languagehat.com

I’m back to reading Zamyatin’s early novellas, and have come to the last of the pre-revolutionary ones, the 1915 Алатырь (Alatyr′). It doesn’t seem to have been translated or much talked about, but it’s interesting in several respects; it’s a sort of magic-realist account of a provincial town built “on the very spot where countless mushrooms once sat in a circle around the Alatyr stone” (На том самом месте, где раньше грибы несчетно сидели кругом алатыря-камня). I’ll provide the description given by Alexander Voronsky in his 1922 article on Zamyatin (in Krasnaia nov’ No. 6) as translated by Paul Mitchell (in Russian Literature Triquarterly No. 2 [1972], 153-175), which begins by quoting the passage following that first sentence:

Among those inhabitants—needless to say it was inherited from mushrooms—there came to exist a downright unrestrainable fecundity. They baptized children wholesale, by the dozens. There remained only one street passing through: a decree came out forbidding travel along the others, in order that the babies crawling in abundance through the grass would not be crushed.

However, the paradise at one time passed away. The Turkish war was on, many people were killed, and the maidens of Alatyr remained without eligible young men. From here the dreams of Alatyr became reality. Glafira, the daughter of the district police officer, moans for eligible young men and awaits a love letter from a handsome stranger. The district police officer, after unsuccessful attempts to marry off Glafira, settles himself still more firmly in his study and invents things. His latest discoveries are the secret of baking loaves of bread not with yeast, but with pigeon dung, and how to prepare waterproof cloth from ordinary unbleached linen. The archpriest Father Peter converses with devils when drunk and when sober; his daughter Varvara also becomes possessed in the absence of eligible young men. Rodivon Rodivonych, the inspector, delights in reading Almanach de Gotha. And then there is Kostya Edytkin, who works at the post office. He has a secret notebook in which is written “The Works of Kons. Edytkin, that is, mine.” And verses: “In my breast there lies a dream, but dear Glafira disdains me.” At night he writes with excitement and great love. In a word, each one has his dreams. Further, a prince arrives in the capacity of postmaster. True, he has a nose with a hump and has no chin—he is an oriental prince, but a prince nevertheless. And here is what happens: Glafira, Varvara, and the maidens all go out of their minds. And the pri[n]ce also has a most noble dream: all should speak one great language, Esperanto, and then the brotherhood of peoples would be realized. The district police officer, the inspector, Glafira, Varvara, the maidens, and others all study with the prince. The dreams end lamentably. Glafira and Varvara arrange to fight it out; Kostya endures a most cruel failure with the composition “The Internal Feminine Dogma of Godliness,” and failure in love also; the prince suffers failure with his Esperanto; the district police officer suffers failure with his experiments; and so forth. […]

In “Alatyr” the basic features of Zamyatin’s artistic talent are those which appear in A Tale of the Provinces [Уездное, 1913]. The tale is somewhat less vivid, but there is in it the same enthusiasm for the word, the same craftsmanship, the same oblique observation, the same smirk and ironical smile, the same anecdotal quality (more, perhaps, in “Alatyr” than A Tale of the Provinces), the same sharpness, abruptness, and prominence of device, the same careful selection of words and phrases, a great force of picturesqueness, unexpectedness of similies, the isolation of one or two traits, and restraint.

As you can see, Zamyatin has the usual literary fun with the presumed features of provincial life: failure, drunkenness, pie-in-the-sky ideas, graphomania, and so on. But it’s the details that make it work; the prince’s Esperanto lessons are described, including a dictation (“Leono esta forta. La denta esta acra…”), and at first they are packed, because everyone wants to get in good with the only aristo within many versts, but finally the only students left are Glafira and Varvara, the gals who are madly in love with him. I love the name Rodivon Rodivonych, which is Rodion Rodionovich with the peasant insertion of -v- to avoid hiatus. As usual, Zamyatin employs obscure words that require much research to decode; it turns out that тусменный means тусклый (‘dim, dull’), but I still can’t identify the баклановка Father Pyotr tries to cure the ailing Kostya with, except that it contains vodka (“of course”) and herbs. In general the brio of the language carries you along, and the last paragraph is so fine I have to quote it; Kostya has been arrested, and the watchman Ipat (a peasant form of Ipatii, i.e. Hypatius) feels sorry for him and hands him a пятак (pyatak, five-kopeck piece):

Kostya humbly took the pyatak and smiled humbly. But there and then he opened his hand. And Ipat’s pyatak disappeared: it was trampled.

