languagehat.com

The indefatigable John Cowan sent me this link about a remarkable man:

Linguist Ken Hale had a preternatural ability to learn new languages. “It was as if the linguistic faculty which normally shuts off in human beings at the age of 12 just never shut off in him,” said his MIT colleague Samuel Jay Keyser.

“It’s more like a musical talent than anything else,” Hale told The New York Times in 1997. “When I found out I could speak Navajo at the age of 12, I used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself.” Acquiring new languages became a lifelong obsession […]

He estimated that he could learn the essentials of a new language in 10 or 15 minutes, well enough to make himself understood, if he could talk to a native speaker (he said he could never learn a language in a classroom). He would start with parts of the body, he said, then animals and common objects. Once he’d learned the nouns he could start to make sentences and master sounds, writing everything down.

He devoted much of his time to studying vanishing languages around the world. He labored to revitalize the language of the Wampanoag in New England and visited Nicaragua to train linguists in four indigenous languages. In 2001 his son Ezra delivered his eulogy in Warlpiri, an Australian aboriginal language that his father had raised his sons to speak. “The problem,” Ken once told Philip Khoury, “is that many of the languages I’ve learned are extinct, or close to extinction, and I have no one to speak them with.”

“Ken viewed languages as if they were works of art,” recalled another MIT colleague, Samuel Jay Keyser. “Every person who spoke a language was a curator of a masterpiece.”

Lucky him!

I’ve found references to a couple of African scripts that I thought were interesting enough to post; I’ll link to the Wikipedia articles and quote the first bit of each:

Nsibidi (also known as nsibiri, nchibiddi or nchibiddy) is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that is apparently an ideographic script, though there have been suggestions that it includes logographic elements. The symbols are at least several centuries old—early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region, with a range of dates from 400 to 1400 CE. […] The origin of the word nsibidi is not known.

The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by King Njoya of Cameroon at the turn of the 19th century. They are notable for evolving from a pictographic system to a partially alphabetic syllabic script in the space of 14 years, from 1896 to 1910. Bamum type was cast in 1918, but the script fell into disuse around 1931. A project began around 2007 to revive the Bamum script.

Parul Sehgal reviews (for the NY Times) several books by Leonora Carrington, a writer I was unfamiliar with; her story is a fascinating one:

Carrington is also a member of a select group of writers — exophonic writers, they’re now called — who work outside their mother tongues. Her memoir, “Down Below,” has perhaps the most unusual translation story I’ve heard. After her first husband, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, was sent to a concentration camp, Carrington suffered a nervous breakdown and began to believe that by purging she could purify the world. She was sent to an asylum in which treatment amounted to a form of torture: She had artificial abscesses induced in her thighs to keep her from walking and was administered drugs that simulated electroshock therapy. She first wrote of these experiences in English in 1942 and promptly lost the manuscript. Later, she told the story to friends in Mexico City, one of whom jotted it down in French. It was then translated back into English to be excerpted in a Surrealist journal in 1944. The blurriness in tone is partly intentional and partly, one suspects, a consequence of being much handled. Many of her pointed short stories were also written in her rudimentary French or Spanish. Her tentativeness with the languages accounts for the “delinquent pleasure of her voice,” Marina Warner writes in a new introduction to “Down Below.” “Unfamiliarity does not cramp her style; rather it sharpens the flavor of ingenuous knowingness that so enthralled the Surrealists.”

There follows a discussion of other writers who changed languages, including Nabokov, Conrad, Yuko Otomo, Jhumpa Lahiri, Emil Cioran (“When I changed my language, I annihilated my past. I changed my entire life”), and Yiyun Li (who “has written that she adopted English in her 20s with a kind of absoluteness that was tantamount to suicide”); then:

The opposite ambition spurred on Carrington. Other languages seem to afford her more life, more lives. She relished feeling ungainly and unsure. Far from feeling impoverished by a smaller vocabulary she felt liberated. “The fact that I had to speak a language I was not acquainted with was crucial,” she wrote of her time in Spain. “I was not hindered by a preconceived idea of the words, and I but half understood their modern meaning. This made it possible for me to invest the most ordinary phrases with a hermetic significance.” […]

She was a writer who insisted on more veils, more masks. It’s said she loved the Egyptian room at the Met, that the sight of all those tightly wrapped mummies was deeply reassuring to her, that she loved basement apartments and living below the ground. Every language she learned seemed to offer a new place to conceal herself, to hide in plain sight — but never out of cowardice. In her elaborately surreal English, in her simple French and Spanish, she kept revisiting her places of fear, almost compulsively retelling her story. “The more strongly I smelled the lion,” she ends one story, “the more loudly I sang.”

