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One of the glaring gaps in biographical literature has been the lack of a good life of Osip Mandelstam, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Two decades ago Ralph Dutli, a Swiss translator of Russian and French poetry, published his Meine Zeit, mein Tier: Ossip Mandelstam; now Ben Fowkes has translated it into English as Osip Mandelstam: A Biography. It’s officially available as of today from Verso Books (whose Red May sale extends through tomorrow, if you want to stock up), and they were kind enough to send me a review copy, which I’ve spent the last week or so reading with absorbed fascination — though I slowed down toward the end as the events described became more and more awful.

Donald Rayfield, in the Literary Review, calls the biography “thorough and fair,” and that’s accurate. Dutli intersperses translations of the poetry with discussions of what was going on in the poet’s life, and I learned a lot of useful background. The chapter that opens with Mandelstam’s birth in Warsaw includes this excursus on his family:

The Mandelstam family had emigrated in the eighteenth century from Germany to Courland. Now part of present-day Latvia, the area lay between the Baltic Sea and the lower reaches of the River Düna (Russian: Dvina; Latvian: Daugava). Artisans had been invited into the country by its duke, Ernst Johann Biron (1690–1772). One of them was a Jewish watchmaker and jeweller who was descended from a rabbinical family, and still retained his ancient Hebrew name. The Mandelstams regarded this man as their ancestor. Osip only learned this fact of genealogy many years later, in the summer of 1928, in the Crimean resort of Yalta, when he brought Nadezhda’s watch to be repaired. The watchmaker’s wife was also a Mandelstam. As if by magic, she produced his family tree.

The Mandelstams, therefore, did not belong to the branch of Polish Jewry that had experienced its ‘Golden Age’ under the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom, the period of economic prosperity and rich erudition which preceded the catastrophe of 1648, when the Cossack forces of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky made an incursion into Ukraine, slaughtering over a hundred thousand Jews during their uprising against Polish rule. It was a frightful anticipation of all the later pogroms. At that time, though, Mandelstam’s ancestors were still living in Germany, in a ghetto located in a town whose name we do not know.

Those ancestors may well have travelled to Germany along the Central European route. They were Ashkenazim (a name which derives from ‘Ashkenaz’, the word coined to describe Germany in medieval rabbinical literature). It is also possible that they did not start to move north until 1492, when the Jews were driven out of Spain (‘Sefarad’) by Queen Isabella of Castile. That is what Mandelstam himself preferred to believe. When he was in exile in Voronezh in 1936, he read a book about the victims of the Inquisition, and he picked out the name of a Hispano-Jewish poet, insisting that ‘at least a drop of his blood’ ran in his veins. Nevertheless, Mandelstam’s attitude towards his own Jewishness was not determined by ‘the call of the blood’. As we shall show, it was complex and variable. […]

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As a quondam embassy brat I was amused by Katie Lange’s DoD News piece on the phrase “military brat” (more familiar to me as “army brat,” which is what I generally heard growing up in Tokyo). She writes:

It pertains to those children who grew up in military families. “Brats” wear the name like a badge of honor, often because of the moves, stressors and cultural experiences that make them more resilient than their civilian counterparts. But outside of the military, the word brat is often considered derogatory. So it made me wonder – where did the term “military brat” originate?

To find out, I reached out to the folks at National Defense University Libraries, who did some research for me. It turns out the origin of the term is still pretty unclear, but there are a lot of interesting theories behind it, and most of them originate in Britain.

The first “theory,” that “BRAT could be an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler,” is obviously absurd, but it demonstrates people’s ineradicable love for acronymic origin stories. The third, that it is a contraction for “barrack rat,” is just as silly but a little more inventive. In the middle, there is a passage of actual information:

Dr. Grace Clifton, a professor at Open University in the UK, has done research with the U.S. Army’s Dr. Becky Powell into the origins of the term. Clifton found reference to a song written in 1707 for a satirical play called “The Recruiting Officer” that described soldier life and that of their dependents. Back then, married soldiers were divided into two categories: the lucky few who were allowed to have their families live in the barracks and be taken care of by regimental funds, and those whose families had to live outside the barracks. The song referenced the latter as being “brats and wives.”

The lyrics may have been the first reference to brat in relation to military families. But it also may have referred to any children. So, that’s still a bit of a mystery.

I mean, no, it’s not a mystery at all: the brats of members of the military are by definition military brats. The actual mystery is the origin of the word brat itself. The OED, in an ancient (from 1888) entry, says: “Of uncertain origin: Wedgwood, E. Müller, and Skeat think it the same word as the brat n.¹ [“A cloth used as an over-garment, esp. of a coarse or makeshift character”], but evidence of the transition of sense has not been found.” (First cite ?a1513 W. Dunbar Flyting “Iersche brybour baird, wyle beggar with thy brattis.”) The AHD says “Possibly from brat, coarse garment, from Middle English, from Old English bratt, of Celtic origin.” And that’s all that can be said on the subject without resorting to flights of fancy. (Thanks, Trevor!)

