Jaroslaw Anders has an NYRB review of what sounds like an interesting novel, Alindarka’s Children by Alhierd Bacharevič, translated from the Belarusian by Jim Dingley and Petra Reid:
[…] The newest addition to this literature in English is Alindarka’s Children, a dark fantasy by one of Belarus’s most original contemporary writers, Alhierd Bacharevič. It opens with a scene that is simultaneously idyllic and menacing. Two children, a sister and brother, are frolicking in the woods and gorging themselves on bilberries. But a voice in the brother’s head, or coming from “the smooth swaying of pine trees,” or maybe from something in those tasty berries, warns him of danger. The girl’s name is Losya and the boy’s is Lochchik, which sounds almost like “aviator” in Belarusian. They have just been rescued by their father and his lover, Katsya, from a prison-like institution called the Camp, in which the obsessive Doctor tries to cure children of what he considers a speech defect called Mova that prevents them from properly pronouncing the sounds of the official language, Yazyk. Since yazyk and mova mean “language” in Russian and Belarusian, respectively, we can guess that Yazyk stands for Russian and Mova for Belarusian, and the task of the Camp is to brainwash young Belarusians into forgetting their native tongue and their national identity. […]
Losya and Lochchik’s reluctance to embrace their regained freedom may also have something to do with the fact that the father had been conducting a linguistic-pedagogical experiment of his own. Religiously devoted to Mova, he seems to be trying to raise Losya as the first true native speaker. Since her infancy, he had forbidden her to utter a word in Yazyk, and everyone at school thought she was mute. For the father’s nosy neighbors and for a young, attractive school psychologist, this amounted to mistreatment. The psychologist had seen Losya’s scribblings in Mova and was sure the girl feared and despised her father. […]
The children’s predicament brings us to the core of what can be called the Belarusian dilemma. The country, in a constant drift between cultures, languages, and identities, suffers from a case of invisibility. Its peculiar history makes it particularly hard for outsiders—and a good many Belarusians—to decipher. Its territory, initially home to a constellation of East Slavic tribes, had by the thirteenth century been absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in 1385 united with the Roman Catholic Kingdom of Poland. After the dual Polish–Lithuanian state was partitioned at the end of the eighteenth century by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the former Grand Duchy fell to Moscow. Between the two world wars part of the Belarusian lands fell under Polish control, with the rest eventually becoming the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. After both parts were “liberated” from the Germans during World War II, the formerly Polish-controlled lands were incorporated into Soviet Belarus; the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 led to the creation of the Republic of Belarus. […]
Alindarka’s Children was published in Belarus in 2014. Alindarka is not a character in Bacharevič’s novel but the protagonist of a nineteenth-century poem, “Things Will Be Bad” by Frańcišak Bahuševič, considered the father of Belarusian literature. In the poem—which Bacharevič weaves through his book—Alindarka is a poor, illiterate Belarusian peasant whose non-name (alindarka is a corruption of z kalindarka, “from the calendar”) and unclear legal status (he is an “undocumented” orphan) are the cause of endless troubles and eventually land him in a Russian jail. The characters in Bacharevič’s novel, it seems, and perhaps all Belarusians, are his symbolic descendants.
But what leads me to post is this discussion of the translation:
The translators of Alindarka’s Children, Jim Dingley and Petra Reid, faced a formidable challenge. Most of the novel is written in literary Belarusian, but there are frequent passages in Russian, in nonstandard forms of both languages, and in a Russian-Belarusian mix known as trasianka (chaff). Dingley and Reid made a bold decision to render the book in two separate, if related, languages: standard English and Scots. Reid, the Scots translator, says in a preface that she does not speak Scots, and her rendition of it is “both variable and fabricated,” deriving from a variety of linguistic and literary sources. She hints at parallels between the parts played by the Belarusian and Scots languages in their respective national movements.
In Alindarka’s Children, Belarusian dialogues, internal monologues, reminiscences, and fragments of the father’s journal are all in Scots, while the voice of the novel’s narrator (originally in Belarusian) and the Russian passages are in English. This approach adds a layer of difficulty that does not exist in the original. Bacharevič wrote the novel for Belarusian readers, who, being almost without exception bilingual, can read the Russian sections with ease. For the average English reader, getting through rather extensive and important dialogue and narrative passages in Scots is not impossible, but it will require some effort and perhaps the use of the online resource Dictionaries of the Scots Language. The translators provide helpful footnotes and a glossary of more difficult Scots words.
Dingley and Reid realize, of course, that no Belarusian character could say something like “Whaur’s yon bestie? Yon pudgie wan!” Therefore, Losya becomes Alicia, and Lochchik becomes Avi (short for “aviator,” but the Jewish name must be the translators’ hint at the boy’s origin). The father is renamed Faither. Instead of Yazyk and Mova, we get the Lingo and the Leid. But some of the characters keep their Slavic names, and the settings and situations are unmistakably Eastern European. So where are we, exactly? In Belarus, in Scotland, or in both at once?
Dingley and Reid embrace those inconsistencies. After all, Bacharevič’s novel is a fable. His characters fight with ghouls and can drive cars by willpower alone. Why not make it even stranger and throw some Scottish oddness into the mix? They even underscore the “Scots dimension” by inserting into Bacharevič’s text numerous fragments of Scottish poetry. Those additions give the book the feel of a melancholy Scottish ballad, which is not exactly the mood of Bacharevič’s work. What we get is a book that is both a translation and a collage—an independent, multilingual literary work.
It is an ingenious response to the novel’s polyphony and a tribute to the Scottish language that echoes the tribute Bacharevič pays to the Belarusian tongue. It remains to be seen how well it serves the more pragmatic purpose of introducing Bacharevič to the general English-reading public. Virginie Symaniec, the editor and publisher of the French translation [Les enfants d’Alendrier (Le Ver à Soie, 2018)], said in an interview that, faced with the same problem, she decided against using Breton, Basque, or Occitan as a substitute for Belarusian. She worked with the translator Alena Lapatniova to diversify the French to preserve the polyphonic effect, but to keep it fully comprehensible for a Francophone reader without the knowledge of regional languages.
While I admire the daring (not to say chutzpah) of the Scots solution, I have to say I prefer Symaniec’s approach; I even like her title better, since it preserves the meaning of the Belarusian. Why not call the English version Alender’s Children?
We have discussed the confused and confusing linguistic history of Belarus and environs before, e.g. 2005, 2006, 2012 (on the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), and 2013.
How do literary translation contracts work? It should be like prestige architecture competitions where rival teams present project plans to a jury, except the author would be the jury
mollymooly: Say, you got something there… (but assuming the author knows the target language).
Sounds like the translation schema was driven by desire to make political points, in detriment to comprehension / literary quality? And the scarequotes around the word “liberated” don’t make it any nicer either 🙁
There are illustrious precedents for “fabricated” dialect use in literature.
Hugh MacDiarmid himself made no bones about using “synthetic Scots” in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and the choruses in Greek drama are in synthetic Doric, where the Athenian playwrights presumably had somewhat less claim on “authentic” dialect than MacDiarmid did. It’s a slippery concept, authenticity.
I see that Petra Reid is from Lanarkshire, so while she is doubtless strictly correct to say that she does not “speak Scots”, she has a sort of claim to be what indigenous Australians call an “owner” of the language.
Robert Burns, too, artificially enhanced the distinctiveness of his Scots over against Standard English English, I’m told. Literary use of actual “real” Scots was already dead by his time.
This sort of thing must face many people throughout the world who are trying to write literature in an endangered language, especially one overshadowed by a closely related much larger language in which most speakers of the minority language are bilingual. In the most propitious cases, the “fabrication” may become real, a bona fide new literary standard. People may even end up speaking it …
So maybe (for most Anglophones) this translation faithfully reproduces the experience of someone fluent in Russian but not Belarusian reading the original? Which is something, I suppose.
“Dingley and Reid made a bold decision to render the book in two separate, if related, languages: standard English and Scots. ”
Wow.
I think it is the first time someone referred to on your site (or in any source I read within tgis year) truly impressed me.
When i was a child I constantly asked myself: why do they never do this? Why do they never do that? Why characters in movies never go to toilet, for example? Ideas are hardly enough to make a great work of art – and some of those ideas were not even meant to (of course I did not expect a film to be “better” because characters pee – it is just that avoidance of some people around me do constantly was stricking). I do not like systmatically observed limitations.