The more such writers I learn about, the more interesting the phenomenon seems. Thanks, Trevor!

The following question was posted on the reddit AskHistorians forum:

The state of Arkansas was apparently originally known as the Territory of Arkansaw [sic]. Why would they have changed the spelling from Arkansaw to Arkansas despite the latter not resembling the name’s pronunciation?

User ScallopOolong responded with a long comment beginning:

George R. Stewart has a whole chapter on this general topic in Names on the Land. He says that Arkansas is the only state name “about which pronunciation and spelling ever rose to be a major issue”. Arkansas/Arkansaw, originally referring to the river, was part of the Louisiana Purchase and, like many other place names in the region, Americans adopted the French pronunciation (or at least an approximation of it). And the name was often, but not always, spelled accordingly: Arkansaw.

In 1819 Congress passed a law creating a territory spelled, according to the Act of Congress, Territory of Arkansaw. In the very same year a New Yorker named William Woodruff moved to the new capital of Arkansaw Territory. Woodruff felt very strongly about language and spelling. He even attacked Noah Webster for including the word “lengthy” in his dictionary, for clearly not being a real word. Woodruff was also a printer by trade and set up a newspaper in the new Arkansaw Territory. In the first issue he printed the Act of Congress that had created Arkansaw Territory. In this Act the word “Arkansaw” occurred eight times. Woodruff felt very strongly it ought to be Arkansas, which was still a common alternate spelling. In his newspaper’s printing of the Act of Congress he changed all eight mentions of Arkansaw to Arkansas.

The population of the territory was only about 10,000, and very many could not read. And most had little to no preference over the spelling of the territorial name. In any case, Woodruff’s newspaper had a huge influence on this particular issue. As Stewart puts it, “Apparently even Congress forgot about [their] original spelling, and later bills used Arkansas”. Reprintings of the Act of Congress quickly started spelling it Arkansas, even official, federal printings. In short, official documents “simply changed the spelling without comment, as if a mere clerical error were being corrected”.

There are a great many more details which I will elide to get to this part:
[Read more…]

I would guess that among English-speaking readers, Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli [translated as The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants] is the least-known of Dostoevsky’s novels — certainly far less known than his works of the 1860s, but also less so than his early novellas, Poor Folk and The Double and so on. (It seems to be well known among Russians, judging from the number of dramatizations available on YouTube.) In a way, this is understandable, since it’s unquestionably a slighter work than the ones to follow, but Dostoevsky was very pleased with it, considering it the best thing he’d done up till then (“I put into it my soul, my flesh and blood”), and I found it well worth reading. It is, though, a very odd novel, and I kept changing my mind about it as I read.

At first, it seems to be structured like a mystery. The narrator, Sergei, an orphan fresh out of college, is urgently invited by his kindly uncle Egor Rostanev to his country estate at Stepanchikovo, where he is told he is to marry a wonderful young woman. He puts off the visit for a while, but finally grits his teeth and goes; on the way, he meets an irascible fellow, Bakhcheev, who has just come from Stepanchikovo and tells him a former hanger-on and fool, Foma Fomich Opiskin, has taken despotic control of the entire family — he himself has quarreled with Opiskin and left in a huff, though he admits he’ll probably be back the next day.

So we are immediately faced with two enigmas: why has Rostanev summoned him to marry some woman he’s never met, and why is he putting up with this Opiskin fellow? When Sergei gets there he tries to investigate, but his uncle keeps telling him “I’ll explain it all later” and running off on one pretext or another. Eventually we learn that his mother and Opiskin are trying to force the poor but beautiful young governess Nastenka out of the house because they’re afraid Rostanev will marry her, so he’s decided if Sergei marries her instead she’ll be able to stay. None of this makes any sense, of course, but it’s told in a highly comic way, through young Sergei’s disillusioned eyes (he sees through Opiskin as soon as he meets him), and it’s a lot of fun to read.

The problem is that Opiskin is too strong a character for the book he finds himself in. He’s a magnificent creation, proud and tortured and humiliating everyone else to make up for the humiliations he’s suffered; to some extent he’s based on Gogol in his late crazed-moralizer phase, and he serves as an exorcism of both Gogol — who had been a strong influence on Dostoevsky, as on all Russian writers of the 1840s — and the high-minded intelligentsia of which Dostoevsky had been a part before he was sent to prison and Siberia. I suspect he is based on people Dostoevsky knew during that time, fellow prisoners who took out their sufferings on those weaker than themselves. He’s unforgettable, but the other characters seem pale next to him, and he’s so vicious it was hard for me to stay in the requisite comic mood. (This may be in part because I’m not Russian.) It’s fine for him to humiliate Rostanev and various fools and hangers-on, but when he is brutal to the faithful old servant Gavrila and the beautiful and somewhat simple-minded boy Falalei, this reader’s smile freezes. Opiskin gets a very satisfying comeuppance, but it doesn’t last long, and he winds up staying on as the evil deity of the household.

