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I imagine a lot of Hatters already know about the “Wicked Bible” of 1631, which (unfortunately for the printer) included the commandment “Thou shalt commit adultery.” But it’s still worth reading this Priceonomics account, which is lively and full of interesting details; my favorite is this timeless rant by the Archbishop of Canterbury, “who’d been disgraced and criticized as a result of the typo”:

I knew the time when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors and the best correctors were gotten being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the best, but now the paper is nought, the composers boys, and the correctors unlearned.

Yea and verily, ’tis even so today!

I ran across this word in my New Great Russian-English Dictionary, where I happened to notice (near the bottom of p. 2912) this entry:

уна́у m indecl zool unau, two-towed sloth (Choloepus didactylus).

First, of course, I was amused by the “two-towed”; then I wondered about the word. The OED entry is from 1921:

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈjuːnɔː/ , U.S. /ˈjʊˌnaʊ/
Etymology: Brazilian of the Island of Maranhão.

Zool.

The South American two-toed sloth, Cholopus didactylus.
Adopted by Buffon from C. d’Abbeville Mission des Pères Capucins, etc. (1614) 252. Of the two kinds there mentioned by the names of Unaü and Unaü ouassou the former is Buffon’s Ai, the latter his Unau.
1774 O. Goldsmith Hist. Earth IV. 343 Of the sloth there are two different kinds,..the one, which in its native country is called the unan [sic], having only two claws upon each foot.
1834 H. McMurtrie tr. G. de Cuvier Animal Kingdom (abridged ed.) 93 Only one species [of Bradypus] is known, the Unau.., less uniform in its organisation than the Aï.
1872 G. M. Humphry Observ. Myology 21 A recess and dimple in the astragalus of Unau and of Aï.

The etymology is blatantly unsatisfactory; fortunately the AHD includes the word: “[Portuguese, from Tupí uná, lazy.]” And it also gives the pronunciation “oo’nou” (OO-now), which I shall adopt as my own, since I prefer to keep initial u- untainted by an unnecessary y- if I can.

The word doesn’t seem to have been used much in recent decades, but Google Books did turn up The Furry Animal Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallotta (1991),which devotes a whole page to it: “U is for Unau. The Unau is a two-toed sloth. Sloths are one of the slowest animals in the world….”

I meant to post this months ago, but efficiency is not my strong suit: perennial LH favorite Boris Dralyuk has an LARB review of Oliver Ready’s translation of Crime and Punishment, and it includes the kind of detailed analysis of passages I crave:

The challenges that this polyphony poses to a translator are staggering. The brave soul must shuttle back and forth between the gestalt — the great unwieldy whole — and its parts, sinking into scenes of violence and casual terror, into fever dreams, into the dramas — little and big — of conversations in tenements and police stations. Ready, who has a practiced ear for Russian dialect and a natural grace with English, is exceptionally deft at navigating these challenges. I’ll point to one instance in which a translator must take note of a number of elements (the structure of dream logic, the use of dialect and folkloric reference, and vividness of imagery) and be honest to them all without bursting the reader’s suspension of disbelief — without, as it were, waking the reader up. In Part I, Chapter 5, Raskolnikov dreams of a scene from childhood — a cart-driver has overloaded his cart with passengers and is beating his nag, urging her to move when she clearly can’t manage:

“Daddy! Daddy!” he shouts to his father. “What are they doing, Daddy? Daddy, they’re beating the poor little horse!”

“Come on, boy!” says the father. “Just drunken idiots fooling around: off we go, boy, don’t look!” — and tries to lead him away, but he breaks free of his grasp and, quite beside himself, runs to the horse. But the poor little horse is in a bad way. She’s struggling for breath, stops, gives another tug and almost falls.

“Flog ‘er till she drops!” shouts Mikolka. “She’s asking for it. I’ll flog ‘er dead!”

“Where’s your fear of God, you mad beast?” yells an old man in the crowd.

