SLOVO-ER-S.

I will have to look for a copy of Chto neponyatno u klassikov, ili Entsiklopediya russkogo byta XIX veka [What you don't understand in the classics, or Encyclopedia of daily life in the 19th century] (Moscow, 1998), a few excerpts of which are online here, dealing with the ways people addressed one another. As anyone at all familiar with prerevolutionary Russian society knows, inferiors called superiors by resounding titles while superiors used the equivalent of "my good man," or simply a name, to them. The most interesting of the excerpts concerns the suffix -s, a contracted form of sudar' 'sir,' omnipresent in prerevolutionary literature as an indication of politeness or servility, depending on the situation. It was known as slovo-er-s, from the old name of the letter s (slovo, literally 'word') and er (pronounced "yer"), the name of the hard sign formerly used after all words ending in a consonant. In The Brothers Karamazov the disgraced Staff Captain Snegirev says to call him Captain Slovoyersov, since in the second half of his life he has had to begin humbly using the -s ending. And there's a wonderful quote from Pushkin's Pikovaya dama [Queen of spades] (the beginning of Chapter 6):

RUSSIAN FOLK TALES.

A 1903 book, Folk Tales From the Russian, has been put online. It has very nice Art Nouveau-ish illustrations and the translations are quaintly charming, but I confess the reason I'm memorializing it here is the name of the author, Verra Xenophontovna Kalamatiano de Blumenthal. She hereby replaces Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken and the rest of the Belgian aristocracy in my onomastic affections. (Via Plep.)

THEORY OF TRANSLATION, 1953.

I went to the Donnell again and this time found fewer pickings—but I was glad to discover A.V. Fedorov's Vvedenie v teoriyu perevoda [Introduction to the theory of translation] (Moskva, 1953) for 25 cents. As soon as I saw the date I knew what I would find, and sure enough, the Foreword begins: "Questions of translation, linked in the closest fashion on the one hand with the disciplines of scientific linguistics—general linguistics, lexicology, grammar, and the stylistics of separate languages, and on the other with the history and theory of literature and the wide field of historical and philosophical sciences, can be fruitfully decided only in the light and on the basis of the works of I.V. Stalin on linguistics." Chapter One, after a quick couple of paragraphs of groundwork, gets down to business: a quote from Marx and Engels ("Language is as old as consciousness"), a quote from Lenin ("Language is the most valuable means of human intercourse [obshchenie]"), and an entire paragraph by the Great Leader and Teacher (language as tool—I can't bring myself to translate the whole gobbet of verbiage). But the book isn't valuable only as a curiosity; it's got lots of bilingual passages, with detailed discussion of the problems involved. I just wonder how quickly a revised edition came out after Stalin died that very year.

VICIPÆDIA  LATINA.

A Latin Wiki! "Ave! Vicipædia (sive Wikipedia) cooperandi opus est ut creatur Libera Encyclopaedia. Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt. Nunque sunt 2453 articuli." (I note with a sigh that the only actual article so far under Linguistica is on Noam Chomsky. At least it's nice and short.) The list of
Nationes mundi is lots of fun, and leads to questions like "Why do they Latinize Djibouti (as Dzibutum) but not Burkina Faso, particularly when Burcina would be such a fine Latinate form? (Via Avva, who links to its short but useful Sententia section in the course of his discussion of the phrase in vino veritas and Blok's distortion of it.)

LINGUISTICS ON NOVA.

The transcript of the Nova program "In Search of the First Language" is well worth reading; the discussants are real linguists, unlike so many of the talking heads that wind up on TV (I went to grad school with one of them), and you can learn a lot from what they say. But as I wrote on the Wordorigins thread where this was posted, you should take this caveat very seriously:

This picture that Dolgopolsky paints of the Proto-Nostratic world is controversial and not widely accepted. In fact, most linguists argue that any attempt to come up with a language spoken fifteen thousand years ago is pure speculation.

IMPASSIBLE.

Larry McMurtry, in his NYRB review of Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, by Mark Perry, quotes Grant's famous description of meeting the defeated Lee at Appomatox, one paragraph of which reads:

What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly....

MARTIAL BLOG.

No, I don't mean another warblog, I mean Martialis, a blog devoted to the poet Martial. As Nick says:

This is an insanely ambitious project. On this blog I intend to present the Latin text and an English translation of all the epigrams of the first-century AD poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known to the English-speaking world as Martial. By my reckoning there are 1565 epigrams together with the five prose prefaces - which at a rate of one a day will take the better part of four-and-a-half years to cover.

By concentrating on one poem a day I hope to encourage readers to make their own observations in the comments section and develop a discussion to which anyone can contribute on matters of translation and interpretation: some books and some poems are rather better served than others by existing translations and exegetical works.

SOLDER.

