paperpools

 Through the incomparable Languagehat, I discover that there is a new website, Lexicity, with resources for learning a wide range of ancient languages. Some of these are well known and have a wide following (the Perseus project, say); others are older or more obscure and are therefore buried many, many hits down the results of a casual Google search. So now, anyway, you can tackle Old Norse or Old Church Slavonic or Akkadian, the only obstacle being such challenges as the language presents, rather than the challenges offered by our very dear friends at Google.

In learning languages, at first everything is repulsive and burdensome. If one were not encouraged by the hope that, after having accustomed his ear to the unusual sounds and having mastered the strange pronunciation, most delightful ways would be opened up to him, it is doubtful that one would want to enter upon so arduous a path. But when these obstacles are surmounted, how generous is the reward for perseverance in overcoming hardships! New aspects of nature, and a new chain of ideas then present themselves. By acquiring a foreign language we become citizens of the region where it is spoken, we converse with those who lived many thousand years ago, we adopt their ideas; and we unite and co-ordinate the inventions and the thought of all peoples and all times.

Radishchev, quoted by Language Hat

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

comment on Languagehat. Who does not normally draw attention to items on Language Log, assuming most readers will be reading LL anyway.  (I know I do.)  But could not resist discussing a post on LL on a tense that was certainly new to me: will have had gone.

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern history, as if the narratives, storylines, and paradigms of other groups mattered little or were the byproduct of alien sources far removed from the authentic, well-ordered, harmonious universe of the "Arab world."[3] As such, they held most Middle Easterners to be Arab even if only remotely associated with the Arabs and even if alien to the experiences, language, or cultural proclivities of Arabs. In the words of Sati al-Husri (1880-1967), a Syrian writer and the spiritual father of linguistic Arab nationalism:

Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize [his Arabness] … we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand … But under no circumstances should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes, whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience.[4]

This ominous admonition to embrace a domineering Arabism is one constructed on an assumed linguistic unity of the Arab peoples; a unity that a priori presumes the Arabic language itself to be a unified, coherent verbal medium, used by all members of Husri's proposed nation. Yet Arabic is not a single, uniform language. It is, on the one hand, a codified, written standard that is never spoken natively and that is accessible only to those who have had rigorous training in it. On the other hand, Arabic is also a multitude of speech forms, contemptuously referred to as "dialects," differing from each other and from the standard language itself to the same extent that French is different from other Romance languages and from Latin. 

Franck Salameh, "Does Anyone Speak Arabic?" (Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2011) ht LanguageHat

Languagehat has a post which includes a quotation from the Autobiography of the Protopope Avvakum. "Protopope" in Cyrillic: протопоп.  Impossible not to love.

"Tadzhik is Persian-Farsi transliterated with Russian letters," Safar replied. "But nothing good ever came of it. They took away the old alphabet and thus cut the Tadzhik people off from their ancient history and culture. This monstrously sly Bolshevik act did terrible damage to the national culture of the Tadzhik people. Why? Because letters are culture-producing for a Tadzhik. Can you imagine Pushkin writing in Russian but with Arabic ligatures? That would be crazy, wouldn't it? But this nightmarish experiment was conducted in the U.S.S.R. on many peoples, Tadzhiks among them. I believe that it was a cunning policy."

Languagehat on Marat Akchurin's Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics, the rest here.

I'm barely fifty pages into Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 and it's already clear to me that this is one of those basic works of scholarship that everyone dealing with the field has to come to terms with. As Raymond Pearson writes in his detailed review (which, along with Martin's response, I urge anyone interested in the topic to read): "The Affirmative Action Empire is overwhelmingly a product of archive-based research. Martin's positively Herculean labours in six historical archives in Moscow and another two in Ukraine have been rewarded with a rich and abundant harvest of hitherto-inaccessible primary documentation." And the picture he puts together as a result is astonishing. Like everyone who's studied the Soviet Union at all, I was aware that each official nationality was awarded its own territory in which its language would be taught and its customs maintained, but I had no idea how complex the system had been. How many such territorial units do you think there were? Fifty, a hundred, a few hundred? At its peak, tens of thousands.

Languagehat on rainirovanie

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers' Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.

