languagehat.com

A fine post from bulbulistan redivivus, that collection of writings of bulbul/Slavo (see this LH post):

Hans Stumme (1864-1936) was a German linguist whose work is is probably known to anyone interested in Berber and North-African varieties of Arabic. Stumme travelled a lot and collected huge amounts of spoken data from – inter alia – Tunisians, Išelḥiyen and the Maltese. […] It is quite clear that Stumme was particularly interested in collecting folk literature, such fairytales and songs, where his books remain an invaluable source of data for folklorists. At the same time, Stumme’s work is extremely valuable for the study of the languages involved […]

This applies doubly to Maltese where there have been at least two major studies of the fairytales (1, 2). As far as I can tell, there is little focus in reevaluating Stumme’s dialectological work (but that might change soon), which is a shame, because there is so much fascinating stuff in there. Like for example song no. 70 from the collection of Maltese songs (Kössler-Ilg and Stumme 1909, p. 27). I am reproducing the text below in standard Maltese orthography and Stumme’s original German translation accompanied by my English one based on the Maltese text.

Ta’ dobra sejrin jsiefru […]

Die Slawen wollen abreisen […]

The Slavs are about to leave […]

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I just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance after decades, and it was just as good (and cynical) as I remembered — I especially enjoyed Edmond O’Brien as Dutton Peabody, editor of the Shinbone Star who orates about the power of the press as he swigs from a jug of booze. But what drove me to post was the name someone uses for that booze: who-hit-John, which Wiktionary defines as “Hard liquor; whiskey.” Nobody seems to know the origin; it’s not in the OED, and Green’s has only one cite for it, from the ridiculously late date of 1980 (“But without a hangover and a headful of Who-hit-John, it is a different light”), but I like it and will try to remember to use it when the occasion arises.

Also, the river which plays such a role in the movie (gun-slinging cattlemen to the north, law-abiding farmers to the south) is called the Picketwire, which is the wonderfully anglicized name of the Purgatoire River in southeastern Colorado (though the territory-turned-state in the movie is never named):

The Purgatoire River, also known as Rio de las Ánimas, has had multiple names. It was named by New Mexican Governor Antonio Valverde y Cosío in 1719 during his exploration of the region. Valverde named it “Rio de las Ánimas,” meaning “River of the Spirits,” as a warning to subsequent explorers of the dangers of crossing the nearby Ratón Pass. Surviving the crossing, they found water and firewood at the river. Over time, the true meaning of the river’s name became lost, and various interpretations emerged. By the end of the 18th-century Spanish traders believed it to be “Rio de las Ánimas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls in Purgatory,” after a supposed massacre that occurred on its banks. This led to the birth of a legend of the same name that explained its history. French trappers learned the name and later translated it as “Rivière des âmes au Purgatoire.” They related their translation to members of the Stephen H. Long expedition in 1820 who renamed it “Purgatory Creek” by removing all references to souls. Mexican traders on the old Santa Fe Trail expanded on the legend and named the river “Rio de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio,” or “River of the Souls Lost in Purgatory,” believing the souls to have become lost. Mountain Men had difficulty pronouncing the French translation and called it “Picatoire,” while Anglophone settlers during the Colorado Gold Rush anglicized it to “Picketwire,” despite the river having no relation to any fence.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the surname Valance, it’s a variant of Vallance: “English and Scottish: of Norman origin a habitational name from Valence in Drôme France named with Latin valentia ‘strength capacity’.”

I will not say James Willis’s “The Science of Blunders: Confessions of a Textual Critic” is the best thing ever written about textual criticism; that would be absurd, since I’ve read very little about the subject and Willis would probably rise from his grave and smite me for blasphemy. But it is so much fun to read I am tempted to reproduce the whole thing; instead I will just quote a few bits that delight me irresistibly as I scroll down. After a biographical introduction (which ends, sadly, “We regret that we have found neither obituary nor likeness of Willis to share with curious readers”), Willis’s text begins:

Some apology is sure to be demanded for a life largely devoted to what has been often called “mere verbal criticism” and regarded as no more than fiddling with letters and words which are of no importance in the wider horizon of the historian or the literary critic. Now while it would be useless to attempt to apologize for the lack of success with which I personally have practised the trade of a critic, for the trade itself much may be said in its defence. That textual criticism is a waste of time will be always believed by those who accept the texts of Greek and Latin authors as coming from heaven above by permission of the Syndics of the Oxford University Press, and therefore I will preach only to the convertible – to those who are willing to ask the simple question, “How do we have any knowledge of the Greek and Roman world?”

