languagehat.com

Rye Dag Holmboe’s LRB review (archived) of Andrew Hussey’s Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou summarizes the amazing career of a man who, like Kurt Schwitters, “bridged the gap between Dada and the Situationist International”:

In​ 1942, walking the streets of wartime Bucharest, 17-year-old Isidore Isou posed himself the same question then being asked of the founding of Israel: how to build a better world than the one around him? The answer came to him as an illumination – or perhaps as mania. ‘All must be revealed in letters.’ Words had, he thought, done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, Isou hoped to make space for a new language to emerge. This was the inspiration for the movement known as lettrisme. Isou saw himself not only as the founder of the movement, but its messiah.

Like Futurism and Dada before it, lettrisme held that meaning was secondary to everything else that makes up a word: sound, appearance, texture, the way it is articulated or intoned. Take ‘Larmes de jeune fille’ (1947), which Isou wrote after his move to Paris :

  M dngoun, m diahl Θ¹hna îou
  hsn îoun înhlianhl M²pna iou
  vgaîn set i ouf! saî iaf
  fln plt i clouf! mglaî vaf
  Λ³o là îhî cnn vîi
  snoubidi î pnn mîi
  A⁴gohà îhîhî gnn gî

The Greek characters here, footnoted below the poem, encode dramatically contorted modes of speech: the theta is explained as a ‘soupir’, or sigh; the mu as a ‘gémissement’, a moan or groan; the lambda as a ‘gargarisme’, a gargling; the alpha as an ‘aspiration’, a mere breath. Isou’s own background is registered in the much repeated letter ‘î’, pronounced in Romanian as more of a long ‘uh’ than a French or English ‘i’, sounded with the tongue close to the roof of the mouth.

[Read more…]

Over a decade ago I discovered the delights of Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The wanderer] and wrote an enthusiastic review; having since read more Veltman than doubtless all but a handful of Americans, I’ve finally gotten around to one of his early works I missed along the way, Предки Калимероса: Александр Филипович Македонский [The forebears of Kalimeros (i.e., Bonaparte): Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon] (1836; you can see the first edition here), and enjoyed it… sort of. As with the Bely novels I recently reviewed, I have no idea to whom I could recommend it; the plot is minimal (narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, finds himself in the camp of Philip of Macedon, meets Aristotle in Athens, and accompanies Alexander the Great on his journeys of conquest) and serves mainly as an excuse to pile up ridiculous pseudo-etymologies that depend on analyzing ancient words and names as if they were constructed from modern elements; furthermore, nineteenth-century characters (e.g., Kizilbash) and habits keep intruding into the ancient setting, serving as a clear signal that the reader is not supposed to take any of it even a little bit seriously. I don’t mind the basic idea, but I don’t see why Veltman included quite so much potted history — couldn’t he have taken it for granted that if we’re reading the book at all we’re familiar with who these people are and what happened at Issus, and concentrated on the fun bits? But Vissarion Belinsky, a fine critic when he wasn’t being the stern smiter of reactionaries (the side of him that appealed to the Soviets), summed it up nicely in his review when the book was published, which ends:

At first Mr. Veltman’s novel surprised us a little; we thought: how can he waste his time on such certainly very sweet, but at the same time fruitless little things? It’s all the more strange because Mr. Veltman’s talent would be suitable for something more practical and more significant… What is it? a fairy tale but not a fairy tale, a novel but not a novel, and even if it is a novel, it is not historical at all, but perhaps etymological, because all the characters are obsessed with the etymological production of words. Did Mr. Veltman really want to be the inventor of a special kind of novel, the etymological?!..

But then we understood everything: this is not a novel but a subtle, malicious satire on historical mystics and desperate etymologists. Here is the proof: Mr. Veltman proves, jokingly of course, that Omir [Homer] comes from po miru [‘through the world’] because the creator of the Iliad was a blind old man and walked around po miru [a Russian idiom for begging]!.. Among the Greeks, Mr. Veltman found varenitsy [?], and tubs, and barrels, and everything that you can find in the Okhotny Ryad [a shopping street] in Moscow… Obviously, it’s a joke!..