Maybe you know other examples, but for me it is the first time I see an English (or Russian) translator doing this. Translations systematically level and normalize. The fear that the reader won’t like your weird where it accurately reproduces the author’s weird or else that you add something idiosyncratic or, worse, both, is dominant.
Their solution is logical but too daring. And I hate that “logical but too daring” fiercely.
I know that the chances that the translation will end up being enjoyable are slim:) First it must just be a good translation, which does not happen always. Then for the whole thing to work you will have to read it properly.
Meanwhile in diglossic countries (in Arab world for example) diglossic literature is an absolutely normal thing. Just not here.
Anyway, someone must have done that, and no one as I beleieved, would ever do such a thing and they did, and I am impressed. I will take a look.
“Bacharevič wrote the novel for Belarusian readers, who, being almost without exception bilingual, can read the Russian sections with ease. ”
Can read Belarussian sections he wanted to say. There is not much Belorussian around in Belarus:(
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Breton is madness. Belorussian is close to Russian. I am not even sure if Occitan is close enough. And yes, I understand that the Scots in question is fabricated:) Which makes it more daring though. I do not care if there is any political point here. As for how literary translation contracts should work, I believe translations must be many.
There are illustrious precedents for “fabricated” dialect use in literature.
Sure, and MacDiarmid is an old favorite of mine. It’s not the use of fabricated Scots in and of itself that bothers me, it’s the use in this context. I haven’t read, or even seen the book, so I can’t judge, but it sounds from the review like it doesn’t work very well — or at least it puts unnecessary obstacles in the path of the prospective reader.
I could easily see this done in Norwegian, with an archaizing and uncompromised landsmål (or just “mål”) on one side, and a rigsmål (or “sprog”) closely tied to Danish on the other.
It’s not related to the novel under discussion, but Alender is one of my pair of go-to names I usually use when I have to name a video game protagonist.
Well. I think this decision on the translators’ part is terrible. In more ways than one. J.W Brewer, above, has broached part of the problem, I think.
There are two separate problems here:
First of all, in using English to render both the Russian passages and the narrator’s Belarusian, the translators are obscuring rather than clarifying the sociolinguistic relationship between Russian and Belarusian: whichever form of English one selects to render Belarusian on the one hand and Russian on the other, a translator should respect the distribution of both languages within the original novel.
Second, the problem is that using Scots to represent (some) Belarusian makes the experience of reading the novel, for anglophones, the polar opposite of what it is for the original audience, i.e. native speakers of Belarusian. For the latter Belarusian is the familiar, unmarked language, with Russian the less familiar, more marked and (in most formal contexts) more prestigious language. To non-Scottish anglophone readers (i.e. most anglophone readers), on the other hand, the Scots passages will be the far more “marked” ones (i.e. linguistically unusual), with the standard English passages being linguistically unmarked.
Since the Scots dialect used in the translation is to a great degree a “made-up” Scots, it seems to me that a wiser choice would have been to render the Literary Belarusian as (Standard) English and to have made up an artificial dialect of English (possibly with as many bookish words and grammatical features as possible, making it appear both alien and prestigious) to render Russian.
I am curious: has the novel been translated into Russian? Inasmuch as the original has Literary Belarusian as the normal, “unmarked” code, it seems to me that rendering Literary Belarusian as Russian would be the obvious choice for a translator, with perhaps some artificial and/or maximally bookish lect of Russian being used to render Russian in the original.
Drasvi: I quite agree, in rendering Belarusian in a French translation both Breton or Basque would be madness. So would Occitan, a language which in any of its spoken and written forms is wholly incomprehensible to most francophones.
“For the latter Belarusian is the familiar, unmarked language, with Russian the less familiar, more marked and (in most formal contexts) more prestigious language. ”
Again: they do not speak Belorussian in Belarus. “They” is most Belarusians.
Lectures about Belorussian literature in Minsk University are in Belorussian. This is the use of the langauge in higher education. There are schools with Belorussian as the instruction langauge, but those are absolute minority: students will study in Russian in the university so Russian-langauge school makes more sense.
Only minority of people speak it at hiome and only in some localities you can hear it on the street.
THey blame Stalin (he killed many Belarusian culture activists) but the Russification went since 50s and especially fast in Lukashenko’s time (30 years ago it was still half-Belorussian–speaking coutnry)
Without reading the book, or speaking Belorussian, I imagined that Losya (Лёся) and Lochchik (Лёччык) are variants of the same name Alexia/Alexey. The most famous Lesya, though, is a variant of Larissa. But Russian/Eastern European hypocoristics are not always firmly attached to the full names.
I do not have precise data about language use at home though, and “on the street” refers to cities.
But as I understand, they do not enter diglossic relationship (one langauge at home, the other in school). It works more like dialect levelling. Let Belorussians correct me if I am wrong somewhere, and I will try to find somethign about use at home. The problem here is that when people answer such questions* it is often a matter of identity.
Finding anything about Tajik in Bukhara is also difficult. Anyway: most people of Kazakhstan are more comfortable with Russian rather than Kazakh and Kiev spoke mostly Russian until recently**. This was the maddest thing about Russian position: they presented langauge rights as the reason behind everything but they do not even know what people in Kiev speak.
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* I mean census etc.
** Well, both were and are used. I think Ukrainian grew in popularity since 2014.
Facts are of little interest to nationalists.
A study published in 2004 found that Russian had quickly become dominant in the cities, not as much in rural areas, but that the Russian is flavored to various degrees by the Belarussian substrate, if you will. This is from nearly 20-year-old data.
The only other nominally national language thus endangered that I can think of is Walloon (and, by the way, Wisconsin Walloon, more technically here).
I looked through the book quickly and found no Russian passages whatsoever. There is some direct speech in Russian. That’s it. And most of the book is narration, which is in Belorussian.
Drasvi: To my mind it is irrelevant, in this context, whether Belarusian or Russian is the dominant spoken language in Belarus. The novel we are discussing being written in Belarusian, its intended readership must consist of inhabitants of Belarus who are readers of Belarusian. That these inhabitants are probably less numerous than inhabitants of Belarus who read Russian-language material only is irrelevant: THE ENTIRE PURPOSE OF THE NOVEL is to denounce a form of ubiquitous linguistic subordination within Belarus, and thus the reality that Belarusian is a minority language within Belarus itself does not change or negate the core message of the novel.
A translator’s job is to render an original work *as perceived by its intended readership* as faithfully as possible into another language. And in this light I stand by my criticism at 5:02: the choice of speech forms (Scots and English) used in the translation does not mirror at all the use of Russian and Belarusian in the original.
Y:To my knowledge Walloon has never been an officially recognized national language in Belgium (or, for that matter, anywhere).
Etienne, my goal was not to disprove you. I just wanted to say, the dynamics is more like what we see with Irish:-(
If we both are right that is good. If a Belarusian comes and says my assessment is wrong it will be great:)
“ a translator should respect the distribution of both languages within the original novel.”
Russian Tolkien fans love Rakhmanova’s translation of the Hobbit, even though it is more like an adaptation and some pages were not translated. Some say that Tolkien’s original English (“the Professor’s English” they say) was bad:)
But for those who does not like it, there is a dozen of other translations. If the goal is to have One translation of everything, it is a mad goal. If there are many, I think translators should experiment.
And some experiments are going to be unsuccessful. That is the thing about experiments.
I am impressed by how the translators did what I think they would never do. I love that. I can find some specific choices of a translation disagreable – and still I want such translations to exist.
(again, just to clarify my position. I do not necessarily disagree with the point about the distribution – but I am highly unwilling to say that a translator “should”. It depends on the situation. Sometimes a translation has a goal, and it limits a translator’s choice. )
“ Breton or Basque would be madness. So would Occitan, a language which in any of its spoken and written forms is wholly incomprehensible to most francophones.
1. “L’occitan (o lenga d’òc) es una lenga romanica parlada en Occitània e pels occitans emigrats de pel mond. Es una lenga fòrça similara al catalan que d’unes considèran aquel coma un dialècte. ”
2. “Ur yezh romanek eo an okitaneg, a vez komzet en Okitania, en em led war un tregont bennak a zepartamantoù eus kreisteiz Frañs, traoñiennoù eus an Alpoù e Piemont (Italia) ha traoñienn Aran e gwalarn Katalonia (Spagn).”
