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The last time I wrote about Victor Pelevin, I said of his Sacred Book of the Werewolf “it’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s fun.” That was my take on most of the Pelevin I’ve read since his glory days of the 1990s, and frankly I’m not sure I would have taken the trouble to read any more if I hadn’t had a copy of his 2017 iPhuck 10 (the title’s in English, sort of, but the book’s in Russian) I got a while back because it was cheap and had gotten good reviews. So I decided I’d give it a try, and if it seemed like more of the same I’d set it aside and go on to something more exciting.

Surprise: this turned out to be the best thing I’d read of his since those ’90s classics. Sure, in a sense it’s more of the same (from that earlier post: “sex, drugs, computer games, corrupt business/power nexus, fancy brand names, plus a dollop of Eastern mysticism”), but Pelevin very cleverly preempts the frequent complaints about repeating himself with this bit of dialogue:

“They reproach you with monotony. Your books, they say, resemble each other.”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “just so you know, there are two kinds of writers: those who spend their lives writing one book — and those who spend their lives writing none. It’s the latter who review the former, not the other way around. And reproach them with monotony. But different parts of one and the same book will always be similar in some way. There are bound to be themes running through them.”

– Упрекают в однообразии. Книги, говорят, похожи друг на друга.

– Милочка, – сказал я, – писатели, чтоб ты знала, бывают двух видов. Те, кто всю жизнь пишет одну книгу – и те, кто всю жизнь пишет ни одной. Именно вторые сочиняют рецензии на первых, а не наоборот. И упрекают их в однообразии. Но разные части одной и той же книги всегда будут чем-то похожи. В них обязательно будут сквозные темы.

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Jeremy Osner’s Facebook post features a French ad for the new Barbie movie with the tagline “Elle peut tout faire. Lui, c’est juste Ken.” [She can do everything. Him, he’s just Ken.] But I was staggered by Jeremy’s comment:

“Lui, c’est juste Ken” means “as for him, he’s just Ken”. HOWEVER: “Lui, sait juste ken” means “as for him, he only knows how to fuck”

“Shurely shome mishtake,” thought I to myself, but a quick Google produced the page 17 French words that young people use the most, and shure enough, there was the entry:

Ken, it means “to have sex” (to screw). And it’s also verlan. It’s verlan for “n*quer” which has the same meaning.

OK, I can see the derivation from niquer, which I was aware of, but how can you have a French verb, even a slang one, with no endings?

Some other items in that list of “words that young people use the most”: gow ‘girlfriend/lover,’ askip ‘it seems’ (abbreviation of à ce qu’il paraît), en soumsoum ‘in a hidden way, discreetly,’ balec ‘I don’t give a damn’ (from je m’en bats les couilles), and dead ça ‘killed it, nailed it’ (Grâce à toi, on a gagné ! T’as dead ça !). I used to think I had at least a passive awareness of French slang; now I feel utterly out of it.

Via the Log I learn of the existence of “a comprehensive, reliable grammar of Sogdian, which is cause for celebration”:

Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豊 2022. Sogudogo bunpō kōgi ソグド語文法講義
[Lectures on Sogdian Grammar]. Kyoto: Rinsen. iv, 500 pp.
ISBN: 978-4-653-04188-7.

Happily, Adam Alvah Catt has written a three-page review at Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae; a few paragraphs are quoted at the Log, but I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s the conclusion:

Yoshida Yutaka’s new publication is an invaluable contribution in that it combines step-by-step instruction, exercises, a reference grammar, a dictionary, a reader, and a bibliography of research into a single volume. One can only hope for an English version of this book so that it can reach a wider audience.

I join Catt in his hope! Incidentally, Martin Schwartz says in the Log comment thread that the Sogdic component of Yaghnobi “is VERY conservative, much more than the Sogdian varieties of Turfan-Dunhuang, Mt. Mugh, etc.,” and adds that “Ossetic is WAY different from Sogdian (and Yaghnobi), and bears the baggage of Caucasic influence, at least phonologically and lexically.”

This account of a 1998 movie at the California Newsreel site tells a remarkable tale:

The story begins in the early 1930s with Lorenzo Turner, an African American linguist who cataloged more than 3000 names and words of African origin among the Gullah of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. He discovered that some Gullah could recite texts in African languages, including almost certainly the longest, a five-line song he learned from a woman living in a remote Georgia fishing village, Amelia Dawley. Although Amelia did not know the meaning of the syllables in the song, a Sierra Leonean graduate student in the U.S. recognized it as Mende, his native tongue.

