languagehat.com

Anatoly Vorobey posted at FB (in Russian) about a novel I’d never heard of; I’ll translate what he wrote:

Jo Walton is a contemporary writer of fantasy and science fiction whom I have not read until now. Lent is a book set in Florence at the end of the 15th century, and its protagonist is a Dominican monk. The first part of the book—a pretty substantial chunk—is virtually indistinguishable from a historical novel (and a very good one, to my taste), containing almost nothing “fantastic”; but then, something happens… it would be too much of a spoiler to say more than that.

An interesting and original idea, wonderful prose—and, most importantly, in terms of the quality of its historical immersion, the book occasionally reaches the level of Patrick O’Brian (the highest possible praise from me). That said, there are some serious flaws—for instance, […], […], and even […]—but to my mind they didn’t outweigh the charm of this novel. Recommended: 4/5.

As you can imagine, that impelled me to read it, and having finished it, I’m in something of a quandary. Like Anatoly, I don’t want to spoil the plot turn, and like him I was somewhat let down by what followed it, but the first 40% (I read it on my Kindle) is so spectacularly good I’m eager to recommend it. He compares Walton to O’Brian, I’ll compare her to Hilary Mantel — I haven’t been so immersed in a carefully worked-out Renaissance environment since Wolf Hall. Furthermore, the portrait of Savonarola (for he is the Dominican monk in question) is as convincing as Mantel’s of Cromwell or Merezhkovsky’s of Machiavelli; for the first time I find myself feeling actual sympathy for that much-maligned fanatic. And it is a sterling example of religious sf/fantasy, not the most common subgenre; I would put it up there with A Case of Conscience and A Canticle for Leibowitz, though pretty much any seriously Christian reader is going to find it heretical, I fear. (The word apocatastasis crops up more than once!) All I can do is quote a couple of paragraphs from chapter 2 to give you a sense of the style and let you decide whether to give it a try:
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Dmitry Pruss writes:

The infamous family of the viruses has been named after the Hantan river in Korea, but where does the river’s name originate?

As one can grasp from Reddit, “The hanja for the Han River 한강 is weirdly 漢江, which means “Han [Dynasty of China] River.” However: “The hanja (Chinese character) for 한 is 韓 which means Korea. This name is probably from when Korea was still a tributary state of China pre-late 19th century. It may also be from when Seoul was known as Hanyang.”

And then: “Actually, the 漢 in 한강 does not actually represent the word “Han” but is rather used for its phonetic value. It transcribes the underlying form 한, which is the attributive form of the archaic verb 하다 “to be great; to be big” (not to be confused with 하다 “to do” which is an unrelated verb) So the name actually means “The Great River” (and from this name is also derived other names concerning the River such as 한성, the archaic name of Seoul). This verb itself is no longer used in Korean but the closely related Jeju language still preserves it..”

Can the LH community bring some clarity?

Bring on the clarity!

Peter Phillips’ LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 8 · 7 May 2026; archived) of Composers in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, is very enlightening to me, since I’d forgotten what little I once knew about medieval music; I’m bringing it here for the etymology of tenor given in this paragraph:

The first experiments with voice part-writing came in the middle of the 12th century. From the start this involved writing a tenor part, based in chant that followed rigid mathematical formulae, with two parts above, often with very lively rhythms. Until the end of the 14th century, the mathematics tended to be applied only to the tenor; by the 15th century, it had spread to include the upper voices as well. But the tenor part remained the generating force for every sacred composition, often providing the theological ideas that the texts in the upper parts would debate. This technique is known today as isorhythm and it is in contemporary descriptions of isorhythm that the word ‘tenor’ is first found (from the Latin tenere, to hold). The tenor voice held the structure together, and was usually the lowest in the ensemble. In time, contrary to modern usage, the countertenor voice came to sing lower as well as higher than the tenor. Proper bass parts, and even the use of the word ‘bass’, are vanishingly rare at this time.

The OED’s 1911 entry has this to say in the etymology: “< Old French tenor, ‑our, 13th cent. (also tenoire, ‑eure, ‑ure, 13–14th centuries), modern French teneur (feminine), substance, import of a document, etc. < Latin tenōr-em course, import (of a law, etc.), < tenēre to hold.” In the main section, under II.4.a. “The adult male voice intermediate between the bass and the counter-tenor or alto, usually ranging from the octave below middle C to the A above it; also, the part sung by such a voice, being the next above the bass in vocal part-music,” they add “So called apparently because the melody or canto fermo was formerly allotted to this part,” which doesn’t really clarify it. Does the “held the structure together” explanation work for people?