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It was an exaggeration:)
Of the handful of Belarusians I’ve met, only one seemed to have learned his Belarusian from his grandparents. All the others, I believe, learned the language at school. However, they were all proud of the language and of their “Lithuanian” cultural ancestry. I assume they would be able to read Bacharevič in Belarusian without much difficulty, just like they once read Yanka Kupala and Vasil Bykaŭ at school. Some of them admitted that Belarusian was no longer a truly living language because it was not used much in everyday life, so linguistic innovation had all but ceased – but I think Bacharevič is an innovator.
Also, Bacharevič has a degree in the language, used to teach it, and knows Belarusian fiction inside out, while his translators are not nearly so fluent in the Scots idiom. Perhaps they should have stayed away from it altogether.
I’ve only read one of his novels, Dogs of Europe (his self-translation into Russian), and enjoyed it a lot. The one with a conlang as a plot device.
i think i agree with etienne on just about all counts.
and all the more because i can think of a half-dozen distinct strategies for using different english lects and registers to accomplish what the review describes…
but i don’t think the idea of a scots/english interpretation is a bad one in principle* at all! the linguistic situation of scots : english does seem pretty parallel to me to the belarussian : russian one. official endorsement, ritualized use of a few literary items, central place in the nationalist mythology – all made irrelevant in practice because of pervasive marginalization, media dominance, and the lack of a meaningful language-support structure. it’s just that this approach seems inept and badly handled. i’d love to see what john m. tait would do with this novel!
* no, i’m very much not using this in the radio yerevan sense
About using it at home, the census:
36.6% in 1999.
23.5% in 2009,
26% in 2019.
It is not reliable, of course. Strangely, the capital has one of the highest levels (34%).
the source (in Russian). Data for regions is p.44, I linked p. 40 where “at home” part begins with ethnicities.
Yeah, it seems to mirror the political situation precisely…
I heard* somewhere**, many years ago, that Belarussian actually consists of five (sic) very distinct dialects, with Standard Belarussian being an artificial mix of them that is taught in schools.
The dialects are dying out but still somewhat extant (mostly in villages), and there are some people who grew up speaking Standard Belarussian (mostly in large cities). Approximately everyone else (particularly in medium-sized towns) speaks Russian.
From other sources I know that there’s a different “Standard” Belarussian, a mix more focused on western dialects, used in the 1950s (?) and apparently popular in the diaspora. No idea how that affected the level of language knowledge in Belarus itself.
*) as in literally heard, in a conversation with some people from Belarus
**) technically, I know where, but the place is essentially irrelevant, as it was a summer camp
I once saw a YouTube clip where Belarusian opposition activists tried to speak to random people on the street in Belarusian with obvious results – most didn’t understand a word and one woman even mistook them for Ukrainians.
Situation where an official language of the country is so little known by its population that some people can’t even recognize it spoken is quite unusual.
Maybe Irish in Ireland comes close.
@SFReader “Situation where an official language of the country is so little known by its population that some people can’t even recognize it spoken is quite unusual. Maybe Irish in Ireland comes close.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoVJYuTyyN8
—Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.
—Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
—Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?
—I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir?
—I am an Englishman, Haines answered.
—He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.
—Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.
At The Joyce Project:
# Gifford notes that Mulligan’s mocking question, “Is there Gaelic on you?,” is a “west-of-Ireland, peasant colloquialism for ‘Can you speak Irish?’” #
this Wales newslet is recycled regularly on twitter, which speaks to its rarity.
I expect a much higher fraction of people educated in the Republic of Ireland would recognise Irish today than in 1904; and recognise French too, for similar reasons. As regards comprehension, French has certainly improved more than Irish. OTOH recognising a language from an L1 speaker is easier than from an L2 speaker, regardless of the auditor’s command of the speaker’s L1 or L2.
“Is there Gaelic on you?”
This is literal translation of “An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?” (“Do you speak Gaelic?”)
Mulligan uses Gaelic grammar in English sentence.
For comic effect, presumably.
this Welsh newslet
I wouldn’t expect a cockroach like that to able to tell one language from another: his brain will stop at “not mine.”
(I expect he was an aficionado of the race-baiting tapeworm Nigel Farage, who famously expressed discomfort at hearing people in a train he was travelling on speaking Not English. Pluen eira!)
“If you want to speak Mexican, go back to Mexico. Here in America, we speak English.”
“I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English, go back to England.”
expressed discomfort at
A lot of anglophone people these days, when they pipe up at all, complain about being “uncomfortable with” something. Do they experience the world as a furniture store where everyone is trying out armchairs, in order to “share” with everyone else ? I find exceedingly strange the expectation that I would give a shit about someone feeling “uncomfortable” – unless, of course, I were an armchair salesman. The very idea makes me uncomfortable.
“If you want to speak Mexican…” brings this to mind:
Anglo [‘white in the United States of non-Hispanic origin’] to a resident of California of Mexican ancestry:
“When did your family move to the United States?”
Californian of Mexican ancestry:
“We never moved here. In 1848 the United States moved the boundary line westward to include California.”
race-baiting tapeworm Nigel Farage
I was imagining him for a second as a racing, galloping worm. It was very satisfying.
This infamous story: A woman is speaking Spanish to her trilingual (and a half) daughter; a busybody stranger tells her, in servants’ English, to speak English to her child so as not to “confuse” her.
This goes beyond language:) Anything can “confuse” a child.
There was a story about child Leibnitz who found a Latin book and began deciphering it and his Latin teacher who said that he is not yet good enough at Latin to read such books and thus the book must be taken from him, presumably because else it would distract him from studies.
I was interested by the use of a word meaning “chaff” to designate a variety of a language, because the origin of English chaff, “banter, good-humored raillery” remains uncertain—is it a figurative use of chaff “grain husks blown away in the wind during winnowing; worthless matter”, or is it a variant form of chafe, “to heat, warm, rub, abrade, irritate”?
According to what I can gather from the Russian Wikipedia, трасянка is apparently not simply chaff in the sense “grain husks (and material from weeds) winnowed away” (Belarusian мякіна, палова, жыціца; Russian мякина, полова, плевел), but rather chaff in the more technical sense from animal husbandry, “cut hay mixed with straw used as cattle feed” (Russian сечка, from сечь “to cut up, chop”). So трасянка is derived from Belarusian трэсці, трасу (Russian трясти) “to shake” and is “something shaken”, not because of the shaking and tossing in the winnowing process, but rather because the farmer makes трасянка to extend his supply of good hay by mixing it with chopped straw and shaking them thoroughly together. Or so I gather. The semantic point of departure is not “insubstantantial thing, useless thing” but simply “mixture”, and трасянка is thus parallel to Ukrainian and Russian суржик “maslin (mixture of wheat and rye), mixture of Ukrainian and Russian”.
I thought I could recall some other use of a word meaning “chaff” (husks) to designate a variety of language considered debased, or another mixed language somewhere in the world, but maybe I was just thinking of the crusca (“bran”) in the name of the Italian Accademia della Crusca, or the grain-related Ukrainian and Russian суржик.
Leibniz. Sorry.
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In a rather racist discussion of migrant workers in Russia and their use of wrong langauges a lady wrote an emotional post in defence of those workers. She always chides her subordinates when they speak their gibberish instead of Russian. But their life is hard, you can’t expect good Russian or good manners from villagers and they need our support in obtaining those. She was quite angry (with other Russians).
There was a similar translation decision in the British TV series Chernobyl. The British cast, speaking English, was portraying native Russian speakers talking to each other. Actors playing academic advisors and high government officials used the accents of educated Londoners. Actors playing working class laborers and firemen used the accents of working class Londoners. Actors portraying coal miners who were brought in to the disaster scene from a different part of the Soviet Union used the accents of the working class of the (former) coal mining regions of England.
the linguistic situation of scots : english does seem pretty parallel to me to the belarussian : russian one. official endorsement, ritualized use of a few literary items,
The distance and nature of differences are similar. The relation between the two languages is such that they appear mutually funny. Maybe Italians and Spaniards could find something similar in their peninsulas.
There is functional similarity too, but USSR can be the absolute world champion in “ritualized use”. It could be Buryat to the same effect.
Robert Burns, too, artificially enhanced the distinctiveness of his Scots over against Standard English English, I’m told.