A recent Laudator Temporis Acti post makes a good point about the occasional usefulness of having physically visited the spot described by a poem. The post starts by quoting Goethe:

Poetry if you would know,
To its country you must go;
If the poet you would know,
To the poet’s country go.

Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.

It goes on to cite an instance from Leopardi’s “L’infinito,” which begins:

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

Ian McGilchrist translated those lines thus:

Always dear to me has been this lonely hill,
and this line of trees which, from so much
of the furthest horizon, hides my view.

And his brother Nigel comments:

It is conventional to translate siepe as a hedgerow, which is exactly what it means in current Italian usage. But in older garden-design tracts siepe is often used to mean a “break of trees”. Since the land drops sharply below the spot in Recanati where Leopardi is said to have composed the poem, only a line of tall trees rising from further down the slope, rather than a hedgerow, would effectively occlude his view.

There’s a photograph that “gives a hint of the declivity involved.” I have to agree that a hedgerow would not fit the situation of the poem.

Update. But as Biscia points out in the comments, poets twist the facts just as much as novelists do: “Here, for instance, is a paper – which I find rather convincing – that suggests there was no actual hedge or line of trees, and that if there was any concrete element inspiring the poem it was probably a wall.”

I recently used an old family (Ozark) word, “catawampus,” and my wife looked at me all catawampus, so I thought I’d better post about it. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has (as I would expect) a splendid entry, with the following succession of senses:

1. fierce, pitiless; thus adv. catawampously.
2. excessive.
3. ill-tempered, crotchety; in a tantrum.
4. out of order, wrong.
5. (also cattywampus) askew; thus catawampously, catawamptiously.
6. (also cattywhompus, (US campus) eccentric.

The first two are alien to me; the third is not my usage, but I think I would understand it if I heard it. My basic senses are ‘out of order’ and ‘askew,’ and I can think of no better way to express them. The OED, in its ancient (1889 vintage) entry (s.v. catawampous), says “Fierce, unsparing, destructive. Also, askew, awry. (A high-sounding word with no very definite meaning.)” (You have to love that parenthetical obiter dictum.) Its etymology reads “A humorous formation, the origin of which is lost: the first part of the word was perhaps suggested by catamount, or ? by words in Greek κατα-.” Green says “[ety. unknown; ? SE cater-/catty-cornered, diagonal]”; for what it’s worth, I’ve always associated it with catty-cornered (or, equally familiar to me, kitty-cornered).

In other interesting lexical news, I just discovered that French ornière ‘rut’ is “Alteration, under the influence of orne, of Old French ordiere, inherited from Vulgar Latin *orbitaria, from Latin orbita.” (That Latin word, meaning both ‘track or rut made in the ground by a wheel’ and ‘circuit, orbit,’ is of course from orbis ‘ring, circle, orbit.’) Whodathunkit?

Great lexicographical news from The Conversation:

The first large dictionary of the Warlpiri language began in 1959 in Alice Springs, when Yuendumu man †Kenny Wayne Jungarrayi and others started teaching their language to a young American linguist, †Ken Hale. Sixty years in the making, the Warlpiri Dictionary has been shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards – a rarity for a dictionary.

Spoken in and around the Tanami Desert, Warlpiri is an Australian Aboriginal language used by around 3,000 adults and children as their everyday language. […] From the start of this project, Hale tape-recorded and transcribed many hours of Warlpiri people talking about language, country, kin and diverse aspects of traditional life.

The Warlpiri people he recorded came from different parts of Warlpiri country, speaking their own distinctive varieties of the language. From this material, Hale hand-wrote the words and meanings on small slips of paper that could be sorted in different ways. […]

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In my family we have always said “Gesundheit!” in response to a sneeze, and it occurred to me to wonder how far back that went. The OED takes it back to 1914 (Everybody’s Feb. 484 ‘Saved your life,’ he murmured mechanically, as one suffixes ‘Gesundheit’ to a sneeze), but the entry is from 1972, and I figured I could antedate it with Google Books. But a search limited to 1800-1913 turned up only references to German uses. 1890:

Oh! the sneezing that year in Germany. The upper ten thousand sneezed (Genesung!); the middle hundred thousand sneezed (Gesundheit!), and the lower thousand thousand sneezed (Helf Gott!)

1893:

people often wish good health to the person sneezing: Ihre Gesundheit ! or Gesundheit ! or (less respectfully) wohl bekomm’s ! or prōsit !

1903:

A German sneezes with all his might, and if there is a compatriot within hearing he says, ‘Gesundheit.’

1912:

Few of us realize when we say “God bless us”, or “Gesundheit” in German, when a person sneezes, that it is the evolution of an old superstition

So 1914 would seem to be at least close to the origin of the use in English; the question is why did it become so widespread when World War I put paid to so many items of German influence? You’d think anyone who said “Gesundheit” during the war would have gotten the “kaiser-lover” treatment and desisted forthwith.