A great deal goes right in Ready’s treatment of this nightmare, which continues for another two pages. The father’s pained and abashed dismissal, “Just drunken idiots fooling around,” which he delivers in choked-off fragments in Russian (“пьяные, шалят, дураки”), sounds far fresher and produces a far more poignant effect than previous efforts: “They are drunken and foolish, they are in fun” (Constance Garnett, 1914); “They’re drunk, playing mischief, the fools” (David McDuff, 1991); “They’re drunk, they’re playing pranks, the fools” (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1992). “They are in fun,” is, of course, hopelessly dated, while “playing mischief” and “pranks,” though close translations of the verb “шалить,” are not really appropriate to the situation or to the father’s register or mental state.

The “mad beast,” too, is an inspired choice. The Russian original has the old man calling Mikolka a “леший (leshii),” that is, a “wood demon” — a creature from the Russian pagan past, which worked its way into the syncretic faith of the village but, by the 19th century, was, for the most part, an element of idiomatic speech. For instance, to send someone to the wood demon is to send them to hell. Under certain circumstances, where the wood demon’s attributes are central to the exposition of a scene, a translator might want to preserve his presence — but here, where he is very much part of an idiom, suggesting wildness and inhumanity, Ready’s rendition works perfectly, allowing us to speed through the passage nervously, just as we ought to.

There’s much more at the link, but that gives you an idea. From now on, when people ask me what translation I suggest reading, I’ll know what to say. (By the way, Dralyuk is preparing for publication a collection of translations of Russian prose and verse reacting to the year 1917; I’ll be reporting on it in due course.)

I learned of the expression “give cards and spades” from a comment by John Cowan, and of course I looked it up. It’s not in the OED, so I tried the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and sure enough:

give cards and spades to allow an advantage; to outdo despite an advantage
1888 in F[armer] & H[enley] II 37: Artie found a Chinaman out in ‘Frisco who could give him cards and spades and beat him out. 1903 A. Adams Log of a Cowboy 274: That little hole back there could give Natchez-under-the-hill cards and spades, and then outhold her as a tough town. [...] 1936 J.T. Farrell World I Never Made 97: None better. She can deal out cards and spades to most gals.

I’m curious both as to its origin (spades are, after all, cards) and to what extent it’s still used, or at least known. Are you familiar with it?

Sorry, that’s a garden-path headline: “disappearing” is not a noun but a verb. The, the definite article, is softly and silently vanishing away. And not only in English, according to Mark Liberman’s Log post:

For the past century or so, the commonest word in English has gradually been getting less common. Depending on data source and counting method, the frequency of the definite article THE has fallen substantially — in some cases at a rate as high as 50% per 100 years.

At every stage, writing that’s less formal has fewer THEs, and speech generally has fewer still, so to some extent the decline of THE is part of a more general long-term trend towards greater informality. But THE is apparently getting rarer even in speech, so the change is more than just the (normal) shift of writing style towards the norms of speech.

There appear to be weaker trends in the same direction, at overall lower rates, in German, Italian, Spanish, and French.

I’ll lay out some of the evidence for this phenomenon, mostly collected from earlier LLOG posts. And then I’ll ask a few questions about what’s really going on, and why and how it’s happening.

The evidence is convincing, and the phenomenon is (to me) astonishing. Why is it happening? Mark offers several possibilities, none of which “seem empirically very promising.” And there’s a follow-up post showing that the same thing is happening in Dutch. At least this is one problem Russians don’t have to worry about.

I haven’t even finished reading Masha Gessen’s NYRB review of Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia by Emmanuel Carrère (translated from the French by John Lambert), but I was so amused and horrified by this passage I had to post it immediately:

At the same time, Carrère preserves the fibs and the factual errors of Limonov’s writing and adds many of his own. He has Andrei Sakharov exiled to Gorky for fifteen years in 1973—in fact, the Russian dissident was exiled in 1980 and was allowed to return home to Moscow in 1986. This is just one of dozens of inaccuracies: generally speaking, dates and figures in the book are more likely to be wrong than right. In addition, Carrère, the descendant of Russian émigrés and the son of a Kremlinologist, offers a variety of interpretations of Russian culture and language that bear the imprint of generations of distortion. Some are innocuous: he claims, for example, that “in the period following [World War II], cities aren’t called cities but ‘population concentrations’”—when in fact “population concentration” is simple bureaucratese for all cities, towns, and villages.