But this joke is written sweetly, sharply, entertainingly, charmingly; reading it, you don’t see the pages turning, you only notice with annoyance that the end is near. So the reader who just wants to have fun and has the free time for it can safely take up Mr. Veltman’s new novel.

I have no idea what he means by вареницы — it doesn’t occur in the text of the novel and isn’t a standard Russian word (though it’s presumably some sort of derivative of варить ‘to boil, to cook’). At any rate, here are some piquant bits:
[Read more…]

Agence France-Presse in Stockholm reports on an exciting development:

The definitive record of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the dictionary’s final volume sent to the printer’s last week, its editor said on Wednesday. The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), the Swedish equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, is drawn up by the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize in literature, and contains 33,111 pages across 39 volumes. “It was started in 1883 and now we’re done. Over the years 137 full-time employees have worked on it,” Christian Mattsson told AFP.

Despite reaching the major milestone, their work is not completely done yet: the volumes A to R are now so old they need to be revised to include modern words. “One such word is “allergy” which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in the A volume because it was published in 1893,” Mattsson said. “Barbie doll”, “app”, and “computer” are among the 10,000 words that will be added to the dictionary over the next seven years.

The SAOB is a historical record of the Swedish language from 1521 to modern day. It is available online and there are only about 200 copies published, used mainly by researchers and linguists. The academy also publishes a regular dictionary of contemporary Swedish.

Assyrian only took 90 years… (Thanks, Trevor!)

Wiebke Denecke at the OUPBlog has welcome news:

Designed to present works from three millennia of literatures in classical Chinese from China and East Asia’s greater Sinitic World in fresh, bilingual translations that are honed to be solidly scholarly, yet eminently readable, The Hsu-Tang Library (HTL) is a pioneering, unprecedented endeavor.

As an endowed library built to last for future generations, HTL will gradually and strategically tap the monumental treasurehouse of “Literature”—scriptural, historical, philosophical, poetical, dramatic, fictional, devotional, or didactic—produced before 1911 in forms of the classical Chinese language. It carries an ambitious symbolic charge through Ji Yun (1724–1805), the maternal ancestor of Agnes Hsin-Mei Hsu-Tang, who served as chief compiler of one of the world’s largest premodern encyclopedias, The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu).

We are launching HTL this year as this encyclopedia celebrates its 250th anniversary and bring classical Chinese-language literature to a new global world of anglophone readers avid to more fully experience one of the world’s most continuous and voluminous literary traditions. At its projected pace of publishing three to four volumes per year, HTL will quickly showcase the immense variety of this literary tradition. […]

[Read more…]

Two interesting etymologies I recently learned:

1) My wife asked me “What does the name Sotomayor mean?” A bit of googling produced the answer:

Spanish: Castilianized form of a habitational name from either of two places in Pontevedra and Ourense provinces Galicia named Soutomaior from Galician souto ‘grove[,] small wood’ + maior ‘larger[,] main’.

And souto is from Latin saltus ‘forest.’

2) Songdog alerted me to the Texan town of Iraan (/ˌaɪrəˈæn/ EYE-rə-AN): “The city’s name is an amalgamation of the first names of Ira and Ann Yates, owners of the ranch land upon which the town was built.” (After a century, the reason it’s Iraan and not Iraann is probably unrecoverable.)

Lameen’s Jabal al-Lughat post Chenoua and the rectification of names made me think more deeply about languages and what we call them, and I’m bringing it here in the hope that it will do likewise for you. (I’ve quoted his words, but you’ll have to go to his post for the links.)

According to Ethnologue – or even to the HCA – Chenoua (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west of Algiers from Tipasa almost to Tenes. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the speakers, who call their own language Haqḇayliṯ or Haqḇayləḵṯ – i.e. Kabyle. Chenoua is the name of one particular area, a mountain near Tipasa, and speakers from other areas are often entirely unfamiliar with the term; I recently learned of a first-language speaker who had reached her twenties without ever hearing of it.

This is not to say that they speak the same language in Tipasa as in Tizi-Ouzou! In fact, “Chenoua” is much more closely related to Chaoui than to what is usually called “Kabyle”. But “Kabyle” is just an Anglicisation of Arabic qbayǝl – “tribes”. It came to be applied to mountain-dwelling groups like this in the Ottoman period as a broad ethno-political category, not a linguistic one; around Jijel, communities who have spoken Arabic for many generations still call themselves Kabyle.

