languagehat.com

Yiddish Empowerment Coach has an interesting Facebook post:

What if I told you that sometimes, transliteration is more authentic than using the alef-beys?

We’re often taught that “real” Yiddish lives in the alef-beys. And those who can’t read it yet? They often feel ashamed. Unskilled. Left out of classes and locked out of literature.

And yes — the alphabet matters. Standardization matters. It lets us teach, publish, and build a shared language in an ancient script dripping with heritage. But standardization also smooths. It evens out quirks. It blurs regional music into one correct, homogeneous voice.

Which is why I love a little joke book called Royte Pomerantsn.

In the early 1900s, the ethnographer Immanuel Olsvanger collected Jewish folk humor in Lithuanian shtetlekh — and published it in transliteration. Not neat, standardized YIVO transliteration. A quirky, phonetic system that captures the Litvish dialect of his storytellers. So you see:
– dar instead of der
– id instead of yid
– nit instead of nisht
– zakh instead of zikh

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Margherita Bassi reports for Smithsonian magazine on another remarkable development in decipherment:

A little more than a thousand years ago, monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert removed Western Palestinian Aramaic and Greek writing from animal-skin parchments. They replaced the words with a Syriac translation of writings by John Climacus, also known as Saint John of the Ladder. […]

The original text, however, might not be completely lost. That’s good news, because it seems to contain copied portions of a second-century B.C.E. star catalog with maps originally created by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, known as the “father of scientific astronomy.” Researchers are now using a type of particle accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to uncover the hidden words.

“X-ray beams from our synchrotron at SLAC are helping uncover the long-erased and overwritten star map by scanning for trace metals left behind by the original inks,” reads a social media post from SLAC.

Previous work has revealed that many pages of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus come from a fifth- or sixth-century C.E. book, which included a copy of an astronomical poem titled Phaenomena. It was originally written by the Greek poet Aratus in the third century B.C.E. Alongside the poem appear to be transcriptions from Hipparchus’ star catalog, which was completed around 129 B.C.E. The work represents the “earliest known attempt to record accurate coordinates of many celestial objects observable with the naked eye,” researchers wrote in a 2022 study investigating the Codex Climaci Rescriptus’ original writings. […]

Last month, researchers at SLAC began scanning 11 pages of the codex, which were sent to the laboratory in Menlo Park, California, by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., reports KQED’s Ayah Ali-Ahmad. The facility’s synchrotron lightsource instrument produces intense X-ray beams that can unveil the document’s hidden text based on the ink composition, which differs from that used by the monks. The work has already revealed the ancient Greek word for “Aquarius” and details about stars within the constellation, Victor Gysembergh, a historian of science at the French National Center for Scientific Research who is leading the project, tells the outlet.

More info, and images, at the link. Today Hipparchus, tomorrow the world Archilochus!

I was reading Noah Shachtman’s NY Times piece on Bad Bunny (archived) when I hit the following passage and had to pause:

The United States is different, and more complicated. It’s really multiple markets in one, each developing and growing side by side. Spanish speakers might be watching música Mexicana videos while Caribbean immigrants and their kids are listening to dancehall, and members of the African diaspora are streaming amapiano. “When you’re that big and that culturally diverse,” Mr. Page says, “it can all happen within your borders.”

Amapiano? It looked Zulu, but there was something odd about it. So I googled, and Wikipedia explained:

Amapiano is a genre of music from South Africa that became popular in the early 2020s. It is a hybrid of kwaito, deep house, gqom, jazz, soul, and lounge music characterized by synths and wide, percussive basslines. The word “amapiano” derives from the IsiZulu word for “pianos”.

Pianos! That’s what I call a fun etymology. (I may actually investigate the music one of these days…)

Natasha Wimmer’s lengthy NYRB review essay on Alejo Carpentier (February 22, 2024; archived) has some good Hattic material near the start:

The historical novels that make up most of his oeuvre favor the Enlightenment and its ideas, but there are also currents of mid-twentieth-century surrealism and existentialism, Afro-Caribbean legend, Hollywoodesque epic, and Victorian maximalism. His prose—revered and sometimes gently mocked in the Spanish-speaking world—is extravagant, bejeweled with rare words and majuscules (a rare word he would surely favor), and festooned with lists. The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra describes his grammar school introduction to Carpentier’s verbiage in his affectionate foreword to Adrian Nathan West’s new translation of Explosion in a Cathedral (issued simultaneously with West’s translation of The Lost Steps, from 1953): “Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language?”