He discusses the difficult path to survival of literary texts, saying:

At every copying there is the possibility of human error. I say “the possibility”, but it is nearer to certainty. Copying is usually a boring task; boredom breeds inattention; inattention breeds mistakes. Therefore the manuscripts of classical authors contain mistakes. The detection and correction of mistakes in texts is the function of textual criticism. Therefore textual criticism is necessary, Q.E.D.

And he provides a splendid catalogue of examples, beginning:
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I’m stealing ShooBoo’s MeFi post, title and all (it means ‘Irishman in space’), because I can’t improve on it:

Manannán, written in 1940 by Máiréad Ní Ghráda is an Irish-language young adult sci-fi space travel book. It may contain the first use of a Mecha outside of Japan. And the first mention of a gravity assist in literature. A machine translation to English of the first 20 pages.

Hacker News discussion.

As a lover of both Irish and sf, I can only applaud. (That last link has responses from actual Irish speakers, e.g. “I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. […] Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they’re missing a fada.”)

This is one of those words I thought I knew, but it turns out I had only a partial view of. My wife and I were watching the making-of extra for I, Claudius when one of the actors talked about how food was brought to the dining table from “dumbwaiters.” From the context it didn’t seem possible that the word was used in the sense familiar to me (Wikipedia: “a small freight elevator or lift intended to carry food”), so I looked it up and discovered a quite different sense — to quote the OED (which has it as two words, dumb waiter; the entry was revised in 2023) “1. Chiefly British. A movable table, typically with revolving shelves, used for serving food and drink” (first citation from ?1730: “Two fine India japan dumb Waiters”). Then we get:

2. Originally North American. A movable platform or compartment inside a vertical shaft, used to deliver items between floors in a building, esp. food or empty plates between a kitchen and a dining area, and accessed through a hatch in a wall. Also occasionally: such a hatch itself.

1833 On the side and in the centre of the main stairway, the dumb waiters rise, by the aid of the steam-engine in the basement, to the tower.
G. M. Davison, Traveller’s Guide Middle & Northern States & Provinces Canada 109

So what Brits call a dumb waiter, we Yanks call a lazy Susan; is there an alternate UK word for the American sense? And are you familiar with both meanings, or does each side of the pond rest in blissful ignorance of the other side’s usage?

A MeFi post by clavdivs (who’s been a member even longer than I have, and whom I think of when my wife and I watch an episode of I, CLAVDIVS) sent me to Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s long poem “Satan Absolved,” written in odd-for-English Alexandrine couplets, and there I found this passage:

Tʜᴇ Lᴏʀᴅ Gᴏᴅ
And thou wouldst be incarnate?

Sᴀᴛᴀɴ
            As the least strong thing,
The frailest, the most fond, an insect on the wind,
Which shall prevail by love, by ignorance, by lack
Of all that Man most trusteth to secure his back,
To arm his hand with might. What Thy Son dreamed of Man
Will I work out anew as some poor cateran,
The weakest of the Earth, with only beauty’s power
And Thy good grace to aid, the creature of an hour
Too fugitive for fight, too frail even far to fly,
And at the hour’s end, Lord, to close my wings and die.
Such were the new redemption.

I was pretty sure I’d never seen the word cateran before; the OED (entry from 1889) has:
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I was intrigued by Martin Haspelmath’s Facebook post:

What’s the most user-friendly corpus site? Maybe Abdulaev et al. (2022)’s corpus of the Dagestanian language Tsez (78 texts, almost 5000 text units, 2388 morphemes)? Which other corpus site is as user-friendly as this one? (Admittedly, it does not include sound.)

Since I presume I’m not the only one curious about Dagestanian languages, I thought I’d share The Tsez Annotated Corpus Project:

The texts that constitute this corpus were collected by Arsen Kurbanovič Abdulaev and Isa Kurbanovič Abdullaev and published with Russian translation as Abdulaev and Abdullaev (2010). The intended audience of this book publication was primarily the Tsez-speaking community and Russian-speaking readers interested in folklore. Work on the book was sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) and part of the agreement was that the institute would be allowed to post on-line a version of the text suitable for scientific use by linguists, with morpheme glosses and an English translation added to the materials available in the book.

