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Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page wrote an essay on a writer about whom he says, correctly, “Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years.” She has a Wikipedia page only because he created it. Her life was awful, but her novels sound remarkable:

Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. […]

There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’ […]

Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’

The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England. […]

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I decided to reread Dostoyevsky’s 1877 story Сон смешного человека, translated by Constance Garnett as “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and was struck by the truth of what Rosamund Bartlett said in the interview I posted here: “it presents Dostoevsky’s major themes in microcosm, anticipates their amplification in The Brothers Karamazov, and is a perfect distillation of his art.” It’s about a guy who thinks nothing matters and is planning to commit suicide until a dream in which he is whisked through space to a planet that is exactly like the earth — except that its inhabitants turn out to be sinless (compare James Blish’s A Case of Conscience). You can read more about the plot at Wikipedia; the essence is that the dream turns him away from suicide and leads him to help a suffering little girl whose appeals he had previously rejected. It’s brilliantly written (and a wonderful change after slogging through a chunk of Ovadii Savich’s 1928 novel «Воображаемый собеседник» [The imaginary interlocutor], which sounded interesting but turned out to be tedious reading), but what leads me to post about it is its treatment of the two Russian words for ‘truth,’ discussed in this 2011 post. In the first paragraph, the narrator says people consider him ridiculous and laugh at him; he would laugh with them, but they make him sad: “Грустно потому, что они не знают истины, а я знаю истину. Ох как тяжело одному знать истину!” [Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!] (I’m using Garnett’s renditions.) Here istina is used for ‘truth.’ Later, when he starts describing his dream, he uses the same word: “Но неужели не все равно, сон или нет, если сон этот возвестил мне Истину? Ведь если раз узнал истину и увидел ее, то ведь знаешь, что она истина и другой нет и не может быть, спите вы или живете.” [But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake.] In ch. V, we have it again:

Они стали говорить на разных языках. Они познали скорбь и полюбили скорбь, они жаждали мучения и говорили, что Истина достигается лишь мучением. Тогда у них явилась наука. […] «Но у нас есть наука, и через нее мы отыщем вновь истину, но примем ее уже сознательно.»

They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. […] “But we have science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we shall arrive at it consciously.”

And in the final section, where he’s talking about prophesying to people about the truth he has found, he uses the same word: “Истину, ибо я видел ее, видел своими глазами, видел всю ее славу!” [Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.]

But at the end of ch. IV, he suddenly switches to pravda:

Пусть сон мой породило сердце мое, но разве одно сердце мое в силах было породить ту ужасную правду, которая потом случилась со мной? Как бы мог я ее один выдумать или пригрезить сердцем? Неужели же мелкое сердце мое и капризный, ничтожный ум мой могли возвыситься до такого откровения правды! О, судите сами: я до сих пор скрывал, но теперь доскажу и эту правду.

My heart may have originated the dream, but would my heart alone have been capable of originating the awful event [pravdu] which happened to me afterwards? How could I alone have invented it or imagined it in my dream? Could my petty heart and fickle, trivial mind have risen to such a revelation of truth? Oh, judge for yourselves: hitherto I have concealed it, but now I will tell the truth.

And in that final section, he joins the two: “Правда истинная [Pravda istinnaya]: я сбиваюсь, и, может быть, дальше пойдет еще хуже.” [It is true indeed: I am vague and confused, and perhaps as time goes on I shall be more so.] I frankly don’t know what to make of all this, and in general the more attention I give to the distinction between the two words, the less I understand it, but I put it out there for your consideration.

Ryan Starkey has an impressive map of British English dialects, about which he says:

The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous.

It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or even town to speak noticeably different ways, with particular features that immediately mark someone out as being from a specific area, to those who have an ear for it.

This is pretty normal in any large region that has been speaking a language continually for 1600 years. You will find the same thing in Germany, Norway, France, and countless other countries. Languages evolve over time, and physical distance between regions means that new features often spread slowly, leading to dialectal differences. Sometimes these differences are small, and only easily recognised by people from the relevant region. Other times there are very clear distinctions, with neighbouring dialects sounding almost like different languages to those unaccustomed to them.

Here I have tried to capture as much nuance as possible. I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. The members of my Facebook group, “Ah yes, the British accent”, were also a huge help in trying to make these borders as accurate as possible. The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made. But it is still very much unfinished, and it always will be.

He then has a heading “Why this map is wrong, and always will be” that (ironically) inspires confidence, with sections titled “There’s no precise definition of a ‘dialect’,” “Borders between dialects are rarely hard lines,” and “Some dialects are not geographically specific at all.” He explains why he included Northern Ireland but not Scots/Doric, and ends with a link to his earlier post Every Native British and Irish Language. Thanks, Trevor!

