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Nelson Goering in a Facebook post showed an image of a footnote from Kuśiññe Kantwo: Elementary Lessons in Tocharian B by Michael Weiss (p. xx fn. 31) that I couldn’t resist posting here:

Don Ringe related the following story, which he heard from Warren Cowgill: In the early course of the decipherment “Sieg could tell from the names in a Tocharian text he was working on that it was a Buddhist text, but he couldn’t figure out which. One night he dreamt that he got up, went to his library, took a particular book, opened it to a particular page, and there was the Sanskrit parallel. Upon waking he did exactly that and found the parallel.” The story may be apocryphal, but names have often played a key role in decipherment from Grotefend’s and Champollion’s day on.

(Cowgill was the director of my ill-fated dissertation half a century ago.) Weiss’s book looks useful and readable; the preface begins:

There are now many excellent resources for learning the structure and grammar of the Tocharian languages, but there are few resources for learning to read the languages. The natural person to write such an introductory textbook would be one of the great Tocharianists, but they have better things to do. So, on the principle “fools rush in, etc.,” I’ve put together twenty lessons that will introduce the basic grammar of Tocharian B — generally regarded as the more archaic and interesting of the two languages for Indo-European purposes — and a vocabulary of about 500 words. The first ten lessons present the rudiments of the synchronic phonology, morphology, and major syntactic topics. Lessons 11-20 cover some diachronic topics and continue the presentation of the syntax. My models are the bare-bones introductory texts of yesteryear (Perry, Quin, the original Wheelock) and the excellent Sanskrit samizdat of Craig Melchert.

And here’s what he has to say about the names of the languages:
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A couple of place names that have recently crossed my path:

1) I enjoyed the 1952 movie Macao and followed the action as best I could on a map I happen to have (there were a pleasing number of geographical references, including shots of street signs); a scene set at the A-Ma Temple led me to look it up and discover it is “one of the oldest in Macau and thought to be the settlement’s namesake,” and sure enough, the Etymology section of the Wikipedia Macau article says:

The first known written record of the name Macau, rendered as A Ma Gang (亞/阿-媽/馬-港), is found in a letter dated 20 November 1555. The local inhabitants believed that the sea goddess Matsu (alternatively called A-Ma) had blessed and protected the harbour and referred to the waters around A-Ma Temple by her name. When Portuguese explorers first arrived in the area and asked for the place name, the locals thought they were asking about the temple and told them it was Ma Kok (媽閣). The earliest Portuguese spelling for this was Amaquão. Multiple variations were used until Amacão / Amacao and Macão / Macao became common during the 17th century.

It has a whiff of folk etymology (people love those “the locals told them” stories), but it could certainly be true.

2) Ian Frazier’s latest New Yorker piece (archived) mentions Prudhoe Bay, and it occurred to me to wonder how that name is pronounced — I mentally said it /ˈprʌd-hoʊ/ (PRUD-ho) but had no confidence in that. So I went to Wikipedia and to my horror saw /ˈpruːdoʊ/ (PROO-doh). To get a second opinion I went to my old standby, Merriam Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, and sure enough it said the same thing. But above it was the name of the Northumberland town that (via Algernon Percy, Lord Prudhoe) gave the place in Alaska its name, and that had the pronunciation /ˈprʌd-(h)oʊ/ (PRUD-(h)o). Having learned distrust, I turned to the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names and found the same thing — but Wikipedia has /ˈprʌdə/ (PRUD-ə)! And I don’t know whether the change from /ˈprʌd-/ to /ˈpruːd-/ happened because of Algernon or Alaskans. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

I’m not a great fan of the opera Carmen, but Larry Wolff’s NYRB review (February 22, 2024; archived) of a recent Met production has some material of Hattic interest:

In Carmen, first performed in Paris in 1875, Georges Bizet created a Mediterranean musical world in elegant French style. Spanish song and dance fascinated nineteenth-century Paris […]. The Metropolitan Opera’s new production, directed by Carrie Cracknell and premiered on New Year’s Eve, sets the opera in contemporary America, possibly in the vicinity of the Mexican border, where Latin rhythms would not be out of place.

