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Tuesday evening I saw a movie from Kazakstan called The Fall of Otrar. I had wanted to see it for some time, since it deals with a time and place of intense interest to me, Central Asia in the early 13th century, at the beginning of Genghis Khan’s conquests. In 1218 most of what’s now northeastern Iran, northern Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan was ruled by the Khwarezmshah Muhammad, who had expanded Khwarezm (or Khorezm) from its base south of the Aral Sea into a substantial empire. Then he was foolish enough to provoke Genghis, who at that point simply wanted to trade with him; within a couple of years he was dead and his empire was ravaged by the Mongols in one of the most brutal episodes of world history. This story (summarized nicely here, and there’s an interesting sidelight on clothing here) is the focus of the movie, which personalizes it by focusing on a (presumably invented) Kipchak scout named Unzhu who spends seven years as a commander under Genghis learning everything he can, comes back to Khwarezm to warn the ruler about the Mongol peril, gets tortured as a spy, and escapes; by the time he’s proved right, it’s too late. Anyway, the movie is long and relentlessly violent, but it’s in Kazakh (with bits of Mongol and Chinese), so I considered my time well spent. And let me take this opportunity to remind NYC-area readers that the Films from Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema festival is just under way at Lincoln Center and will be going on all month.

Of course, it would have been nice if Khwarezmian had been spoken at least by the court (many of the underlings and military were Turks by this time, and Kazakh is a reasonable substitute for their dialect), but since it’s been extinct for centuries, I’ll give them a pass on that.

That title works in both English and French, which is good, because this link (via La grande rousse) is about French—specifically, the character œ. (If you can’t see it correctly, it’s an o and e jammed together.) The title of the little essay is “What do you call the character œ?” and the answer is “digramme soudé oe” ‘joined [literally ‘soldered’] digraph oe,’ or more colloquially “e dans l’o” ‘e in the o.’ The heart of the essay:

D’un point de vue typographique, la soudure de deux ou plusieurs lettres en un seul caractère est appelée ligature. Par exemple, le caractère & (l’esperluette) est une ligature représentant sous une forme stylisée les deux lettres du mot et…. La ligature œ est quant à elle une ligature “linguistique” ou “orthographique”, dans la mesure où, en français, elle est obligatoire pour certains mots (cœur) et interdite pour d’autres (coexister), peu importe la police de caractères utilisée.

From a typographical point of view, the joining of two or more letters in a single character is called a “ligature.” For example, the character & (the ampersand) is a ligature representing in stylized form the two letters of the [Latin] word et [‘and’]…. The ligature œ is a “linguistic” or “orthographic” one, inasmuch as in French it is required in certain words (cœur) and forbidden in others (coexister), whatever font is used.

It finishes with a nod towards the ancient rivals across the Channel/Manche: “Mentionnons pour terminer les noms anglais de ces deux caractères : œ est appelé ethel (ou œthel) tandis que æ est appelé aesc (ou æsc, ou ash).” In English, they say, the œ is called ethel and the æ ash. Now you know.
Incidentally, note the use of la police in the sense of ‘font, set of type’; it’s new to me. As Anatoly says, no day without a word (ни дня без слова).

I’ve just started what promises to be a slow and fascinating read, Ammiel Alcalay‘s After Jews And Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. I have long been interested in “Levant” as an archaic term (for the eastern Mediterranean lands) that still carries a freight of complicated meanings, and Alcalay disentangles many of its forgotten legacies and relates them to the present and the medieval past. I have a feeling I’m going to be making a number of entries based on the book as I read it; at the moment I’ll just say that any book that mentions Osip Mandelstam, one of my favorite poets, on the second page and Janet Abu-Lughod, one of my favorite historians (for her book Before European Hegemony), on the third is catnip to this Languagecat. And when I found a reference to Ella Shohat at OneMansOpinion (an interesting blog I discovered through Stavros), I somehow knew she’d be in the book, and sure enough, there she was.

I’ll quote a paragraph that will give you an idea of the treasures hidden in After Jews and Arabs:

[Read more…]

I’ve been wanting to know for some time exactly what those Iraqi crowds were chanting in the days of Saddam (remember back then?); all I could make out was dam ‘blood’ (and of course “Saddam”). Then I went here and found, among much else worth your attention, this:

“bil rooh, bil daam nafdeek ya saddam” – we will sacrifice our soul and blood for saddam.

