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A couple of years ago I posted an update on The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish; now WordFinderX has a new version, with a somewhat updated national map (German seems to be spreading) and more granular maps showing the West (Hindi in Fremont), the Southwest (Tagalog in Gilbert), the Midwest (Swahili in Fargo), the Southeast (Tamil in Winston-Salem), the Northeast (Greek in Wilmington), and New York City (as impressive a spread as you might imagine, with Staten Island featuring, from north to south, Russian, Chinese, and Italian). Thanks, Taylor!

The Economist’s language columnist Johnson joins the discussion of AI that’s been roiling the online world:

More and more people are using simple, free tools, not only to decode text but also to speak. With these apps’ conversation mode, you talk into a phone and a spoken translation is heard moments later; the app can also listen for another language and produce a translation in yours.

You may still get a surprise or two. Google Translate may be the best-known name in machine translation, but it often blunders. Take “my wife is gluten-free,” the kind of thing you might say at a restaurant abroad. In French or Italian, Google Translate renders this as “my wife is without gluten”—true to the words rather than the meaning. DeepL, a rival, does better, offering various options, most of them along the correct lines.

The best tool may not be a translation app at all. Though not marketed for the purpose, ChatGPT, a generative AI system that churns out prose according to users’ prompts, is multilingual. Rather than entering an exact text to translate, users can tell ChatGPT to “write a message in Spanish to a waiter that my wife and I would like the tasting menu, but that she is gluten-free, so we would like substitutions for anything that has gluten.” And out pops a perfect paragraph, including the way Spanish-speakers actually say “my wife is gluten-free”: mi esposa es celíaca. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation, more like having a native-speaking dinner companion than an automated interpreter.

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Lynn Patyk discussed her recent book Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs at Bloggers Karamazov (The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society), and I found her ideas new and worth sharing:

KB: You write that provocation is “the key artistic mechanism of Dostoevsky’s creation” (p. 9). Why is provocation such an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s work?

LP: I think Dostoevsky dreaded boredom and being boring, and as I just said, provocation is a key communicative tactic to avoid that. Dostoevsky avoided becoming an engineer (so as to avoid being boring) but I often think of him as engineering his fiction – his communicative/plot situations – to keep things moving. I often refer to provocation this way in my book, as the primum mobile, or perpetuum mobile, or the moving mover. It’s a key reason why Dostoevsky’s fiction is so breathless and dynamic. Provocation also hits the ball into the other’s court, with all the suspense and uncertainty that that entails. So every time there is a provocation, there is the breathless “what will the reaction be?” and this opens a space… which in fiction approximates the space of possibility and freedom, as if there is no author and all of the characters are autonomous agents reacting spontaneously and “in the moment.”

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I just ran across the word almanac in my reading and had my usual “what’s the etymology?” thought. Unable to come up with one (other than “doubtless from Arabic”) on the spur of the moment, I opened up my trusty American Heritage Dictionary and found:

Middle English almenak, from Medieval Latin almanach, from medieval scientific Arabic al-manāḫ, the calendar : Arabic al-, the + medieval scientific Arabic manāḫ, calendar (variant of Arabic munāḫ, halting place, caravan stop (probably applied metaphorically to the position of celestial bodies), abode, from ’anāḫa, to make (a camel) lie down, from nāḫa, to lie down, rest; see nwḫ in the Appendix of Semitic roots).

Which was interesting, of course, but then I thought I’d cross-check with the OED, which as it turned out had revised its entry as recently as 2012, and found this far more complicated story:
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Dennis Duncan’s LRB review (archived) of The Themerson Archive Catalogue, edited by Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley, is full of interesting things (Franciszka and Stefan Themerson were Polish refugees who moved to London during WWII), but this passage is of obvious LH relevance:

When Stefan eventually joined her in London they set up home in Maida Vale. It was here, in 1948, that they launched their publishing house, the Gaberbocchus Press. The name was taken from a translation of ‘Jabberwocky’ into Latin by Carroll’s uncle: the inadvertent Pataphysics of a made-up word carried over into a dead language. In Franciszka’s drawings for the press’s stationery and catalogues, the Gaberbocchus is a louche, penile dragon, masked and smiling, often brandishing a nibbed sword. As with the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, the early Gaberbocchus productions were of the Themersons’ own work. An essay by Stefan on the Polish artist Jankel Adler – another émigré who had fought with the Polish army in France – was followed by a version of Aesop’s fable ‘The Eagle and the Fox’, devised by Stefan and illustrated by Franciszka, in which the tale is told and then reversed, with the eagle coming out on top. Two more books by Stefan followed, as well as a volume of poetry by Hugo Manning, a Londoner of Polish Jewish extraction.

