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I just watched the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, which effectively intertwines jazz music and musicians (Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Nina Simone, and many others) with the tragic history of the Congo in 1960, culminating in the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba, one of my early memories as an assiduous reader of international news (it’s filed with the Plain of Jars and Quemoy and Matsu in a dusty cupboard way at the back of my brain). There is also plenty of Congolese music, including a song “Satchmo Okuka Lokole” performed by Joseph Kakasele, “le Grand Kallé”, and his band African Jazz. Naturally, I wanted to know what “Okuka Lokole” meant; I first came across a Louis Armstrong House page making the absurd claim that it means “jungle wizard, the man who charm beasts,” but happily I then found José Nzolani’s detailed PAM article with the following convincing account:

The song is sung in Lingala. But “Okuka lokole” is from Tetela, a Bantu language spoken by the Batetela. This ethnic race of the Anamongo group is located east of Kasai, on land irrigated by the Lomami and Sankuru rivers. The singer Papa Wemba and Patrice Emery Lumuma, the separatist leader, are famous figures of this ethnic group.

The lokole is a long section of hollowed-out tree trunk and carved with a narrow slot. This type of drum is used as a musical instrument or for sending messages. The idiophone instrument produces sounds by being struck on both sides of the slot with wooden sticks. Widespread among the Bantu peoples, the lokole is often compared to morse code. For the Batetela, this large drum plays a special role. “Okuka” in their language is a resistant tree ideal for fabricating lokole drums. It is also one of their surnames.

You can see a lokole at the Wikipedia article, and there are more photos here. As for the Batetela, check out the tangled tale at Wikipedia, beginning:

“Batetela” as a clan or tribe did not exist. Only between 1885 and 1887 are the first public geographical journals, notes and books reporting a people named “Batetela”. Missionaries were reporting all people speaking languages akin to today’s “Kitetela” or culturally similar people as “Batetela” despite the name “Batetela” evolving from the term “Watetera” in reference to bilingual communities from the 1870s Barua lands(Baluba lands in Maniema).

This term “Batetela” was either a corruption or mistranslation off the mid- to late 19th-century term known as “Watetera” which was used to describe the people from this region which Arab slave traders termed “Utotera”.

It goes on in that vein for many paragraphs.

I have to mention also that during the performance of the song the subtitle read “[man singing in Zulu]” (!), and at one point a subtitle reads “from Kobongo towards Kabala” when the towns involved are actually named Kabongo and Kabalo. Africa in general, and the Congo in particular, are treated with remarkable casualness (and I don’t mean just in this movie).

For previous Congo-related onomastic inquiry, see this 2012 post (quickly derailed onto a discussion of TV shows, but I did get a good answer from, of course, MMcM).

Tessa Hadley is not only one of my favorite living writers (see this anniversary post) but a source of interesting words (e.g., gabardine). My wife and I are currently reading Free Love, and when we got to “She stripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls white, ripped up the foul old carpet and bought a striped dhurrie in the market” I put down the book and said “What’s a dhurrie?” She said “I think it’s a kind of rug,” and that turns out to be correct. OED (entry from 1895): “A kind of cotton carpet of Indian manufacture, usually made in rectangular pieces with fringes at the ends, and used for sofa-covers, curtains, and similar purposes” (first cite 1880 “Dhurries are made in squares, and the ends often finished off with fringe; the colours are not bright, but appear durable,” Mrs. A. G. F. E. James, Indian Industries iv. 19); the etymology just says “< Hindi darī,” but Wiktionary takes the Hindi dubiously further:

Probably from Sanskrit स्तरी (starī).

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Is this स्तरी as in a “sterile cow” or a “sterile night”? This seems semantically bold – is there a formation of स्तरी from स्तॄ (stṝ, “to spread, strew”) that’s possible? That would be much more semantically tenable.”

I’ll say it’s semantically bold, but I like the fact that they air their dubious linen in public.

Adam Thirlwell has an LRB review (archived) of “Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Stein — it makes me want to go back to an author I read and enjoyed decades ago but haven’t looked at much since. I’ll excerpt a section about her writing, with its “devotion to the cut”:

Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining nothing. The pleasure would have to be elsewhere. This may be the final lesson of Wade’s book, which explores Stein’s biography not for explanations, but in order to better enjoy the pleasure of her sentences as a kind of physical delight. In the end, you have to go back to where you started: the surface and its sentences. ‘All of which was literally true,’ Stein writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘like all of Gertrude Stein’s literature.’