Which is a roundabout way of saying: Salam Pax is back. I’m much relieved, and catching up on recent Baghdad life. (Thanks for the link to Graham at MetaFilter.)

Interestingly, the saying goes back at least to 1967, though then it exalted an earlier pair of Arab leaders; from this reminiscence of Jerusalem:

The June 1967 War started when I was eleven. The days preceding it were filled with wild rejoicing. Many people took to the streets, overjoyed by the moves of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, which included ordering the United Nations Emergency Forces to withdraw from the Sinai and closing the Straits of Tiran, and King Hussein’s signing of a defense pact with Nasser. They shouted: “‘Ashaa Hussein wa Nasser” (“Long Live Hussein and Nasser”), “Bil ruh bil dam nafdikuma ya Nasser wa Hussein” (“We sacrifice our spirit and blood for you, Nasser and Hussein”)…

Via Beth, this “Persian with Rumi” page with its small but excellent collection of bilingual quatrains, transliterated and with glossaries. (Minor annoyance: not only are the translations by A.J. Arberry fusty, they don’t even reproduce the AABA rhyme scheme; why?) A sample:

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This is totally frivolous, but it’s about all I’m up for today, and let’s face it, I’m a sucker for unusual names. Via the prinsessor-smitten Des, herewith some of the proud products of Flemish-Walloon mixed blue-blood marriages:

Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken
la baronne Laetitia de Villenfagne de Vogelsanck
la comtesse Céline d’Arschot Schoonhoven

I should add, however, that Des’s favorite is non-Belgian, “the splendiciously named Gioia Sardagna von Neuberg e Hohenstein Ferrari.” Now imagine a butler intoning those names, one after another, as a parade of magnificoes enters your country house for a shooting party…

Well, it’s my bounden duty to tell you about the latest theory of language spread, but I’m damned if I know what to say. According to an article by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times, Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles and Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra are claiming that the world’s languages were spread by agriculture.

The premise is that when humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their populations were small, because wild game and berries can support only so many people. But after an agriculture system was devised, populations expanded, displacing the hunter-gatherers around them and taking their language with them.

[Read more…]

The May Harper’s contains an unsettling essay by Mark Slouka called “Arrow and Wound” [also available here]. After an allusion to a visitor’s seeing the aged Tolstoy “scoop a double handful of violets from the wet earth, breathe in their aroma with a kind of ecstasy, then let them fall carelessly at his feet,” Slouka describes in richly imagined detail (based, of course, on Dostoevsky’s own account) the experience a young Dostoevsky underwent when with of his fellow subversives he underwent a mock execution that shook him to the core and changed him into the wrathful conservative we are familiar with. He then describes a parallel experience that befell the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, who was seized by the Germans after the Prague revolt that began exactly 58 years ago and taken out to be shot. Seifert claimed in his book Všecky krásy světa [All the Beauties of the Earth] that while waiting to be shot he had no remarkable thoughts; he found a little bread and cheese in a pocket and shared it with a friend, he looked at a public toilet in the distance and remembered an obscene picture of a woman someone had drawn in it that had fascinated him as a boy, he wondered what people who weren’t being executed were having for lunch. After it was over, he forgot all about it, and didn’t think of it again for years.

“Whose version do we believe?” Slouka asks. “I suspect that the romantics among us (as well as the more conventionally and narrowly devout) side with Dostoevsky. And perhaps the rest of us do as well. How could a person not be touched, altered, by such an experience?… What of Seifert, then? Do we write off his amnesia as denial, debunk him with a pinch of Freud?… I think not. To do so, it seems to me, would be to assume that consciousness can be teased apart from its retelling, which it cannot…. It is also to forget a more intriguing and complicated truth: that we in some measure shape the events that befall us just as surely as we are shaped by them.”