That experience complicated his optimism. He seems still to have retained a belief that the shining communist future was a possibility, but having seen the stupidity, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality that were everywhere on the ground, no matter what the Kremlin planners might intend, he had to respond, to tell the truth as he saw it, and that response involved a complex and brilliant manipulation of the very language the Kremlin used to propagate its ideas. Characters are always talking about "directives" and "backwardness" and "tempo," regurgitating the catchwords that ceaselessly bombard them from Party organizers, "plenipotentiaries," and other emissaries from officialdom. One of them asks: "Is it really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there's a five-year plan?" The five-year plan inside us is one of the things the novel is about; some of the characters are trying to fulfill it by constant work, others by denunciations and violence, and the main viewpoint character, Voshchev, by questioning and introspection, irritating pretty much everyone else (as Platonov irritated the Party, despite his professed devotion to its ideals). By the time the novel heads into increasingly surreal-seeming and deadly territory, you're so accustomed to the strangeness of the telling that you can't escape its spell.

Languagehat on The Foundation Pit

Languagehat has a terrific account of Martha Ackmann's Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone: The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League.

At the beck and call of my consciousness are two or three little words: i vot ['and here'], uzhé ['already'], vdrug ['suddenly']; they rush around on the half-lit Sevastopol train from car to car, lingering on the buffer areas [platforms between cars?], where two thundering frying pans rush at each other and crawl apart.

Mandelstam's Egipetskaya marka at Languagehat

But in a person there lives a small observer – he takes part in neither actions nor sufferings – he is always cold-blooded and always the same. His employment is to see and to be a witness, but he has no vote [literally 'voice'] in the life of the person and it is not known why he, lonely, exists. This corner of a person's consciousness is illuminated day and night, like a doorman's room in a great house. For days on end this doorman sits awake in the entrance, he knows all the inhabitants of his house, but not a single one of them asks the doorman's advice about his own affairs.

Languagehat has been reading Platonov's Chevengur, translates a couple of passages which make one long for more.

Languagehat has buried a terrific offer in the Comments section.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the US publishers of Uglier than a Monkey's Armpit did manage to include the names of both authors of on the cover of a book with two authors (a feat we might once, in our innocence, have taken for granted), but absentmindedly forgot to include the introduction by Steve "Languagehat" Dodson - a feature unique to the US edition, which for fans of LH's indispensable blog must be one of the chief attractions of the book. The introduction will appear when the book is reprinted; a slight problem with this is, of course, that it offers a strong incentive to fans to wait for the reprint, thereby, presumably, postponing the appearance of this highly desirable edition.

Dodson, anyway, has now generously offered to send a copy of the missing introduction as a Word document to anyone who buys the book (he can be reached, obviously, via the blog). Not only is this a great offer, it is a chance for readers to pick up a collector's item! The first US edition, minus the introduction, augmented with a genuine Word document from Steve Dodson! Our very dear friends at Amazon can provide the first half of this dynamic duo for the unbeatable price of $10.15, here.

(The name of that book in full, with full complement of authors: Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-downs, and Curses from around the World, by Stephen Dodson and Roger Vanderplank.)

Some examples of entries can be found in an earlier post on LH, here.

About a year ago Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit, a book on untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world, was published in the UK. Author, according to the cover, Robert Vanderplank.

Nothing odd about that, except that the book had two authors, one of whom was Steve Dodson of Language Hat fame. (Note that it seems not to have occurred to OUP* that mentioning LH might actually bring hordes of readers clamouring for the book. Some believe in God without knowing whether one exists; some know the Internet exists without believing in it.)

Now a new version is upon us. The American edition of Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit has come out, and, mirabile dictu, the name of Stephen Dodson appears on the cover. Sadly, the book does not include the introduction by Steve Dodson. (He has been told it will appear in the next printing.)

Mr Dodson would seem to have a disposition of unnerving saintliness. This is a man who could, if he so chose, vaporize his publishers with insults, put-downs and curses from around the world. His comments on the matter remind the reader of nothing so much as Superman in the guise of mild-mannered Clark Kent.

(The only reasonable inference is that the insults and put-downs are of such power they would destroy anyone on whom they were deployed.)

Of the UK edition, he merely commented that his own name appeared only in tiny print on the copyright page, and added

The US edition will feature my lively introduction, in which I quote Pushkin, Mark Liberman, and my nonagenarian mother-in-law; the editions available now carry an introduction by my coauthor, Robert Vanderplank.

before offering various attractive entries from the book.

Now that the US edition has come out, minus the promised lively introduction, he merely mentions its absence and comments that the packager, not Penguin, is to blame.

The reader who wants to know more about Pushkin, Mark Liberman and Dodson's nonagenarian mother would appear to have only one course of action: buy the book now, minus the introduction, in the hope that doing so will bring forward the reprint. He or she will, at any rate, be able to curse those responsible with rare cosmopolitanism.

