reason why German people have got a reputation for being humourless and grumpy,” said Professor Myers, who heads Psychology at Hope College, Michigan.

The story is illustrated with photographs of Michael Schumacher (looking wry, I’d say, rather than grumpy), Gerhard Schroeder (pensive), and Helmut Kohl (definitely grumpy).

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Claire of Anggargoon is back from her planned hiatus (as I am back from my unplanned one), and her first post after the “I’m back” announcement was to this “online exhibition” of Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu. The images themselves are beautiful, and the accompanying descriptions give a sense of the variety of the libraries’ holdings. I found particularly interesting Ahmad al-Bakayi ibn Sayyid Muhammad ibn Sayyid al-Mukhtar al-Kunti’s nineteenth-century [thanks, Levana!] Jawab Ahmad al-Bakayi ala Risalat Amir al-Mu’minin Ahmad al-Masini (The Response of Ahmad al-Bakayi to the Letter of Amir Ahmad, Ruler of Massinah):

This document is a reply to the ruler of Massinah [usually spelled Macina–LH], Amir Ahmad, who ordered the arrest of a German traveler, Heinrich Bart[h], suspected of spying for the British. The author of the reply cites Islamic law as making the arrest illegal and declines to obey the amir. The scholar states that a non-Muslim entering the domain of Muslims in peace is protected and may not be arrested, have his property confiscated, or to be otherwise hindered.

Welcome back, Claire!
Addendum. I just realized I’ve already posted this. Oh well, it was almost three years ago; consider it an oldie but goodie.