And occasionally botching it sadly: “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled” has a big fat anglicism in the use of the interrogative pronoun as a relative pronoun. “Scots ‘at hae” would be just as intelligible.
Meanwhile in diglossic countries (in Arab world for example) diglossic literature is an absolutely normal thing.
Most books in Arabic, whether or not they contain “pictures and conversations” are entirely in Modern Standard Arabic, no matter where they are set.
it puts unnecessary obstacles in the path of the prospective reader
All writing in anything but the dialect that the reader is accustomed to read puts obstacles in their path. Whether they are necessary is a different question, and seems too high a bar to me. You praised Snyder’s Reconstruction of Nations for constantly changing the names of cities according to the people talking about them (even in a single sentence) despite other Hattics complaining about the confusion. I agree with you, but I think it would be wrong to call Snyder’s device either necessary or obstacular (which has three 20C citations in the OED and none before that).
Belarussian actually consists of five (sic) very distinct dialects, with Standard Belarussian being an artificial mix of them that is taught in schools.
That part sounds exactly like the situation of Basque, according to PRI’s The World in Words radio show—though of course the languages overshadowing Basque aren’t its near relatives. (And thanks to Hat for recommending this show, which I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of.)
You praised Snyder’s Reconstruction of Nations for constantly changing the names of cities according to the people talking about them (even in a single sentence) despite other Hattics complaining about the confusion.
Surely I don’t need to explain the difference between a novel and a scholarly monograph.
That part sounds exactly like the situation of Basque
Welsh, too, though more than five. Literary Welsh is supradialectal, though a southern friend insists vigorously that William Morgan maliciously northernised his Bible translation, with the consequence that Literary Welsh has been biassed against the south ever after, I think this is the same sort of illusion that leads people to suppose that Appalachian English (say) is a sort of relic of Elizabethan English.
Welsh seems to be successfully evolving a new modern common-ish written standard, though, partly by favouring the more conservative of the actually spoken elements dialect-by-dialect. It sounds like Basque dialects are a good bit more diverse, though, and there isn’t a centuries-old common literary language to do the job of umpiring between the differences. (I gather that this has also been a problem for Breton.)
(I gather that this has also been a problem for Breton.)
As a learner I was comfortable with it. There are differences between dialect groups. I do not think that differences between texts in these dialects remotely approach those between two neighbouring villages whose people claim that they can’t understand each other (until they meet at the marketplace and understand each other perfectly), but there are some:-) And …. ?
Well, I have not dealt with this one which is quite differetn from the KLT group.
Regardless of drasvi’s … whatever they are doing, I must join him in respectfully disagreeing with Etienne.
For the latter Belarusian is the familiar, unmarked language, with Russian the less familiar, more marked and (in most formal contexts) more prestigious language.
That is exactly the other way around. The most recent work on the subject I have at hand is Marián Sloboda’s “Management bilingvismu v situaci jazykového posunu. Diskurzy, problémy a krajina Běloruska / Bilingualism management in the situation of language shift Discourses, problems and the landscape of Belarus”, a 2011 Charles University PhD dissertation (in Czech). What this work and similar one’s like Marina Scharlaj’s “Das Weißrussische zwischen Sprachkontakt und Sprachverdrängung” (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2008) make absolutely clear is that Belarusian is now essentially relegated to the countryside. The census data shows this clearly, even if it is – as always – problematic with the way it treats the terms “native language” and “language used most often”. The former is defined as “язык, усвоенный первым в раннем детстве” (“language learned in childhood), but as it turns out, to most people (59.4%), this means “the language of my ethnicity” (Sloboda 2011: 34). So e.g. when the 2009 census gives the figure of those with Belarusian as the native language as 53.2%, it does not mean that this is their actual native language and it definitely does not mean that they use Belarusian as the primary means of daily communication. Schröder’s survey puts the figure of those using Belarusian every day at 25%; the IISEPS poll of 2008 which asked about “the language of everyday communication” has 3.1% for Belarusian (Sloboda 2011: 34).
The most interesting of Sloboda’s findings is the ongoing stigmatization of Belarusian as a backwards redneck деревенский “village” language (cf. the case study, especially 2011: 110) as opposed to Russian as the city language. There had been efforts to combat that, but they have ceased in recent years and the result is the near uniform shift to Russian for anyone who moves to the city, which is a lot of people. The political turmoil and conflicts, as well as the existence of Trasyanka, certainly do not help.
So in short, these days, Belarusian is definitely not “the familiar, unmarked language”.
Oh awesome, it turns out Bakharevich’s works are available on Apple Books!
John,
Most books in Arabic, whether or not they contain “pictures and conversations” are entirely in Modern Standard Arabic, no matter where they are set.
Well, dunno about most. Non-fiction, sure. But in fiction, there has been more and more inclusion of the dialect, especially in Egypt, if only for realism.
And there are thriving genres of popular literature, like riwayat in-net (“web novels”), a form of collaborative fan fiction, that is written almost entirely in Dialectal Arabic.
I felt sad when reading a newspaper article in Belarusian, from around 1960. It was normal Soviet journalistic language. It was Belarusian only at the level of vocabulary and morphology, but semantics / pragmatics / syntax / phraseology were identical to a narrow specific subjenre of literary Russian, and I could easily date it based on my knowlege of Russian langauge. Only one or two times the author referred to a local idiom and he would not do that I think if it was not an article about the situation with Belarusian.
The same can be said about Bacharevič’s text: semantics and syntax are the same as in literary Russian.
Meanwhile in Russian dialects number of tenses varies, for one thing.
The problem has to do with those “two neighbouring villages whose people claim that they can’t understand each other”. You can publish 6 monographs tracing phonetical and morphological developments in a dialect, you can create a distinct literary language supposedly capturing their result – and you end up with two “langauges”… that only differ in that in one it is spelled “favor” and the other has “favour”.
Semantics, pragmatics, syntax, derivation etc. are exactly parts of a language that are connected to culture. How you can speak about language being an important part of your heritage if you discard semantics?
Bulbul: I respectfully disagree with your respectful disagreement. Please see my 6:31 comment yesterday. Literary Belarusian IS the “unmarked language” TO READERS OF THE NOVEL. Which from a translator’s perspective is what matters.
Drasvi: Your comment on written Belarusian not differing from Russian in semantics, phraseology and stylistics (I wonder though: would Belarusian-language material published in the diaspora give you the same impression?) reminds me of a famous French dialectologist who, on the subject of Occitan-language activists, said of them that they all had an excellent, first-rate knowledge of standard French, and that without this knowledge it was impossible for any of them to speak/write Occitan correctly. And indeed Modern written Occitan (what little I have read) strikes me as being purely French in semantics, phraseology and stylistics too. I suspect the same is true of a great many minority languages.
Literary Belarusian IS the “unmarked language” TO READERS OF THE NOVEL. Which from a translator’s perspective is what matters.
While theoretically unimpeachable, that would seem to make no sense in this particular situation, when the only people for whom Belarusian is the unmarked language are village people who almost certainly will not read this novel. The ONLY readers of the novel in the original will be people to whom Russian is utterly familiar and Belarusian is a much-mocked rural lect.
As I understand Etienne (I honenstly don’t know if I agree with him or not:)), the translator has changed the role of Scots in the novel. The voice of the narrator is English.
Etienne,
Literary Belarusian IS the “unmarked language” TO READERS OF THE NOVEL.
I must reiterate: this is wrong, based on the sociolinguistic facts on the ground. Literary/standard Belarusian is not an unmarked language to ANYONE. As Hat notes, the main target audience for anything written in Belarusian is not a villager who actually speaks Belorusian, but a city dweller whose main language is Russian. What that reader’s relationship to Belarusian is is a fascinating subject of inquiry and I hesitate to speculate on that. What I do know is that there is a substantial movement, especially among young people, to if not revive then at least devote more attention to Belarusian, either for nationalistic or for nostalgic reasons.
Also, having read the first few pages, I am under the suspicion that the Belarusian in there is actually not standard Belarusian…
The beginning of the novel – with a parallel Russian text, as I understood it. The word in brackets are those that caused any sort of trouble.
Маю сястру зьелі ваўкі.
Мою сестру съели волки.