[When I said "OUP" I meant, of course, "Boxtree". Boxtree, as UK publishers of the book, might reasonably have been expected to take into account LH's popular blog; since OUP did not publish the book, they presumably had no say in the matter. Vanderplank is director of the University of Oxford Language Centre, hence, probably, the careless blogger's muddle. Also I am in the middle of moving from one apartment to another. But as Mies said, Die Seele ist in den Details; it's bad to find one's Seele so threadbare.]

From Languagehat:

[...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazement and indignation concerning his lines about me: they see them as nearly libelous. But I quickly cooled down, and I think that at that time, in 1915-16, there was something in me that provided fodder for his anecdote. The anecdote itself is an invention, but it is possible that he accurately reflected the disrespectful feeling I had toward those around me. I was very awkward: in gloves with holes, not knowing how to behave in high society—and then I was ignorant, like all newspapermen—an ignoramus despite myself, self-taught, who had to feed a large family with my clumsy writings. Vladimir Vladimirovich's father, on the other hand, was a man of very high culture. He had a particular game: enumerating all of Dickens' heroes, almost three hundred names. He engaged in a competition with me. I ran out of steam after the first hundred. We jokingly competed in our knowledge of the novels of Arnold Bennett. Here too he took first place: he named around twenty titles, whereas I had read only eight. I always treated him with respect and lovingly preserve his few letters and friendly notes in Chukokkala [Chukovsky's album].

Относительно Владимира Владимировича: люди, прочитавшие его мемуары (я не читал их), пишут мне с удивлением, с возмущением по поводу его строк обо мне: видят здесь чуть не пасквиль. Но я вскоре поостыл и думаю, что в то время – в 1915-16 гг. – во мне было очевидно что-то, что дало пищу его анекдоту. Самый анекдот – выдумка, но возможно, что он верно отразил то неуважительное чувство, которое я внушал окружающим. Я был очень нескладен: в дырявых перчатках, неумеющий держаться в высшем обществе – и притом невежда, как все газетные работники, – невежда-поневоле, самоучка, вынужденный кормить огромную семью своим неумелым писанием. Отец же Владимира Владимировича был человек очень высокой культуры. У него была особая игра: перечислять все имена героев Диккенса – чуть ли не триста имен. Он соревновался со мною. Я изнемогал после первой же сотни. Мы в шутку состязались в знании всех романов А. Беннета. Он и здесь оказывался первым: назвал около двух десятков заглавий, я же читал всего восемь. Я всегда относился к нему с уважением и любовно храню его немногие письма и дружеские записи в «Чукоккала».

This has more of a bearing on my work than may immediately be obvious.

Nabokov was taught French and English as a small child. In Speak, Memory he describes his childhood, describes reading the simple texts which introduced a child to these languages. He sat in a room in a grand house, while a girl swept the gravel on a path outside. He comments that the girl may well have been happier sweeping the gravel than performing the tasks assigned her by the Soviet system.

Every child can't live in a grand house, but every child could have a mind furnished with, as it might be, Homeric Greek. Flaubertian French. The Hebrew of the Psalms (which Milton thought the greatest poetry he knew). Our educational system does not want every child to have a mind furnished in the grand style. It sets up an obstacle course. Those who succeed can aspire, if they work very hard, to a house furnished in the Tyler Brulé style.

Andrew Gelman drew my attention to his latest post on different kinds of suspense. Wrote a looooooooong comment which turned out to have missed much that was key. Meanwhile things have gone horribly wrong between the editor formerly known as Mr Whitelist (Ed Park) and me. 2C2E.

Moving right along.

A friend who is a professional classicist tells me by e-mail that he was sent a promotional flyer about Lectrix a while back.

Anyway, it went ahead, and a couple of years ago I received an advance flyer about it, which gave a sample line with examples of their discussion and commentary - the sample line being Aeneid 9.9.  In order to demonstrate the value of their "dictionary/parser", they highlighted the word "sedemque" - and informed us that this came from "sedo, sedare, sedaui, sedatum: settle, allay; restrain; calm down", and the "parser" box accordingly parsed it as "sedemque: verb subjunctive present active 1st sing."