In 1951, Gaberbocchus published the work for which it remains best known. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is bold, cartoonish and archly slapdash, its lead couple resembling the Macbeths reimagined as Roald Dahl’s Twits. Ubu is greedy, cruel, cowardly, oafish – all the sins except lust. His wife is a randy, ambitious grifter. Yeats had been present at the play’s notorious premiere in Paris in 1896, but Barbara Wright’s translation for the Themersons was its first appearance in English. From the opening word – Ubu’s exclamation ‘Shittr!’ (‘Merdre!’ in the original) – Wright captures Jarry’s freewheeling slang perfectly. In its typography, too, the Gaberbocchus edition was attuned to Jarry’s provocations. Printed on bright yellow paper, the book was not typeset but handwritten, in thick italics, directly onto the litho plates. The writing competes for space with Franciszka’s illustrations, which sometimes disregard the text, layering themselves bluntly on top, and sometimes play off it, as a page number, for instance, falls through a trapdoor. Franciszka’s Ubu is soft, Obelix-nosed, with a conical head: part moomin, part Ku Klux Klansman. He looks pitiful, comical, disgusting. One can’t help secretly rooting for him. […]

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Back in 2005 I welcomed Lameen Souag’s brand-new blog Jabal al-Lughat; it’s gone silent (like too many blogs) for a couple of years, but now it’s back with a post Miscellaneous Darja notes, which begins:

With Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platforms (Substack sounds promising – any good ideas?), but in the meantime, let’s see if this is still working and post some miscellaneous notes on Dellys Arabic from my holiday.

I am delighted to see anyone turning back towards blogging, especially such a distinguished exemplar of the form; as I’ve kvetched many times, I don’t understand why people choose to share their thoughts on mediums (or, if you prefer, media) where they will vanish beneath the waves after a few comments. Here are the next couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Today, when a watch started randomly beeping, I heard a cousin say ʕəbbẓi næ̃mpoṛt waħda təħbəs “press any one, it’ll stop”. This is obviously the same construction as næ̃mpoṛt ħaja, and was indeed produced by the same person. So it seems that næ̃mpoṛt is indeed a fixed part of his grammar; but note that it is followed by an indefinite noun (ħaja ‘thing’, waħda ‘one’) rather than an interrogative pronoun as it would be in French (quoi ‘what’, qui ‘who’).

When I heard the verb ykạmiri ‘he’s filming’, I initially thought this was proof positive that the loanverb ending -i had become a productive denominal verbaliser (cp. kạmira ‘videocamera’); after all, there is no French verb camérer. But it turns out that camérer is attested in Algerian French, so the case remains ambiguous.

For the rest, which is just as interesting, click the link, and I hope Lameen will continue to grace the fertile land of Blogovia!

We just got our copy of the latest New Yorker, whose cover is a vivid image of a woman eating a slice of watermelon; you can see it, as well as read a brief interview about it with the artist, Olimpia Zagnoli, here. What struck me most was the title, “Cocomero,” which turns out to be an Italian word (stress on the second syllable: /koˈko.me.ro/) meaning ‘watermelon.’ Questions that arose which I could not answer: why is the title in Italian, and why is the meaning not mentioned either in the magazine or in the interview? A question that I could answer, thanks to the Wiktionary article linked above: what is the etymology? It turns out to be from Latin cucumis ‘cucumber.’ Apparently in northern Italian regional usage, it still means ‘cucumber,’ but for some reason in the standard language it switched to the much larger fruit. But what drove me to post is the etymology given for that Latin word:

A wanderwort likely ultimately from Sumerian 𒄾 (ukuš₂, “cucumber”) or an unidentified pre-Indo-European Mediterranean substrate language; see Arabic قِثَّاء‎ (qiṯṯāʔ, “snake melon”).

Much as I love Sumerian etyma, is that anything more than a wild guess? (We discussed Italian words for ‘watermelon’ back in 2016.)

Benjamin Breen at Res Obscura has thoughts about Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful:

The Hortus Sanitatis (Latin for The Garden of Health) is an encyclopedia about the natural world that was first published in Mainz, Germany in 1491. It features 530 chapters on plants, 164 chapters on land animals, 122 chapters on flying animals, 106 chapters on animals that swim in the sea, and 144 chapters on precious stones and minerals. It is 454 pages long.

These are the ways that bibliographers tend to classify books. But nothing I can tell you about the Hortus Sanitatis will do justice to what you learn from looking at it. Because numbers aside, the most salient thing about this book is that it’s incredibly beautiful.

