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I was reading a recent issue of the LRB and came to “Mohocks,” by Liam McIlvanney, a review of The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein. I almost skipped it because, really, who cares?—but my omnivorous reading habits kicked in and I plunged ahead. I’m glad I did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have learned about the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of mostly imaginary conversations between the Edinburgh wits of the 1820s that were a regular feature of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. McIlvanney describes them as follows:

Wilson’s dialogues are… an astonishing repository of literary Scots, particularly in the speeches of the [Ettrick] Shepherd [James Hogg], those unpredictable and extravagant vernacular riffs. Since the 17th century, Scots has been (in David Craig’s useful phrase) a ‘reductive idiom’, a way of undercutting Latinate English, and we get a lot of this in the Noctes… But we also get lengthy, vertiginously inventive passages in which the Scots tongue is put through its paces in a manner almost without parallel in 19th-century writing. The Scots of the Noctes is a language not merely of pawky humour and vituperation, but of philosophical speculation, impressionistic description, political oratory, sentimental rhapsody, critical pronouncement, religious devotion. In short, it is a language fit for all purposes, and if he did nothing else in his long and varied career, Wilson composed, as Cockburn noted, ‘the best Scotch that has been written in modern times’.

So I’m hoping somebody will put it, or at least a good sample of it, online. (There is actually a searchable archive of Blackwood’s here, but alas only for 1843-1863, well after the years of the Ambrosianae—named, incidentally, for a real Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose’s of Picardy Place, where they were set.)

By the way, I urge anyone with the slightest fondness for the kind of theological weirdness exploited by, say, Hawthorne to read Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner; you can even do so online. It’s a real hoot, and at the same time sends a shudder down the spine.

Addendum. The Scribe has taken note of my call for online Noctes and has posted some at The Discouraging Word under the rubric (le mot juste—it’s red) “Dogs and skating in the Noctes” [roughly halfway down — thanks, January First-of-May!]. Even the few excerpts there show amazing range, from the casual (“It’s lang sin’ I’ve drank sae muckle sawt water at ae sittin’—at ae soomin’, I mean—as I hae dune, sir, sin’ that Steam-boat gaed by. She does indeed kick up a deevil o’ a rumpus.”) to the exalted:

But the mystery o’ life canna gang out like the pluff o’ a cawnle. Perhaps the verra bit bonny glitterin’ insecks that we ca’ ephemeral, because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for ever and aye openin’ and shuttin’ their wings in mony million atmospheres, and may do sae through a’ eternity. The universe is aiblins wide eneuch.

Many thanks for the prompt satisfaction!

Des is not a man who sees an Augean stable and wanders off whistling; he has decided to take on “Serious Writers who have succumbed to the urge to Hold Opinions about languages,” and his first installment, in which he whacks Mihály Komis about the head and shoulders for suggesting that Hungarians should learn German rather than English, is now available for your delectation.

Via Avva comes this Guardian piece by John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who picks his favourite words with unusual origins. I myself particularly like #8:

to curry favour is a common idiom which embraces two linguistic ‘fossils’ as well as a cultural misunderstanding. The ‘currying’ here does not refer to the addition of spices to a dish but to the act of rubbing down a horse with a brush or comb. The idiom derives from the French ‘estriller fauvel’, ‘to curry the chestnut horse’, the horse in question, Fauvel, being a character in the French tale the ‘Roman de Fauvel’ (1310). In the story Fauvel, like Reynard the Fox, represents hypocrisy and duplicity. In English the unfamiliar ‘Fauvel’ was gradually replaced by the similar-sounding ‘favour’ in an idiom that came to mean ‘to seek to win favour, to ingratiate oneself’. As is the case with many fossilized idioms, the fact that the transformation of ‘Favel’ to ‘favour’ made nonsense of the verb ‘curry’ in the context did nothing to deter usage.

It’s interesting to learn that hobbit “has since turned up in one of those 19th-century folklore journals, in a list of long-forgotten words for fairy-folk or little people”; when will they get around to adding this to the online OED entry?

Larry Trask, who made a prior Languagehat appearance in this entry, has a useful Basque page, prefaced with the following pointed caveat:

But please note: I do not want to hear about the following:

Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian / Etruscan / Pictish / Sumerian / Minoan / Tibetan / Isthmus Zapotec / Martian

Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions / the Phaistos disc / the Easter Island carvings / the Egyptian Book of the Dead / the Qabbala / the prophecies of Nostradamus / your PC manual / the movements of the New York Stock Exchange

Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind / a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis / the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica / evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri

(Thanks to Vidiot for the link.)

Addendum. Thanks to Pat of fieldmethods.net for this excellent interview with Trask; I was sad to read at the end: “Illness has robbed him of his voice, so that this interview had to be conducted entirely by email.”