Carmen is an entertainer. This is clear from her very first appearance, singing the erotically descending phrases of the “Habanera” and then the sinuous “Seguidilla” later in the first act. For Bizet, Carmen’s artistry is closely tied to her Andalusian origins and Roma identity. The “Habanera,” named for Havana, borrows its Afro-Cuban inflections from a piece by the Spanish Basque composer Sebastián Yradier, who had visited Cuba. […]

Bizet set the second act in the inn of Lillas Pastia in Seville, where Carmen and her two best friends give a cabaret performance; the lyrics celebrate the “strange music” of the Roma—“ardent, crazy, fevered”—and reference Basque tambours and frenzied guitars. At the Met there is no Andalusian inn; the act takes place inside the trailer of the hijacked truck racing along the highway. It is a spectacular update, a cabaret in motion, and the twenty-seven-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, dancing in denim short-shorts and shiny blue cowboy boots, handled every sensual ornamentation in Carmen’s vocal lines with youthful agility. Akhmetshina played Carmen not as the more usual worldly femme fatale but as a teenage rebel without a cause, which gave a different sense to the character’s recklessness, volatile sexuality, risky romances, and impulsive confrontations. […]

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We’ve discussed Ryan Starkey before, but I recently took a look at his website, Starkey Comics (“Colourful images about culture and language”), and was astonished at the breadth of his coverage. Check out Etymologies of Endonyms and Exonyms, which currently includes The etymologies of Georgia, Georgia, and Sakartvelo; The Etymology of Croatia and Hrvatska; The Etymology of Myanmar and Burma; and The Etymology of Japan and Nippon — I’m sure holes can be picked in details here and there, but it’s so nice to see etymologies laid out in such pleasing graphic form, and his discussion of Burma/Myanmar is exemplary:

Burma was the earlier exonym for this southeast Asian nation in English, and is derived from the informal, spoken form of the endonym “Bama”.
“Bama” evolved from the more formal/literary form of the endonym, “Mranma”.
In 1989 the official English name of the country changed to “Myanmar”, a Latinised form of Mranma”, although “Burma” remains in use in many places, including the adjective form and name of the main language (Burmese).
Both “Burma” and “Myanmar” contain the letter “r”, despite being borrowed from Burmese words without an “r” in those positions. This is because Burma was a British colony, and majority of the accents of England are non-rhotic: the letter “r” is always silent when not before a vowel, and is simply there to modify the preceding vowel.
So an “r” was added to the spelling of both simply to show that the preceding vowel was long, not because it was ever intended to be pronounced.

There’s Austronesian words for ‘two’, Indo-European Words for Ten, The Etymology of Every Toki Pona Word, and much, much more. Enjoy!

Our nightly reading these days is Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which I first read three decades ago and have very much been wanting to revisit; at close to 2,000 pages, it should occupy our bedtimes well into next year. The first novel, The Jewel in the Crown (also the title of the superb television serial made from it), is online at archive.org for anyone who wants to sample it; I thought I’d post this passage for its linguistic interest:

The teacher at the Chillianwallah Bazaar school, whose pupils were all Indian, was a middle-aged, tall, thin, dark-skinned Madrassi Christian, Mr F. Narayan: the F for Francis, after St Francis of Assisi. In his spare time, of which he had a great deal, and to augment his income, of which he had little, Mr Narayan wrote what he called Topics for the local English language weekly newspaper, The Mayapore Gazette. In addition, his services were available as a letter-writer, and these were services used by both his Hindu and Muslim neighbours. He could converse fluendy in Urdu and Hindi and the local vernacular, and wrote an excellent Urdu and Hindi script, as well as his native Tamil and acquired Roman-English.

“Roman-English” doesn’t convey anything to me; I’m guessing it might mean English written in the Roman alphabet, but how else would it be written? All suggestions welcome.

Also, just because it was preying on me and I’m pleased to have solved the puzzle: I’m enjoying my new Blu-ray of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, notorious for its 439-minute running time (I’m following my brother’s advice and taking it in chunks, easy to do since it’s divided into twelve parts), and today I watched the sixth part, “A pók dolga II (Ördögcsecs, sátántangó) [The Job of the Spider II (The Devil’s Tit, Satan’s Tango)],” which takes place in a bar where everyone is getting increasingly drunk. One character, Kelemen, keeps repeating the same phrases over and over until you want to slug him, and the most frequently repeated was subtitled “I was plodding and plodding” (it’s the first thing you hear in this YouTube clip). Of course I wanted to know what the Hungarian was, and I think I’ve finally figured out it’s vágtattam (see the conjugation here), which means ‘I galloped.’ I don’t know why the translator went with “plodding,” but it seems misleading.

Update. It would appear rather to be baktattam, from baktat ‘plod, trudge, walk slowly’; see Xerîb’s comment below.

