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In reading Isabel de Madariaga’s Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (heavy going at times, but much more informative than the many lurid biographies of Catherine) I discovered to my delight that the two main parties in mid-eighteenth-century Sweden were the Hat Party and the Cap Party. Here’s a quotation from an online biography of Gustavus III:

To the conflicting interests of peasants, nobles, priests, and officials was added the struggle between the aggressive, pro-French, and aristocratic Hat party and the more conservative, pro-Russian Cap party.

I don’t know which I would have supported, but the choice would have been more entertaining than Republican vs. Democrat.

I recently bought Youssou N’Dour’s new album Nothing’s in Vain (Coono du reer), and having opened and played it today I am doubly delighted—not just by the music, which is wonderful, but by the booklet. For once, an African language (Wolof) is accorded the respect routinely given European ones: the lyrics are provided in the original as well as in translation. This parallels the recent trend in dictionaries to give exact etymologies even for African and Australian languages: where once “okra” was said to be “of African origin,” now Merriam-Webster’s says “akin to Ibo ókùrù okra.” To celebrate, here are the first lines of the song “Tan bi” followed by their translation from the booklet:

Sedd bi ag tàngaay bi dafa mel ni yëppa yam
Bu ci xas yegsi ba jàll da nga naan mo la gënël
Seddaay bi, tàngaay bi
Koo gëjë gis nan ko xaar tàngaay bi

No matter what the weather, it’s the same for us
In fact, we tend to prefer the season just ended
People you haven’t seen for a long time reappear when the weather is warmer
It’s time for outings again.

Addendum. Well, as I say, that’s the booklet’s translation. I suspected it was on the loose side, so I went looking for an online Wolof dictionary—and found a good one (pdf file). I’d have to know something about Wolof grammar to figure out the sentences, but tàngaay is ‘warm weather,’ seddaay ‘cold weather,’ and dafa mel ‘is like,’ so that gives some idea of what’s going on in the first line. Anyway, if you have any interest in West African languages, check out that dictionary.

Imagine a map of European Russia (you’ll have to imagine it, or dig one up yourself, because I can’t find a good one online [well, here‘s a sort of decent one]). Fifty miles south of Moscow the Oka River flows toward the east, having risen in the Central Russian hills far to the south, flowed north through Orel, and turned sharply east at Kaluga. At Kolomna it is joined by the Moscow River and proceeds, thus reinforced, to the southeast, past the ancient city of Ryazan, until it makes another sharp turn to the northeast, picks up the mosquito-ridden Moksha River from the south, passes through the even more ancient city of Murom, and finally joins the Volga at Nizhnii Novgorod. The reference books tell you that Nizhnii Novgorod was founded by a Russian prince in 1221. It wasn’t. It was conquered by the armies of Murom, Ryazan, and other Russian towns from the Mordvins, a Finnic people whose main city it had been. The Mordvins, in fact, were the main power between Rus and the Volga Bulgars (both of which were shortly to be overwhelmed by the Mongols), ruling the region between the Oka and the Volga, only a small part of which is left to the truncated Republic of Mordovia after many centuries of Russian encroachment.

Except that there are no Mordvins. I had known that the Mordvin language included two main dialects, Erza (or Erzya; the z is palatal) and Moksha, that had little or no mutual comprehensibility, but I thought it was parallel to, say, Upper and Lower Sorbian. Turns out it’s more like Spanish and Portuguese, if everybody else ignored that distinction and called them both “Iberian.” The “Iberians” wouldn’t like it, and neither do the “Mordvins.” This was brought forcibly to my attention by an impassioned essay called “Erza We Are!” by Mariz Kemal. She will make you feel as bad as I do about referring to “Mordvins,” but I honestly don’t know what the alternative is, since absolutely nobody (except us, of course) has heard of Erza and Moksha. Anyway, hear her out:

Actually, neither Erzas nor Mokshas call themselves “Mordvinians”. Asked about his or her nationality, any Erza would say, “Mon Erza”. The only person to say “Mon Mordvin” is Prof. N. Mokshin who has nothing left to do, for he has defended his thesis on that subject. Yet Erza people, the true Erzas, consider the word “Mordvinian” to be a nickname. This is our common feeling. We do not like the word; indeed, who would be pleased to have been registered under a nickname for life? Once I was told by a school teacher from Orenburg District (the home to about 100 000 Erzans) that when young Erzan boys and girls obtain their passports, they prefer to be registered under virtually any nationality—most often Russian—but Mordvinian. If only they could have the “Erza” fixed in their passports, that would surely change the whole matter. I am used to people complaining of this situation. No one, however, has courage to question those who hold power: none dares to raise a voice of protest against being nicknamed throughout one’s life.

