TAKE NOTE.

The historian-in-training known to the phone book as Greg Afinogenov and to Hatters as slawkenbergius sent me a link to something he's been working on for quite a while which is finally launching: TakeNote. He says, "It's a virtual exhibition, tied to a conference happening at Radcliffe next month, of historical notes from all kinds of sources in Harvard libraries, with high-quality images and a tagging/commenting system." The site itself says:

The contributions to this virtual exhibit exemplify the great range of note-taking that furthers intellectual or artistic activities (excluding commercial or administrative kinds of notes, among others). Most past note-taking does not survive at all, either because the notes were designed to be temporary (like notes on post-its today) or because they were discarded intentionally or unintentionally at some point. When notes survive, institutions such as libraries and archives have typically played a key role in their survival. This exhibit celebrates the role of agents of preservation as well as the role of note-takers themselves in offering us a glimpse into the working (and thinking) methods of past readers and writers.

WORD AND THING.

I'm currently reading The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, by the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko, which I will be reporting on in due time; for now, I'll just say that I'm impressed enough with it that it's making me want to study Ukrainian. One thing I've learned so far in my dabbling is that the Ukrainian word for 'thing' is річ [rich], which is etymologically identical to Russian речь [rech'] 'speech, way of speaking'; the Russian sense is the original Slavic one, and apparently Ukrainian and Belorussian got the meaning 'thing' from Polish rzecz. (This explains how the Polish word rzeczpospolita can be a calque from Latin res publica.) Carl Buck, in his Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, explains the Polish sense development thus: "Hence 'subject matter' and further generalization." Googling for more information, I found in Folia Orientalia Vol. 39 (2003), page 215: "The etymological relation 'saying, word > thing' is common in many languages, e.g. Polish rzecz 'thing' going back to 'saying, speech'." But offhand I'm not coming up with other examples, though I'm sure there are some, so I'm throwing the floor open for suggestions.

MICHAEL HEIM, RIP.

I own a number of translations by Michael Henry Heim, who died at the end of September, but his name had somehow not stuck with me, so when I read Margalit Fox's NY Times obituary I was shocked to learn about "the wide array of languages with which he worked. Conversant with a dozen tongues, he translated from eight of them, spanning Slavic (Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian); Germanic (German, Dutch); Romance (French, Romanian); and Hungarian, a non-Indo European language." How did he do that? His translations include "from Russian, the novel The Island of Crimea, by Vassily Aksyonov; from Serbo-Croatian, a volume of stories, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, by Danilo Kis; from Czech, the novella 'Too Loud a Solitude,' by Bohumil Hrabal; and, from Hungarian, the novella 'Helping Verbs of the Heart,' by Peter Esterhazy." I pulled down a couple of his translations and was struck by the elegance of the English; here's a sentence from the opening of The Encyclopedia of the Dead: "It cannot be denied that he himself contributed to the confusion, answering the most innocent questions about his origins with a wave of the hand broad enough to take in both the neighboring hamlet and half the horizon." Susan Bernofsky has a nice reminiscence of him at her blog; I can't help but wish that when the Czech government called him up to ask "what words to use in English to name their new country," he had told them to go with Czechia rather than the Czech Republic, but that's water under the bridge. Thanks for the link, Eric!

THE LEATHER CASE AND THE HONED SICKLE.

The eud�monist couldn't resist this quote from Patrick Leigh Fermor (Roumeli, p. 112; see this LH post for more Fermor), and neither can I:

Yet it is impossible not to have a sneaking respect and liking for this hieratic mandarin language with all its euphuistic artificialities and its archaic syntax. Kathar�vousa has even been used now and then (a feat of unnatural virtuosity) as a medium for poetry; some of the poems of Calvos have a curious fabricated beauty, and there are elements of Kathar�vousa in Cavafy: cunningly placed bits of whalebone in the more sinuous demotic. It is elaborate and forbidding, but it is precise: indispensable, its champions say (which its opponents bitterly deny), for legal, scientific or mathematical definition. Kathar�vousa is an expensive faded leather case stamped with a tarnished monogram, holding a set of geometrical instruments: stiff jointed dividers and compasses neatly slotted into their plush beds. Dimotiki is an everyday instrument � a spade, an adze or a sickle � the edge thinned and keen with honing and bright from the whetstone; and the wooden shaft, mellow with sweat and smooth with the patina of generations of handling, lies in the palm with an easy balance. Partisanship for the two idioms has led to rioting in the Athens streets, to bloodshed and even death.

GLOSS.

Via MetaFilter:

The Global Language Online Support System (or GLOSS), produced by the Defense Language Institute [...] offers over six thousand free lessons in 38 languages from Albanian to Uzbek, with particular emphasis on Chinese, Persian, Russian, Korean, and various types of Arabic. The lessons include both reading and listening components and are refreshingly based on real local materials (news articles, radio segments, etc.) rather than generic templates.

Important note: level 1 is considered "low intermediate" and assumes a basic knowledge of the language. For more elementary lessons [...] try the ever-popular FSI Language Courses.

THE BOOKSHELF: BEYOND PURE REASON.

Back in 2007 I quoted a paragraph about the groundbreaking ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure and said it "reawakened in me the impact�not just intellectual but emotional (it was almost like falling in love)�of learning about all this as I was in the process of deciding linguistics was what I wanted to do, several decades ago"; I get the same feeling from reading Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure's Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents, by Boris Gasparov (of which Columbia University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy), and I have to say that anyone interested in how modern linguistics and structuralism in general came to be (and, of course, anyone interested specifically in Saussure) should read it. Gasparov takes an admirably evenhanded approach both to Saussure's ideas and to their complicated and quarrelsome posthumous history, and I find it hard to imagine the job being done better.