Лёччыка так [усхвалявалі] гэтыя словы, …
Лётчика так взволновали эти слова, …
якія толькі што невядома чаму прыйшлі яму ў галаву – ….
которые только что неизвестно/неведомо почему пришли ему в голову. …
[быццам] ён [неўпрыкмет] [пракаўтнуў] іх разам з чарнічным лістком, да якога прыклеіўся маленькі жук з…
будто он незаметно проглотил их вместе с черничным лист[оч]ком, к которому приклеился маленький жук с….
сонечным блікам на сьпіне – што Лёччык ажно перастаў жаваць, …
солнечным бликом на спине — что Лётчик даже перестал жевать, …
[выпрастаўся], [заплюшчыў] вочы і зь нейкім [урачыстым жахам] прамовіў:
выпрямился, закрыл глаза и с каким-то [….. ] произнёс:
“Маю сястру зьелі ваўкі”.
Голас прагучаў так, [нібы] належаў зусім ня Лёччыку, а камусьці іншаму.
Голос прозвучал так, словно принадлежал совсем не Лётчику, а кому-то другому.
усхвалявалі – I misunderstood this one.
быццам – this one is obvious, I did not understand it because I am an idiot.
неўпрыкмет – guessed right, was not entirely sure.
пракаўтнуў – guessed right, was not sure.
выпрастаўся – guessed right, was not entirely sure.
заплюшчыў – understood slightly wrongly (зажмурил “squinted” but it is just закрыл “closed”).
урачыстым жахам – “торжественным ужасом”. Decided not to try to guess and looked up in a dictionary. Жах is present in Russian dialects, but I did not remember it.
нібы – guessed right, but was tempted to translate it as будто (just like быццам) because of the etymology. It is better to have two different words, будто for the быццам, словно for нiбы.
“Modern written Occitan (what little I have read) strikes me as being purely French in semantics, phraseology and stylistics too.”
The same is happening in Spain: Catalan and Galician are becoming more and more like Castilian.
For example, Catalan has three words meaning ‘mayor’: alcalde, batlle, and the third one so rare that I cannot now remember it. Spanish has just alcalde for ‘mayor’, as a result of which batlle and that third word have been obsolescing for over forty years. And so on with other sets of synonyms in Catalan and Galician.
The relevant linguistic term is abklatschsprache ‘carbon-copy language’.
I first thoguht about it when I found in someone country house a book 100 Great Ukrainians. I read two biographies (Golda Meir and Sholem Aleikhem) . I was able to read it fast, fluently, I was able to understand all the words and phrases without exception and it was clear that I can write a program that can convert it in perfect literary Russian, because it was reworded Russian. It is not my normal expereince with Ukrainian and it was obvious that the author learned Ukrainian as an adult.
I see the same in Ukrainian TV – journalists are usually Russian speakers. Professors in universities are likely the same people who taught there 30 years ago. When the country quickly switches to such Ukrianian (with Russian speakers dominating TV) – what will happen to the language (which still has many L1 speakers)?
Until I read this book I never thought about this complication for language revival. Sadly, for most people “Ukrainain” (or any other language) is anything that matches the school grammar – and school grammar is not even a sketch.
In extreme cases, that’s how mixed languages come about. People hold on their linguistic identity by the more transparent process of maintaining its vocabulary, while the grammar (even including complex morphology) shifts entirely to that of another language.
The practical question is how we can use Gaeltacht (metaphorical).
@Arthur: TVTropes has an article on that phenomena, which they call “accept adaptation”. Given that site’s biases, it focuses mostly on “popular” works and on translating accentual/dialectal from Japanese to English and from English to other languages. It’s not quite the same thing as what’s being discussed here, but it still interesting nonetheless. For example, it is not uncommon for translations to either ignore the issue altogether or even use dialects and accents where the original did not.
@drasvi: I distinctly remember a substitute teacher telling that I couldn’t understand The Lord of the Flies when I was in Grade 8, even though I remember reading The Second World War: A Short History by R. A. C. Parker around the same time.
Móva . The Russian cognate is molvá “rumour”, the verb mólvit’ is archaic for “to say”.
When discussing Ukraine, Russian speakers may colloquially refer to Ukrainian speech as “[the] mova”. “She speaks [the] mova“: she speaks Ukrainian. Such usage, I think, exactly makes sense when two varieties coexist. Anything an Irish person speaks is Irish, after all – does a geographical reference make sense?
Apparently in Belarus it means “Belarusian” and would mean that in Moscow if people discussed Belarusian in Moscow: “mova” is a langauge that calls itself “mova”. I do not know if Belarusian and Ukrainians call each other langauges so.
I wonder if they use “yazyk” in the sense “Russian” or is it just he?
Собаки Европы in Russian and Belarusian (his translation)
Хто б ведаў, як мне надакучыла ваша беларуская мова. І хто б ведаў, зь якой асалодай я пішу гэта. Надакучыла. Надакучыла.
Дакука.
Нуда.
Яна мне абрыдла. Брысь, мова, брысь.
——
Как же мне надоел ваш белорусский язык, кто бы знал. И кто бы знал, с каким наслаждением я пишу это. Надоел. Опостылел.
Ос-то-чер-тел.
Опротивел.
Достал.
Брысь, моя обрюзгшая мова, брысь.
And indeed Modern written Occitan (what little I have read) strikes me as being purely French in semantics, phraseology and stylistics too. I suspect the same is true of a great many minority languages.
I’ve been thinking about this lately with respect to Welsh and English.
On the one hand, there are all sorts of locutions which look like straight calques of English, especially verb + adverb combinations which eerily resemble English phrasal verbs, and where the meaning of the whole isn’t obvious from that of the components but matches pretty exactly in the two languages. A great many individual lexemes have exactly the same semantic range in the two languages too.
On the other hand, there are all sorts of differences deliberately placed to trap the English: you talk by someone (siarad wrth), not “to” someone; you go i’r ysbyty “to the hospital” but you don’t go *i’r meddyg “to the doctor” (you go at y meddyg instead); “time” can be amser, pryd, gwaith depending on context … and the nuts and bolts of the syntax are quite different.
I was wondering how many of the similarities are actually parallel developments rather than straight English influence (after all, it’s not a very odd idiom to say that an event is “going well” (yn mynd yn dda, for example.) You’d really need to do an in-depth search of premodern spoken Welsh idioms to know.
There’s certainly nothing like the Occitan-French convergence, but then that’s hardly surprising given the much greater structural differences between English and Welsh than between Occitan and French.
Here is an example of columnist prose in Irish with my translation
—
Le linn na 1980idí thugainn cuairt ar chol cheathrair le mo mháthair a raibh cónaí air cóngarach do Lochanna Bhaile Coimín (Taiscumar Pholl an Phúca) in iarthar Chontae Chill Mhantáin. Bhíomar inár suí lá samhraidh ag láthair phicnicí in aice na lochanna ag féachaint ar ghrúpaí éagsúla a bhí ag baint taitneamh as spóirt uisce. Ba chuimhin le m’fhear gaoil an t-am nuair nach raibh aon loch ann.
During the 80s I visited a cousin of my mother’s who lived near Lochanna Bhaile Coimín (Poll an Phúca reservoir) in the western part of Co. Wicklow. We were sitting on a summer’s day at a picnicking area next to the lakes looking at various groups that were enjoying watersports. My relative remembered the time when there was no lake there.
—
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tuarasc%C3%A1il/baile-na-habhann-i-gcill-mhant%C3%A1in-an-baile-fearainn-a-b%C3%A1dh-1.4580949?mode=amp
This is discursive prose. I would say it is not particularly influenced by English style:
— le linn na-the more “English” style would be sna or (more extremely) i gcúrsa de na
–sentence style would be regarded as “rambling” in English (and more commas would be needed) but is entirely OK in Irish
But
–Ba chuimhin le…an t’am: am is literally “time” but this is an Ulster usage that I think may be English-influenced. Ba chuimhin le … na laethanta would sound more generically Irish to me.
Re Ukraine/Belarus I think there are several differences wrt Irish:
1. These languages never developed a literary standard (or the rural speakers were untouched by it).
2. These languages are much closer in grammar and vocabulary to Russian than Irish is to English.
3. There are large numbers of adult learners (I think even in NI now, Irish is part of the school curriculum for people who want to learn Irish).