Archaeologists have traced the division between the two peoples—Erza and Moksha—back to the beginning of the new era and possibly to an even earlier period. The separation completed by the 7th century. By the 12th century Erza and Moksha were already two different nations with culture, languages and anthropological types distinctively of their own.

The best way to preserve for the future these two languages—and the two nations as well—is to reject the idea of mixing Moksha and Erza into a single Mordvinian nation. The Finno-Ugrian world has already suffered great losses as a result of such “fusions”. Let us recall the Meria, the Murom, the Viess, the Chud, the Meschera…

I am Erza and I declare: let my people never be mentioned in the list of those gone. My nation must survive and enter the 21st century bearing the name of Erza!

A particularly welcome section from a Merriam-Webster page of excerpts from Flappers 2 Rappers, a history of youth slang by Tom Dalzell. [Via Prentiss Riddle.]

From a Calvin Trillin food rant in this week’s New Yorker:

Shanghai Tang… listed on its menu, in addition to soup dumplings, dishes like Dry Fish Tripe with Pork Sinew. (Until some tweaking was done in the translation department a few years after the restaurant opened, that dish was actually on the menu as Dry Fish Stomach with Pork Sinus.)

1. Alphabets. You won’t believe the wonderful stuff on this site. A couple of examples: evolution from Phoenecian to Latin, and language families (useful for checking on French language names: of the Dravidian languages, “Telougou” is obvious, but “Tamoul” and “Canara” are not). Just scroll down the sidebar and keep clicking.

2. A nice little Anthologie de la poésie, with poems both French and translated (including Wendell Berry and Meleager). The best-represented author is Victor Hugo, and there will be no “Hélas” from me*; if you can read French and haven’t read “Booz endormi,” do so at once. The line “Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth” contains the pure essence of poetry.

*When Gide was asked who in his opinion was the greatest poet in the French language, he responded: “Victor Hugo, alas!”

Update (Oct. 2023). Alas, La Grande Rousse lasted only three years — the last post was mars 31, 2005. I liked that blog…

I just saw (and immediately bought) a book that could have been published expressly for me… and, I suspect, for certain other frequenters of Languagehat, which is why I’m mentioning it here. NYU Press has published an amazing book called The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, which presents each work in its original language with facing page translation. Over 700 pages long, it starts with Pastorius‘ remarkable Bee-Hive of 1696 (in English, German, and Latin, with bits of Greek, Italian, French, and Dutch thrown in for spice), a couple of early documents in Massachusett, the Walam Olum or the Red Score of the Lenape (with pictographs and transcriptions of the Lenape myths and migration stories), a poem by Lorenzo da Ponte, and (perhaps the most amazing find) the 1831 Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself—in Arabic! (The original manuscript, with its beautifully clear writing, is reproduced.) It continues through nineteenth-century works in French, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, and (Nic, Pat, are you listening?) Welsh, and for the twentieth century adds Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Navajo, Hebrew, Chinese, Hungarian, and Greek. There is a “Brief History of Bilingualism in Poetry” and a satisfyingly detailed section of notes (“Omar’s construction is ambiguous; he does not use the past construction (kana) to indicate his previous religion. A literal translation would read: ‘Before… my religion is the religion of Mohammed.'”). And there is the recurring pleasure of seeing American names in unusual linguistic contexts, such as Arabic (“Ya ahl Nu-Karulin [‘O people of North Carolina’]! Ya ahl Su-Karulin!”) or Welsh (“Pan welais destynau Eisteddfod Granville, N.Y….”). I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I’ll close with an excerpt from György Gyékényesi‘s “Occidental Cantata”:

Bartókot láttam
amint rigódalt jegyzett
a Carolinákban
sej rigómadár ne szállj fel a fára
s New Orleans-i ütemre rándult a keze
hey
hey
the saints go marchin’ in
hey
hey
the saints go marchin’ out
míg hömpölygött a Mississippi