He now goes in a direction that I will not reveal, since it would spoil a beautifully prepared surprise for those who read the full essay (which I hope you will; the issue is still on the stands). At the conclusion, he returns to his main theme:

Every retelling is inevitably a distortion, but that does not mean it is without value. We can’t help but tell the truth. Although we will never know what Dostoevsky experienced that December morning in Semenovsky Square, we can, from his retelling, with its particular fingerprint of stresses and omissions, learn a great deal about him. Although we will never know what Jaroslav Seifert really thought or felt standing against that wall (although he himself may no longer know—indeed, may never have known), we can see, with perfect clarity, what he wants us to believe he thought or felt. Nothing reveals us as clearly as our attempt to shape the past. Retrospection is, by definition, reflexive.

What our inadvertent self-portrait reveals, if we study it closely enough, is that our consciousness, rather than being shaped by a particular event, predated it. That we were, in a sense, anticipating it. That, to recall Kafka’s haunting insight, “the arrows fit exactly into the wounds” for which they were intended. Dostoevsky experienced what he did in Semenovsky Square because he was Dostoevsky. Because he already carried inside him, like a patient wound, the “cursed questions” he would seek to answer the rest of his life. Seifert, the poet of the quotidian and the small, thought about the things he did because he was Jaroslav Seifert, the man who, thirty-five years later, would write a book called All the Beauties of the Earth. Because, like Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, he gathered the things of this life, and let them fall at his feet. The experience, in other words, was already prepared for him by the time he got there. As it is, to some extent, for all of us.

I suppose both sides in the Truth in Blogging debate can find ammunition here. The adherents of “alibis and consistent lies” can point to “We can’t help but tell the truth” and say “You see, that’s what I’m trying to tell you: it doesn’t matter how ‘accurate’ my words are, they tell the truth about me and how I see the world.” I, on the other hand, am struck by the extreme nature of the experience described by such different people with such different attitudes towards it, and I am intensely interested in how the experience of knowing you’re about to die is described by someone who was there, who felt it, and the fact that different people felt different things simply adds to the interest. I don’t believe you can accurately imagine such an experience, any more than you can imagine combat or giving birth without having been there. True, most things that bloggers write about are far less extreme in nature, but it still makes a difference to me whether you are writing from knowledge or from imagination. I have no desire to constrain what people write about, and I can thoroughly enjoy a completely invented description (I’ve written them myself); all I ask is that you give me some hint so I can know what I’m reading and respond accordingly. There is a difference between fiction and history, despite the easy and fashionable contempt of some who consider themselves above such petty concerns.

I usually resist these fads that sweep Blogovia at regular intervals, but I can’t resist Rob’s Amazing Poem Generator. Put in your URL, getcher poem. Here’s mine; I may adopt “herewith a clue about these matters” as the official LH motto. Or perhaps “Posted by consulting the late Stan Brakhage.” (Via wood s lot.)

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John Hardy‘s comment in my latest Sapir-Whorf thread led me to this brilliant article (on the brilliant Zompist site) on how English could be written with a character system; if you don’t know how the Chinese writing system works (which you probably don’t if you haven’t studied it), read about “yingzi” and you’ll learn the basics.

One example from the article leads me to a brief etymological excursus:

“One way would be to use hanzi directly, as the Japanese do…. Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. ‘gung-ho’ would be 工合.” Now, he doesn’t explain “gung ho” further, but most dictionaries give it as Chinese for ‘work together.’ It’s not that simple. To quote the always quotable American Heritage Dictionary:

Earlier Gung Ho, motto of certain U.S. Marine forces in Asia during World War II, from Chinese (Mandarin) gonghé, to work together (short for gongyèhézuòshè, Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society) : gong, work + hé, together.

Most of us are not aware of it today, but the word gung ho has been in English only since 1942 and is one of the many words that entered the language as a result of World War II. It comes from Mandarin Chinese gonghé, “to work together,” which was used as a motto by the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society. Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson (1896–1947) borrowed the motto as a moniker for meetings in which problems were discussed and worked out; the motto caught on among his Marines (the famous “Carlson’s Raiders”), who began calling themselves the “Gung Ho Battalion.” From there eager individuals began to be referred to as gung ho.

However, this is not quite correct. There is no “Chinese gonghé, to work together”; gonghé is purely an abbreviation for the full name gongyèhézuòshè, and corresponds exactly to the equivalent English abbreviation Indusco. So what Carlson’s Raiders were actually yelling as they charged the enemy was “Indusco!” Inspiring, no?