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Last night my wife and I watched our favorite Yuletide movie, The Shop Around the Corner, which is set in prewar Budapest, and as always I was deeply pleased that all the signs were in actual Hungarian, from the “pengő” and “fillér” on the cash register to the “NAGY ÁRUHÁZ” ‘big department store’ on a building sign. Which prompts me to share some quotes from Victor Sebestyen’s Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West that Joel has been posting at Far Outliers.

From Liszt’s Languages:

Liszt had tried a few times to learn Hungarian and employed as language tutor a young academic reputed to be a brilliant teacher who had managed to get several dignitaries from the court in Vienna to at least utter a few sentences in Magyar. But, as he once admitted, he gave up the effort after five lessons when he encountered the word for unshakeability – tántorithatatlanság. Many of those trying to learn the language would have lost the will to carry on well before then. Liszt wrote to a newspaper after the National Theatre debacle: ‘Notwithstanding my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I am and shall remain until my end, a Magyar heart and soul.’

(Go to the link for a story about how he ended up making an impassioned Hungarian nationalist speech in French.) From Magyar’s Main Modernizer:

In 1801, after serving 2,387 days in jail for a minor walk-on part in the Jacobin movement, Ferenc Kazinczy was released from prison. He felt no bitterness. ‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he was freed. He was forty-one, an erudite polyglot – translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière and Schiller – and proprietor of a modest estate close to Buda. He still burned with a zeal for radical change in Hungary, but during his years of incarceration he abandoned an overtly political programme and any ideas of rebellion against the Habsburgs as impractical gestures that were bound to fail. From prison he had been corresponding with a group of like-minded Enlightenment figures, who came to the conclusion that the way to modernize Hungary, to create a new nation, was through its language and culture. Out of prison, he withdrew to his estate, Széphalom, and for the thirty years up to his death he devoted himself to a single passion: the renewal of the Hungarian language and literature. […] A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today. ‘Magyar is half dead, atrophied…worn out. It has lost all vigour and freshness of the centuries long gone,’ he said when he embarked on his undertaking. […]

Kazinczy and his collaborators created new words based on Hungarian roots, borrowed foreign words and ‘Magyarized’ them, or used image association. For example, the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok. The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’. The word for revolution came from the existing word to boil, ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradalom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ – a noun, not an adjective. More than 8,000 new words came into common usage in colloquial and literary Hungarian within a generation.

And from Language Change in Budapest:
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I recently saw a reference to a “Maghrebi doughnut” called sfenj: “a light, spongy ring of dough fried in oil. Sfenj is eaten plain, sprinkled with sugar, or soaked in honey.” Sounds delicious! That Wikipedia article is full of interesting stuff (e.g., Moroccan Arabic idioms like “Give someone a sfenj and he’ll say it’s ugly” and “As if hitting a dog with a sfenj”), but of course I wanted to know about the etymology, for which I had to go to Wiktionary, which gave the overall meaning of the Arabic word as ‘sponge’ and said “From Ancient Greek σπόγγος (spóngos).” The best part is the list of Descendants:

• Maltese: sfinġa
• Libyan Arabic: سفنز‎ (sfinz)
• Moroccan Arabic: سفنج‎ (sfanj)
• → Persian: اِسفَنج‎ (esfanj)
 • → Hindustani:
    Hindi: इस्फ़ंज (isfañj)
    Urdu: اسفنج‎ (isfanj)
• → Sicilian: sfincia
  • → English: sfincia
  • → Italian: sfincia, sfincione

Note that none of them is spelled or transliterated “sfenj”; ah, the joys of rendering Arabic into the Latin alphabet! (That “English” sfincia is pretty marginal; it seems to be used only of the Sicilian dessert, and the Wiktionary link goes to the Sicilian entry, just like the one above it. The OED knows nothing of such a word.)

The Economist reports on a heartening development (archived):

Jourdan Thibodeaux has had a job every day since his tenth birthday. These days the dreadlocked millennial flips houses, manufactures pork sausages and raises two little girls. But the project of his lifetime is resuscitating his family’s heritage with his voice and his fiddle. Born of African, French, Native American and Spanish descent in south-western Louisiana, he speaks with an accent your correspondent had never heard. Loss is the subject of his ballads. Young people of the bayous have forgotten their families, he laments in French, and understand only their conqueror’s language. Kneeling in a church pew he confesses that he fears it will all die with him: “Tu vis ta culture ou tu tues ta culture, il n’y a pas de milieu,” he sings, “You live your culture or you kill your culture, there is no in-between.”