I am sometimes asked why I became a historian. A big part of it is that I just really like looking at old books. Not just looking, exactly, but finding out what we can learn from looking at them — how the meaning and function of a book interacts with the technologies used to produce it and the creativity and craftsmanship of its creators.

The Hortus Sanitatis is what’s known as an incunabulum, or “cradle book,” a term for books produced before 1500 during the infancy of movable type printing. […] Early modern printed books are a much wider category, encompassing the entire period between ~1450 CE and ~1800 CE (I tend to date the end of the early modern period to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815). Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books.

His thoughts are interesting and the illustrations are gorgeous; check it out!

I’ve finished Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (see this post); it seems to be considered a classic (“In a 2015 poll conducted by BBC, The Waves was voted the 16th greatest British novel ever written”), but it didn’t do much for me — I appreciated the formal experimentation, but the language felt musty and “poetic” in the Victorian sense, the characters were too Bloomsburyishly twee to care much about, and Woolf’s snobbery kept annoying me, all those condescending remarks about boot-boys and shopkeepers. I did notice, though, that the color purple came up even more frequently than it did in To the Lighthouse (see this post), and since the novel is conveniently online, I thought I’d catalog its appearances as an aid to comparison:

‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
The air no longer rolls its long, unhappy, purple waves over us.
Now they twist their copy-books, and, looking sideways at Miss Hudson, count the purple buttons on her bodice.
This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows.
‘The purple light,’ said Rhoda, ‘in Miss Lambert’s ring passes to and fro across the black stain on the white page of the Prayer Book.
When I read, a purple rim runs round the black edge of the textbook.
She lets her tasselled silken cloak slip down, and only her purple ring still glows, her vinous, her amethystine ring.
What vast forces of good and evil have brought me here? he asks, and sees with sorrow that his chair has worn a little hole in the pile of the purple carpet.
Or perhaps they saw the splendour of the flowers making a light of flowing purple over the beds, through which dark tunnels of purple shade were driven between the stalks.
I feel through the grass for the white-domed mushroom; and break its stalk and pick the purple orchid that grows beside it and lay the orchid by the mushroom with the earth at its root, and so home to make the kettle boil for my father among the just reddened roses on the tea-table.
Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit.
On the wall of that shop is fixed a small crane, and for what reason, I ask, was that crane fixed there? and invent a purple lady swelling, circumambient, hauled from a barouche landau by a perspiring husband sometime in the sixties.
A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves–a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.
But on the other hand, where you are various and dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple.
Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness, something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glove-like over those finer nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make it spread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented, purple with grapes.
We who are conspirators, withdrawn together to lean over some cold urn, note how the purple flame flows downwards.
It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust.
Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all blossom and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and purple and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad yellow petal, or was barred by some thickly furred green stalk.
Now the shadow has fallen and the purple light slants downwards.
I love punctually at ten to come into my room; I love the purple glow of the dark mahogany; I love the table and its sharp edge; and the smooth-running drawers.
But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves; the red drops in the roses.
I throw my mind out in the air as a man throws seeds in great fan-flights, falling through the purple sunset, falling on the pressed and shining ploughland which is bare.
So imperfect are my senses that they never blot out with one purple the serious charge that my reason adds and adds against us, even as we sit here.
I luxuriate in gold and purple vestments.
His shirt front, there in the corner, has been white; then purple; smoke and flame have wrapped us about […]
A purple slide is slipped over the day.
Bees boomed down the purple tunnels of flowers; bees embedded themselves on the golden shields of sunflowers.

Oh, and I did learn an antiquated slang term, tweeny ‘betweenmaid’ (“a maidservant whose work supplements that of cook and housemaid”).

I think I’m going to move on to Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (a welcome birthday present two years ago); if anybody is wondering what my wife and I are reading at night these days, it’s Anita Brookner — we began with her first novel, A Start in Life (1981), and have now moved on to her second, Look at Me. The tales are slow and domestic, but the telling is terrific.

A reader writes:

I came across a term, “the Anka Banka” which is unfamiliar to me. I can glean context, but want to know if you have or can find any information about it. It is spoken about 55 seconds into this video […]

My Internet searches were not helpful.

The video is an interview with an engineer who is spending hundreds of dollars a day on crack (allegedly — there is much doubt expressed in the YouTube comments about who he is and whether any of it can be taken at face value); the interviewer asks him how he can allow this to happen to his own life, and he says he used to ask the same thing about others, but “once you have tried it, you become the Anka Banka[,?] you understand.” Does anybody have a clue as to what the reference is? (N.b.: There is an Urban Dictionary page for the phrase, but it is based solely on this quote.)