Костя покорно взял пятак, улыбнулся покорно. Но тут же и разжал руку. И пропал Ипатов пятак: затоптали.

I tried to keep something of the alliteration and rhythm, but it’s much stronger in Russian; it reminds me of the last line of Мы (We): “Потому что разум должен победить.” (Because reason has to triumph.) What a writer!

Oh, and the title, Алатырь, is of mysterious origin; you can see a few suggestions at Wiktionary and more (if you read Russian) at Wikipedia.

How could I not post Hsi-Yao Su’s “Global Swearword, local ideologies: The Re-semiotization and indexical field of Fuck in Taiwan” (Language & Communication, July 2026; open access)?

Abstract
This study examines how the English swearword fuck is taken up in Taiwan—a context where English functions as a foreign language—by analyzing metapragmatic commentaries on a controversial moment in which a prominent actress uttered fuck during her acceptance speech at a major awards ceremony. While swearing in official settings, especially by a woman, is conventionally viewed as inappropriate, public reactions to this incident were mixed, with a majority supportive. Drawing on Christie’s (2013) discursive-pragmatic approach to swearing and on the linguistic-anthropological and sociolinguistic notions of indexical order (Silverstein, 2003), indexical field (Eckert, 2008), and language ideological assemblage (Kroskrity, 2010), the analysis identifies multiple, and at times conflicting, indexical associations in the metapragmatic discourse: fuck as inappropriate/vulgar, genuine/authentic, cosmopolitan/sophisticated, performative/professional, gendered, and class-oriented. These associations function as micro-instantiations of broader ideological regimes of moral order, gender propriety, cosmopolitanism, and affective performance. By linking micro-level evaluations to a heterogeneous yet traceable ideological assemblage, the study shows the analytic value of a language ideological perspective for socio-pragmatics research and demonstrates how global linguistic hierarchies are re-semiotized through local moral and affective dynamics.

The “controversial moment” is utterly charming:

When Ying-Hsuan Hsieh, an acclaimed actress in Taiwan, received the [Golden Bell] Best Actress award, she began her acceptance speech in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan’s national language, as expected. However, because she had been nominated for two roles, she mistakenly thanked the wrong production team. Realizing her error mid-speech, she exclaimed “fuck” in English before restarting her acknowledgements in Mandarin. The incident was uncensored in the live broadcast, and Hsieh later apologized on Facebook to “all the parents” for not being a good role model. Public responses to the incident were mixed but largely supportive, which is particularly intriguing given that both swearing in public (especially in a high-profile event) and by a woman are stereotypically considered inappropriate in Taiwan and cross-culturally.

I’m delighted by the largely supportive response, and this is the kind of scholarship I can get behind unreservedly.

All my life I’ve known the phrase little green men as a jocular description of extraterrestrials, but I never thought about where it came from; now Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has done a Big List post about its fascinating history:

Before there were grays, reptilians, and other species of extraterrestrial beings that have visited earth in science fiction tales and in hallucinations, there were little green men. The phrase appears at the close of the nineteenth century but has its origins in older folklore about little people, a term for elves, fairies, and other mythical beings. […]

The phrase little people begins to be applied to fairies and the like in the eighteenth century. For instance, there is this published in the Delphick Oracle of 2 October 1719, although the little people here are humans of small stature whom the writer believes to be the origin of beliefs in fairies […] Poet George Waldron uses both little people and little men to denote the fairies believed by the locals to live on the Isle of Man. From his Description of the Isle of Man, written in 1726 and published posthumously in 1731 […] By the mid eighteenth century, such little people begin to be described as being clothed in green, and the phrase little green man starts to make its appearance. […]

The little green people move from being earthly spirits to extraterrestrial beings at the close of the century. Charles Battell Loomis’s children’s story the Green Boy from Harrah tells of the adventures an earth boy named Sandy has with an extraterrestrial visitor, printed in the Atlanta Constitution of 8 October 1899 […] And we get the phrase little green men used in reference to ETs in the Sunday Oregonian of 29 July 1906 […] Two years later, Ohio’s Columbus Evening Dispatch of 31 March 1908 printed this joke that shows that the phrase little green man had become widely understood as a reference to extraterrestrial beings:

The Martians were prepared to catch the first message from the earth.