The story of that culture dates back to before America’s founding. One year after the French settled New Orleans in 1718 the first slave ships docked on Louisiana’s shore. Feeding a hungry economy took many hands and after two decades there were four slaves for every free person in the colony. Sugarcane, the region’s cash crop, was particularly labour-intensive, which made communication between the Europeans and Africans critical.

Masters learned words from West African languages and slaves picked up on some French. Together they crafted a new hybrid language known as Kouri-Vini, or Louisiana Creole. By the time America purchased Louisiana in 1803 Kouri-Vini had become the language of the swamp, spoken alongside French. Slaves became fluent, working-class whites learned it on plantations and black nannies taught it to children of the wealthy.

After a description of the decline of the language, the article continues:
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Kaya Genç writes for The Markaz Review about an impressive feat:

On June 15, 2012, at the age of 38, Kawa Nemir visited his family home in Istanbul, lay on his childhood bed and began translating the following sentence into his native tongue:

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” The next afternoon, Nemir took the notebook with him, flew to Diyarbakır in eastern Turkey and continued translating the rest of James Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish. It did not escape his attention that it was June 16, Bloomsday, the day during which Ulysses, set in 1904, takes place.

Nemir, a chain-smoking poet with intense eyes and a romantic bent, had spent a decade translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into Kurdish. In Turkey — and increasingly in Europe, where many Kurds live in diaspora — bookworms have grown up on his translations of Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale and Walt Whitman.

For Nemir, translating Ulysses into Kurdish was a way to draw attention to a language that had been the victim of nationalist politics in Turkey. […] The elder son of an affluent Kurdish family, Nemir was born in 1974. His own linguistic history mirrored that of many of his generation: While he spoke Kurdish at home, his school lessons were in Turkish and English. By the time he became a teenager, Nemir had forgotten Kurdish. Between 1990 and 1992, while studying at a high school in Istanbul, he devoted his time to regaining his Kurdish by studying the language each day. He decided to stop writing in Turkish, except for works of criticism.

Nemir took to working in Kurdish instead. After graduating from college with a degree in English literature, he found work at Jiyana Rewşen, a Kurdish literary magazine, in 1997 and became its chief editor, encouraging contributors and readers to open their eyes to world literature and become more cosmopolitan. In the meantime, he began to translate works by Shakespeare and William Blake into Kurdish.

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JC’s excellent “Random Link” feature took me to this 2015 post, and as I always do I checked the links, expecting that the one to Peter Jensen Brown’s blog would probably be dead after eight years, but not only did it work, the Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog is still going, and earlier this year had a post “Two Gallon” Top Hats and “Ten Gallon” Cowboy Hats – a Voluminous History of the “X-Gallon” Hat that I obviously couldn’t resist (language and hats!). It is indeed voluminous (like the hats), and it’s full of visuals (newspaper clips for the most part); by the time you’re done, you’ll know all about this fine expression. The conclusion is that “‘ten-gallon’ is an ‘irreverent,’ humorous exaggeration used to emphasize the relatively large size of the hat,” but the fun is in the details. Some excerpts:

For many decades, beginning as early as the 1880s, silk top hats, stovepipe hats or plug hats, were routinely referred to as “two-gallon,” “four-gallon,” “five-gallon” or, on occasion, even “ten-gallon” hats, although by far the most common version seems to have been the “two-gallon” hat.

Beginning in the late-1910s, as top hats were going out of style, western-style “cowboy” hats became the new sheriff of “x-gallon” hat town. One of the earliest known, unambiguously Western examples was a reference to “ten-gallon hats” in Texas, although “two-gallon” and four-gallon” were more common through much of the 1920s. References to “x-gallon” western hats were kept in the public eye through movies and movie commentary, shameless self-promotion by westerners and western towns and civic organizations, and by several high-profile incidents involving Presidents Harding and Coolidge and high-profile hats. “Ten gallon hat” would become more-or-less standard by the 1930s. […]

The earliest such reference, from 1882, does not specify the type of hat, but suggests that it would make the speaker unrecognizable from his normal appearance.

Hush! Charley; don’t talk so loud. When we have our two-gallon hat on the girls can’t tell us from the “hairy man of the jungles.”

The Homer Index (Homer, Michigan), April 12, 1882, page 3.
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Surprisingly, the Australian slang term bogan seems never to have come up here, so I’m pleased to find this 2019 investigation by Bruce Moore, which sums up the known history of the word:

Bogan is the most significant word to be created in Australian English in the past 40 years. It is defined as “an uncultured and unsophisticated person; a boorish and uncouth person” in the 2016 edition of the Australian National Dictionary. […] The type of Australian the term refers to has been the subject of books, television shows, and heated debate. The noun has generated many derivatives and compounds: bogan chick, boganhood, boganic, boganism, boganity, boganland, boganness. Not since “ocker” appeared in the late 1960s as a reference to an uncultured and uncouth Australian male has there been such a productive Australian word.

