TOLSTOY OR DOSTOEVSKY?

As Paul, who sent me the link, wrote, "To me this is asking : which is better eating, poulet de Bresse roasted with herbs or prime New York strip perfectly char-grilled ?" And of course he's right, and everyone involved in this poll at The Millions agrees, but it's still an ever-enjoyable question to chew over, and the eight Russian experts asked for their opinions by Kevin Hartnett provide an enjoyable variety of answers. (An irrelevant remark: Duke University has a Professor of the Practice of Russian? I wonder how that odd title came about.) Myself, I will have no opinion until I've read more of each writer in the original, and even then I'm pretty sure my answer will be "They're both great, and which I prefer depends on my mood that day." I must say, though, that the respondents who come down on Dostoevsky's side tend to write more entertainingly than the Tolstoyophiles, and the latter occasionally evidence a certain pomposity; when Andrew Kaufman says of Dostoevsky "What he doesn�t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations," my response is "You shouldn't need a novelist to make you do that, and that's not what literature is for anyway." I liked Chris Huntington's conclusion:

In any case, I realize that the �competition� between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is just an exercise in love. No one really has to choose one or the other. I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:

  Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It�s not the tone but the wonderful point of view � genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.
  -Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Strakhov, September 26, 1880

ON NOT LICKING YOUR FILL.

I ran across a Russian proverb I couldn't interpret, �Не наелся � не налижешься� (literally "[if/since] you didn't eat your fill, you won't lick your fill"), so I asked Sashura, who can explain everything, and he explained it. The idea is that if you haven't taken care of the important stuff, there's no point worrying about the details, and if you have, there's no need to, as in this quotation from Dombrovsky in which Maxim watches men he had trained: "Всё, что он вложил в этих людей, они показывали, и нечего суетиться в последнюю минуту. Не наелся, не налижешься. Люди были хорошо одеты, обуты, вооружены." [These men were showing everything he had put into them, and there was nothing to worry about at the last minute. You didn't eat your fill, you won't lick your fill. The men were well dressed, shod, armed.] There are any number of variants: "Чего не съешь, тем не налижешься," "Чем не наелся, тем не налижешься," "чего не наелся, того не налижешься," "коль не наелся, так и не налижешься," "Если не накушаешься, то и не налижешься," and the more elaborate "Если ложкой не наелся, языком не налижешься" ['if you didn't eat your fill with a spoon, you won't lick your fill with your tongue'].

The interesting thing, and what leads me to post about it, is that some googling revealed that it's not just Russian but more widely Eastern European: this message board has the following exchange:

Liliana Boladz: Co sie nie najesz, to sie nie nalizesz.
I am not sure, if this is a Polish proverb.

Dodo Kaipdodo: There sure is the Lithuanian "Ko neprivalgei, neprilai�ysi"; the nights before exams, when trying not to fall asleep "catching up", I used to remember that and go to sleep, finally...

EMERY.

Nigel McGilchrist's LRB review of David Abulafia's "magisterial" The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (I confess I'm a sucker for words like "magisterial") got me so fired up I went to the Amazon page, noticed that the Kindle price was under ten dollars for this $35 book (Amazon's selling the hardcover for $21.69, but who needs another hardcover cluttering up the place?), and succumbed to the lure of getting it instantly, even though I won't get around to it for a while. I suspect it will eventually provide me with a number of posts, but the word that inspired me to write this one doesn't even occur in the book—it's from a section of McGilchrist's review where (in the time-honored tradition of scholarly reviewers) he complains about what the book doesn't cover:

In his discussion of the prehistoric era, Abulafia mentions obsidian, whose importance to early human communities cannot be overestimated, and points out that the training of tool-makers �in what seems a deceptively simple craft was no doubt as long and as complex as that of a sushi chef�. Obsidian is cited a dozen times in the first thirty pages, but never so as to explain or to pursue satisfactorily its immense significance. Obsidian is the oldest widely �traded� commodity in Mediterranean history. It occurs naturally and is easily accessible at only two major sites within the sea � the volcanic islands of Lipari near Sicily, and Milos in the Aegean (that is, if we exclude minor sources such as Nisyros and Gial�) � and yet it is found at the lowest levels in archaeological sites all over the Mediterranean from Malta to Crete, and from Lemnos to Egypt. Thanks to its distinguishing characteristics we can recognise the source of the material in each case, and can deduce that from perhaps as early as 8000 BC, obsidian from Milos was being transported around the Aegean islands, presumably in sail-less coracles.

MORE ON MACHINE TRANSLATION.

Even though I'm deeply skeptical of the idea that automatic translation will ever be more than barely adequate (which is often good enough, as I insisted here), I continue to be interested in discussions of the topic, and Konstantin Kakaes has one at Slate called "Why Computers Still Can�t Translate Languages Automatically." I like the fact that he emphasizes the difficulties without pooh-poohing the whole idea; in his conclusion, he writes:

Automatic semantic tagging is obviously hard. You have to deal with things like imprecise quantifier scope. Take the sentence �Every man admires some woman.� Now, this has two meanings. The first is that there exists a single woman who is admired by every man. [...] The second is that all men admire at least one woman. But how do you say this in Arabic? Ideally, you aim for a phrase that has the same levels of ambiguity. The point of the semantic approach is that rather than attempt to go straight from English to Arabic (or whatever your target language might be), you attempt to encode the ambiguity itself first. Then, the broader context might help your algorithm choose how to render the phrase in the target language.