Early​ in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein describes the pictures she and Leo acquired as they began their collection: a Daumier and two Gauguins and a Cézanne landscape along with two ‘tiny canvases of nude groups’ and ‘a very very small Manet’. But two paintings in particular are given special emphasis: Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne with a Fan and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. It’s as though the paintings together offered an ongoing possibility, that the most searching artistic experiments might need to be done through portraits – and that the best subject for an avant-garde portrait is your wife.

Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. She describes Toklas telling stories to her dying mother (like Stein, Toklas’s mother died of cancer when Toklas was young) and then leaving her father and brother for the utopian bliss of the final paragraph, which is her love affair with Stein, a mutual balance of speaking and being heard:

She came to be happier than anybody else who was living then. It is easy to believe this thing. She was telling some one, who was loving every story that was charming. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was almost always listening. That one who was loving was telling about being one then listening. That one being loving was then telling stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending. That one was then one always completely listening.

[Read more…]

I have no idea what this site is about other than being a showcase for texts in apparently invented languages; this recent post, for example, begins:

Aża cīfir zuoj

Thorenur khioj thurenur, řa duiker. Siřover taekar ofo, ici se laima şiekhar ifi koiden, siekar, beifir ata zirenur roidir, vu go ifi sibe. Eçe aba diamur ikhi mēli khiari cui ozho, thai mebi, koimir, nofo uzhu, şiala da çuizir reizir, roidir cerenur poi merenur. Seiş lui me khugo eve do feamur soilir. Vēs unu çīmir, ei thoamur imu siekar çafa galu deidir feamur, ethe i vueni çei petenur o apha ucu raifir soelo theamur, lāmur pharenur vai, ri bī vāş boiben thaga morenur ořo eve goekher? Vobe uru zuifir ata çişur laima khoel.

Şarenur udu, zhutenur feamur bamu. Patenur ule reilir ata ucu zuelo bamo goekher? Bui uřu laidir feamur te feuş te, tařover obo uamur ukhu, çui o işi vueni çala ene, şurenur zai mola coekhar lai ifi keala çala khioj ikhi, foimir, efe ukhu mēli noelo otho şarenur noej sibe. Kufa idi çuizir iři imi, řoi vu ono. Uzhu ene zeamur roidir zueş. Da bui eşe sitenur eve rei, khiari ephe theamur ça leilir tuifir işi gaşur zoima thuku, theamur voşur, çofe thuipen khe. Nudo zo goekher? Bai be zhai, çoekar nofo nuima patenur vu feamur kheidir ubu řili rogu ukhu zuelo tāmur eze citenur sibe. Ese vāş neşur. Zirenur khāva şetenur. Şēkhar ethe khiari phī, roidir gifa ucu gei tāmur asa. Zuelo zeizir daimo guşu itenur ru atha feuş khugo akha oco leidir. Ava, ifi aga kufa ephe kāmur řīlir, iekar keka. Ulu fetenur sago da thurenur theidir, zhī boiben, oro khī iamur, vēs, khogo go, ifi rauş siřover ede ephe çuizir pheamur sişur soilir. Coizir phe řuamur, zuoj.

Zuoj indeed, not to mention Iä. Make what you will of it; there are more links, with various speculations, at the MeFi post where I found it. But stay safe out there!

Ben Yagoda is an old LH favorite (e.g., 2015, 2022), so I was delighted to see that last week’s New Yorker included an essay of his (archived) on H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It starts:

In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he was unhappy that, in two places in the piece, an editor had changed the word “but” to “however.” He made his case for a page and a half, and concluded, “But is a hell of a good word and we shouldn’t high hat it. . . . In three letters it says a little of however, and also be that as it may, and also here’s something you weren’t expecting and a number of other phrases along that line.” He signed the memo “St. Fowler McKelway.”

The “Fowler” was a joking reference to Henry W. Fowler, who, though not a saint in the magazine’s corridors, was certainly a great authority when it came to matters of grammar and style. A few years earlier, Wolcott Gibbs, another editor, had put together an internal document for new members of the staff titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It was a numbered list of thirty-one strictures, and in the penultimate one Gibbs wrote, “Fowler’s English Usage is our reference book. But don’t be precious about it.”