I just discovered that each major English-speaking region has its own way of pronouncing this word, and apparently (to judge by this WordOrigins thread, where I discovered the situation) each is unaware of the others. I had always assumed everyone pronounced it SODD-er, as we do in the US (short o, no l). Now I find that Australians say SOHL-der (long o, with l), while the OED says "('sQld@(r), 's@Ud@(r))," which means Brits use a long o (SO) when they omit the l but a short one when they pronounce it (SOL). So what I want to know is, what do Canadians say? Other variants and anecdotes are, of course, welcome.

ETYMOLOGICAL MYTHS.

The Telegraph has begun a series of excerpts from Port Out, Starboard Home by Michael Quinion, to be published by Penguin at £12.99 on July 1 (in the UK, obviously). The first begins with a good summary of various wrong ideas people get about where words come from and continues with a discussion of the marvelous phrase "all mouth and trousers"

This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we're fairly sure that it is a pairing of "mouth'', meaning insolence or cheekiness, with "trousers'', a pushy sexual bravado. It's a wonderful example of metonymy ("a container for the thing contained'').

RIP STEVE LACY.

Music speaks for itself,
And needs no explanation
Or justification:
Either it is alive, or it is not.

LAGOMDUKTIG.

Another new language blog, by Billy McCormac: "Lagomduktig documents my quest to unravel the mysteries of translating the Swedish language." The title "is a combination of two more or less 'untranslatable' words: lagom (just enough, just right) and duktig (clever, smart)." If you have any interest in Swedish, check it out.

POSTIL.

I encountered a number of words new to me in an enigmatic post chez l'Eudæmoniste (chez whom there is nil postiche) that is either a riff on the word post itself or a gloomy meditation (or of course both). It consists of words and phrases built around the syllable post, beginning with the hapax postation (OED: 'The placing of one thing after another'; only in 1607 Schol. Disc. agst. Antichr. i. ii. 95 The postation of the wine doth not preiudice it, therefore the postponing of the Crosse doth not preiudice it neither) and ending with a second hapax, postreme ('Last, hindmost; absol. one who is last': 1553 Bale Gardiner's De vera Obed. G j b, They were counsailed of som bodye not to contende to be called supremes, as longe as they are still postremes), but the word that buttonholed me was postliminy, which turns out to mean 'In Rom. Law, The right of any person who had been banished or taken captive, to assume his former civic privileges on his return home. Hence, in Internat. Law, The restoration to their former state of persons and things taken in war, when they come again into the power of the nation to which they belonged.'

ARTLEX.

The ArtLex Art Dictionary has "definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references." A sample entry:

Rayonism - A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting characterized by the fragmentation of forms into masses of slanting lines. It was practised from 1912-1914 by Natalya S. Goncharova (Russian-French, 1881-1962), Mikhail Larionov (Russian-French, 1881-1964), and a few other Russian painters. Larionov's manifesto on Rayonism stated that it is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism." Aspects of each of those isms can indeed be seen in Rayonist paintings -- Cubism's breaking up of forms, Futurism's movement of forms, and Orphism's rich color. In addition, the Rayonists expounded a theory that objects emitted invisible rays which the painters could manipulate to their own purposes. "The rays which emanate from the objects and cross over one another give rise to rayonist forms. The artist transforms these by bending them to his desire for aesthetic expression." Goncharova and Larionov often applied the paint in their Rayonist works with palette knives.

Also called "Rayonnism," "Rayism," and, in Russian, "Luchism."

GELLHORN ON STYLE.

Reading a review by A. Alvarez (one of my favorite depressive Brit writers) of a Caroline Moorehead biography of Martha Gellhorn (one of my favorite reporters) in the April 8 NYRB, I came across an excellent little snippet from a youthful letter of hers:

The great temptation is to do what I call "fine writing," the beautiful mellow phrases and the carefully chosen words. That I must avoid like the plague; only the simple words; only the straight clear sentences. I am terribly frightened of "style."

WINE TALK.

Mark Liberman has a most interesting series of posts at Language Log, taking off from a querulous comment of mine on a Semantic Compositions entry ("I was disappointed in Mark's post; I hate to see him joining the bandwagon of people making easy jokes about winetalk"). Anyone at all interested in the topic should read Apologia pro risu suo, Grand Cru Smackdown, and More on winetalk culture. I should say that I did not mean to imply that the exotic descriptions used by so many wine writers are all exact and scientific, or that I do not myself often find them funny as hell. In the immortal words of Theodore Sturgeon, "90% of everything is crud," and that certainly applies to wine babble. I merely resent the fact that the noble art and science of wine appreciation is so frequently the target of free-floating populist resentment and suffers indignities not often heaped on, say, art historians (who are at least equally given to unverifiable specifications and unsuitable metaphors). I just wish Americans drank wine as routinely as soft drinks so they wouldn't see it as some sort of Old World boondoggle.