A team at the University of Colorado, funded by DARPA, has built an open-source semantic tagger called ClearTK. They mention difficulties like dealing with the sentence: �The coach for Manchester United states that his team will win.� In that example, �United States� doesn�t mean what it usually does. Getting a program to recognize this and similar quirks of language is tricky.

The difficulty of knowing if a translation is good is not just a technical one: It�s fundamental. The only durable way to judge the faith of a translation is to decide if meaning was conveyed. If you have an algorithm that can make that judgment, you�ve solved a very hard problem indeed.

DOWN WITH PALATALIZATION!

A recent post at Anatoly's blog (now called просто здесь красный, где у всех голубой, a quote from Aquarium's song "8200") shows an absolutely hilarious sign held up by a protester: "Мы за пересмотр итогов палатализации" [We are for a reconsideration of the results of palatalization]. Unfortunately, unless you're familiar with the Slavic first, second, and third (no Wikipedia article, for shame!) palatalizations, you're going to have a hard time seeing the humor, but for those who are, Anatoly's thread is funny enough I think it's worth posting.

Addendum. Don't miss Bathrobe's long comment below (May 15, 2012 09:54 AM) on Mongolian scripts and dialects and the history of the split between Buryat and Mongolian!

IGNORANT BLATHERING AT THE NEW YORKER.

Joan Acocella is the longtime dance critic of the New Yorker. I imagine she's a fine dance critic; I don't know or care anything about dance, so I wouldn't know one way or the other, but when I've dipped into her pieces from time to time she's seemed literate and sensible. She writes book reviews as well (she has a PhD in comparative literature, so she even has academic credentials in case any were needed). However, when it comes to the study of language, she is an utter ignoramus, which makes it surprising that the New Yorker allowed her to run on for pages and pages blathering about it in the latest issue. I'm as mad about it as I was a decade ago about David Foster Wallace's similarly dumb essay for Harper's; I don't have the time or energy to go into similar detail, but I hope to give good grounds for thinking the New Yorker shouldn't have published it.

In the first place, like DFW, she's using a review assignment as a pretext for an extended rant that only occasionally bothers to make contact with the book allegedly under discussion. This kind of thing is fine when the reviewer is a specialist in the field and can provide helpful context and relevant information; that's half the fun of reading the NYRB and LRB. But Acocella is not an expert; she knows no more about the study of language than I do about the history of dance, which is to say a mix of clichés and misunderstandings. I suspect Acocella would be upset if she were to read what purported to be a review of a book on dance in which the reviewer jovially passed along a lot of nonsense about the Ballets Russes and George Balanchine picked up at random over the years, yet she apparently feels no shame about doing the same herself.

After setting up the straw men she will be manipulating for the rest of the review ("many English speakers have felt that the language was going to the dogs," while "[t]o others, the complainers were fogies and snobs"), Acocella turns to telling us about Fowler, Orwell, and (of course) Strunk and White (that's E. B. White, of the New Yorker) as though we'd never heard of them before. After 1,300 words of this, she moves on to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which DFW called "the Fort Sumter of the contemporary Usage Wars" (see this LH post). As she says at great length, it aroused considerable controversy and gave rise to the American Heritage Dictionary and its "usage panel," which started out pretty conservative but over the years has started to reflect general usage much better. She then has 800 words on slang and "U and Non-U," for no apparent reason except that she finds them interesting. She is then ready to provide her magisterial judgment on the subject at hand: prescriptivists are snobbish but descriptivists are self-righteous, and the author, an example of the latter, is just full of mistakes. "Hitchings applies a great deal of faulty reasoning, above all the claim that since things have changed before, we shouldn�t mind seeing them change now." What's wrong with that, you ask? I won't try to summarize her "argument"; here it is in all its glory:

NEW OLD LANGUAGE.

The Independent has a story by David Keys, "Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace," that will make the heart of any aficionado of the ancient Near East beat faster. Not that they've discovered an epic poem, or even a laundry list—it's just a bunch of names—but we aficionados will take what we can get, and this is actually pretty exciting:

Evidence of the long-lost language - probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran � was found by a Cambridge University archaeologist as he deciphered an ancient clay writing tablet unearthed by an international archaeological team excavating an Assyrian imperial governors� palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey.

The tablet revealed the names of 60 women � probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer programme. But when the Cambridge archaeologist � Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars. [...]

Typical names, borne by the women � the evidence for the lost language � include Ushimanay, Alagahnia, Irsakinna and Bisoonoomay.

SYM AND EM.

I've always been a little confused by the words sympathy and empathy, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. I'm even more confused after reading this passage in Jenny Turner's LRB review of Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation by Richard Sennett:

In the present book, one key contrast is between sympathy — 'I feel your pain' — and empathy, 'maintaining eye contact even while keeping silent, conveying "I am attending intently to you" rather than "I know just what you feel" . . . Both . . . convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but the one is an embrace, the other an encounter.'