I was recently flipping through my Merriam Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (as one does), and at the top of p. 534 I was thunderstruck by the entry beginning “Ishawooa Pass \ꞌi-shə-wä\” (i.e., /ˈɪʃəwa/). Could that be right? So I did some googling and found this video, where seven seconds in we hear “up the Ishawooa trail” with the final vowel more like a schwa (natural for words of that phonetic shape) but otherwise as advertised. Not a trace of anything that might be represented by the -oo-. Trying to find out more, I did some more googling and found this page, which gives some history:

Town in Big Horn County, Wyoming. An Indian word meaning “much cascara.” (Gannett, 1905) “Ishawooa was named by Capt. Belknap. He wanted something different, and took this Indian name. I do not know what it means. It isn’t ‘Ishawood’ nor ‘Ishawoa,’ but is ‘ISHAW-OOA.’ (Rollinson, 1948)

As incoherent as that is, it’s better than nothing; “cascara” is presumably this. And that page led me to Wyoming Places, which “provides information about locations, histories, and name origins of places in the great state of Wyoming.” I like sites like that (cf. Colorado Place Names from earlier this year); local pronunciations are a longstanding interest of this blog, starting less than six months into its existence.

An amusing quote from Anthony Kenny’s A Path from Rome (1985), via Laudator Temporis Acti:

The Latin spoken by most examinees was halting and incorrect; that of the lecturers and examiners was fluent but far from classical. The accent of an Englishman, an American, a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German differed so much from each other that it took some time to realize that the lecturers were not all speaking different languages. Lecturers did not scruple to translate the idioms of their own tongue literally into Latin, leaving foreigners to make what they could of them. Thus a Frenchman would speak of a far-fetched interpretation of a Scripture text as being ‘ad usum delphini’, while an American would drawl ‘haec theoria non tenet aquam’.

[….]

Though Latin was the official language of communication at the Gregorian, it was hardly ever used for spontaneous conversation between students of different nationalities. The ten-minute breaks between the lectures gave, instead, a great opportunity for would-be linguists (‘spekkers’) to practise foreign languages. But most remained resolutely Anglophone.

“Ad usum Delphini est une locution latine signifiant « à l’usage du Dauphin ». […] Aujourd’hui, cette expression est employée de façon ironique pour désigner un ouvrage expurgé afin de pouvoir être mis entre toutes les mains.”

Back in 2016 we discussed Movies Featuring Linguists, Linguistics and Languages; I’ve just seen a movie that rates a prominent place in any such list, the terrific 1974 Japanese police procedural Castle of Sand (砂の器, Suna no utsuwa). It’s slightly marred by the fact that one of the important characters is a pianist/composer, which means that we spend far too long listening to gloopy wallpaper music of the type moviemakers consider “classical,” but other than that it’s brilliantly done (and can be seen at The Criterion Channel, which [plug!] costs less per month than the price of a movie and will satisfy the cravings of any cinephile). What brings it here, though, is a scene in which our hero, a dogged Tokyo detective, visits the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics to ask a dialect expert about zuzu-ben (rendered in the subtitles as “Z accent”), a classic marker of Tōhoku dialect. The scene features dialogue like “What are phonemes?” and a comparison of the similar speech patterns of widely separated regions. I watched it a couple of times just for the thrill.

One thing that bothers me, though, is the English title. Suna no utsuwa doesn’t mean ‘castle of sand’; suna is ‘sand,’ all right, but utsuwa “literally means ‘vessel’ or ‘container’, and commonly refers to any kind of cup, plate, dish, or pot.” At the start of the movie we see a boy shaping beach sand into a vessel and pouring water into it. There is no castle nor anything castle-like, and I am mystified by the mistranslation — if you don’t like “Vessel of Sand” or the like, why not just call it something entirely different and more suggestive of the kind of movie it is? If Jean-Pierre Melville had made it, it would have been called, say, Le trimard (and been considerably shorter). But I guess both versions of the title are part of the same pseudo-poetic impulse that gave us the gloopy music.

Trevor Joyce recently put an image of this poem on Facebook, and I loved it so much I asked his permission to post it at LH, which he generously gave, so here ’tis:

Neglect in Camera

It is another obscure chamber. The town is trapped in light and shade, and limited to the back wall of the shop. The glasses man and his parrot inhabit an intermediate dimension.