Also, I discovered the Wikipedia article Response to sneezing, which is full of interesting things — not least that in Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean, “nothing is generally said after a sneeze except for when expressing concern when the person is sick from a cold or otherwise.” Areal feature!

Last year I posted about the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE); now Sandra E. Garcia reports for the NY Times (archived) on how it’s coming along:

The researchers say they aim to publish a first batch of 1,000 definitions — some words and phrases will have more than one — by March 2025. But the more important goal of the project, which will be edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a scholar of African American history at Harvard University, is to underscore the significance of African American English and to create a resource for future research into Black speech, history and culture. […]

To support their etymological claims, researchers and editors from Oxford Languages and the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African & African American Research have drawn on lyrics from jazz, hip-hop, blues and R&B as well as letters, diaries, newspaper and magazine articles, Black Twitter, slave narratives and abolitionist writings. Individual entries will be explained using quotations pulled from Black literature, including examples from Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Martin Luther King Jr. […]

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Indian linguist Anvita Abbi writes for Scientific American (June 2023; archived) about the Great Andamanese languages she has been studying, and a fascinating group of languages it is:

When I first met Nao Jr., at the turn of the millennium, he was in his 40s and one of only nine members of his Indigenous group, Great Andamanese, who still spoke the idiom of his ancestors; the youngsters preferred Hindi. As a linguist with a passion for decoding structure, I had researched more than 80 Indian languages from five different families: Indo-European (to which Hindi belongs), Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Tai-Kadai. I was on the islands to document their Indigenous voices before they faded into whispers. What little I heard was so baffling that I returned many times in later years to try to pin down the principles undergirding Great Andamanese languages. […]

Great Andamanese, it turns out, is exceptional among the world’s languages in its anthropocentrism. It uses categories derived from the human body to describe abstract concepts such as spatial orientation and relations between objects. To be sure, in English we might say things like “the room faces the bay,” “the chair leg broke” and “she heads the firm.” But in Great Andamanese such descriptions take an extreme form, with morphemes, or meaningful sound segments, that designate different zones of the body getting attached to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs—indeed, to every part of speech—to make diverse meanings. Because no other known language has a grammar based on the human body or shares cognates—words that are similar in meaning and pronunciation, indicating a genealogical connection—with Great Andamanese, the language constitutes its own family. […]

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Last November, Larry Yudelson at the Jewish Standard reported on an interesting find:

Back in 2005, Avihai Shivtiel, a researcher in the Cairo Genizah archives at Cambridge University, published an account of a page found in the Genizah with a list of words written in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Romance — the latter being the language once known as Latin as it evolved toward some dialect of what we now call Spanish, but written in Hebrew letters. The list includes word pairs such as “lachem” — Arabic for meat — and “carne,” Spanish for meat. […]

Recently, José Martínez Delgado of the University of Granada looked at the Judeo-Romance word list. He realized, as he told the Genizah Fragments blog, “I had seen this handwriting before.” He sent the image to a friend, who confirmed his impression: “We were looking at Maimonides’ handwriting. “We were able to confirm this by gathering other examples of Maimonides writing the same words that appear in this fragment, and it’s clear that it’s him.”

So does that mean Maimonides spoke Spanish? First, he said, “We cannot be sure it’s Spanish – it is some sort of Romance dialect, but from where? Aragon? Valencia? Catalonia? We don’t know yet. And second, if anything, this is an indication that Maimonides did not speak a Romance dialect. The words are simple – bread, water, meat, egg. These are basic words, and it seems like he was trying to acquire them. He wrote out his list of words and then filled them underneath as he learned the translation. Some categories of terms are not fully translated.”

There’s an interview with Martínez Delgado at the Genizah Fragments blog with more details (and close-up photos). Thanks, RC!

I found this on Facebook and of course couldn’t resist filling it out; it helps further linguistic science and exposes me to lots of terms I didn’t know about (e.g., topinambour for ‘Jerusalem artichoke’). Warning: it takes quite a while (approximately 200 questions) and is sometimes irritating (it’s not clear why for some you have to check one answer and for others you can choose several). There are some items/actions that are unfamiliar to me (“What do you call the action of drinking water without touching your mouth to the bottle?”) and some questions that are controversial, either linguistically (“How do you pronounce ‘forte’”?) or culturally (“What kind of animals does a ‘vegetarian’ eat?”). Of LH note: “samara” was one of the choices for ‘maple key.’ Of course, I’m not sure they’ll even be able to use my responses, because of this question and response:

Do you feel that there are any other features of your dialect or dialect acquisition that need mentioning? If so, write about your dialect acquisition or history here:

My father was from the Ozarks (E Oklahoma, NW Arkansas), my mother from a Norwegian-American community in E Iowa; he went into the foreign service, so I grew up abroad with friends of many nationalities. I moved to the US for college in Los Angeles, went to grad school in New Haven, moved to New York City, and currently live in Western Massachusetts.

Do I even have a dialect? Anyway, if you feel like giving it a go, click the link.