This sense of marvel and puzzlement is alive in West’s translations, which reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction. The original 1963 English translation of Explosion in a Cathedral by John Sturrock is mostly sure-footed and highly readable (for better and worse), but West lovingly restores the eccentric sweep and florid detail of the novel, better conveying the grandness of Carpentier’s vision.* That’s only part of the task, though, because for all his ornamentation, Carpentier is not a forbidding writer. West’s translation is sensitive to his humor and irony, and the reader is borne happily along through the thickets.

To begin with, West reverses the decision made by Sturrock (or Sturrock’s editors) to break the text into digestible paragraphs, restoring Carpentier’s monumental slabs of text and thereby the novel’s unconventional pacing. He also takes care not to dispel mysteries unnecessarily. Take the first sentence of the novel: “Last night, I saw the Machine rise up again” (West) versus “I saw them erect the guillotine again tonight” (Sturrock). (In Spanish, Esta noche he visto alzarse la Máquina nuevamente.) Sturrock introduces a prosaic “them,” shifts the ringing Esta noche (“tonight” in his translation) to a weaker position at the end of the sentence, and—most critically—decodes the sinister “Machine,” leaching the text of its cryptic force. (Carpentier never uses the word “guillotine” in this opening section.)

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I found Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Facebook post extraordinarily depressing; I’ll reproduce it here (apart from the photos, which show lots of empty shelves) so you can be depressed too (or not, depending on your attitude toward these things):

Empty shelves. What used to be the literature collection of the University of Amsterdam in the PC Hooft building now feels like a ghostly place. Yesterday I happened to pass by and noticed that the doors were open, so I went inside and found myself wandering for half an hour through what used to be a buzzing place full of students, academics and, of course, books.

They are gone. After the summer last year, the UvA opened its (splendid!) new humanities library at the heart of the university quarter in the old city. The new building is beautiful, a great place for students and staff to come and study, and at first sight it looks like a true library, including many study places lined with books. I very much appreciate this new building, and yet the impression is deceptive, for most of the physical books have actually vanished from the library’s collection, replaced by digital copies. The heart is gone. What’s left is essentially an empty shell.

I had a conversation with a colleague who works in the UvA’s library context, and who told me how few books are actually left in the collection. When I expressed my feelings of malaise about this development, she asked me “but how often do you yourself still order a physical older book?” And I had to admit it: rarely. I buy books that I want to read. But like almost every other academic these days, I use digital copies of books that I just need to consult.

I understand the cold financial logic of getting rid of enormous collections of books that are never used (a previous librarian could tell me the exact housing costs for each square meter of books, in a city like Amsterdam where space it extremely expensive). But even apart from the well-established fact that digital books are much more vulnerable than physical ones and may simply not survive the future development of technology (take a moment to imagine what that means!), some unquantifiable quality gets lost forever if one can no longer smell and turn the yellowed pages in a book that was published a hundred years ago. They have an aura.

Most of all, I’m saddened by the managerial “presentist” mentality of not being worried all too much about the destruction of cultural and intellectual heritage. I’ll never forget a small exchange I once had in a café, when somebody asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I was a historian. For several seconds she looked at me with a stunned expression on her face, and finally managed to blurt out: “but… but… it’s over!” She just couldn’t fathom that somebody would be interested in the past.

In fairness, here’s a response from a librarian:
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I have always vaguely wondered how far back that famous phrase goes, and Dave Wilton has done the relevant spadework at Wordorigins:

The phrase take me to your leader is a science fiction cliché, so much so that in the 2007 “Voyage of the Damned” Christmas episode of Doctor Who the time-traveling, title character said, “Take me to your leader! I’ve always wanted to say that!” (Another phrase in that episode that the good doctor always wanted to say was “Allons-y Alonso!”)