These dramatic clues were taken up again in the 1980s by Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist at Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College. Studying Bunce Island, an 18th century British slave castle, Opala discovered that it sent many of its captives to Georgia and South Carolina where American rice planters paid a premium for experienced slaves from Africa’s “Rice Coast.” The comparative coherence of this slave community may account for the high degree of African cultural retention among the Gullah. In 1989 Opala helped organize a gala homecoming for a Gullah delegation to their long-lost African sisters and brothers documented in an earlier California Newsreel release, Family Across the Sea.

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A couple of words for related to young people with unknown or uncertain etymologies (the words, that is, not the people):

1) Gamin, which the OED defines as “A neglected boy who has been left to run about the streets; a street urchin, a guttersnipe; (more generally) a streetwise or impudent child”:

Etymology: < French gamin (1805; 1803 in the more general meaning ‘young boy’; 1765 denoting a glassmaker’s assistant), further etymology uncertain.
A suggestion that the French word is a borrowing (with remodelling after words in -in -ine suffix⁴) < German regional (Alemannic) Gammel uproar, row (or a related word in the same family) is very uncertain.

The TLFi cautiously says “formé peut-être en Lorraine sur le rad. germ. gamm-, cf. alémanique gammel « gaîté, joie bruyante; vaurien »; AHD goes all in with “probably” and a fuller account:

[French, probably of eastern dialectal French origin (Lorraine) : *gamm-, root meaning “good-for-nothing, vagabond” and of German origin (akin to dialectal German (Hesse, the Rhineland) gammeln, to bum around, be idle or unproductive, from Middle High German gamel, game, fun, mirth, variant of gamen, from Old High German gaman; akin to Old English gamen, game) + French -in, diminutive noun suffix.]

2) I recently learned from one of those British cop shows set in Oxford the very specific term scout “At Oxford (also at Yale and Harvard): A college servant.” (The entry is from 1911; I have no idea if anyone still uses this word at Yale and/or Harvard.) Here the etymology is simply “Of unknown origin: identity with scout n.⁴ [“The action of spying out or watching in order to gain information”] has been conjectured, but evidence is wanting.” If you’re curious, this is the sixth and last scout in the OED (the first is “A high overhanging rock”); here are the citations:
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We’ve discussed the notorious Pahlavi script before (e.g., last December), but I’m not sure people realized quite how bad a script it is. Now Ben Joeng has a Twitter thread/rant explaining why:

I often describe Pahlavi as the worst writing system ever invented.

Let’s take a perfectly-serviceable writing system for a completely different language (Aramaic) and adapt it for our language (Middle Persian). We’ll call this new script “Pahlavi”.

Aramaic doesn’t really write all the vowels, only consonants, but that’s OK for Aramaic, because through a quirk of Semitic grammar, consonants carry most of the semantics. But our language, Middle Persian, is Indo-European and *does* carry a lot of semantic weight in vowels.

This is why when Greek (IE) borrowed writing from Phoenician (Sem.), it repurposed a bunch of the consonants that Greek didn’t have to use as vowels.

Pahlavi didn’t do that, though, it just carried on not writing vowels.

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No, not Robert the Bruce, King of Scots; this is a much more recent guy, who (as “R. Bruce”) wrote a book I happen to own, [Teach Yourself] Cantonese. In investigating the mysteriously initialed author, I turned up his 1999 obit in the Independent, which made it clear he was of considerable Hattic interest:

A career of high achievement in the service of one’s country would be enough for most people but in Robert Bruce’s case there was a great deal more. What he attained in diplomacy and scholarship, particularly in relation to the languages and peoples of China, would have set him apart in any case, but the fact that he did so under the burden of virtual blindness throughout much of his life makes his story all the more remarkable.

Bruce was born in 1911 in Fraserburgh on the north-east corner of Aberdeenshire, the second son of Henry George Bruce, who owned the family herring-curing business and to whom Robert declared at the age of 11 that he was an atheist. Such iconoclastic utterances were to be entirely characteristic of him over the following decades but the atheism did not survive the course; he died on his 88th birthday as an Episcopalian.

Having gained a first class honours degree in History and Economics at Aberdeen University, in 1933 he applied to the Colonial Service. His interview consisted merely of being asked to which colony he would like to go. Choosing Malaya, he was sent for training to Wadham College, in Oxford, a city he described as embodying “the tradition of Platonic superiority. It held the guardian class of parliament and India; the aristocratic class.”