Now, anyone with a minimal knowledge of Latin can see that the word is not a verb, but a noun - from sedes, of course.  But whoever had done the dictionary/parser did not have a minimal knowledge of Latin.  I investigated further, and discovered that what they had done was simply stick "sedem" through a computer translator, and the computer came up with it being part of the word "sedare".  I told X, in some amusement, and he contacted CUP, who explained that their computer dictionary wasn't yet complete, but that it would be complete before the final product went on sale; they also implied that the problem was that the word was "ambiguous", and that this ambiguity would be reflected in the final version.  But this seemed to me to show the flaw in the whole enterprise, because "sedemque" in Aeneid 9.9 is not ambiguous at all if one actually knows Latin, instead of simply running word-forms through a computer.

So, well, hm. Note that the Perseus project, which also provides links to dictionary entries and grammatical help, is free (link in sidebar). It may be that Lectrix was substantially improved after the trial run. My guess is that this is what went on behind the scenes: people who actually knew the languages said you couldn't provide grammatical guidance using computer programs of the quality then available; a computer programmer who didn't know the languages said Piece of cake; and the rest is history. And a trial subscription to Lectrix is not available to individuals, because anyone who checked it out and found this level of elucidation of "sedemque" would decamp.

Languagehat had a post a couple of days ago on his bafflement over the verb " imitere" in the opening lines of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita. To a classicist, unsurprisingly, it's obvious what the verb is; LH went to the PDF commentary provided by the author, and all was revealed. This is, obviously, what someone who subscribes to a service like Lectrix is looking for; if I were eligible for a trial subscription I could see whether they're now providing it.

I was trying to think of a way to explain Puppet Stayman to Evan Lavender-Smith, and not really succeeding, which is not to say I did not send him a long e-mail on the subject but to say that it does not bear repeating. Meanwhile there is an amazing post on Language Hat on the politics of Central European languages.

Language Hat quotes Remy de Gourmont in a post on The Writer's Capital Crime:

Conformism, imitativeness, submission to rules and to teachings is the writer's capital crime. The work of a writer must be not only the reflection, but the larger reflection of his personality. The only excuse that a man has for his writing is to write about himself, to reveal to others the sort of world that is mirrored in his own glass; his only excuse is to be original; he must speak of things not yet spoken of in a form not yet formulated...

(LH also gives the original French and a link to the post where he came across it.) One commenter asked how you can break the rules effectively if you have not mastered them first - a very common response to the sort of position Gourmont sets out, and one that misses the point.

Suppose I grow up in a family where people obsessively play Hearts. We switch around between different versions of the game - sometimes we play Black Maria, where the Queen of Spades costs you 13 points and you pass on three cards to the left before you begin play, sometimes we invent twists of our own. I also have four friends: A lives in a family of chess fanatics, B lives in a family of bridge fanatics, C lives in a family of go fanatics, D lives in a family of poker fanatics.

What I see at once is something remarkable. Languages are translatable, more or less; it may be more or less tricky, but it's intelligible to speak of Chinese being translated into Turkish AND Arabic AND English. Games are not translatable. Chess is a game for two players with complete information; you can't "explain" what's going on in a chess game in terms of bridge, which is a game for two sets of partners with imperfect information, a mixture of skill and chance which depends on skilful sharing of information between partners. And you can't "explain" either in terms of poker, which is a game for an indeterminate number of players, a mixture of skill and chance in which sharing of information between players would in fact be collusion and outlawed. A game is intelligible on its own terms - which means, paradoxically, that you can play a game with someone whose language you don't know, provided you both know the rules of the game.

You don't understand a game in terms of some other game, you understand it by learning to play it - but the more games you play, the more you will understand about the radical otherness of games. And this, it seems to me, is the sense in which Gourmont thinks each writer will develop his own aesthetics.

We don't have to agree with this position - it's perfectly possible to believe that a great writer may, on the contrary, be like a great chess player or a great bridge player, someone supremely gifted within the constraints of a particular established form. If originality is seen in terms of breaking rules, though, that presupposes that art is still comprehensible only in terms of constraints which already exist - originality is to be embedded in the sort of Oedipal drama at the heart of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. It's as if one is actually incapable of understanding a form in which the rules one knows have no purchase. ("Yes, I realise it's a game for four people with cards, I know you don't have a board and you don't have pieces, but how can you expect to invent a game effectively if you haven't got the hang of the King's Indian?")

One way the reader can tell Humbert Humbert is not Vladimir Nabokov: 'At one point he confuses a hummingbird and a hawksmoth[?], now I would never do that.'

Nabokov and Trilling on Lolita, Parts 1 and 2, mentioned in passing in Languagehat's post 'On Last Looking into A la recherche du temps perdu'.