We have still not established its etymology. Some have argued the term “bogan” may derive from the Bogan River and district in western NSW. But there is no evidence whatsoever that could link our uncouth bogan with this area. […]

Until now, the earliest evidence of the word cited in the dictionary is from a letter signed by “Dave, Phillip Island, Vic” to the surfing magazine Tracks in September 1985. He asks: “So what if I have a mohawk and wear Dr Martens (boots for all you uninformed bogans)?” But fresh evidence discovered by Melbourne historian Helen Doyle, and kindly passed on to me, suggests the word dates to at least 1984, and probably originated in Melbourne. It comes from an article that appeared in the third edition of a magazine produced by students at Xavier College Melbourne in 1984, which includes a detailed description of “the bogan doll”. […]

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Laura Wagner, Sumurye Awani, Nikole D. Patson, and Rebekah Stanhope have a very interesting article, “To what extent does the general public endorse language myths?” (Language and Linguistics Compass 17.3 [2023], e12486, open access), which “reports on an investigation of adults’ level of endorsement of 18 language myths” and discusses “how this snapshot of public understanding can help linguists target their efforts at public education.” From the introduction:

Beyond the topic of linguistic prejudice, there are comparatively few studies looking at other kinds of misconceptions that people have about language. […] One of the more comprehensive studies of people’s language misconceptions, and a touchstone study in this field, is Folk Linguistics by Niedzielski and Preston (1999/2010). They took an ethnographically inspired field-work approach to examine the perspectives that ‘the folk’ had about several dimensions of language. They documented beliefs connected to linguistic prejudice and dialect, as well as misconceptions related to language development. For example, their participants indicated that speaking to children in babytalk would hinder their language development, and that using the passive voice represents bad writing.

The goal of the current study is to add to this general literature about what language misconceptions are held by members of the general public. We note from the outset that this work is descriptive in nature: we are not proposing any systematic analysis about why people believe certain myths (but not others), we are not interrogating the ideologies behind these myths, and we provide only a few suggestions for how to combat them. We aim instead to augment the body of data that feeds into these broader goals with a large, up-to-date sample of participants. Our study investigated a wide range of myths, which we chose with some care. Following the traditions of sociolinguistics, we focused on topic areas that have genuine societal import. Thus, we included several myths connected to linguistic prejudice because belief in such myths has notable negative social consequences. But misconceptions about language have meaningful consequences in other domains as well. Myths about children’s language development impact parenting practices; myths about bilingualism impact immigration policies and educational practices; myths about linguistic diversity impact international relations. And finally, misconceptions about what linguists know and care about limit the ability of language scientists to influence popular opinion and public policy on matters where they should have a strong voice. […] This snapshot will provide a first step towards a broader goal of identifying the areas where linguists’ voices could do the most good in encouraging the public to adopt a more scientifically grounded understanding of language.

Thanks, Y!

I just saw the new movie Godland on the Criterion Channel; it’s gotten rave reviews and doubtless deserves them, long and grim as it is (it reminded me of an Icelandic saga, though nowhere near as concise). But I’m bringing it here for its linguistic interest — I can’t think of a movie other than Godard’s Contempt (see this 2003 post) that features language difference so prominently. It’s about a Danish priest who goes to Iceland to build a church; he doesn’t speak Icelandic, so he’s dependent on the help of a translator and on the locals’ varying understanding of Danish. The subtitles distinguish the languages (Danish in Roman type, Icelandic in italics), and there is an amusing scene in which he tries futilely to learn a few Icelandic words. (There is also some acerbic commentary by an Icelander on the Awful Danish Language.) All the credits are in both languages, as is the title… but there’s a catch: the Icelandic Volaða land is not synonymous with the Danish Vanskabte land, and neither means anything like “Godland.” Danish vanskabt apparently means ‘malformed; having a birth defect’ (van- ‘mis-, mal-‘ +‎ skabt ‘formed, created’), while Icelandic volaður ‘miserable’ is the past participle of vola ‘to cry, weep’ (from Old Norse vāla, vǣla, probably cognate with English wail). I find it unacceptable that when the Danish and Icelandic titles are shown on the screen, they are both translated as “Godland”; why not give the English-speaking viewer a clue as to what they actually mean? The differences are discussed in this Reykavík Grapevine piece by Iryna Zubenko:

“The name ‘Volaða Land’ comes from a poem by Icelandic priest Matthías Jochumsson who studied for the priesthood in Copenhagen,” Hlynur explains. “He moved up north after he came from Denmark. He experienced a harsh winter in Akureyri when the whole fjord froze. During the next summer, it wasn’t warm enough, so the fjord stayed frozen. He wrote this hateful diatribe about Iceland — a very aggressive poem called ‘Volaða Land,’ which means violent, wretched, disfigured island.”