The similarity is that people who use the language regularly are either people who speak a local dialect or who speak an “artificial” standard (with more or less reduced native vocabulary and expressive power) that can lack the colour and vivacity of a living, growing language.
Poll an Phúca
As seen in Ulysses!
Under the somewhat less transparent form Poulaphouca.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/u/ulysses/summary-and-analysis/chapter-15/chapter-15-20
Nymphs are involved.
Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted.
@de
I could have used the “anglicised” spelling but to me it looks silly. I think remote parts of Wicklow were Irish speaking up until the late 18th century. I do not think that watersports are allowed anymore in the reservoir, I do not know about picknicking.
I find it interesting that Belarusian seems much farther from standard Polish than Ukrainian does, especially given that Belarus was under Polish cultural domination for many centuries. Is standard Ukrainian more “Polish” because of 19th century Habsburg era promotion of Rusyn and Polish cultural leadership in places like Lemberg/Lviv/Lwów, while urban areas in Belarus were being Russified under the Tsars?
I wouldn’t leave “Blessington Lakes” as “Lochanna Bhaile Coimín”; I’m confident the Irish is a back-translation. At what point “Blessington Lake” became “Blessington Lakes” I dunno. It seems to be synonymous with Pollaphuca Reservoir, which is a single lake, albeit with several lobes. One might justify the plural by including Golden Falls Lake, but that’s Ballymore Eustace, not Blessington. I surmise the Blessington tourist office wanted to invoke the Killarney Lakes.
@mollymooly
“The English name Blessington, first found in 1667, is a translation based on false etymology: the original Irish name [Baile Coimín = the town of Coimín— surname (from Comyn)] seems to have been interpreted at the time as *Baile Comaoin(e), ‘the town of the blessing’. This English version was itself gaelicised in the 18th century and we find *Baile na mBeannacht, ‘the town of the blessings’, in manuscripts written by Tadhg Ó Neachtain, alongside the original Irish form (e.g. ‘baile na mbeannacht .i. crois bhaile cuimin’ KIL 20).”
source: https://www.logainm.ie/en/54622
Of course you are right and Blessington is the long-established name.
It is the name of the lake, rather than that of the eponymous settlement, which I suggest was a back-translation. I suppose one might call it a ping-pong translation.
“sentence style would be regarded as “rambling” in English (and more commas would be needed) but is entirely OK in Irish”
Do you mean that the English translation is “rambling” too? It does not seem to depart far from your Irish original.
—-
I noticed that some specimens of 19th century prose, when translated word-by word into Russian, would produce much better Russian than any of the modern publications.
(I have a vague feeling that the above line smells 19th century to a degree, if so, it is because I have just read one of the aforesaid specimens)
@drasvi
As you say, the English sentences in my translation copied the phrasing and some word order of the original Irish. I feel the result in English (but not the original Irish) is indeed “rambling”:
We were sitting on a summer’s day at a picnicking area next to the lakes looking at various groups that were enjoying watersports.
This would be Ok in spoken English. In written English, an editor might suggest something like:
One summer day, we sat/were sitting in a picknicking area by the lake(s) and watched / watching various groups, who were enjoying watersports.
@molly
Ok. So I suppose the locals felt that they wanted a lake, not a reservoir and wanted it attached to Blessington, not Polla’phúca. So in true Radio Yerevan fashion, the Irish translation followed????.
Patriotic self-irony: “У СССР беларусы заўсёды былі на перадавых пазыцыях. Ня стаў для іх выключэньнем і працэс русыфікацыі.”
Literally : In USSR belarus-people always were on forefront positions. Not became for them [an] exception as-well [the] process of-russification. (from)
Thank you! It is how I understood you, but I wanted to be sure. I am far from being a fluent reader in Irish and was afraid I am missing something. Yes, it is somewhat different. A Russian text would be different from English too. There a deal of variation in English itself at this level though. I do not understand well enough how language works at this exact level and where what comes from. I can’t tell what is “un-English” and what is merely against the current literary fashion.
I wonder about one detail of the census data (linked above). The most Belarusified ethnic group seems to be Poles: 57, 40 and 46 %% of them said they speak Belarusian at home in 1999, 2009 and 2019.
I guess it is because of where they live. But did their ancestors speak Polish in 30s (and maybe also next decades)? Was this group shifting to Belarusian in exactly the same decades when most of Belarus people were shifting to Russian?
Rural Poles of western Belarus and Lithuania are native speakers of Belarusian (or rather its variety called “prosta mowa”).
I am of the opinion that they always spoke it (or in Lithuanian case switched to it from Lithuanian* sometime in 19th century).
* or perhaps even from some other now extinct Baltic language
I am of the opinion that they always spoke it (or in Lithuanian case switched to it from Lithuanian* sometime in 19th century).
Aha:
“Trudno powiedzieć, czy to są Białorusini, którzy się spolonizowali, czy Polacy, którzy ulegli białorutenizacji, czy też Litwini którzy najpierw zbiałorutenizowali się, a potem spolonizowali. ”
He also says, when he first came to Vilnus area in 2009 and asked locals to speak to him partly in Polish and partly “simply”, he was surprised to hear literary Belorusian. He thinks it is because Tarashkyevich, the author of “Belarusian grammar for schools” (Vilnus 1918) was from Lavoriškės area (Mačiuliškės specifically) himself.
The man (Mirosław Jankowiak) works with Belarusian dialects in Russia, Lithuania and Latvia and has some interesting stuff, all in Polish.
Village sociolinguistics: Ja hawaru [trochę] pa litousku, ja leniusia pa gudacku hawaryć, ja pa biełarusku, maja mama była biełaruskaja, jana z Biełarusi, a tata byu Lićwin, baba pierapiajeć mużczynu i usie my hawaryli doma pa gudacku [K 1931 Kack];
Very literally:
I speak [a bit] in Lithuanian, I am lazy in Gudic to speak , I in Belarusian, my mom was Belarusian, she is from Belarus, and father was Lithuanian, woman pierapiajeć man and all we spoke at home in Gudic.
Gudai is a famous ethnonym. Used to refer to many things over the history of the region. Usually connected to Goths who once lived there. Here seems to refer to Belarusian speech.
pierapiajeć is a new verb me, apparently means “what a women can do to a man to make him speak Gudic”.
Carbon copy:
I’m glad to say we never had such a nasty experience with our trilingual (and a half: but I’m not sure which the half would be; maybe German or Portuguese) daughter. I always spoke to her in English, my wife always in Spanish, and her friends and teachers always in French. She never showed the slightest sign of being confused. Sometimes when speaking English she would come to a word she didn’t know in English and she would use a French word, but it was always obvious from the slight pauses before and after the inserted word that she knew perfectly well what she was doing. One of (many) things I learned from my daughter when she was a child is that children do not get confused by such things.
This thread has got me thinking how the Belarusian book could be translated into other languages effectively. I agree with the comment above that it would be very difficult in French: the French of Switzerland, Belgium or Quebec don’t differ enough, and Occitan and Haitian differ too much. Every Saturday I buy La Marseillaise, our local communist newspaper, which has a page in Provençal. When I try to read this I find that a knowledge of French is very little help, whereas a knowledge of Castilian helps a lot (Catalan would be much better, if I had more knowledge of Catalan).
What about that transitional speech called “Franco-Provencal” on old (I think) linguistic maps?
This thread has got me thinking how the Belarusian book could be translated into other languages effectively.
Catalan would work for Spanish, I think. Brazilian Portuguese could probably work for European Portuguese, and possibly vice versa.
German and (to a lesser extent) Italian have so many (and so divergent) dialects that the hard part might be finding one that isn’t too distinct from the standard.
German and (to a lesser extent) Italian have so many (and so divergent) dialects that the hard part might be finding one that isn’t too distinct from the standard.
For German, you could probably use a mesolect like Berlinerisch, which is different enough that people would notice the difference, and close enough to the standard to be parsable by the average reader. It has been used e.g. to render the non-standard speech in “My Fair Lady”.
But it wouldn’t come close to the situation with Belarusian – a literary standard used by urban nationalist intellectuals and dialects spoken by villagers, while most of the population use the former imperial language (Russian) in daily life. There is literature in German dialects, but for the average reader, its connotations are folklorist or humorist, not ideas of national aspiration. It’s “down home”; high literature is supposed to be written in Standard German.