Frankly, I found it unbelievable that Rostanev, a former hussar, would put up with endless humiliations from this nasty fellow and continue to regard him as wise and benevolent; in fact, once the plot settled in I didn’t actually believe anything that happened — it has the air of a Moliere play in which you’re supposed to accept all the silliness and laugh at the folly of humanity. But this is Dostoevsky, not Moliere, and he’s thinking not of folly but of good and evil. Before long he’ll figure out how to create plots worthy of his characters and obsessions, but it’s very interesting to watch him working it out as he goes. If you have any interest in Dostoevsky, I recommend giving this book a try; just don’t expect Crime and Punishment.

I’ve just discovered one of those literary allusions that were common currency in the 19th century but that have largely been forgotten since. In his once well-known novella Atala (1801), Chateaubriand has his hero say:

Le cœur le plus serein en apparence ressemble au puits naturel de la savane Alachua: la surface en paroît calme et pure, mais quand vous regardez au fond du bassin, vous apercevez un large crocodile, que le puits nourrit dans ses eaux.

The apparently most serene heart resembles a natural well in the Alachua savannah; its surface seems clear and calm, but when you look down at the bottom of the pool, you see a large crocodile, which the well nourishes in its waters.

That’s a great image, and it’s based on fact; in What is the Alachua Savannah? we read: “Upon visiting Alachua Sink, Bartram was amazed by the number and size of the alligators, ‘so abundant that, if permitted by them, I could walk over any part of the basin and the river upon their heads.’” (By the way, although it’s irrelevant to Chateaubriand I can’t resist noting that the modern Florida place name Alachua is pronounced /əˈlætʃu.eɪ/ [ə-LATCH-oo-ay]; according to Wikipedia it’s from a “Native American word meaning ‘sinkhole’ in either the Muskogee or Timucua languages.”) It was more or less translated by Batyushkov in his 1810 poem Счастливец [The lucky man]:

Сердце наше кладезь мрачной:
Тих, покоен сверху вид;
Но спустись ко дну… ужасно!
Крокодил на нём лежит!

Our heart is a dark well:
Its surface appearance is quiet and peaceful,
But if you go down to the bottom… horrible!
A crocodile lies on it!

And it was well enough known in 1859 that Dostoevsky could get a laugh in his Selo Stepanchikovo [The Village of Stepanchikovo] by having Foma Opiskin attribute it to Shakespeare. But does it survive at all? Have any of you heard of it?

The University of Cambridge has produced an English Dialects App that is allowing them to track how dialects are doing:

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.

The English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s. […]

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for ‘a small piece of wood stuck under the skin’, ‘spelk’ instead of Standard English ‘splinter’.

On the controversial word “scone”:

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

Fascinating stuff; thanks, Pat!

For ages I’ve been saving this American Scholar link, in which Stephanie Bastek compares two versions of the same passage from “Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s modernist masterpiece, Cré na Cille,” Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson’s translation, called Graveyard Clay, and Alan Titley’s, called The Dirty Dust. The first begins “. . . Nóra Filthy-Feet standing for election! Good God above, they’ve lost all respect for themselves in this cemetery if the best they can offer is Nóra of the Fleas from Mangy Field,” the second “. . . Toejam Nora standing for election! Jesus Christ Almighty, they have no respect left for themselves in this cemetery, especially if they can’t put up anyone else only Fleabag Nora from Gort Ribbuck.” I love that sort of comparison, and if you do too, hie thee to the link.

And now Trevor sends me this interview with John Donatich, Director at Yale University Press, about the two versions:

“The book was so difficult to translate in the first place. The stakes were made higher as this would most likely be the first exposure many global readers might have to this purported classic. We had to make sure to get it right. That said, we felt the book could stand two different kinds of interpretations, much like a great musical piece might stand several interpretations: a rigorous, elegant and faithful version and one that took more expressive risks.”

I have two books by Ó Cadhain, but alas, not Cré na Cille; one of these days I’ll have to remedy that. I love modernist masterpieces!

