In Connie Wang’s NY Times review (archived) of Wenyan Lu’s novel The Funeral Cryer (a fine example, by the way, of the benefits of opening up the paper to a more diverse group of reviewers), she talks about the “professional wailers, usually from China, who are paid to cry at funerals”: While I’ve never personally witnessed a funeral crier, my family comes from the parts of China that still employ this and other local traditions that have endured even as their young people have moved abroad. For example, my American husband finds it confusing that I don’t know the given names of my extended f ..read more

A reader writes: Castor fiber, the Eurasian beaver, is an interesting name. This website wants to connect it to Castor. There is a line of vague defeat: “But the animal did not live in Greece in classical times (the closest beavers were north of the Black Sea), and the name probably was borrowed from another language, perhaps influenced by the hero’s name.” This is in the wiki entry: In the 4th century BC, Aristotle described this species under the name λάταξ/ (latax). He wrote that it is wider than the otter, with strong teeth, and at night it often uses these teeth to cut down trees on riv ..read more

Today’s SMBC is pure Languagehattery. Punch line: “My grandpappy weren’t no speaker of Proto-Indo-European!” (Thanks, Sven ..read more

David-Antoine Williams (see this 2022 post) wrote me thus: I thought I might pass along some recent work of mine on OED editions and revisions. The most recent is a short thing on antedating rates in OED revisions, and then there are two older ones on the quoting of female authors in various editions and revisions, and the treatment of non-UK/US English across the long history of the dictionary. Needless to say, I found it all of great interest, and I hope you will too. I link to his posts, which in turn link to the actual articles. Antedating (in) the OED, “a short article by me on antedati ..read more

Or so Sarah Butcher reports: If you’re wondering which coding language to learn for a software engineering job in banking, Goldman Sachs’ CIO Marco Argenti seems to be aligning himself to the people who suggest an advanced knowledge of the English language and an ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and coherently in it, is now up there alongside Python and C++. Writing in Harvard Business Review, Argenti says he’s advised his daughter to study philosophy as well as engineering because coding in the age of large language models is partly about the “quality of the prompt.” “Ambiguous or ..read more

Slavomír Čéplö (aka bulbul) wrote me as follows: I have a mystery which I was hoping you or one of the Hatters might help me to solve. It involves a Church Slavic translation of a homily by John Chrysostom (see the attached edition by Reinhart). The text is quite trippy and even Reinhart has to admit he can’t figure out two parts (p. 169), of which the first one is the most interesting: чепито? in “и на чепитѣх(ь) | лежахꙋ ѻтроци, и ѻтроковице” apparently describing some sort of bed or sofa Does this sound like a challenge worthy of the Hatters? It does, and I am hereby posting it in the sur ..read more

We don’t seem to have discussed cryptids here at LH, and I’ve just discovered a fine one, the almas, “said to inhabit the Caucasus, Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains of Central Asia and the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia”: We were told that it had a flat face like that of a human being, and that it often walked on two legs, that its body was covered with a thick black fur, and its feet armed with enormous claws; that its strength was terrible, and that not only were hunters afraid of attacking it, but that the inhabitants removed their habitations from those parts of the country which it vis ..read more

A few years ago I mentioned that RusTRANS was “actively seeking essays for a new, Open Access volume which is aimed at stimulating and consolidating scholarship about the global imprint of Russian literature in translation”; now the volume has appeared, as editors Muireann Maguire and Cathy McAteer explain: […] Our edited volume, Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context, studies how literature itself acts as diaspora. In this collection of forty-one essays by three dozen international scholars, we trace how, since 1900, Russian literature has been disseminated beyond its political ..read more

Today I learned one of the best animal names ever: noolbenger, ‘A small species of nocturnal marsupial, Tarsipes rostratus, of southwest Western Australia.’ It is apparently more commonly called a honey possum, but that’s not nearly as much fun. The OED has it (entry from 2003), with a more descriptive definition: Chiefly Australian. The honey possum, Tarsipes rostratus (family Tarsipedidae), a tiny marsupial with a long pointed snout and a prehensile tail that is restricted to south-west Australia and feeds exclusively upon nectar and pollen. a1845 Nool-boon-goor. Aborigines of King George’s ..read more

I enjoyed John McIntyre’s April 27 post: My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college.” Let’s unpack some of what is in this. First, a century ago, many fewer young people went to college at all, and they usually came from schools with curriculum designed to prepare for a college education. And, mind you, even then, scholarship was not necessarily pronounced. In the Ivy League colleges, the “gentleman’s C” was e ..read more