Some of his renditions are almost comically wrong. Carrère, for example, writes that Limonov’s father worked as a “nacht-kluba, which you could translate as ‘nightclub manager,’ but which here means organizing leisure and cultural activities for the soldiers.” In fact, Limonov’s father worked on an army base as a nachalnik kluba, which is unrelated to any sinister German-sounding word for “night,” and translates simply as “club director.” In a detailed passage, he invents a convoluted version of the collective drinking binge, which he says is called zapoi—but that is simply the Russian word for “drinking binge,” which can be engaged in alone or in a group and has no attendant rituals other than the drinking itself.

A Russian-speaking reader could spend hours criticizing Carrère’s translations of Russian words: improbably, he manages to misuse just about every Russian term he includes in the book. Add the anachronisms and misstated dates, and you are faced with a most uneasy question: How much do facts matter?

My answer to the last question is, of course, “they matter a lot,” and I pity readers who take Carrère’s “pseudobiography” as gospel truth, but I do enjoy trouvailles like nacht-kluba.

Exciting news for anyone interested in either the Gothic language or the history of the Crimean Goths: five (brief) examples of Gothic graffiti have been found on the cornice of a basilica and dated to the 9th-10th centuries. The paper is Андрей Юрьевич Виноградов, Максим Игоревич Коробов, «Готские граффити из Мангупской базилики» [Andrei Vinogradov and Maksim Korobov, "Gothic graffiti from the Mangup basilica"], Средние века 76 (2015) № 3-4: 57-75 (the longest graffito is reproduced on p. 64, the others on later pages); since the paper is in Russian, I’ll summarize their conclusions here for those who don’t read it:

1) The existence of the Gothic language in the Crimean mountains in the 9th-10th centuries is confirmed, used side by side with Greek.
2) The Gothic language was written in Crimea and used for both quotation of biblical texts and private invocations and commemorations.
3) It was not used only by clerics.
4) This find represents the first proof of the use of Wulfila’s alphabet outside Italy and Pannonia, as well as of its use for practical purposes after the 6th century.
5) The quotation from the Psalms shows the acquaintance of the Crimean Goths with Wulfila’s Bible.
6) The liturgical texts are evidence of local church services in Gothic.
7) At least in the early Byzantine period, the Crimean Goths were part of the Gothic cultural world, and thus linked with the Goths of the Lower Danube region.
8) There is no apparent distinction between the language of the inscriptions and the previously known examples of Gothic.
9) The writing appears to be that of a learned scribe.
10) The epigraphic culture appears to be close to that of the local Byzantine culture.
11) Local Goths used both Byzantine and Gothic names.
12) There was a developed local viticulture.

Just one of those surprising etymologies that I can’t resist sharing:

in·kling (ĭng’klĭng)
[Probably alteration of Middle English (a) ningkiling, (a) hint, suggestion, possibly alteration of nikking, from nikken, to mark a text for correction, from nik, notch, tally, perhaps from variant of Old French niche, niche; see NICHE.]

And if you’re curious about niche:

[French, from Old French, from nichier, to nest (from Vulgar Latin *nīdicāre, from Latin nīdus, nest; see sed- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots) or from Old Italian nicchio, seashell (perhaps from Latin mītulus, mussel).]

And while I’m at it, I might as well quote the amusing Usage Note:

Niche was borrowed from French in the 1600s and Anglicized shortly thereafter. Many French borrowings have troublesome pronunciations, because most English speakers can’t speak French very well, if at all. Niche presents an interesting variation of this pattern. It was quickly converted into a comfortable English-sounding word, pronounced (nĭch) and rhyming with itch. But in the 1900s, people familiar with French thought that a word that looked French should sound French, and so the Francophone pronunciation (nēsh), rhyming with quiche, was revived. Some Americans consider this pronunciation to be an affectation; however, it is standard in Britain and is included in most American dictionaries. The hybrid pronunciation (nēch), which takes something from each version to rhyme with leech, is less favored, perhaps because it makes one look as though one doesn’t know what language one is speaking. In our 2005 survey, 69 percent of the Usage Panel found it unacceptable.