The first text is Allahes ašuni: The rainbow; click through and you’ll see it is indeed beautifully presented. I presume esin šebi xecin šebi ‘What is to be said, what is to be left out’ is the local equivalent of Georgian იყო და არა იყო რა [iqo da ara iqo ra] ‘it was and it wasn’t’ and similar “once upon a time” formulas mentioned by me here and discussed later in the thread, beginning here.

From the home page:

“Starobulgarska Literatura” (“Medieval Bulgarian Literature”) is a specialized peer-reviewed journal dedicated to medieval Bulgarian literature and culture and their Byzantine and European contexts. Since Medieval Bulgarian literature constitutes an important segment of the European cultural heritage, our journal is addressed to an international audience and highlights the work of both Bulgarian and foreign scholars. The journal publishes original research in the fields of literary and interdisciplinary studies of medieval Slavic literatures, as well as editions of unpublished old Slavic literary works and their newly-discovered copies, critical reviews, surveys, information on national and international medievalist events, and current bibliography.

“Starobulgarska Literatura” is published in one issue per year. It contains materials in Bulgarian, Russian, English and German.

The current issue (Issue 71-72 [2025]) has some interesting-looking articles, like Dobriela Kotova’s “Constantine of Preslav as Translator and Preacher: Emotion and Reason in the Uchitel’noe Evangelie” and Lora Taseva’s “Old Bulgarian Translation Correlates of ἀμφιβάλλω ‘doubt; disagree, quarrel’.” Thanks, V!

A great site I recently learned about: Визуализация переписи населения Российской империи 1897 года [Visualization of the 1897 Russian Empire Census]. You can look up individual cities or guberniyas or see the overall imperial statistics. This is going to be a tremendous boon to anyone interested in Russia at the turn of the previous century.

1) Jeanna Smialek, “What French Romance Novels Could Tell Us About A.I. and Translation Jobs” (NY Times, Feb. 15, 2026; archived):

The European Union, with its 27 nations and two dozen official languages, is a center of the translation and interpretation industry. That is why, in Brussels and The Hague and Paris, a recent nugget of literary news has generated so much conversation.

Harlequin France — purveyor of titles like “Médecins et Célibataires” (“Doctors and Singles”) and “Passion Pour un Inconnu” (“Passion for a Stranger”) — recently confirmed that it would be running tests with Fluent Planet, a company that uses A.I. to make translation cheaper and faster. The move was met with both outrage and resignation within the industry. Translator groups called Harlequin’s decision to cut ties with some human translators “unacceptable.” Translators themselves posted about the “sad news.” […]

Harlequin France’s story is an example of how artificial intelligence is sweeping the translation field, rapidly improving machine translation, particularly for popular language pairs like English and French.

Reports of the death of human translation are exaggerated, as the piece goes on to say. But “outrage and resignation” about sums it up. Thanks, cuchuflete!

2) Kashmir Hill, “They Are in Love but Don’t Speak the Same Language” (NY Times, Feb. 14, 2026; archived):
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Hermione Lee’s NYRB review (February 12, 2026 issue; archived) of Francesca Wade’s new life of Gertrude Stein starts with a pleasing quotation:

As part of her account of how amazingly well-known Gertrude Stein had become in America by the mid-1930s, Francesca Wade refers to, but doesn’t quote, this exchange from Top Hat (1935) in which Ginger Rogers’s dressmaker is reading her a telegram:

“Come ahead Stop. Stop being a sap Stop… My husband is stopping at your hotel Stop. When do you start Stop.” I cannot understand who wrote this.

Rogers: Sounds like Gertrude Stein.

The review is admirably even-handed, and anyone interested in Stein and her shifting reputation might want to read it; I’ll post a couple more bits I liked. After mentioning Stein’s bullying father, she quotes this, from Everybody’s Autobiography (1937):

Fathers are depressing. There is too much fathering going on just now…. There is father Mussolini and father Hitler…and father Stalin…. Fathers are depressing.

Perhaps a touch overgeneralized, but one can sympathize. And this is a delicate skewering:

Sometimes the praise feels excessively solemn, as when Wade comments on Stein’s late-1920s essays on grammar: “She moved increasingly away from nouns, whose meanings were disappointingly preordained, and from punctuation, which she found didactic.”