The current popularity of the phrase and its application to extraterrestrials and flying saucers dates to the 1950s, but the phrase itself is considerably older. The first known application of a variant of the phrase to first contact with extraterrestrials dates to 21 March 1953 and a cartoon by Alex Graham that appeared in the New Yorker (shown here). The cartoon depicts a flying saucer that has landed in a field and two aliens talking to a horse, saying, “Kindly take us to your President!”

We see the phrase in its familiar form in an Associated Press article from 21 August 1956 that reported on the Republican National Convention in San Francisco:

One delegate, intrigued by an outer-space type of portable transmitter in the hands of a network reporter, walked up and demanded, “Take me to your leader.”

But the 10 October 1956 issue of Variety also reports on this incident, calling it “the old space-man gag,” indicating that the catchphrase was already well associated with UFOs.

And before the extraterrestrial invasion of our popular culture, the phrase appears quite often in adventure fiction dating back to the nineteenth century.

Click through for the 19th-century quotes, and of course for the cartoon. My curiosity is now satisfied. (For a related joke, see Dan Milton’s joke here; I quoted “Allons-y, Alonso!” in 2022.)

Nicholas Andresen’s recent post annoys me somewhat because (like almost everyone else) he writes as if “AI” were some kind of “conscious” “agent” that does things with purpose (it starts “In September 2025, researchers released the internal monologue of OpenAI’s GPT-o3 as it decided to lie about scientific data. Here’s what it was thinking…”), but never mind, it’s got a lot of interesting material. He starts with the discovery that “a model’s own output could serve as scratch paper” (this is called “Chain-of-Thought”), and continues:

But something strange is happening to Chain-of-Thought reasoning.

Remember that screenshot we started with? “Glean disclaim disclaim.” “Synergy customizing illusions.” Online, people have started calling this kind of thing Thinkish. There’s a whole emerging vocabulary: “watchers” apparently means human overseers, “fudge” means sabotage, “cunning” means circumventing constraints. Some of the other words – ”overshadows,” “illusions” – seem to mean different things in different contexts, and some combinations resist interpretation entirely.

Weirdly, Thinkish reminds me of home.

I grew up near Gibraltar – a tiny British territory dangling off the southern tip of Spain – where a Spanish-English blend called “Llanito” is spoken. Here’s an example:

“Llévate el brolly que it’s raining cats and dogs.”

To a Llanito speaker, this is completely normal: “take the umbrella, it’s pouring”. To anyone else, it might take a minute to parse – there’s a Spanish verb, borrowed British slang, and an idiom that makes no literal sense in any language.

And Llanito feels great to speak. You’re never stuck – you can always grab the best-fitting piece from each language and move on. It’s just less bueno for everyone else.

That’s Thinkish. The model seems to grab whichever token fits best, optimizing for its own convenience. The problem is that we’re the outsiders now.

He goes on to Alfred the Great’s translation of The Consolation of Philosophy and how languages change, and returns to AI:
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I’ve praised Tessa Hadley many times at LH (e.g., last year), and I’m going to do so again; her latest New Yorker story, “The Quiet House” (archived), is every bit as good as I expected, and I thought I’d bring a couple of excerpted paragraphs here in the hope of enticing readers:

During the time of their youthful adventures, and although they proclaimed themselves feminists, they still more or less thought all those things about the inauthenticity of women. They didn’t so much think them with their conscious minds: the sensation of secondariness was built into the very texture of their imagination and their desires. They supplied to every adventure some invisible observer, male, to fulfill it and make it real. And yet the girls also took for granted, with contemptuous confidence, their right to travel alone and wear shorts and sleeveless tops if they wanted to, while girls their age in Italy and Greece were kept chastely at home. They learned how to say foul things in other languages, in order to put off the boys and men in those countries who followed them and propositioned them, pleading with them so insistently and cravenly—“like dogs,” Jane said. They saw the recoil and disgust on the boys’ faces, at hearing those words from a girl’s mouth.
[…]

The book group had degenerated somewhat, Jane and Geraldine both thought, into a kind of dining club, each member feeling obligated to put on a spread of delicious Ottolenghi-type dishes when it was their turn to host. Discussion of the books was too perfunctory; the two friends’ ideal would have been more like a seminar. They brought their books marked up and bristling with torn slips of paper, and were disappointed when they were hardly opened. Both of them devoured fiction: Jane, a history graduate, was susceptible to a serious theme and anything in translation, whereas Geraldine, who’d done English literature, insisted she cared only about the sentences. Life was hard, she said. Thank God for sentences.