To provide a simplistic but not inaccurate caricature/summary of that history: for the first half-century after his death in 1913, "Saussure" meant two books, the M�moire sur le syst�me primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europ�enes (Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages), which appeared in December 1878 (though the cover date is 1879) when he had just turned twenty-one, and the Cours de linguistique g�n�rale (Course in General Linguistics), which he did not even write (it was compiled by his students from class notes) and which came out in 1916. The first put historical linguistics on a sounder theoretical footing than it had had and famously postulated the existence of a Proto-Indo-European laryngeal which actually turned up in Hittite (sadly, two years after his death); the second jump-started the entire field of synchronic/structural linguistics and was foundational for everything that came after—Jakobson, Bakhtin, and my very own pre-Chomsky American linguistic tradition. Then the tide turned; structuralism was out, poststructuralism was in, and the Cours was considered laughably outmoded. Just around that time, however, Saussure's own notes began being excavated, thousands of pages of them, and people realized there was a whole different side of Saussure that was much more attractive to the postmodern mentality, notably his three-year obsession (which I, an unrepentant modernist and structuralist, consider utter nonsense) with what he variously called hypogram, leitwort, Stichwort, mot-th�me, logogram, antigram, paragram, cryptogram, and anagram; the last is the term that has stuck, thanks to Jean Starobinski, who published some of the papers in 1964. The people who were excited by that sort of thing accused Saussure's students of having grievously misrepresented their teacher's ideas when putting together the Cours.

Gasparov deals with all this sensitively and sensibly. As is my wont, I'll quote some chunks of the text to let you see his style and approach. From p. 46:

DAILY RUSSIAN SAYING.

daily-russian-saying-2 doesn't actually post new sayings every day, but every few days is good enough for me. They tend to go for the pungent and funny:

Мужчина как загар - сначала пристаёт, а потом смывается 'A man is like a suntan - at first he sticks [to a woman], and then he fades away'

Лучше перебздеть, чем недобздеть 'Better to over-fart than to fart incompletely'

And while I'm at it, it's high time I posted Sashura's Achtung, or Why job-is-done sounds offensive (Russian office slang), which is also pungent and funny:

Асап - [asʌp] from English abbreviation ASAP (as soon as possible). It has acquired verbal forms (проасапить - to do smth asap) and has become part of a paraphrase of the Russian proverb �поспешишь � людей насмешишь� (haste and make yourself a laughing stock, close to �no haste, no waste�) � �ноу асап � ноу факап� (no asap � no fuckup). The rhyming here comes from phonetic pronunciation of asap.

ROSSIISKII VERSUS RUSSKII.

A few years ago I wrote about Tomasz Kamusella's book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe (which sparked quite an interesting discussion); now he has an article in Acta Slavica Iaponica called "The Change of the Name of the Russian Language in Russian from Rossiiskii to Russkii: Did Politics Have Anything to Do with It?" It's available as a pdf file at this link, where it's followed by a response (in Russian) by Oksana Ostapchuk, "Русский versus российский: исторический и социокультурный контекст функционирования лингвонимов" [Russkii versus Rossiiskii: Historical and sociocultural context of the functioning of language names]. He explains the genesis of the article in this passage:

As remarked above, between the 1750s and 1830s, the name of Russia (Rossiia) corresponded unambiguously to the name of the Russian language (Rossiiskii), as is the norm in the case of other states across Central and Eastern Europe. I do not know why the name of this language changed to Russkii and why this occurred in the 1830s. Until 2007, I worked at one of Poland�s best centers of Russian studies. I thought that colleagues more knowledgeable than I in the history of Russian and other Slavic languages would have readily provided an explanation. To my surprise, no answers were forthcoming. It appeared that they either did not know of this issue or considered it unimportant. I was flabbergasted [...]

The gap between Russkii and Rossiiskii was never very wide in the early modern period, because at that time, it was bridged by intermediary forms that are not current (at least in standard Russian) today. They included the following forms for the Rus�/Muscovian male, namely Rossiianin, Rosiianin, Rusianin, Rusin, Rus, Ruski, and Russkii. A similar series can be extended between Rus� and Rossiia, namely, Rus�, Rusiia, Rusa, Russa, Roseia, Rosiia, and Rossiia. And likewise, a similar net of words may be hung between the adjectives Russkii and Rossiiskii, that is, Russkii, Rus�kii, Ruskii, Ruski, Roskii, Rosskii, Rosiiskii, and Rossiiskii.

This plethora of forms and their varied and variously overlapping meanings are a testimony to the natural variability of a language before a standard form is imposed on it with authoritative dictionaries and grammars that constitute the normative basis for any printed matter in a standard language (in the Western meaning of this word) and for school textbooks published in it. [...]

But as evidenced by the titles of the Russian dictionaries recorded by Stankiewicz, in the course of the standardization of Russian during the second half of the eighteenth century, a consensus was reached. The state was dubbed Rossiia, its population, Rossiiane, and the language, Rossiiskii. This consensus began to unravel in the 1830s and 1840s, and was definitively broken by the 1850s. It was replaced with Russkii for the empire�s population and its language, while the polity�s name remained the same as before, Rossiia.