Some more good bits from the review:
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I learned a couple of new words from this fascinating “interactive” NY Times article by Abraham Z. Cooper, a pulmonary and critical care physician and associate professor of medicine (archived versions don’t seem to work, because of the interactivity, but hopefully you can read the text at Facebook):

In 2021, researchers described what they saw when they had examined skin-biopsy samples that included tattoos: The ink particles had traveled deeper than anticipated, through interstitial spaces into the tissue underneath the skin, or the fascia. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University and a senior author of the paper reporting the results, told me.

The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it — two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way — broke accepted anatomic boundaries. The researchers also found that the same was true for other previously unknown microscopic connections between organs in the abdomen.

That interstitial spaces exist in and under the skin and between and around the body’s organs had been observed going back more than a century, but they were assumed to exist in isolation from one another, like a patchwork quilt.

Theise and his colleagues published their first observations of these spaces in 2018. Their findings in the 2021 tattoo-ink study implied that the body’s interstitial spaces were parts of a vast interconnected whole — what scientists now call the interstitium. “This is clearly a third bodily system for the circulation of fluids,” in addition to the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems, says Rebecca Wells, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior author of the study. The human body suddenly looked less like a patchwork quilt and more like a knitted blanket.

The OED (in a 1900 entry) has interstitium as a synonym of interstice, but in 1993 they added a sense “Anatomy and Zoology. That part of a given region of the body which lies between the principal cells, tissues, etc. of that region” (first citation from 1949). Later in the Times article, we get:

Plants seem to possess their own version of an interstitium, too. It’s called the apoplast, a type of interstitial space that transports water and nutrients outside cell membranes. These and other examples suggest that fluid moving through interstitial spaces might have represented the first circulatory systems to develop in the earliest forms of complex multicellular plant and animal life, hundreds of millions of years ago.

The word apoplast is new enough that it isn’t in the OED; per the Wikipedia article it was coined as far back as 1930, but that was in German, and who knows when it entered English? That’s why we need an OED entry. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Russian лунатик [lunátik] and English lunatic are the faux-est of faux amis: the English word means only ‘madman’ and the Russian one only ‘sleepwalker’; I should really have called the post Veltman’s Sleepwalker, but that would have sounded weird to me, since I think of it with the Russian word, so Lunatik it is. If the novel ever gets translated, I can use “Sleepwalker” for the resultant post. At any rate, this is one of those novels that wound up disappointing me, not because it is bad but because it started out looking like it was going to be much wilder and more intriguing than it turned out to be.

After Raina (see this post) I was really hoping for a return to Veltmanian form with his 1834 novel Лунатик, and I was thrilled when I saw the title of the first chapter: “1–∞ год” [Year 1–∞]. “That’s the stuff!” (I said to myself), and read the first couple of paragraphs:

Beneath the light-blue vault of the Universe, on the path to infinity, rolls the languid companion of the sun, the Earth’s good neighbor.

As she traces her orbit, as if in love, she never averts her gaze from the world inhabited by humans; her face is eternally turned toward it, and no one born of earth has ever beheld the back of her head—neither Galileo, nor Isaac Newton, nor Johannes Kepler, nor Edmond Halley, nor Giovanni Battista Riccioli…

Под голубым сводом Вселенной, по пути к бесконечности, катится томная сотрудница солнца, добрая соседка земного шара.

Совершая свой круг, она, как будто влюбленная, не отводит взоров от мира, населенного человеками; лик её вечно обращен к нему, и никто из земнородных не видал её затылка: ни Галилей, ни Исаак Невтон, ни Иоганн Кеплер, ни Эдмонд Галлей, ни Жак-Баптист Рикчиоли…

Very promising! The next few chapters were headed “1811 год” [The year 1811], “1812,” and “I. 1812 год” [I. The year 1812], which was pleasingly quirky. Alas, after a few flourishes he got into the plot itself, which turned out to be a standard-issue confusion-of-identity/loss-of-memory one that culminates in “Oh no, those two lovebirds can’t get married after all.” Veltman loved that shit, but I can’t really get into it. Still, it was a fun read and had some exciting descriptions of the French takeover of Moscow that must have influenced Tolstoy (the bemused adventures of the young hero, Avrely, kept reminding me of Pierre’s almost identical mishaps in War and Peace). I’ll quote a couple of nice bits; first an amusing description of a hearty officer who’s resigned his commission and moved back to his provincial estate to live with his wife and daughter:
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Nils William Olsson has a paper called “What’s in a Swedish Surname?” (Swedish American Genealogist 1.1 [1981]) that is, as you might expect, about Swedish surnames. I’ll quote some bits that particularly interested me:

It should be emphasized that the patronymic is not identical with a family name. It was not until the latter part of the 19th Century that the patronymic in Sweden congealed to become a family name. Before that time it had changed with each generation. Thus persons named Sven and Anna, the children of Anders, were known as Sven Andersson and Anna Andersdotter. If Sven in turn had a son, he became Svensson and his daughter became Svensdotter. Iceland is the only Scandinavian country today, which retains the system of patronymics. Even the telephone directories follow this custom by listing Icelandic telephone subscribers by their Christian names. The patronymic follows in second place.