And speaking of sentences, here’s the story’s first: “Geraldine woke out of busy dreams into the calms and shallows of old age.” I memorized it even as I read it. Now, that’s writing.

If you want to blow your wig, cast your pies on the Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary (1945):

In the old days the people greeted a new ruler with the cry: “The King is dead, long live the King!” Today there’s a strange shout: “Webster is dead, long live the Hepster!” […]

The Editors feel that JIVE TALK is here to stay and believe that this book is the most complete dictionary of Jive words and phrases ever presented. It may be of no assistance to an Abercrombie but we’re sure it will help most people a great deal.

Zowie! And don’t miss the JEOGRAPHICAL JIVE section, which goes from KEEN from ABERDEEN to CONQUERS from YONKERS. Take a bow, Jay!

I was reading Mary M. Wiles’ Interview with Jacques Rivette (yes, I’m still on my Rivette kick; I recently saw his late sort-of-thriller Secret défense and posted a rant about the folly of calling it “Secret Defense” in English) and was struck by this passage:

mw: Why did you feel the need to return to the theater after La bande des quatre?

jr: After La bande des quatre, I was so pleased with the work we did with the actresses that I wanted to continue. And since they also wanted to do some theater, we got together a small group like that to work with each other on some classics; Corneille, Racine, and Marivaux, is what we were working on. And then at the end of a few months, they wanted to do a real performance, and that’s when we dropped Marivaux, which was too hard. But we kept—and we should have just kept Corneille. Because, it was already too much, Corneille and Racine. It was just that we wanted to continue to work on those classics … on Corneille, which was the driving force. And besides, the work that I did with them and with the guys who had joined them was much more interesting to me, the play by Corneille, that is, Tite et Bérénice [1670], than working on Racine’s plays, on Bajazet [1672]. Bajazet is fabulous, I can’t speak ill of Racine, but you grasp it all in the very first reading. That’s it, we said, we understand it all, but then, afterwards, what were we going to do with it? Whereas Corneille is hard, even for the French, he’s hard.

mw: You can imagine that for us …

jr: It’s like Latin for us. It isn’t French. All of those authors were fluent readers of Latin and Greek, but Corneille couldn’t read Greek, and that’s a big difference between them. Racine read Greek, and Corneille read Latin. And he read so much Latin that it’s almost Mallarmé, it’s so dense. Corneille’s Bérénice, it’s true that it’s a hard play, it’s overloaded, each verse says three things, and its characters are infinitely rich. Infinitely more things are happening between Titus and Bérénice, infinitely more things are happening in Corneille’s play than in Racine’s, where nothing happens. Bérénice isn’t the Corneille play that I like the best though, even if it’s got fabulous language. It’s fabulous as a poem, but it’s like Shakespeare for you. As a matter of fact, I gather it’s hard to translate, like Goethe is untranslatable, like Pushkin is untranslatable, like Dante is untranslatable, well, like all the major poets. I don’t know, but, in any case, it was difficult to stage.

mw: I’ve read a few of Corneille’s plays but have never seen them performed on stage.

jr: In France, I’m not the only one, once you get hooked on Corneille, you’re lost. It’s very deep. He’s an author I find very dense, so full of history, of thought. He’s a very rich author.

It makes me wish I’d kept up the French literature I studied almost sixty years ago with the imperious Mme Ruegg; we read Corneille and Racine and I loved them both, but I can no longer remember them well enough to know whether I agree with what Rivette is saying. It doesn’t matter, though; when somebody expatiates like that about literature they love, it’s the loving attention that matters, I don’t really give a damn whether they’re “right.” (I often have that reaction to Dmitry Bykov’s essays about Russian lit.) Anyway, I should give Bérénice a try.