The source of what Kenneth Tynan later called the magazine’s “Fowler fixation” was Harold Ross, who’d dreamed up the idea of The New Yorker and brought it into being in 1925. Fowler’s “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage” was published the following year, and Ross seized on it enthusiastically. (The book is usually referred to as “Modern English Usage” or simply as “Fowler,” in the eponymous manner of Hoyle or Roget.) An E. B. White Notes and Comment piece from the late nineteen-forties shows just how strongly the editor continued to feel. Ross—unnamed, merely described as “a tall, parched man”—sees a copy of the book on the writer’s desk, picks it up, and thumbs through favorite passages. “ ‘Greatest collection of essays and opinions ever assembled between covers,’ he shouted, ‘including a truly masterful study of that and which,’ ” White recounted. “ ‘That’s the business that really fascinates me. . . . I got so excited once I had the pages photostatted.’ ” Thomas Kunkel, Ross’s biographer, reported that, from time to time, Ross would read the “that” and “which” entries for relaxation.

After a long passage on the book’s high status at the magazine, Yagoda turns to the origin of the book and its author:
[Read more…]

Victor Mair’s Language Log post starts off with Japanese 奴隷 dorei ‘slave,’ of which Mair says “Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n-” (in Mandarin it’s núlì) and continues “So I started to ask around how is it that Japanese has a d- initial for 奴隷 (‘slave’) and Sinitic has an n- initial?” The heart of the post is a long and interesting response by John Whitman:

The alternation btw d- and n- with 奴 reflects the general alternation between kan’on 漢音 and go’on 呉音; both go’on and kan’on exhibit characteristics of Middle Sinitic (MS) in Sino-Japanese. The kan’on 漢音 for 奴 is do, but the go’on is nu, identical to the usually reconstructed MS nu for 奴. In this case, the go’on reading is relatively unusual on the Japanese side, but it occurs e.g. in the reading 奴婢 (nuhi ぬひ), the category of slaves in the Ritsuryō 律令 Nara Period legal system.

The d-~n- alternation is standard when there is an opposition btw kan’on and go’on readings involving original MS /n/, for example 男性 dansei ‘male’ vs 男体 nantai ‘male body’. The alternation between 女性 zyosei < dyosei ‘female’ vs女体 nyotai ‘female body is the same thing.

This reflects a change in Sinitic, not Japanese. Some northern MS dialects in roughly Tang times depalatalized MS /m/, /n/, /ng/. South Coblin has a detailed study of this, looking not just at the phenomenon in Japanese kan’on but at Tibetan and intra-Sinitic Buddhistic readings. A mystery, unresolved as far as I know, is how this made it into Japanese kan’on 漢音 but not Sino-Korean, which are both held to have been borrowed around the same time, roughly mid-late Tang, perhaps a bit later in the SK case. One possibility is that the denasalizing region included Chang’an; the Koreans were savvy and in constant contact enough with China to understand that the denasalized pronunciation was substandard, even if associated with the capital region, while the Japanese clerics who imported the readings were less with it, or more superliteralist.

In modern Japanese, kan’on readings are vastly less marked, and almost always used in neologized kango 漢音. Go’on readings have a strong association with Buddhism. The 呉 wu2 designation refers most likely not to any region of China (such as Southeastern China/Suzhgou~Shanghai region), but to the Korean peninsula. The kun 訓 vernacular reading of 呉, kure, refers to Korea and is probably the same word as Korean 고려 Koryŏ [koryə] or possibly Kuryŏ [kuryə], what you get if you subtract the flattering 高 from 高句麗, as non-Korean texts often do. This reflects the fact that both Sinography and Buddhism were originally imported to Japan from Paekche.

What bothers me is the reference to Coblin’s “detailed study of this”; Mair has linked it to Academia.edu, but I found it at JSTOR, and it is not at all a study of the phenomenon in question but a general discussion of early Northwest Chinese phonology. I presume the section Whitman refers to is 2.1 (pp. 12-13) on nasal initials, and I also presume by “depalatalized” he means “denasalized” (since that’s the only thing that makes sense in the context of /n/ > /d/), but I don’t see anything in the passage that would explain the Japanese development (he talks about [nd] but not [d]). If anyone has thoughts about all this, let’s hear them!

I’ve started reading Yuri Annenkov’s 1934 novel Повесть о пустяках [A story about trifles], set in Russia in the first couple of decades of the century; it was looked on with disfavor by almost everyone, because not only did it use suspiciously modernist devices (montage, ornamental prose, etc.), but the “trifles” are two revolutions, WWI, and the Civil War, and nobody was up for treating world-historical events as background for the personal life of some nobody. I, however, am up for it, and am enjoying it so far (even if the opening is basically a straight ripoff of Bely’s Petersburg).