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Fara Dabhoiwala reviews for the NYRB (June 22, 2023 issue) Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age; here are some juicy tidbits:

Nowadays we take for granted that any kind of learned book should be indexed, however tedious the labor. So valuable is this tool, so central to our ways of thinking about and using information, that in the case of multivolume scholarly editions of texts, it’s not uncommon for the index itself to constitute an entire book. Yet in the classical world the concept of such a search aid was unknown. To Cicero, an “index” meant a label affixed to a scroll that indicated its contents, rather like the printed spine or dust jacket of a modern volume on a bookshelf. As Dennis Duncan notes in his clever, sprightly Index, A History of the, the rise of the index in its current form is a story of many interrelated developments, each with its own contingencies and chronology: the replacement of scrolls by the codex, the triumph of alphabetical order, the rise of new pedagogies and genres of learning, the invention of print, the adoption of the page number, and the constantly changing character of reading itself.*

Take alphabetical order. Even though the consonantal alphabet had been around since the early second millenium BCE, the earliest known examples of its application as an organizing principle date only from about the third century BCE. The now lost 120-scroll catalog of the Library of Alexandria listed authors partly in alphabetical order. That the ancient Greeks were fond of using it is evident in everything from their fishmongers’ price lists to records of taxpayers and monuments to playwrights (the background panel of one surviving marble statuette of Euripides lists the titles of his plays from alpha to omega).

Yet after them the Romans largely disdained the alphabetical principle as arbitrary and illogical, and so did Europeans throughout the Middle Ages. Books about words—like lexicons, grammars, and glosses—employed it, but it was not a widely understood rule. […]

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Peter Backhaus in the Japan Times reports on a truly bizarre phenomenon:

If there’s something like a Murphy’s Law for syntax, the name of this restaurant near my school is a pretty good example of it. Reading “Steak The First,” it always makes me wonder how these three words came to be aligned in just that order. “The first steak,” “first the steak,” “the steak first” — all of these seem safe for consumption. But “steak the first”?

In order to understand what’s going on here, we need to appreciate the very specific way the little word “the” is used in Japanese, where it is normally pronounced ザ (za). Note that the reading may change to ジ (ji) when the following word starts with a vowel, as in the name of the invincible Japanese rock band The Alfee, which officially reads ジ・アルフィー (ji arufī).

But since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles, it’s a bit challenging to understand what use it can make of ザ in the first place. Even more puzzling is that, more often than not, ザ shows up in places where English syntax wouldn’t want you to put an article at all. […]

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I’m still slowly making my way through Martin’s Enlightened Metropolis: Constructing Imperial Moscow, 1762-1855 (see this post), and I’ve come to a very interesting passage on names that I’ll quote below (the “Volkov” he refers to is Dmitrii Volkov, a “skilled, peripatetic goldsmith” with some education who kept a record of his employment in a notebook during the 1820s):

Names, and how they were recorded, were markers of identity. They show how cultural patterns shifted over time and spread from one estate to another.

The significance of a name for one’s identity is apparent from Volkov’s copybook. He wrote out his name repeatedly and in different forms: Dmitrii Stepanych Volkov; Dmitrei Stepanov Volkov; Dmitrei Stepanov; Dmitrei Volkov. According to Ivan Belousov, who grew up in a Moscow tailor’s family in the 1860s and 1870s, apprentices were called only by a nickname, which was derived from their looks, place of origin, or some other characteristic. At the end of their apprenticeship, in an important rite of passage, they bought drinks for everyone in the shop and were henceforth addressed by their name and patronymic. When Volkov wrote his name in its full, formal form, he was affirming his social position as an adult craftsman.

Volkov’s experimentation with the form of his patronymic likewise suggests an interest in the linkage between name and status. In everyday interactions, Russians expressed respect by addressing people with their first name and full patronymic (Stepanovich or Stepanych). However, in official documents, this usage was reserved for holders of the top five government ranks, whereas persons of lower status had to be content with the “half patronymic”: Stepanov or Stepanov syn (Stepan’s son). In his notes in the copybook, Volkov’s friend Arstov played with these nuances by addressing him reverentially as “Mr Dmitrii Stepanovich, master of the gold trade,” while humbly calling himself “Ivan Stepanov syn Arstov.” Using the European form of one’s name was especially refined. Arstov made ironic allusion to this, too, when he signed his name in Latin, the international language of scholars, as “Johannes natus, Arstoff vocatus.”

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