By the 15th and 16th Centuries family names begin appearing in Sweden, at first confined almost exclusively to the aristocracy, somewhat later but in a parallel development to what was happening in the British Isles and on the Continent. At first the family name was simply an identifier added to the patronymic. This identifier was usually the symbol emblazoned on the field of the escutcheon, thus Ture Jonsson Tre Rösor, a Swedish political leader, who died in 1532 was named thus because of the three roses inscribed on his coat of arms. Gustaf I (1521-1560), the first of the modern kings of Sweden was known as Gustaf Eriksson Vasa or Vase because of the fact that his escutcheon was inscribed with a vase (fasces in English). One of the oldest Swedish families of nobility used an escutcheon on which the chief or upper half was emblazoned in gold, the lower half or base was inscribed in blue. In the popular jargon of the day the family which carried this heraldic emblem was first known as Dag och Natt, later changed to Natt och Dag (Night and Day), a name carried by the family to the present time […]

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Venya Gushchin reviews (for the Brooklyn Rail, “an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond”) what sounds like an interesting translation-cum-adaptation of one of the most famous works of Russian literature:

The plot of Eugene Onegin, Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse, is barebones. Our eponymous hero is a Byronic fop, bored by aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg. After moving to his inherited estate, he meets his friend Vladimir Lensky’s fiancée’s sister Tatiana Larin. She falls in love with Eugene Onegin, who condescendingly rejects her. After an ill-fated ball, Onegin kills Lensky in a duel. Years later, back in Saint Petersburg, Onegin sees a now married Tatiana. Now it’s his turn to confess his love and be symmetrically rejected. Unlike in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there is no intricate network of characters, no metaphysical quest for the meaning of life itself.

Instead, Pushkin gives us sparkling, encyclopedic digressions on urban and countryside Russian life. The poet-narrator is as much a character as those outlined above, his asides and personality at times overtaking narration in feats of dexterous versification. Most famous among these digressions is his stylistically varied confession to a foot fetish. […]

I quote these nimble variations on a theme from Robert E. Tanner’s recent Ambivalent Souls: A True Translation of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’. […] In Ambivalent Souls is not a timeless classic, but a messy, constantly shifting text, always approached from a particular historical perspective. […] With notable exceptions like Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Maggie Millner’s Couplets, contemporary formal verse can sound archaic or child-like. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous literal translation of Eugene Onegin dispenses with form altogether, the text’s “greatness” conveyed instead through two volumes of commentary. Formal fidelity, chosen by others like Charles Johnston, can at times result in accurate but dated versions that fail to capture the narrator’s chattiness. Tanner makes Pushkin as fluid and glittering in English as he is to contemporary Russian readers.

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Ah, in my younger days how I would have lusted for the Gold Medal of Philology! To get up on a stage before a glittering international crowd and give a carefully prepared speech humbly acknowledging that my ground-breaking work on the Indo-European zero-grade present formation was perhaps not without interest… Well, Kim Willsher of the Guardian tells us how it all went down:

At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of language in historical contexts – from an international society of the same name. Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and academic Umberto Eco, those attending were told.

It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement – but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.

Although the ceremony did take place, there was no International Society of Philology. The American university to which it was supposedly affiliated existed only online and its address was given as a business services company in Lewes, Delaware. The award – likened to a Nobel prize – was invented by Montaclair, and the academic had bought the medal from a jeweller in Paris for €250 to present to himself. Now the professor is under investigation for suspected forgery, use of forged documents, impersonation and fraud. He denies any criminality.

Click through for the thrilling details; who knew philology was a venue for such goings-on? (Incidentally, I must point out that Lewes, Delaware, like its English namesake, is pronounced in two syllables: /ˈluː.əs/.)

The Storica blog has a post about Pinocchio that has some Hattic material:

Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children’s magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.

Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him. […]

The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.

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Via Laudator Temporis Acti:

Letter of Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring:

Thrippsy pillivinx,

Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs? — Flosky! beebul trimble flosky! — Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp.

Beebul trimble flosky indeed! You can see the autograph letter at the link. It must have been fun to be a friend of Lear’s.