“Let me see,” exclaimed the first little green man, “I wonder if the first communication will be a flash, a tick or a knock.”

“A knock, very likely,” laughed the second little green man. “You know the earth is just full of knockers.”

Which shows how wise the Martians really are.

Who knows what was denoted by “knockers” here? Green’s has a plethora of slang senses, and if you’re thinking about ‘boobs,’ that isn’t attested until considerably later (and would have been an unlikely referent in a 1908 newspaper anyway). At any rate, click through for more, including the quotations, which I have elided.

Vita Nouva has a remarkable interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt:

Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the customer-facing dashboard was rendering with a ragged left edge (the rag falls on the left in Arabic, since the lines set out from the right margin; the ticket said “ragged right”) when the design team had explicitly specified justified text. Attached were three screenshots from three browsers and a polite note from the product manager observing that the Latin-script version of the same block looked, I quote, “fine.”

The same six months I had closed three other tickets against the same product, each of which had presented to its filer as the only bug. A customer’s name had appeared with its letters unjoined on a printed agreement, the way a sign-painter would have laid them out in 1962, because the PDF library on the receipt server pre-dated the existence of a shaping engine in its language runtime. A search index had been returning empty for accounts the customer service team could see in the database because a 2017 import had encoded twelve thousand names using fossil Unicode codepoints from 1991 instead of regular ones from 1995, and the index, very reasonably, treated the two encodings as different strings, So, that ragged-left ticket was the smallest of the four, HOWEVER, it sat on top of the same iceberg and pointed at the same thing. […]

It did look fine. I spent about half an hour with it, I walked the rendered DOM, I set text-align: justify in so many different combinations of font-family and direction declarations, and at the end of the exercise I wrote a reply explaining, more or less honestly, that the problem was not a bug in our stylesheet but the state of Arabic typography on the web.

The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an Egyptian physician who taught himself font engineering for fun (or that what I imagine about him). Walking through these, ended up to be the most enjoyable couple of weeks in that job, and I want to go through it here too.

Trust me, the resultant story is worth your while, especially if you know or care anything about Arabic and/or coding. I got it via Lycaste’s MeFi post, where there are some good comments:
[Read more…]

It’s too hot and muggy today to construct a coherent post, so I’ll just toss out some bits and pieces I’ve had sitting around.

1) In some earlier thread I ran across a mention of the widespread Afroasiatic root *lis- ‘tongue,’ which has the following descendants:

• Proto-Berber: *iləs (see there for further descendants)
• Egyptian: ns (see there for further descendants)
• Proto-Semitic: *lišān- (see there for further descendants)
• Proto-Chadic: *lis-um-
   • Hausa: harshè (see there for further comparisons)

Check out the Berber writing systems: Central Atlas Tamazight: ⵉⵍⵙ (ils), ⵉⵔⵙ (irs); Medieval Tashelhit: ايلس (iles).

2) I recently watched the 1925 movie The Big Parade (it’s about American soldiers in WWI; an intertitle reads “THE BIG PARADE/ Men! Guns! Men!/ Men! Guns!”), and at one point one Yank calls to another (per an intertitle): “Yo….Slim!” I’m not sure if this is an antedate; the OED (entry revised 2016) lumps all these senses together: “An exclamation used to attract attention, to express warning, surprise, etc., or to incite or encourage action; hey! Later (colloquial (frequently in African American usage)) used as a greeting or in response to a greeting,” and these are the two WWI-era citations:

1919 Every morning we fall out at six o’clock and yell ‘YO’ when our name is called. We like it.
Marine (Paris Island) 12 March 5

1920 Yo!! Breakfast.
W. B. Ellington, Company ‘A’ 23rd Engineers 112

Meanwhile, Green’s has “1. yes!” (first cite: 1918 [US] D.G. Rowse Doughboy Dope 29: You are assisted in answering ‘Yo!’ to your name by the fortunate knowledge of where it comes on the company roster) and “2. (US) a general term of address” (first cite very late: 1961 [US] (con. 1945) G. Forbes Goodbye to Some (1963) 94: ‘Greetings.’ ‘Yo.’). At any rate, I was struck by the very modern use in a 1925 film (set in 1917).

