languagehat.com

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:
[Read more…]

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. […]

[Read more…]

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.)

We discussed the new Grambank database a few months ago; now the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports at Phys.org on a study they’ve done using it:

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. […] This grammatical distinction in the case system, along with many others, sets Icelandic apart from its closely related sister languages. “One prominent hypothesis about why some languages show more complex grammar than others links grammatical complexity to the social environments in which these languages are used,” says first author Olena Shcherbakova from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

For example, Icelandic is primarily learned and used by the local population of over 350,000 people. Such relatively small isolated communities are also called “societies of intimates.” In contrast, the other Scandinavian countries, located in close proximity to their neighbors, have larger populations with substantial proportions of non-native speakers.

Such communities are known as “societies of strangers.” Many linguists have claimed that languages with more non-native speakers tend to simplify their grammars, as unlike children, adult learners struggle to acquire complex grammatical rules to master the intricacies of their new language.

But is this Icelandic example representative of the striking linguistic diversity worldwide? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology wanted to find out if the grammars of languages tend to evolve simpler when spoken by larger societies of strangers with many non-native speakers.

[Read more…]

I gave up on my dream of being a mathematician around 1970, but I still enjoy occasionally taking a gander at the field from afar, even if I can no longer follow the details. In recent years I’ve run into something called p-adic numbers that were so unintuitive I cracked my brains trying to understand them without result (the Wikipedia page, like all their math pages, was singularly unhelpful); now, via this MetaFilter post, I have come as close to real understanding as I am likely to thanks to Derek Muller’s Veritasium video (33 min.). I normally prefer to absorb information by reading, but even a well-written piece like this one by Kelsey Houston-Edwards only made sense to me after watching the video.

But this isn’t MathHat, and I’m bringing it here because of the odd term “p-adic.” The “p” stands for prime, but why “-adic”? It was apparently first used in James Pierpont’s Lectures on the Theory of Functions of Real Variables (1905), p. 92: “When m is used as base, the numbers a are said to be expressed in an m-adic system.” But he’s just said “When m=10, we have the decimal system”; why would you go from “decimal” to “-adic”? Anybody know the history of this terminology?

The end of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s LRB review of a biography of Zwingli by Bruce Gordon is amusing and instructive:

There is little to criticise in Gordon’s assured account. I wish that he had assisted his readers by commenting on some of the surnames that litter his pages, because among them are a number of scholarly clerics who adopted a fancy cod Latin or cod Greek name for themselves. This was a common practice in the 16th century and it was not just pretension (though there was a bit of that too). These surnames were symbols of the international nature of European scholarship, at a time when anyone with an education could travel and make themselves understood in Latin anywhere from Cork to Copenhagen or Córdoba. The Reformation would have been impossible without this common Latin culture. Take the Protestant scholar Theodor Bibliander, who ended his days in Bullinger’s Zurich in 1564 (slightly under a cloud, after an unfortunate row about predestination). He was a German-speaking Swiss, like Zwingli and Bullinger, and it doesn’t require too much knowledge of Greek to turn Bibliander into ‘book-man’, revealing that Theodor’s original surname was Buchmann. We really ought to have been given the reason for the especially intimidating surname of a man who figures a great deal in Gordon’s book: Johannes Oecolampadius, a great friend and theological colleague of Zwingli’s – indeed, such a close friend that the terrible news from the battlefield at Kappel seems to have brought on his own death. Oecolampadius started life in western Germany as Johann Hussgen. Casting around for a more academically resonant name, he decided that Hussgen could just as well be spelled ‘Hausschein’ – domestic lamp. While ‘John Houselamp’ doesn’t have much of a ring to it in either English or German, turn it into sort-of Greek with a dusting of academic Latin and behold: Johannes Oecolampadius.

Interestingly (as Gordon does point out), Zwingli took his own Christian name in an opposite direction, into a deeper vernacular. Named Ulrich after his father, he exploited the local Swiss dialect to refashion himself as ‘Huldrych’, meaning ‘rich in grace’, once he embarked on his clerical career. It was a fitting linguistic turn for the man who, among other things, can take the credit for masterminding the first complete Reformation Bible in German, using Swiss German rather than the Hochdeutsch of Luther’s Saxon translation. Zwingli did draw on Luther’s work for his own project, which is why he and his scholarly team in Zurich were able to complete their version first. Another reason for Luther to be cross with him.

My own onomastic question is about the origin of the surname Zwingli — anybody know?