Joonas Vakkilainen provides some very interesting information about Finnish on Quora:

Written standard Finnish is an artificial construction which is based on a mixture of dialects, not on any specific dialect. There is no prestige language that would be the norm of formal written Finnish. Because of the constructed nature of the written language, there is an organisation that gives the norms for it. The board of Finnish language (suomen kielen lautakunta) consists of specialists of Finnish language, and they ponder the norms of written Finnish and can change them. These norms are followed in formal writing, such as newspapers and scientific writing. This is called language maintenance (kielenhuolto).

The norms of written formal English are called prescriptive grammar because they are man-made rules that are prescribed to be used in official English. Even though written Finnish is more man-made and artificial than written English, its norms are not actually prescriptions. They are called suggestions: the board of Finnish language suggests how official language be used. English-speakers think that their norms are meant to be used both in writing and speech, but in Finland, the prescribed norms are just meant for one register of language. Nobody speaks according to them (except for very formal situations such as TV news or public speeches) and nobody thinks that they even should be spoken. This is why I don’t want to call them prescriptions even though they actually are that; the linguistic culture just is different from the English-speaking world.

Furthermore, the “prescriptive” rules of written Finnish are more akin to spelling in English. Because Finnish is spelled phonemically, words look different when spelled according to different dialects. That’s why there are official forms of words. In English you can’t change the spelling according to your accent but in Finnish you can. The phonemic spelling of Finnish thus enables the use of dialects in writing. In English, it is not easy to write accents because you don’t have means to do it, but in Finnish you can do it easily. When Finns write on social media, text messages or chats, they often use dialectical language. In Finnish the spelling just change the pronunciation of the particular word if you read it aloud but it of course doesn’t affect how people normally speak. This is again why we should not see the standard Finnish as a prescriptive construction similarly as the norms of formal English.

Formal written English is like the language of the upper class and educated people. That’s why English-speakers try to speak according to its rules when they want to appear sophisticated. Formal written Finnish on the contrary is thought to be a tool for an equal society. The Nordic model wants to eliminate social classes. That’s why the language is not wanted to be the language of a certain group of people but a common form that nobody speaks natively, and this kind of form of language requires an organisation that does language maintenance.

Most of that is new to me. Thanks, Bathrobe!

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli [The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, also translated The Friend of the Family] and enjoying it a great deal, though it’s an odd mixture of sitcom and existential drama (like The Man Who Came to Dinner, but with a genuinely evil Sheridan Whiteside). One of the minor characters is a foppish serf who wants to change his surname from the odd-sounding Vidoplyasov; after trying out a couple of others, he’s settled on Эссбукетов [Essbuketov], and the much-put-upon head of the household, the narrator’s uncle Egor Rostanev, responds “И не стыдно, и не стыдно тебе, Григорий? фамилия с помадной банки!” [Aren’t you ashamed, Grigorii? a family name taken from a pomade jar!]. It cost me some effort, but I finally discovered the source: Ess Bouquet, described in a post at the perfume blog The Scented Salamander as “one of those perfumes steeped in history and antique exotic tastes that require further investigation and elucidation to fully appreciate”:

First we have to address the meaning of the name, which sounds a bit puzzling to the modern ear: “Ess Bouquet” we learn from Septimus Piesse writing in 1857 is the contraction of the word “essence of bouquet”. The original recipe for the scent by an anonymous London perfumer is recorded as early as 1711. By the time Piesse writes his The Art of Perfumery in the mid-19th century this original date has been forgotten and the much imitated perfume formula is attributed to, not its rightful creators whoever they may be, but rather to its famous developers, Bayley and Co., established 1739. […]

Ess Bouquet was immensely popular, the bestseller of Bayley and Co. who advertised their perfume shop with the name of this fragrance in capital letters in full view.

The perfumery was also well known for its surviving signboard and painting inside the store, some of the last ones in London to bear the representation of a civet cat at the turn of the 20th century – an allusion to the much sought-after perfumery raw material. Perfume shops with civet cat signs were common throughout Europe before such signboards were considered too dangerous to be left hanging over the streets and so they were prohibited. […]

There was not just one Ess. Bouquet fragrance but rather a type, an original recipe which came to undergo many variations while being sold under the same name. It became somewhat of a generic designation like “eau de Cologne” is and so there were “Ess. Bouquet Perfumes” mentioned in the plural.

There’s more information at the link, along with some nice images; the brand has been forgotten to the point that the Michael Glenny translation of Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 renders “И Лондонские духи клик-клик, эсс-букет” (from Chapter 7) as “‘Click-Click’ — the fragrant London perfume — ‘S’ brand,” so I thought it was worth bringing here.