3) Just now I watched the 1994 movie English, August (based on a 1988 novel of the same name), which is a multilingual delight — it’s about a young Bengali, Agastya Sen, who as a reluctant civil servant is posted to the rural town of Madna (the movie was filmed in Visakhapatnam and the nearby seaside town Bheemunipatnam), and the movie has dialogue in English, Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu, the local language (which poor Agastya/August has to learn for his job by means of lessons based exclusively on official phrases like “The decision will be deferred until next week”). I was surprised to learn that Telugu was spoken so far north on the east coast of India. Also, Visakhapatnam has complicated onomastics:
[Read more…]

As soon as I started reading Joseph O’Neill’s “Forward Into Foreignness” (called “Polyglotism” in the paper version of the issue of the New Yorker I was reading; archived), I knew I was going to post it:

In the nineteen-sixties, my father, a Corkman, was employed by Chicago Bridge & Iron, an American corporation that built industrial plants worldwide. He worked in hardhat management positions. An early project took him to Mersin, in Turkey. There, he met my mother. She had just spent a year at Langham Secretarial College, in London. They courted in English, then married at Mersin’s Church of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things.

My mother belonged to Mersin’s well-off Christian community, which was mainly of Syrian origin. This Levantine subculture socialized in French, voiced endearments in Arabic, communicated with functionaries in Turkish. Polyglotism was prized. My mother’s father spoke French, Arabic, Turkish, German, English, Italian, and Ladino. He sent my mother to French-language boarding schools in Lyon and Aleppo. She used French with her four children. We called her Maman and my father Papa. My first word was “attends,” because “attends” was my mother’s invariable response to my cries from the crib.

That was in Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. We kept moving—to Tripoli, in Lebanon; to Amanzimtoti, in South Africa; and to Matola, in colonial Mozambique. Our nanny there, Victoria, chatted to us in the language of Lisbon, and my first ironic remark was made in Portuguese. I was four years old. The remark came in response to my parents turning off my bedroom light. “Muito obrigado,” I said. I added, translating, “Thank you very much.”

[Read more…]

I posted about a video by Taylor “Language” Jones last year, and now he’s got another one I can’t resist sharing, Dear Hank Green, here’s the science of “Bruschetta”. It’s about how we choose which version of borrowed words to say (with detours into what even counts as “borrowed,” e.g. the fake-French “nom de plume”), and it’s one of the few video essays I wish were longer — it’s under fifteen minutes, and I would happily have watched for half an hour if he analyzed a bunch of good examples. One of his trick questions (“leave the answer in the comments if you know it!”) is what the real French phrase is; another is “in what language is bgadim an actual word?” (spoiler: it’s Hebrew). I was distressed that he called /beɪˈʒɪŋ/ (“Beizhing”) the “standard” pronunciation of Beijing, but I can’t in good conscience dispute it. And I’m reminded of my comment here: “The problem, of course, is knowing with whom to use which pronunciation.” (I just thought of a good example: I’ve heard enough Cantonese-speakers call Wong Kar-wai “Wong GAH-wei” that that’s how I say it in my head, but I would never dream of saying that in conversation — I will keep calling him WONG kar-WYE like a normal English-speaker.)

Relatedly, I ran across the name of the luxury clothing line Xuly Bët (or, as they apparently style it, XULY.Bët Funkin’ Fashion Factory), which is said to mean “to open your eyes wide” in Wolof. Amazingly, that is actually correct; Arame Fal’s Dictionnaire wolof-français has “xulli, v. écarquiller les yeux, faire les gros yeux” (Bul xulli xale bi, dafay tiit ! Ne fais pas les gros yeux à l’enfant, il va avoir peur !) and “bët b-, n. oeil.” As I understand the writing system of Wolof, this should be pronounced /ˈxulli bət/; my question, in case any of you have any dealings with luxury clothing lines, is: how do non-Senegalese pronounce this? If I were an English-speaker who knew nothing about Wolof, I might try /ˈzuwli bɛt/, but I can think of all sorts of other possibilities, and I can’t imagine either English- or French-speakers hitting on the correct (i.e., Wolof) one.

Stone Creek Coffee has a page on a variety I was unfamiliar with, and there’s a linguistic angle:

If you’ve been following our Reserve coffee line-up over the past few years, and just the coffee world in general, you may have noticed a few observations. This year, we had Wildflower Geisha Colombia and Apricot Glaze Geshe Peru; several years ago, we had Cinnamon Blackberry Gesha. These variations aren’t misspellings; they’re different names for the same coffee variety, shaped by history, geography, language, and each producer’s preference. […]

Why Are There Different Spellings?