I think Spanish would work for Portuguese. In my experience Portuguese speakers can read Spanish with ease, and don’t have much trouble with understanding it when spoken. It wouldn’t work in the other direction: Spanish speakers find spoken Portuguese (especially European) unintelligible, and make heavier weather of reading it than I think is justified.
Arpitan nowadays, cognate with alpin; of course the actual speakers (who are few these days) call it and its local varieties patouès. It would not be feasible as an L language for French, though possibly so for Italian (which has an embarrassment of L riches anyway).
pierapiajeć
This is the one and only document (in several copies) on the Web in which this word appears. However, GT renders it as fuck in isolation; when asked to translate the whole passage as Polish, the phrase comes out “a woman to eat [devour?] a man”.
“Is there Gaelic on you?”
This is literal translation of “An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?” (“Do you speak Gaelic?”)
Mulligan uses Gaelic grammar in English sentence
Only he doesn’t, at least not correctly: the Irish phrase above equates to “do you have?”.
Mulligan’s attempt at Stage Irish would instead mean something like “is there an Irish word for you?” (“an bhfuil Gaeilge ort?”).
It being Bloomsday, all errors are Mulligan’s alone, not those of Shem the Penman.
Le linn na 1980idí thugainn cuairt ar chol cheathrair le mo mháthair…
During the 80s I visited a cousin of my mother’s…
The verb is in the habitual past tense (-inn) not the simple past. So there were several visits of which what follows relates one. “I used to visit…”.
GT (Irish to Russian) gets this amusingly wrong:
В 80-е годы мы с мамой навестили двоюродного брата.
In the ’80s my mother and I visited [on one occasion] a cousin.
@per incuriam: If the pictures are to be believed, in recent years Bloomsday in Dublin seems to have turned up a substantial number of people in fetish gear (or at least borderline fetish gear). Joyce would have approved, I presume.
@pi
You are right. In the 80s I used visit…. But in English it sounds funny to me with the rest, which is not frequentative but one occasion. And “used visit” makes me think it is no longer happening (but maybe it is not????). So maybe “I often visited / visited several times.,,One summer day, we were…”
I think i want to clarify a few sociolinguistical details.
There are large numbers of adult learners (I think even in NI now, Irish is part of the school curriculum for people who want to learn Irish). (PlasticPaddy)
Belarusian is mandatory in Belarusian schools. 1 hour a week of the “other” langauge (1 hour of Russian in “Belarusian” school, 1 hour of Belarusian in a “Russian” school) in the first grade, some time later the number of hours for Belarusian and Russian langauge and literature becomes equal. Or so I read. They also spoke about possibly introducing teaching Belarusian history and geography in B., but they have canceled the plan.
The resulting proficiency must be not bad (languages are similar). To quote some guy from Quora:
“Of course I speak and read Belarusian easily, but knowledge of Belarusian is akin to knowledge of kung-foo – a master never uses it without a purpose.”
(and yes, I heard the interest to Irish has grown in NI since recently. )
LH:… the only people for whom Belarusian is the unmarked language are village people who almost certainly will not read this novel. The ONLY readers of the novel in the original will be people to whom Russian is utterly familiar and Belarusian is a much-mocked rural lect.
Mockery:
I have never heard nor seen a Belarusian person mocking Belarusian language. I think I would if I lived ther. Possible reasons for looking down upon it:
village – civilization
nationalism – antinationalism
useful – useless.
I think, “Belarusian” still has some affinity with “rural and unprestigeous” but it is countered by schooling (see above). I would rather expect arrogance towards villagers and dialects:(
I suspect Lukashenko’s relations with Belarusian are not unlike that of Muslim nationalists with Islam.
I think, the third axis, “useful vs. useless” is the most important for most people.
(Unless I missed it earlier): What would the Romance or Germanic equivalents be of Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, from the point of view of any of you here who speak these languages, in terms of subjective similarity? Are they like, say, Castilian, Argentine, and Chilean? Or German and two varieties of Yiddish?…
Readership: It must be mostly people who often read books in Belarusian… Also some people for whom it is one of a few novels that they ever tried.
[a small number of people who are more comfortable with Belarusian ]
[a large number of people who can very comfortably read in Belarusian but can read in Russian slightly faster]
[a large number of people who can comfortably read in Belarusian but still will come across new words]
[a smaller number of people for whom it takes an effort to read it]
The first group depends not only on what you speak, but also on what you read since childhood. I do not know. In pre-Khrushchev Belarus the vast majority of books published in Belarus were published in Belarusian (but there was import). Now the vast majority of titles are published in Russian. 15% of titles in Belarusian in 2018. I think, less than 10% a few years before. The decline in publishing was not monotonous. The situation is not that there is nothing to read in B. but there are too many interesting things that you only can found in R.
Conclusion: I think LH is right that for most readers B. is marked – but I also think, only slightly so. A different story is that a “reader” (actual) is not the same as the person who the book is addressed to (who the author has in mind).
Village – city:
I think here LH exaggerates:( Educated villagers – in the sense “readers”, not in the sense “degree holders” – are less unusual here than in many third world countries. Books are accessible.
My freind’s father asked his school teahcer if he has anything to read about the calculus of variations (Brett knows why: someone told him about Lagrangian formulation of mechanics and he thought it is cool). He is a smart man, but the point is that it was a village school and his parents divorced when he got to the university, bacause their neighbours’ son went to university and became a drunkard and his father thought it is a very bad idea;)
They remarried two month later “when grandfather got hungry”.
The bottom line is that our powerty does not mean lack of education. And the Internet: villages are exploring it enthusiastically since 00s. There are most certainly some rural readers in Grodno’s countryside.
They of course are minority – Belarusian speakers and rural population are a minority anyway! – but….
Look, my freinds befriended some (harshly persecuted in Soviet times) sect. The story is that some peasant gave away his property and went to preach the end fo the world. It is one of hundres such sects from tsarist times but the end of the world came immediately, in the form of revolution. Many of them were killed in 20s. The guy recommended to abstain from childbirth and sex, but as the end of the world was slow, some of survivors decided to reproduce – and of course, only they left any offspring. They moved to a shithole, but then many died and were tortured durig the Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign.
And the thing is, the guy my freinds communicated the most with, he advised them to avoid radio (Antichrist etc.). But he loved Master and Margarita:)
I think here LH exaggerates
Mais oui, c’est mon métier.
Actually the guy was a realist.
TV and radio are indeed better avoided (whether they are controlled by demonic forces or not).
And Bulgakov is just good literature and not demonic forces at all.
That he once was crucified changes nothing, Christ was a realist as well.
Sadly, i have never met the guy.
Don’t feel bad; I’ve never met him either.
Le linn na 1980idí thugainn cuairt ar chol cheathrair le mo mháthair…
Language Hat:
Is that definitely wrong, or is the Irish you gave it ambiguous? That’s only part of the original sentence. If I enter the entire sentence from the column and ask for Irish to English*, it produces the correct translation:
But if I give it only the partial sentence above, it produces:
The online dictionary tells me that le has a lot of meanings, including “4. (a) In company with.” and “8. (a) (Relationship)”, so I wonder if both “… with my mother” and “… of my mother” are legitimate translations of the sentence up to mháthair? Or is there something I don’t know about that would rule that out?
*I’m guessing you asked for Irish to Russian to see if it got the right verb aspect in Russian? But of course it wasn’t trained on an Irish-Russian corpus, it’s really doing Irish to English to Russian—and in English the simple past isn’t necessarily wrong here. As PP discusses, a sensitive translator might indicate the change in aspect, but PP’s suggested translation involves adding something that wasn’t in the original, which is too much to expect from a machine.
To demonstrate that it goes through English, try translating words that are homonyms in English. For Irish séala (‘seal’, as in wax seal), it gives Russian тюлень (‘seal’, marine mammal).
(тюлень comes from Sami, says Wiktionary, citing Vasmer. Not many words from Sami in Russian!)
You’re right about everything, of course, but I just put in the part per incuriam quoted without even reflecting whether it was a complete sentence. Thanks for the correction/explanation!
John, I just meant, I thought I will see the guy some day (he is a freind of my friends after all) and then the guy died. I tend to feel sad in such situations. (Obviously I would feel more sad otherwise, that’s normal)
But if I give it only the partial sentence above, it produces:
During the 1980s we visited a cousin with my mother …
The online dictionary tells me that le has a lot of meanings, including “4. (a) In company with.” and “8. (a) (Relationship)”, so I wonder if both “… with my mother” and “… of my mother” are legitimate translations of the sentence up to mháthair? Or is there something I don’t know about that would rule that out?
