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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. […]

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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.

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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:
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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:
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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:
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Via r/MapPorn (“Map Porn, for interesting maps”), Do you pronounce the “r” in “arm”? England, 1950 vs. 2016. It’s just a map (well, two side by side), but it blew my mind — I had no idea the boat had rho’d that far out to sea. (Found at Facebook, but I figured Reddit was accessible to more readers.)

I’ve spent the last three weeks reading two of Andrei Bely’s maddeningly difficult novels, Котик Летаев (1917-18, translated by Gerald Janecek as Kotik Letaev) and its continuation, or sequel if you prefer, Крещеный китаец (1921, translated by Thomas R. Beyer as The Christened Chinaman, available online here). I’ve posted about Bely a number of times, reviewing Серебряный голубь (The Silver Dove), Петербург (Petersburg), Симфония (2-я, драматическая) [Symphony: Second, Dramatic], and a translation of all four Symphonies, and while these are in one sense not like any of the others (they focus on the impressions of a small child and have almost nothing in the way of a plot), in another they’re clearly part of the same web of prose: his musical style gets more so, his love of archaic, dialectal, and invented words becomes stronger, and his overriding sense of a dialectic between East and West is sharpened. Here this is personified in the figure of Professor Letaev, the father of little Kotik (clearly modeled on Bely’s own father, Nikolai Bugaev — Andrei Bely, “Andrew White,” is of course a pseudonym); he is a mathematician, with Western rationality, but also a highly eccentric man who represents the “Scythian” East, whence the ridiculous title “The Christened Chinaman” that Bely gave it on its 1927 book publication. The original journal version was called Преступление Николая Летаева [The crime/transgression of Nikolai Letaev], which is far superior, since such plot as there is focuses on the protagonist’s sense of guilt at causing (he thinks) the rift between his rationalist father and his music-loving mother, who increasingly resented her husband and became violent when he seemed to be influencing their son, at one point beating Kotik for showing signs of “premature development” (and having his father’s “big forehead”). I don’t understand critics who claim that the title was changed because he hadn’t gotten around to describing the crime (the later parts of the novel were apparently lost); it’s explicitly said that his “crime” is what I described above. And I don’t understand critics who separate the two novels, or (like Janecek in his essay on Kotik Letaev for the Reference Guide to Russian Literature) discuss one without mentioning the other — they are clearly parts of a single whole, and I could quote entire paragraphs that only a very diligent Belyologist could identify as coming from one or the other.

All that said, do I recommend these novels? I have no idea. The language is very, very difficult; I had to consult the translations and their annotations with depressing frequency, and even then some usages remained incomprehensible to me. And the unvarying dactylic rhythm (perhaps explained by Bely’s perception of the novels as constituting an epic) maddened some critics (like Gleb Struve), who found it boring and mannered; I enjoy it, possibly because I’ve read so much epic verse the meter feels natural to me and sweeps me along. (Also, it’s useful in showing which syllable Bely stressed in some words.) Of course, if you read them in English these will not be problems for you (neither translator tried to reproduce the rhythm); then all you have to deal with is the emphasis on childish perceptions (which sometimes reminded me uncomfortably of The Family Circus), the lack of plot, and the frequent allusions to the anthroposophical theories of Rudolf Steiner. If those don’t put you off, go for it; these are not classics like Petersburg, but they give a striking child’s-eye view of the world and some glimpses of Moscow in the 1880s.

An interesting word I pluck more or less at random is алтабаз [altabaz], more usually written алтабас [altabas], which is a kind of Persian brocade and is apparently from Turkish altynbäz. If anyone (Xerîb?) knows more about it, do tell.