The variety traces back to Ethiopia, referring to Mount Gesha, which is why many coffee historians consider Gesha the most historically accurate spelling. Somewhere along the way, Gesha also became Geisha, a spelling that stuck in Panama and throughout much of Latin America. And in Peru, you may also, more rarely, see Geshe, particularly among some indigenous growers and producer communities.

But coffee names don’t travel through history in a clean, straight line. Seeds moved between countries. Agricultural records were translated. Names were handwritten, copied, and adapted between languages over decades. There’s also a fascinating etymological layer here. When words move between languages, Amharic to Spanish, Spanish to English, and through Indigenous languages like Quechua along the way, they rarely arrive as perfect one-to-one translations. Sounds shift. Spellings adapt to fit new alphabets and pronunciation habits. A single original word can branch into multiple versions, each shaped by the language that adopted it.

Gesha, Geisha, and Geshe all reflect different moments in that journey. […] At Stone Creek Coffee, we use the spelling the producer uses. If a farm calls the variety Geisha, that’s what goes on our label. If another producer uses Gesha or Geshe, we use that instead.

I’d say that’s a pretty sophisticated analysis for a coffee site. (The Amharic word appears to be ጌሻ.) Thanks, Sven!

I’m a sucker for the technical vocabulary of traditional fields, the more obsolescent the better (cf. retting flax), so of course I enjoyed Rukmini Callimachi’s NY Times piece (archived) on the beleaguered master thatchers of olde England and the roofs they thatch:

For the most ardent traditionalists, the only true thatch is “long straw” — typically cereal straw, like wheat, which is threshed to remove the grain — believed by historians to be England’s original roof. Then there’s water reed, the more durable alternative that is increasingly imported from abroad.

For master thatcher Stephen Letch, the difference is unmistakable. The problem is that for almost everyone else it’s undetectable — which is one reason long-straw roofs are going extinct. “There’s 20 or 30 long-straw thatchers left in all of England,” said Mr. Letch, 66, who has spent much of his life trying to preserve this dying art. “We’re the last and we know we’re the last — and we know that once we’re gone, those skills will be lost.” […]

Long before Britain was stitched together by a railway, roofs were made from whatever grew nearby, like heather in the northern highlands and reed near bogs and waterways. Overwhelmingly, though, most areas of the country used straw, a byproduct of the wheat grown to make bread, according to historians. It’s a lightweight material that keeps homes well insulated in the summer heat and the winter cold, but it is also flammable, attracts insects and the spiders that feed on them, and requires costly maintenance.

[Read more…]

Back in 2010 I posted about the death of Sol Steinmetz, rabbi and etymologist; now a longtime LH reader has sent me a copy of his 2008 book Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and it’s a pure delight. In the introduction, he says:

Changes in meanings make language flexible and malleable. But how do words take on new meanings? The study of meanings and the changes of meaning that words undergo is called semantics (from Greek sēmantikos “having meaning, signifying”). I’ve titled this work Semantic Antics because many English words have changed meaning in fascinating, unusual, and unexpected ways. Those are the words I focus on in this book.
[…]

As a language consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, I was fortunate to have had access to the OED’s treasury of historical citations, which I used to trace and illustrate the development of meanings discussed in this book.

His very first entry, about “A1,” taught me something I didn’t know; after citing the first use in the sense ‘first-class, outstanding’ in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) — “‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam. ‘A, 1,’ replied Mr. Roker.” — he explains:

Dickens adopted a technical shipping term, A1, and used it figuratively. The shipping term was created by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, a British publication founded in 1760 by Edward Lloyd to circulate and exchange shipping news among merchants and underwriters. Lloyd published his first Register of Ships in 1764, and in it he devised a system for classifying the condition of every registered ship. In this system, the top classification was A1, the letter A denoting a first-class condition of a ship’s hull, and the number 1, a top condition of the ship’s stores. When shipping merchants would describe a ship’s condition as being “A1,” it was the highest praise they could assign to it, and so inevitably the term passed into figurative use as a synonym of “first-class, excellent.”

And paging through it I see all sorts of entries I look forward to exploring; many thanks, Brian!