As I have said elsewhere, I use the comfortable English-sounding rhymes-with-itch pronunciation, but to each their own.

Mark Edmundson has a piece in the LARB that is well worth reading if you enjoy evocations of what it’s like to be a kid (and, of course, profanity). Here’s a taste:

Tanzio and I were Jesuits of profanity. We acquired new words steadily; we evaluated them according to their level of intensity and seriousness; we deployed them with and at each other. As time passed and I got to know more kids, the discourse on bad words unfolded further. When I was nine, I was often to be found sitting on the brick wall constructed by Tony’s grandpa, in company with a half dozen other kids theorizing about what might be the worst swear you could create. I think the prize went to terms that blended the super-sacred with the rankly vulgar: so that if you were in the mood to purchase a one-way to hell you might say something about a certain sort of act with the Virgin Mary.

[...]

Our parents would have been blown down flat like sailors in a typhoon if they heard us cursing. They would probably have been less shocked if we had run out of the local variety store with a fistful of cash swiped from the till, or made an inept try at setting fire to a parked car. They probably wouldn’t have been impressed by our theological disputes; and they would not have been in love with the way we denounced our teachers; but they would have burst into rage if they had heard us swear.

Things are probably different now, but that’s definitely how it was when I was a wee tyke. I’m afraid that towards the end Edmundson wanders off into standard thumb-sucking pseudo-profundity (“the movement toward the omnipresent profane is a move away from hope”), but up to that point it’s a delightful read. Thanks, Paul!

I’ve been reading Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300, and I found the following passage so sensible and interesting I thought I’d quote it here (it’s near the start of chapter 2, “Scripts and Languages”):

For the present purposes the relevant variants are East Slavonic and Church Slavonic. In Rus, East Slavonic and Church Slavonic were both written and spoken, though in the relationships between written and spoken they are like mirror images of each other. In origin East Slavonic was the spoken vernacular of the East Slavs of the lands of the Rus, while Church Slavonic was the written medium which was developed in the process of translating Scripture for West and (eventually, mainly) South Slavs. In usage, spoken Church Slavonic was a means to disseminate the written forms (e.g. through liturgy, through sermons, through recitation and reading aloud), while written East Slavonic derives from (which is not to say that it is identical to) speech. Initially distinct both geographically and culturally, East Slavonic and Church Slavonic form the outer parameters of most discussion about language in Rus. Like Common Slavonic, they are abstractions, and hence contentious: should they, for example, be regarded as distinct languages, or as variants of the same language? If viewed separately, is either of them in fact an entity, or do they, too, dissolve into their own subvariants? If viewed together, what is their interrelationship?

Pristine Church Slavonic (the Cyrillo-Methodian translations) and pristine East Slavonic (the speech of the East Slavs) are irrecoverable from direct contemporary evidence. ‘Old’ Church Slavonic is normally deduced from a more or less agreed ‘canon’ of somewhat later manuscripts (mostly from the eleventh century) which are deemed to reflect it most accurately. In practice, however, virtually all Church Slavonic manuscripts already contain hints of their own linguistic milieu, and over time Church Slavonic divides into increasingly pronounced regional variants, or dialects, dubbed ‘Russian Church Slavonic’, ‘Bulgarian Church Slavonic’ (or ‘Middle Bulgarian’), and so on. Nevertheless, the differences in written convention are too trivial to be interpreted as disintegration, and throughout the Middle Ages, Church Slavonic – in the legitimately capacious sense of the term – continued to serve as a written lingua franca for Orthodox Slavs. Spoken forms of East Slavonic (aka. ‘Old Russian’, ‘Old Ukrainian’, or the ingenious coinage ‘Rusian’) are of course unrecorded, because our only evidence is filtered through the selective and more or less conventionalised medium of writing. We see spoken East Slavonic as if through occasional gauze-covered holes in a screen. There is no way in which we can reconstruct, for example, the rhythms and nuances of an authentic domestic conversation. Nevertheless, the glimpses are sufficient to reveal certain general features, as well as certain distinctive regional features. Accidents of survival mean that we are particularly well informed about the Novgorodian version.