That’s quite right.
But for some reason GT changes the singular to the plural (perhaps it took a detour through French: avec ma mère on est allé visiter…).
@PlasticPaddy: “These languages [Ukrainian and Belarusian] never developed a literary standard (or the rural speakers were untouched by it).”
Rather, Belarusian was a late developer, or its Renaixença started late and its outcome remains uncertain. The language extensively used in the administration of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) is often referred to as (a register of) Old Belarusian but also as Old Ukrainian or simply Ruthenian. However, it fell into disuse as the chancery language as Polish had replaced it by the end of the XVII century. As SFReader says, Polish and/or Polonized landowners and estate managers in Belarus could still speak Belarusian because it was the language of their peasants, their servants and their children’s nannies. By 1917, it was not yet obvious that it would ever recover as a literary or administrative language.
Baudouin de Courtenay – a prominent advocate for minority language rights and linguistic diversity both in the Russian Empire and, later, in Poland – wrote in 1913 that, while Belarusians should be free to create and use their own literary language if they wished, he did not expect them to take that road. Considering the potential re-opening of the Vilnius university, Baudouin expected the student body to consist largely of Belarusians so one language of instruction, in his view, would be the literary language closest to Belarusian, that is, Russian. (Lithuanian and Polish would also be used, and possibly Yiddish, although he did not elaborate much further.) I wonder if he changed his mind later on, when Belarusian started to be used for all purposes in Soviet Belarus in the 1920s.
That didn’t last long. With the advent of cultural revolution in 1929-30, Belarusian and its linguists became tangled in the (invented) SVB conspiracy and accused of aiming at Polonization; as Terry Martin writes, “Language and terror were linked.”
“Ruthenians” were a minority in Austria-Hungarian Galicia, where Poles were the dominant group. According to report, the 1847 rebellion (a year ahead of the rest) ended when Ruthenians delivered a cartload of noble Polish heads to the Austrians. I’ve seen the Ruthenians described as Ukrainians.
The historian who reported that, whose name I forget for the moment, was famous for his anecdotal approach. (And so am I, on my lesser way).
Austria’s-Hungarian ethnic politics is a thing in itself. It gave us Fiorello LaGuardia, an Italian-Hungarian Jew (more or less).
“That didn’t last long.”
The last thing I would want to do is reverse-engineering Stalin’s brain to make sense of his national policies (and also to make predictions: “what he would have done if not WWII?”). But:
– secondary schools very massively Belarusian-medium (~90%) during the whole decade (30s).
– when Yiddish schools were closed (again, towards WWII), they became Belarusian rather than Russian, I think.
– the nationalist scheme (Russian vs. Belarusian) does not include Yiddish. A good half of urban population spoke Yiddish:/
– the shift to Russian in administration is also (I think… I can check) not early 30s, rather towards 40s.
(- I do not know what was happening in higher education. The langauge of higher education affects situation seriously)
– at least is Uzbekistan it looked like “Uzbekistan for Uzbeks”. Deportation of Tajik speakers to Tajikistan, and a policy of…well, hiding its internal diversity that still continues (a Tajik speaker from Uzbeksitan said to me that with the new president situation is changing but I do not follow the developments). By comparision in 1920s they would develop literature even in such communities and langauges as “Persian(s)” (former Iranian Shiah slaves of Bukhara). I suspect that with Belarusia the plan could be similar: Belarusian schools were closed in Smolensk region (a Belarusian-speaking but Russian administratively), while in Belarus they closed Yiddish schools.
Right, it’s not that Belarusian was suppressed in favor of Russian, but those who were professionally concerned with supporting it (and probably promoting features that distinguished it from Russian, though I’m not familiar with the details) were suppressed, and I’m guessing that didn’t help the long-term future of the language.
“, but those who were professionally concerned with supporting it”
Yes.
12 слов, помогающих понять культуру Беларуси
Includes мова. Don’t miss the “Карта Беларуси. Минск, 1918 год,” which has Курляндія to the west and Велікарасея to the east.
The classic Ethnographic Map of Belorussian племя. (people?): Belorussian Dialects, by Karsky, 1903.
A large modern version can be found in Wikipedia, but it is redrawn. As I see, dialect borders are just a bit different.
And Ethnographic Map of European Russia, by Rittich: retromap, Wiki (retromap.ru has convenient zoom, Wikipedia is one huge file).
This is the one and only document (in several copies) on the Web in which this word appears. However, GT renders it as fuck in isolation; when asked to translate the whole passage as Polish, the phrase comes out “a woman to eat [devour?] a man”.
Eureka. It was of course перапяець (Russian перепоёт) “will oversing” which means will outsing.
Aha! Well found.
Sounds like a reference to Russian (and apparently Belarusian) proverb “The night cuckoo bird will always out-sing a day-bird”.
Meaning a wife has greater influence on her husband than anyone he meets during the day.
Maybe. Or convergence. I think “who will outsing who” exists as a metaphor in Russian outside of the proverb and could be the common origin for both. Hard to tell.
I did not see what the word means because of the Polish orthography. Subconsciously I believe, that a prefix can’t be more than 4 letters long, so I could not see a prefix in piera🙁 Today I remembered how my freind was mocking Lukashenko’s Belarusian phonology:
Я пиратрахивал парламент и буду пиратрахивать!
For someone with Moscow accent it sounds as “I have [repeatedly] pira-screwed the Parliament and I will keep pira-screwing it!”, with obscure but clearly emphatic prefix pira- and unnecessary imperfective suffix -va-.
But it is “I have [repeatedly] shuffled (or: re-shaken. Not sure what he meant…) the Parliament and I will keep re-shuffling {or: re-shaking) it!”, .
The whole difference is p’e-r’etr’a-kh’ivat’ vs. p’e-ratra-kh’ivat’
Pira- is how my freind rendered piera-.
Stravinsky said that Polish is intelligible to Russians, except that you keep hearing people talking about things like the stink of perfume.
“I have [repeatedly] pira-screwed the Parliament and I will keep pira-screwing it!”
“But who is fucking us? Nobody!” —Menachem Begin
On the other hand, GT identifies the sentence as Russian and turns it into “I have pirated the Parliament and I will pirate!”; idiomatically the second clause would be “I will continue to pirate it!” If I force GT to treat it as Belarusian, I get exactly the same result.
@drasvi: “For someone with Moscow accent it sounds as ‘I have [repeatedly] pira-screwed the Parliament and I will keep pira-screwing it!'”…
I don’t think it’s as complicated as that. Most Russians correctly perceived “pira” or “piera” as a regional/dialect/non-standard pronunciation of pere-. It’s only when the minimal pair tryakh-/trakh- was involved that Luka’s Belarusian hard r produced a comic effect. He meant to say “I’ll keep re-shuffling or re-shaking the parliament” but sounded like “I’ll keep screwing them one after another.”
Polish written in Cyrillic (such texts exist) looks about as different from Russian as Ukrainian.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/szhaman/7191632/784084/784084_original.jpg
Alex K. maybe you are right. I only heard it as rendered by my friend, with clear /i/. I did not hear pere-trakhivat’. I understood that what is meant is peretr’akhivat’.
—
I just remembered as my cousin from a that used to be Chernigov, Gomel and Bryansk region in different times (now in Russia) came to Moscow and imitated what is though to be Moscow accent. Namely Maaaaskva.
Becuse Moscow is famous with “a-kanye”.
It did not stop her that she is a native speaker of a dialect where the feature is more prominent.
@John, my freind said piratrakhival, it contains pirat “pirate”.
But the actual Belarusian pronunciation is pera-
Googling “piajeć” gives a vaguely erotical rhyme:
A dzied babu razuvaŭ, / Pad nožačku pahliadaŭ:
— Oj, babuĺka, što za źvier, / Ja ž bajusia, kab nia zjeŭ.
— Ci ty ŭ liesie nia byvaŭ, / Čornych źviaroŭ nia vidaŭ? / Ty, dziaduĺka, nia rabiej, / Heta ptuška — salaviej…/ Jon i śviščać i piajeć, / I spakoju nia dajeć.