My wife and I were talking about sukiyaki (which her mother had enjoyed in a NYC Japanese restaurant sometime in the 1930s-’40s) and I wondered how far back it went in English; the OED, in a 1986 entry, takes it back to 1920 (“Another name by which this dish [sc. nabe] is usually known outside of Tokyo, is suki-yaki. This is derived from suki, which means a spade, and yaki, to cook”), but I figured that could be easily antedated using Google Books, and sure enough I quickly found a hit from 1915 1912 [thanks, ktschwarz!] (something about a “sukiyaki room” in a new Japanese social club in NYC). The most entertaining find, though, was Takeo Oha’s NY Times piece from July 6, 1919 (which you can read without the OCR errors in the Herald of Asia reprint at Google Books); it starts:

Now that the Atlantic has been crossed in the short span of sixteen hours by airplanes, the world has become a very small place indeed. Already aviators are turning their eyes to the Pacific. Soon we may expect to see the United States of America and Japan drawn much closer together by quick aerial transportation and with the shrinking of the ocean may the mutual understanding and friendship of our two nations become the greater. But New Yorkers need not wait for quick aerial transportation to visit Japan. Japan has come to New York.

The part of LH interest comes a few paragraphs later:

There are two vernacular newspapers, one weekly and the other semi-weekly. Doubtless any subscriber to any other New York newspaper could dispense with these without serious danger of backwardness in news. In consequence their readers hover in the neighborhood of the unlucrative two thousands. The parlor game, commonly christened “ta-maya” among my compatriots, has practically become one of the standard features of Coney Island and other New York Summer resorts. From a mercenary point of view the business is good and forms the best Summer side line. Really you need not be an infallible shot in order to turn a cigarette package target into your coveted prize at 50 cents or win a 5-cent doll by rolling away dollars at the Japanese ball game. Business is business, the Japanese has learned.

This metropolis may boast of no less than a dozen Japanese restaurants. Your casual visit will introduce you to fresh sliced fish taken raw, seasoned bamboo shoots, and lotus root and pickled radish served on the same table with “sukiyaki,” palatable at least to the Japanese. “Sukiyaki,” a compound word still unauthorized in any standard English dictionary, is the Japanese “quick lunch,” eaten while being cooked on a small charcoal table stove. Beef, onions, cabbage, beancurd, and other vegetable additions, not forgetting Japanese soy, sugar, and a little sake, are ready to be prepared in a shallow pan á la japonaise on the fire. The rest devolves upon you and your company, ladies not honorably excluded! A great time saving it is for the proprietor, this having his guests prepare their own meals! Though a fairly comprehensive menu is obtainable, Geisha girl entertainment, the Japanese equivalent to New York’s cabarets, is still unobtainable. Rice cakes have risen to a conspicuous place lately and have usurped a position in the bill of fare of chop suey restaurants. Their taste is the same as in Tokyo, but their price is different, as any sen-beiya-san (Japan rice-cake man) in New York City can tell you.

Note the use of “the Japanese” for a single Japanese person, a phenomenon we’ve discussed somewhere, and the Orientalizing “honorably”; what interests us, however, is the mention of “sukiyaki” as not occurring in any standard English dictionary, which of course makes sense at that early date. But I’m also curious about the parlor game called here “ta-maya”; does anybody know what that might be referring to? Google has been of no help to me; I’ve only found 霊屋 tamaya ‘mausoleum; (temporary) resting place of a corpse.’

This is one of those situations where I idly wonder about where a common word — in this case, abandon — comes from, and fall down a rabbit hole. The OED has revised its entry relatively recently (2011); it says the verb is from Anglo-Norman and Middle French (h)abandoner, “apparently either < abandon abandon n.¹ or directly < the phrase a bandon (see abandon adv.),” so let’s check those out. The noun:

< Anglo-Norman abandun, abaundun abandonment, surrender (first half of the 13th cent. or earlier) and Middle French abandon power, jurisdiction, discretion (12th cent. in Old French (see phrases below); French abandon; also in sense ‘freedom from constraint’ (1607 in en abandon without constraint)) < a bandon (see abandon adv.).

OK, let’s see abandon adv:

< Anglo-Norman a bandun, a baundoun, a baundun, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French a bandon under (one’s) jurisdiction or control (c1176 in mettre a bandon: see note), freely, willingly (c1230 or earlier), in abundance (c1230 or earlier), unrestrainedly (late 12th cent. or earlier), completely (c1235 or earlier) < a at, to (see a- prefix⁵) + bandon bandon n. Compare to be at a person’s bandon at bandon n. 1.