Now, at one point he’s describing a turn-of-the-century interior and he uses the word ламбрекен [lambrekén], which meant nothing to me. No problem, that’s why God created dictionaries, so I turned to my trusty Oxford and found it defined as “pelmet.” I cursed and looked that up, and discovered that it means (to quote Wiktionary) “A decorative item that is placed above a window to hide the curtain mechanisms, visually similar to a cornice or valance.” Ah, now valance I knew, thanks to the educational efforts of my first wife, so the sense was more or less clear. But what of the etymology? Wiktionary doesn’t have one, but the OED (entry revised 2005) says:

Probably a variant of palmette n. (compare sense 2 at that entry), palmette designs having been a conventional ornament on window cornices. Compare:

1925 Pelmet, a word used by upholsterers and sometimes by art dealers, who prefer the word ‘palmette’, to denote the horizontal stiff curtains or valance hiding the rod, rings and headings of the hanging curtain decorating a door, window, bed, etc.
J. Penderel-Brodhurst & E. J. Layton, Glossary of English Furniture 123

But what about ламбрекен? Well, that’s straightforwardly from French lambrequin, for which Wiktionary says:

From Middle French lambequin, perhaps from Middle Dutch lappekijn, lepperkijn, from Old Dutch lappakīn. By surface analysis, lambeau (“scrap, strip”) +‎ -quin (diminutive suffix).

And it turns out that French word was borrowed straight into English as well; the OED (entry from 1901) has the sense “A scarf or piece of material worn over the helmet as a covering” from 1725 and this more modern one:

2. U.S. A cornice with a valance of pendent labels or pointed pieces, placed over a door or window; a short curtain or piece of drapery (with the lower edge either scalloped or straight) suspended for ornament from a mantel-shelf. Also transferred and attributive.

1883 Mr. Barker smiled under the lambrikin of his moustache.
F. M. Crawford, Dr. Claudius iii
[…]

1888 The carved marble mantle-piece was concealed by a lambrequin.
T. W. Higginson, Women & Men 162

The whole quest was worth it for the phrase “the lambrikin of his moustache” (seen here at Google Books).

Taylor Jones, known around the internet as Language Jones, has a twenty-minute YouTube video thoughtfully called “Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??” If I were modeling my style on his, I might have called this post “LINGUISTICS INFLUENCER is TOO WOKE — and WRONG about NAMES!!” But instead I went with the modest title he himself might have used if he weren’t so hungry for clicks and likes. Don’t get me wrong, I basically enjoyed the video, even though I dislike the snark-filled, overemphatic influencer style; Jones studied with the great William Labov (LH obit post), for whom he expresses great affection and respect, and clearly knows his subject. Still, I think he’s wrong about some stuff.

First off, and trivially, he says the name of Michael Lisicky wrong — he gives it initial stress, but Lisicky himself uses penultimate stress (as you can hear in the first few seconds of this video). No biggie, but I would hope that a linguist would take the trouble to get it right.

Now to the meat of the video. He discusses Labov’s famous paper “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York Department Stores,” and his basic claim is that it is fatally flawed because it does not take race into account: in 1962, when the study was carried out, the Great Migration of blacks to the north was going on, and whites were increasingly differentiating themselves from black speech — he cites Gerard Van Herk’s paper “Fear of a Black Phonology: The Northern Cities Shift as Linguistic White Flight.” Very true, of course, but the problem is that Van Herk is talking about the Northern Cities vowel shift, whereas Jones is talking about rhotic versus nonrhotic speech, and the fatal flaw in his argument is that nonrhotic speech is not a distinctive characteristic of New York Black English; to quote the very thorough Wikipedia article African-American Vernacular English, “The level of AAVE rhoticity is likely somewhat correlated with the rhoticity of White speakers in a given region; in 1960s research, AAVE accents tended to be mostly non-rhotic in Detroit, whose White speakers are rhotic, but completely non-rhotic in New York City, whose White speakers are also often non-rhotic.” Indeed, nonrhoticity is a notorious feature of old-fashioned white New Yorker speech, which means that the idea Jones is pushing, that the workers Labov interviewed were pronouncing r’s to show they were white, is absurd.

It is, of course, true that Labov’s very short (less than ten pages) paper does not prove some of the things it has been claimed to prove — it is more of a discussion-starter than a thesis — but it holds up better than Jones thinks, and I suspect there is a certain amount of slaying-the-elders going on. That said, Jones makes some good points, and it’s always good to be reminded of Labov’s work. (I should add that Craig, who sent me the link — thanks, Craig! — points out that Jones is an AAVE expert, so he would doubtless nitpick my nitpicking. As always, I welcome correction.)