According to Hlynur, the poem was published without the priest’s knowledge. Matthías faced public backlash and had to write another poem about the beauty of Iceland to restore his reputation.

“That poem was a big inspiration for the film,” Hlynur admits. “The Danish translation of ‘Volaða Land’ is ‘Vanskabte Land.’ It’s a very strange translation but a very beautiful one. It’s very expressive, almost more brutal than the original.” He continues: “The English title, ‘Godland,’ is very different from the original title. I always felt like if you put ‘Volaða Land,’ ‘Vanskabte Land,’ and ‘Godland’ together, they give you a good picture of the film.”

You can read the Jochumsson poem here; it begins:

Volaða land,
horsælu hérvistar slóðir,
húsgangsins trúfasta móðir,
volaða land!

Dwight Garner’s NY Times review (archived) of Ray Isle’s The World in a Wineglass is a master class in how to write a negative review of a book by someone you respect; here’s the nub of it:

Isle is among the best, and best-known, wine commentators in the United States. For many years, he has been the wine editor for Food & Wine magazine. He is a genial presence when he appears, glass in hand, on the “Today” show. His palate is beyond reliable. It should be insured, as Betty Grable’s legs were, by Lloyd’s of London. I would take his wine advice to the bank. What I would not do is take his new book out of the bookstore. It’s too heavy. It’s also too padded, like a student’s term paper. If it were an Easter basket, it would be 95 percent shredded green paper. You must really poke around to find the candy eggs.

But I’m bringing it here for the delightful ending:

There is a certain kind of food and wine writing that walks unwittingly into a class minefield. The liberal urban writer is dropped onto a stony goat path among artistic or successful rural people, or both: How should he describe them? What not to do is to baste them in joie de vivre. Isle consistently and patronizingly refers to people as “cheerful and twinkly” or from the “wise old elf school.” He says that they are “extraordinarily animated” or “fiercely animated” or possessed of “an infectious, impish smile” or “irrepressible.” It’s as if he is describing toddlers, or the brain addled. No one would refer to a lawyer, or an ambassador, or a scholar or indeed a wine writer in this manner.

One Slovenian winemaker says to Isle, in my favorite lines in the book: “I need critics! I don’t need this wow-brow shikimiki zak-zak!” Isle presumes the last bit means something like “useless hipster yes-men.” Shout it loud: Down with wow-brow shikimiki zak-zak! Up with Ray Isle, who has better books in him.

Erin Maglaque (/məˈglɑk/) reviews Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher by Oren Margolis for the LRB (14 December 2023; archived), from which I learned a lot about that interesting fellow:

Aldus Manutius​ is the bibliophile’s bibliophile. Between 1495 and his death in 1515, Aldus issued from his Venice press more first editions of classical texts than had ever been published before, and more than anyone has published since. With his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, he designed an elegant new typeface for printing in Greek (a serious technical challenge) as well as the italic font. Aldus shrunk the book: from the large-format volume kept in the library, to a smaller, stylish text to be tucked into a pocket. As Oren Margolis puts it in his new biography, Aldus ‘unchained literature from desks and remade reading as a pastime’. He printed dozens of beautiful books, none more so than the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the book that – by giving equal attention to nymph orgies and classical architecture – captured the libido of the Italian Renaissance.

Aldus seems to have been a difficult character. He squabbled with his workers, even alienating the great Griffo. He was an evangelist for humanist printing and had a zealot’s splenetic temper. He was chronically overworked and felt overlooked by his scholarly peers, though he could namedrop and network with the best of them. According to an earlier biographer, he was ‘almost morbidly sensitive’ about grammar and pronunciation; he got into friendship-straining arguments with Erasmus about case-endings. It’s hard not to flinch from his overweening desire to be praised. He was working himself to death and never let anyone forget it.

But I like him. I can’t help it. Anyone who has sat in the park with a paperback has Aldus to thank for freeing the book from the library, the desk, the metal chain that sometimes bound books to shelves. If you’re the sort of person who gets a quiet thrill from well-chosen punctuation, Aldus is a kindred spirit; he revived the use of the semicolon after centuries of inadequate commas. He is the secular patron saint of pedants and editors. He was so peeved by the widespread practice of shortening Latin and Greek diphthongs into long vowels that he wrote an essay about it. He is also a paragon for those of us awaiting our great second act. In his twenties and thirties, Aldus was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious that he changed what reading meant?

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