Over the weekend I downloaded Mozilla and started using it for various tasks (including eliminating pop-ups, which was a thrill). Eventually I got around to updating Languagehat. As soon as I hit Publish and checked the front page, I croaked in horror: the typeface was too large, the layout was wrong, links didn’t work, the whole thing was farfoylt, farblondzhet, farkuckt. I tried everything I could think of; nothing helped. And of course today I have a record number of visitors, 179 so far. It’s like having everyone in the neighborhood drop in on the very day your house has been savaged by the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. I hope you will take a look at the archives to see the clean, pleasing look of Classic Languagehat, and bear with me until order is restored. This will definitely happen in the next couple of weeks, because Jan. 31 marks the six-month anniversary of Languagehat, and I am determined to change to Movable Type by then. In the meantime, I don’t want to leave you with nothing but bitching and moaning, so here are a fine discussion of Entish and a general query.

Query. There is an interesting thread on MetaFilter about collective terms for animals, from the normal (a pride of lions, a flock of geese) to the fanciful (an unkindness of ravens, and of course the famous “exaltation of larks”). S. Cody asked “whether this phenomenon occurs in other languages,” and I said I wondered myself. More specifically:

I’m sure hunters elsewhere had comparable terms, but they would have stayed within the professional circle (so to speak) and never have penetrated the wider world of literature, and thus would have died out with the premodern culture of hunting. But it’s possible that other languages have comparably specific terms (though probably without the facetious additions) that simply don’t show up in bilingual dictionaries, like other rare words that aren’t of much use to anyone but specialists.

So… anybody know? (Avva, if this exists in Russian, I’m sure you know or can find out.)

Update. As you can plainly see, the template has been unfarblondzhet. I owe Songdog several beers.

Phil Gyford has had the brilliant idea of starting a Pepys’ Diary blog; the diary begins on Jan. 1, 1660 (or 1659 if you want to be technical, since in those days the new year didn’t start until March 25), and on Jan. 1 of this year Phil began posting an entry at the end of each day. To his surprise, the site has been getting a lot of attention, both from the press and from people (like me) who always intended to read Pepys but might never have gotten around to it without this stimulus. I should add that one of the best features of the site is that, like most blogs, it allows comments, which means that people who tend to look things up and enjoy sharing what they find can leave annotations for the general good.

So I encourage everyone to join in the fun—but I also want to warn against linguistic complacency. Some usages are unfamiliar, so that if we don’t look them up we are at least aware of our ignorance (like “a collar of brawn“), but it’s easy to glide over words that look familiar without realizing they are being used in a very different sense. As a sample of what one has to be on the lookout for, herewith some faux amis of the seventeenth century (modern meanings after the colon):

able: wealthy
affect: be fond of, be concerned (similarly, affection: attention)
amused: bemused, astonished
approve of: criticize
beard: any facial hair
blur: innuendo, charge
caress(e): make much of
cheapen: ask the price of, bargain
club: share expenses (also as noun: share of expense, meeting at which expenses are shared)
cosen, cousin: any collateral relative
daughter-in-law: stepdaughter (similarly mother-in-law, etc.)
dress: cook, prepare food
effeminacy: love of women
family: household (including servants)
grief: bodily pain
ingenious, ingenuous: clever, intelligent
lean: lie down
light: window
meat: food
nearly: deeply
owe: own
policy: government; cunning; self-interest
ready: dressed (similarly, unready: undressed)
resent: receive
sewer: stream, ditch
speed: succeed
strangers: foreigners
tale: reckoning, number (similarly, tell: count)
ugly: awkward
vaunt: vend, sell
warm: comfortable, well off
watch: clock

For further information, see the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary (condensed list after each volume, full description in the Companion volume).

From a thread at Avva I learned that the Russian family name Chaadaev (well known because of the nineteenth-century Westernizer) comes from the Mongolian name Chaghatai (well known because of Genghis Khan’s son, who inherited Central Asia and founded a dynasty). This was interesting enough, but in the course of the discussion someone asked if the name was Turkic or Mongolian, apologizing for his bukvoedstvo. This was a new word to me; it means ‘pedantry’ but is literally ‘letter-eating’ (bukva ‘letter (of the alphabet)’ + ed- ‘eat’). I love it, and will henceforth proudly identify myself as a bukvoed.

(Bukva, incidentally, is ultimately borrowed from Germanic boko ‘beech tree,’ which is also the source of English book. And while I’m at it, the plural of book should historically be beech, which is the result of applying the regular sound changes to the Old English plural bec, with long e. Isn’t linguistics fun?)