What should you call a language in a situation like this? “Chenoua” takes a part for the whole, and as such is confusing, as well as privileging one group of speakers over others. “Kabyle” matches speakers’ traditional self-understanding, but misleads linguists, who are accustomed to using this for the much larger, not very closely related Berber variety spoken further west. “Western Algerian Berber” is potentially too broad; perhaps “Dahra Berber” is better, after the low-lying mountain range where most speakers live, but it presupposes a distinction from “Ouarsenis Berber” that is probably not linguistically justified.

[Read more…]

I woke in the middle of the night wondering how you say ‘early’ in Italian. (My wife and I had just seen an Italian movie, which may have prodded my mind in that direction.) My Italian isn’t great, but I know most of the basic vocabulary, so it was frustrating. “Let’s see, it’s temprano in Spanish, de bonne heure in French…” Nothing helped, so I got up and looked it up. Turns out you can say either presto (Se ne andarono presto ‘They left early’) or di buon’ora (but that seems to be limited to ‘early in the morning’). It made me realize that ‘early’ is a multivalent concept (see the various senses at Wiktionary; I’m sure the OED slices even more finely). I also thought that maybe the English word was related to Russian рано [rano], but the latter does not have a clear etymology.

Joel of Far Outliers is reading Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, and he’s done a couple of posts featuring borrowed words in their variety of German. From Bessarabian German Invectives:

Baba (Russian) = old woman, mommy, grandma—also translated as a lethargic person: “Des isch doch a alte Baba … (That’s a tired old grandma.)”

Bagash (French/Russian) = baggage—also translated as riffraff: “Des isch a Bagasch! (What a bunch of riffraff!)”

Barysh, “barisch” (Turkish/Russian) = profit— “Der hat sein Getreide mit gutem Barisch verkauft. (He sold his grain at a good profit.)”

Besplatno (Russian) = free of charge— “Des mache mir ihm besplatno … (I’ll do that for him free of charge.)”

Bog (Russian) = God (deep sigh): “Bozhe moi” = “Mein Gott (My God!)”

And that’s just the B’s. From Bessarabian German Food Names:
[Read more…]

This year I received a superb Father’s Day gift (thanks, S&L!), Colin McEvedy’s Cities of the Classical World: An Atlas and Gazetteer of 120 Centres of Ancient Civilization. I’ve been making my way through it very slowly; with a page or two on each city, it’s an ideal book to pick up from the coffee table when one doesn’t feel like plunging into something that would take up more of one’s day, and I always get something new from it, most recently an unexpected usage of a familiar word: in the entry for Benevento, McEvedy writes: “In 542, Totila, king of the Ostrogoths, retook the town and, to make sure it could not side against him again, slighted its walls.” Did what to its walls?! A visit to the OED showed me that this was in fact the original sense of the verb:
[Read more…]

The Quebec Culture Blog has, sadly, been quiescent since 2016, but in its heyday it did a terrific series of posts on Canadian French accents; here’s the first, with links to the others, and here’s a taste:

Through my growing-up years, my family had moved numerous times within the country. During this period, my education was in French wherever we lived in Canada. As a child, my parents sought to ensure that my French and English were at the same level, and that I was able to identify with Canada’s French language and Francophone culture wherever we lived.

By the time I was 20, I had already lived in four provinces. Since then, I had lived in another two provinces for a total of six provinces. Thus, from a very young age, I became quite familiar with many forms of French accents in numerous provinces. […]

It is a part of Canada which I hold very close to my heart. For me, Canada would not be the same without it’s linguistic and cultural duality (regardless of the province), or the diversity of it’s Francophone nature. I’d like to share some of my own knowledge with you regarding our different accents and realities. […]

I have done my best to provide comprehensive information, but in a manner which doesn’t require an entire book. To keep things interesting, in addition to video links of many accent samples, I will also provide anecdotes with some of my own personal stories and experiences, as well as interesting images throughout this series.

From the second post, on Ontario:
[Read more…]