As it happens, yesterday was a day of, shall we say, personal chronological significance, and my lovely wife gave me several presents, mainly books. (As she put it, “You don’t need more books, of course, but… you need more books.”) One of these was a book I recently posted about, Switching Languages, “the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one.” I am, of course, delighted to have it (and Summer in Baden-Baden and Life Along the Silk Road) and am very much looking forward to reading it. Another source of delight: not only is my wife lovely and generous, but she reads my blog.
Coincidentally, today’s NY Times has an article very relevant to the book, about two Americans who have made careers in Argentina, writing in Spanish:

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Regular readers will know that I often have occasion to berate the hapless William Safire, whose love for the English language is passionate but lamentably short on genuine knowledge. Today, however, reading him has filled me with joy, for he has brought me good tidings. The magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Jonathan Lighter, was dropped by its original publisher, Random House, after two volumes in an appalling demonstration of obsession with profit to the exclusion of all other factors. (They might have considered the example of the OED, which was similarly seen by Oxford as a sure money-loser in the beginning; since then, of course, it has been a bonanza for OUP.) But salvation is announced in Safire’s Sunday column:

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Having recently posted about the AHD’s extension of the etymology of “ginger” back to Dravidian, I am now equally delighted to have them trace “souk” back beyond the obvious Arabic to Aramaic shuqa ‘street, market,’ from Akkadian suqu ‘street.’ And of course, bless their little hearts, they provide the protoform in their Semitic appendix. Thanks to The Discouraging Word for alerting me to this!

Andrew Krug, responding to my recent (and not very serious) query about Ladino blogs, has come up with the next best thing: a Ladino newspaper online. Well, actually a newspaper for the Sephardic community of Turkey, mainly in Turkish, but with a column in Ladino (in Latin characters). Thanks, Andrew!

(Other Ladino links here, and see my entry on Sefarad.)

So I was reading the Sunday paper and came across Ron Rosenbaum’s description of the infamous “Salic law speech” at the start of Shakespear’s Henry V and the way in which a director can use it to establish his approach to the whole play. Henry is thinking of invading France and wants the blessing of the Church; he calls in the Archbishop of Canterbury and asks him to explain “Why the Law Salique, that they have in France,/ Or should or should not bar us in our claim.” The Archbishop, doubtless thrilled to have a willing royal ear for the kind of detailed historico-legal exegesis which usually sends his auditors running for the transepts, begins “Then hear me, gracious sovereign, and you peers…” and continues for a mind-numbing (or enthralling, according to taste) sixty lines unraveling the tangled history of the kings of France, full of peppy bits like “In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant” and “Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair.” It can be played as farce or as conspiracy, or even straight. At this point Rosenbaum says:

The fact that those who take the Salic law sequence seriously need blackboards and placards on easels accompanied by illustrations to make sense of it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s nonsense. Read closely, the speech is a kind of spiraling black hole of self-cancellation.

This made me put down the paper and furrow my brow. A spiraling black hole of self-cancellation… what did that remind me of? Ah yes, of course, Finnegans Wake. (This recognition was a result not so much of my fondness for Joyce, extreme though it is, as of my youthful immersion in science fiction, believe it or not—in this instance James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.)

On page 572 of Finnegans Wake Joyce interrupts the stream of dreamtime worldspeech for the one passage of straightforward (not to say clinical) English in the book. It begins:

Honuphrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor who makes dishonest propositions to all. He is considered to have committed, invoking droit d’oreiller, simple infidelities with Felicia, a virgin, and to be practising for unnatural coits with Eugenius and Jeremias, two or three philadelphians…

and continues with a complex explication of the manifold immoral interrelationships among a group of people we have not met before and shall not meet again. At the end comes the simple question, “Has he hegemony and shall she submit?” This parallels nicely the King’s question at the end of the Salic Law speech, “May I with right and conscience make this claim?”

Blish’s protagonist, Father Ruiz-Sanchez, expends much anguish of mind and soul on the first question. The Archbishop, per contra, has a ready answer to the second, which boils down to “Sure!” But he has been bought off by the king’s favorable attitude to the quashing of a parliamentary bill imposing confiscatory tax rates, so we can hardly take his reply as representing an honest resolution of the problem. In fact, the passages that lead up to the questions are both of them spiraling black holes of self-cancellation, and I think it’s fair to say that both cases remain open. Therefore, any readers sending in a detailed analysis of both, with clear and convincing answers to both questions, will receive a certificate proclaiming them Doctor Philosophiae, Divinitatis, et Legis Salicae and a letter authorizing them to resolve any and all of life’s problems, by writ of Languagehat University. Or, if you prefer, you could always propound a fresh Gordian knot, your own case of conscience, and let it inspire plays, novels, or at the very least blog entries.

A funny, if inadequate, essay on Spanish swearing, via Avva. (I say “inadequate” because, although it basically concerns itself with the swearing of Spain, it includes a digression on the Argentine variety; this, although accurate as far as it goes, might lead unwary readers to suppose that they now have at least an overview of the international situation, whereas in fact swearing varies richly from country to country, as might be expected, and the most striking fact about Argentine swearing—the replacement of joder by cojer, which in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is the common verb for ‘take’—is not even mentioned.)