The parrot knows the names of things. Roskyn, he says. Then, shag, cendal, gazzatum, dobby, fleece. An ignorance of grammar does not allow his speech to accumulate meaning. His master draughts the projected image on his scrim. Things he knows, but not their names.

They make an odd pair, this glasses man and his pet. When the bird dies, his master will have him stuffed, he loves him so. Already selected is the corner in which he will perch, steadfast. The figures moving through the inverted silver town are averaged into a poised stasis. They represent the citizens as the bird represents the tropics.

Later, the glasses man will attend with oils to the precise textures of cloth, of hair, of milk pouring, a needle penetrating lace, sunlight on pearl, on skin. His nails are dark from years of grinding colours. His eyes are dark from years. His skin? Gossamer!

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I don’t think I ever thought much about the history of the word ideology, but it turns out to be quite interesting. Wikipedia:

The term ideology originates from French idéologie, itself deriving from combining Greek: idéā (ἰδέα, ‘notion, pattern’; close to the Lockean sense of idea) and -logíā (-λογῐ́ᾱ, ‘the study of’).

The term ideology, and the system of ideas associated with it, was coined in 1796 by Antoine Destutt de Tracy while in prison pending trial during the Reign of Terror, where he read the works of Locke and Condillac. Hoping to form a secure foundation for the moral and political sciences, Tracy devised the term for a “science of ideas,” basing such upon two things:

  1. the sensations that people experience as they interact with the material world; and
  2. the ideas that form in their minds due to those sensations.
[…]

A subsequent early source for the near-original meaning of ideology is Hippolyte Taine’s work on the Ancien Régime, Origins of Contemporary France I. He describes ideology as rather like teaching philosophy via the Socratic method, though without extending the vocabulary beyond what the general reader already possessed, and without the examples from observation that practical science would require. Taine identifies it not just with Destutt De Tracy, but also with his milieu, and includes Condillac as one of its precursors.

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1) I happened to look up Catalan lluny ‘far’ in Wiktionary and realized that it was, of course, identical to French loin, but why couldn’t I think of a Spanish cognate? It turns out that the Spanish equivalent, lueñe, is so obsolete it’s not in any of my dictionaries (though it is in the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española), having been replaced by lejos (from Latin laxius ‘wider’); these forms are all from the Latin adverb longē, and there is a slightly less obsolete Spanish luengo from the adjective longus. It would certainly be interesting to have a look at Yakov Malkiel’s “The Decline of Spanish luengo ‘long’; the Disappearance of Old Spanish lueñ(e) ‘far’” in J. M. D’Heur and Nicoletta Cherubini (eds.), Etudes de philologie romane et d’histoire littéraire offertes à Jules Horrent (Liège: [publisher unknown], 1981: pp. 267–73), but I have no access to that volume.

2) The Northampton Education Foundation’s 21st annual Adult Spelling Bee was won on the word jelerang, unknown to me and most dictionaries (including the OED) but present in the Big Merriam-Webster, which says, disappointingly, “origin unknown.” You can see one on p. 154 of Wood’s Popular Natural History, which also has a pleasingly Victorian description (“The Jelerang is rather common in the countries which it inhabits, and as it is very retiring in its habits, and dreads the proximity of mankind, it is not so mischievous a neighbour as is the case with the greater number of the Squirrels”).
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This Phys.org article describes an important fossil find:

The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti Western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains. Except this tale unfolded about 30 million years ago, just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition during which North America saw great cooling and drying, making the continent less hospitable to warmth-loving primates.

Now, paleontologists from the University of Kansas and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing have published evidence in the Journal of Human Evolution shedding light on the long-standing saga of Ekgmowechashala, based on fossil teeth and jaws found in both Nebraska and China.

To do so, the researchers first had to reconstruct its family tree, a job helped by the discovery of an even more ancient Chinese “sister taxon” of Ekgmowechashala the team has named Palaeohodites (or “ancient wanderer”). The Chinese fossil discovery resolves the mystery of Ekgmowechashala’s presence in North America, showing it was an immigrant rather than the product of local evolution.

This is of considerable interest in a number of ways, but of course what I chose to investigate was the strange-looking name Ekgmowechashala. Wikipedia tells me it’s “Sioux: ‘little cat man’,” but that only goes so far; can anyone provide a lexical/morphological breakdown in Lakota/Dakota, and maybe tell me how it’s pronounced in the original language and/or by English-speaking biologists? (Perhaps Xerîb, who happens to have a copy of the New Lakota Dictionary and was so helpful about “Onhey!”)