Étienne de La Vaissière’s Acta Orientalia article “A Military Origin for New Persian?” (open access) attracted my attention because of my long-standing interest in Persian and its history. The abstract:

The question of the transition from Middle Persian to New Persian has been hotly debated. This article attempts to answer two questions: who spoke New Persian before it was put into writing in the middle of the 9th c.? This social group is identified with the soldiers of the armies of Abū Muslim, i.e. peasants from Marw and their descendants. They came during one century to the forefront of Abbasid political and administrative life and imposed their specific dialect as a political language, in the shadow of Arabic. The second question is: what could have been the origins of the spoken language in the Marw oasis of the first half of the 8th c.? The article tries to demonstrate, on a much more tentative basis, that the demographic history of an oasis twice manned by soldiers from the South, first Middle Persian-speaking ones and then Arabic ones, both groups added to the local, Parthian-speaking population, is well reflected in the unique combination of Middle Persian, Arabic and Parthian characteristic of Early New Persian. Early New Persian is the language of 8th c. Marw, or more generally Outer Khurāsān. This Marw hypothesis, based on the presence of Parthian vocabulary, is however very cautious, as nothing is known of the grammar of spoken late Middle Persian and many of the linguistic differences between Middle and New Persian might have evolved separately in different historical processes.

Ignorant as I am, I find the idea plausible, and I like his modesty:

For the time being, the argument must rely primarily on historical analysis. The grammar and phonology of spoken Middle Persian are not known, as its written forms are largely archaizing—this represents a major limitation. With regard to vocabulary, I had hoped that a sociolinguistic analysis of Early New Persian, particularly of its distinctive Parthian layer, might yield results. Unfortunately, very little research has been conducted in this area.

The final paragraph:

In the absence of more data, especially from earlier texts, many complex scenarios remain possible for the linguistic situation in early 8th-century Marw. More comprehensive studies of Early New Persian vocabulary—or new textual discoveries—are needed to confirm or refute this plausible hypothesis.

But the details he provides are intriguing and help fill out my picture of the situation in that time of rapid change.

You’d think I would have learned long ago to associate Northwestern University Press with daring, off-the-beaten-path publications that are often right up my alley, considering that they put out translations of Veltman’s Selected Stories (translated by James J. Gebhard, 1988) and Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev (translated by Gerald J. Janecek, 1999; I wrote about the novel here). Not for them the umpteenth version of Anna Karenina or yet another Reader’s Companion to Dostoevsky! As I wrote last year, they are publishing Stephen Bruce’s translation of Veltman’s Странник, The Wanderer (scheduled for November), and to thank me for my assistance with the translation (not to mention having inspired it in the first place), they are sending me not only a copy of it but a number of other books from their imprint, several of which have already arrived (thanks, Charlotte!). I have just finished the first of these, Benjamin Paloff’s brand-new Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, and I’m here to tell you about it.

I have long had an interest in Bakhtin, and back in 2018 I worked my way through Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson; I learned a lot from it, but it’s so fat and comprehensive that I wound up skimming a fair amount and forgetting much of what I learned. Paloff’s book is very short (93 pages of text and 27 pages of endnotes) and focused on a single aspect of Bakhtin’s thought, his concept of “adventure” as it applies to both life and literature. Paloff’s basic point is that Bakhtin is not primarily a literary critic or philologist, as we tend to think of him (because of his famous works on Dostoevsky and Rabelais) — he is obsessed with the question of how to lead an ethical life, which for him means treating other people as having the same freedom we feel ourselves to have, and his basic insight is that we can and do treat people much as we treat characters in novels, constructing a whole (inevitably incomplete and misunderstood) from whatever random selection of qualities have become apparent to us (or have been provided by the author). As Paloff puts it: “Following Bakhtin, I refer to stories that preserve the hero’s freedom not to mean anything as ‘adventure,’ and I regard this adventure not only as the essential intersection of Bakhtin’s early reflections on language and literature and his later writings on behavior, but more fundamentally as the precondition for imagining the lives of others ethically.” He goes into this from various angles and usefully brings in analogies from movies like The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski (as a result of which I rewatched the first two for the first time since the ’90s and saw the last for the first time ever, so that I finally have a context for all the memes). There’s fascinating stuff on Bakhtin’s relationship with Lukács (he was so “electrified” by The Theory of the Novel that he wanted to translate it, but Lukács refused permission, telling him sternly that he no longer liked the book) and many other topics; if you have any interest in Bakhtin, I heartily recommend this book, which not only has plenty of helpful illustrations but, amazingly, no typos that I noticed, not even in the many quotes in the original. Well done, NUP!