How different from one another were Church Slavonic and East Slavonic? Linguistic comparisons cover four main categories: sounds (phonology), word-forms (morphology), sentence structures (syntax), and vocabulary and meaning (lexis and semantics). The sounds of pristine Church Slavonic, reflecting South Slav pronunciation, would have been somewhat strange to the ear of an untutored East Slav at the time of the official Conversion of the Rus; and stranger still by the late twelfth or early thirteenth century as the loss of reduced vowels brought about major changes in the sound structures (and word-forms) of East Slavonic. However, this is to some extent a false contrast, since the sounds of pristine Church Slavonic are unlikely to have been imported intact together with the writing system. Church Slavonic is a written language, but this does not mean that the conventions of writing ‘are’ the language. For readers and their listeners in Rus, Church Slavonic probably had a strong local accent. Our notional untutored East Slav might have been even less struck by the morphological contrasts between his spoken vernacular and Church Slavonic. Inflected word-endings, for example, were broadly similar, and one could quite easily get used to the consistent alternatives in word-formation. More exotic was the way in which words were strung together in clauses and sentences. Devised for the purpose of translating from Greek, Church Slavonic was apt to mirror Greek rhetorical structures unfamiliar to spoken East Slavonic: complex structures of subordination, or the widespread use of participles. But perhaps most alien of all were many of the words themselves, and their meanings. Although Church Slavonic and East Slavonic shared a common core of vocabulary, Church Slavonic brought a mass of concepts which were wholly new to the East Slavs. It was saturated with words and expressions which had no precise precedent in any pre-literate variety of spoken Slavonic: words borrowed or calqued from Greek, or familiar Slavonic words imbued with unfamiliar connotations.

What, then, does our East Slav make of Church Slavonic? If he listens to a catalogue of his debts read from a piece of birch-bark, and then to the Lord’s Prayer, is he experiencing two languages, or one? Compare the following assertions by modern linguists: (i) ‘all the evidence says that Old Church Slavonic and Rusian belong to a single language’; (ii) ‘the most striking feature of East Slav writing is the juxtaposition of two languages’; (iii) ‘[the language reflected in early Novgorodian sources is] simply a dialect of the Late Common Slavonic language’; (iv) ‘we must accept that there were . . . two types of Early Russian literary language’. Some of these assertions relate to language in general, others specifically to written language, but the underlying question is the same.

Linguistic argument alone cannot produce an adequate answer. There is no purely quantitative measure – a particular number of distinct phonological, or morphological, or syntactic, or lexicographic features – which determines whether the Rus version of Church Slavonic and the written derivatives of East Slavonic should be regarded as separate languages. Linguists can plausibly assert that substantial elements of Church Slavonic might have been incomprehensible to an audience of ordinary East Slavs, but comprehensibility is not the paramount criterion. I find great difficulty in comprehending some varieties of writing and speaking in English (such as computer manuals, or specialist discourses on literary theory, or the Statutes and Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, or the dialogue in a Newcastle pub), but I have no difficulty accepting that the language is English. What matters is perception: the perception of those who see themselves as within – or outside – the linguistic community.To put it crudely: language does not define community; community defines language. The wider community of early Rus – the silent majority – cannot tell us what it thought, but for the community of articulate Christians there was no doubt: the whole point of Church Slavonic lay in its affinity with the native tongue, in the fact that it was not Latin or Greek or Hebrew, in the fact that it was therefore, in principle at least, accessible. No source ever suggests that there might be two written languages, or even that there might be different languages for writing and speaking: ‘The Slavonic tongue is one.’

I wish all my readers a happy new year — удачи всем и здоровья!