Notes
With sense 1 [‘Under control or authority; at one’s disposal’] compare Anglo-Norman aver a bandun, to have in one’s jurisdiction, under one’s control (first half of the 14th cent. or earlier), Anglo-Norman and Middle French mettre a bandon, mettre a son bandon to put under one’s jurisdiction, leave to one’s mercy (c1176), to entrust (second half of the 12th cent. or earlier). With sense 2 [‘At one’s own will or discretion, without interference or restraint’] compare Middle French a son bandon at his pleasure. Compare also the phrases cited at abandon n.¹

The entry for bandon n. ‘Jurisdiction, authority, dominion, control’ hasn’t been revised since 1885, so let’s check Merriam-Webster’s verb etymology for the rest of the story:

Middle English abandounen, borrowed from Anglo-French abanduner, derivative of abandun “surrender, abandonment,” from the phrase a bandun “in one’s power, at one’s disposal,” from a “at, to” (going back to Latin ad “to”) + bandun “jurisdiction,” going back to a Gallo-Romance derivative of Old Low Franconian *bann- “summons, command” (with -d- probably from outcomes of Germanic *bandwō “sign”) — more at at entry 1, ban entry 1, banner entry 1

I confess I did not go down those final rabbit holes; I abandoned the quest, as you might say. But there’s plenty there to chew on.

I’ve frequently had occasion to complain about translators simply skipping passages they found difficult, and I’ve run across some in my latest reading. I decided to finally try one of Mark Aldanov’s historical novels, and I chose Истоки (‘Sources’) [Russian text: I, II], which I have a hard copy of — it’s set in the period leading up to the assassination of Alexander II, in which I have an interest at the moment — and I’m enjoying it; it’s easy reading compared to many of the modernist writers I’ve struggled with, and it’s good Tolstoyan fun to have historical personages show up to interact with the fictional characters. In the section I recently finished, a restless young painter named Mamontov leaves Russia with the vague plan of visiting Bakunin in Switzerland and Marx in London, partly to try to understand their ideas and partly with the hope of painting them. He learns in Zurich that Bakunin is living at the Villa Baronata on Lago Maggiore, and when he stops for a rest in nearby Locarno he discovers the great anarchist is actually in town giving a lecture, which of course he decides to attend. He meets Bakunin afterwards and is invited up to his rented room, where they eat, drink, and talk a great deal. At some point it occurred to me to wonder how Catherine Routsky had handled some of the material in her 1948 translation Before the Deluge; as I suggested above, it did not go well.

The first instance is minor and I wasn’t surprised at its being skipped; when Bakunin sizes up our hero, bedraggled from his long travels, he offers to treat him to dinner: “I have ten francs and dinner here only costs one and a half.” The embarrassed Mamontov insists on paying, producing this exchange:

— Ради Бога!.. Напротив, я прошу вас сделать мне удовольствие и честь быть моим гостем. Для меня будет величайшим удовольствием, если вы со мной пообедаете.

— Я могу сделать вам и это удовольствие, и эту честь, — благодушно ответил Бакунин. Он произносил «чешть». — Разве вы тоже при деньгах?

Routsky renders it:

‘On the contrary, I am asking you to give me the pleasure and the honour of being my guest. It will be a great pleasure for me if you will have dinner with me.’

‘I can give you that pleasure and that honour,’ Bakunin replied good-naturedly. ‘Are you, too, in funds?’

The substitution of Ради Бога! ‘For God’s sake!’ with “On the contrary” is pathetic, but I can’t blame her for skipping “Он произносил «чешть»” ‘he pronounced [chest′ ‘honor’] chesht′,’ since I can’t think of a good equivalent. But a few pages later, when Bakunin is complaining about Marx and his fellow Germans and their delight at the victory of Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, we get a whole chunk of text omitted:
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A recent Works in Progress post by Henry Oliver is far too long and repetitious (ironically, because his subject is style in English), but it has some useful thoughts and examples; if you’re good at skimming it might be worth taking a look at. (Warning: he quotes William Rees-Mogg approvingly. But then he quotes Helen de Witt approvingly, which redeems him to some extent.) This is the nub of it:

From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter. […]

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.

Nothing earthshaking, but worth thinking about. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)

Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:

It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).

Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:

My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]

I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).

I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!