I’ve been a fan of Veniamin Kaverin since reading his 1971 novel Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror] (LH post); I also enjoyed his early Скандалист [The troublemaker] (LH post), and I’m now reading his 1931 novel Художник неизвестен [The artist is unknown, tr. by P. Ross, whoever that is, in 1947 as The Unknown Artist] and savoring it slowly. I haven’t gotten very far and haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but I thought I’d share this bit from near the start, a rant by one of the main characters, Aleksei Arkhimedov ..read more

I have long been familiar with a dish called “pigs in a blanket,” which refers to hot dogs in croissant dough, and am not surprised that it is a US thing (hot dogs, n-est’ce pas?), but I am quite surprised to learn that Brits have a dish of sausage wrapped in bacon called “pigs in blankets” (as well as “kilted sausages” or “kilted soldiers”); furthermore, “it is a seasonal item, seldom offered commercially outside the Christmas season. […] Tesco in 2019 reported that a majority of shoppers they surveyed planned to serve the dish at Christmas dinner and that more planned to serve pigs in blanke ..read more

Maria Sereda has a Facebook post (in Russian) describing a phenomenon she’d learned about on a trip to Bishkek (Bishkek/Pishpek): in Kyrgyz, you can form an emphatic adjective by repeating the first syllable and adding -p-, and bilinguals do the same thing in Russian, creating, e.g., сипсиний [sipsinii] ‘very blue’ from синий [sinii] ‘(dark) blue.’ Commenters say the same is true of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and “all of Central Asia,” and one says Turkish has the same phenomenon: sarı ‘yellow’ sapsarı, yeşil ‘green’ yemyeşil. As you can see, that last has -m- rather than -p-. I did some digging and ..read more

Sorry, I know there’s been a glut of AI-related material here, but I was disturbed by this in a different way. Rachel Chason writes for the Washington Post (archived): SAFO, Mali — Most of the students had never seen their native language in its written form until recently. Now, they were eagerly sounding out the words appearing on the ThinkPad laptops before them, sometimes stumbling as they read a story written entirely in Mali’s most popular language, Bambara. The twist? The story on their screens had been generated, translated and illustrated using artificial intelligence. As Mali’s relat ..read more

Dmitry Oparin interviews Vasily Kharitonov for the Russia Program: Vasily Kharitonov is a linguist at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2022, he went to the Nanai village of Dada in the Far East to teach children the Nanai language and study the local linguistic landscape. In a conversation with anthropologist Dmitry Oparin, the scholar talks about his methods of studying native speakers, the factors that influence the prestige of a language, and how the infrastructure in Russia works for those who communicate and read in more languages than just Russian ..read more

I’d almost be willing to post Claire Moses’ NY Times story (archived) just for the bare existence of the word Böögg, but I’ll use the proposed etymology in the last quoted paragraph as a hook: Imagine if Punxsutawney Phil just didn’t show up one year. How would people know how much longer winter would last? People in Zurich found themselves in a similar state of limbo this week. On Monday, high winds disrupted the city’s annual spring festival, a Swiss version of Groundhog Day that includes a parade and the ceremonial burning of a fake snowman — an effigy of winter — whose head is packed with ..read more

I’ve finally finished Nabokov’s 1932 novel Подвиг [The feat], translated by Nabokov & Son as Glory; it took me a couple of weeks longer than it should have because I kept taking nibbles rather than making meals of it. I don’t really know why — it is, of course, well written — but the further I got the grumpier I became, and finally I had to force myself to gobble up the last 50 pages or so. And now I am going to grouse about it. Warning: there will be spoilers, especially because the ending is the only thing that makes it a novel rather than a series of biographical events (many of them ta ..read more

Melina Moe has a new LARB article “There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters” that makes me like Morrison a great deal: “I found it extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but ..read more

The Tumbrel Diaries of May 23, 2009 had a post The definitive Pavlova color spectrum that featured: Complete chronological list of 31 references in the Argus newspaper (Melbourne) to “Pavlova” or “pavlova” as the name for a “new season” color, together with all accompanying named colors or shades, 1926–28 The entries are studded with impressively outré color names, e.g. (from April 26, 1926) “tangerine, amourette, nilesque, veronese, tan, Pavlova, oriflamme, rust, and burnt oak” and (from Sept. 20) “pervenche [periwinkle blue], bois de rose, plum, navy, white, brown, raisin, champagne, wine ..read more

John Emerson sent me a link to Bob Yirka’s Phys.org piece “First languages of North America traced back to two very different language groups from Siberia,” saying “Looks dodgy to me”; I responded “Well, Johanna Nichols is well respected, so I wouldn’t dismiss anything she says out of hand, but this is surprising. I’ll toss it over the fence at the Hattery and see if it gets torn to shreds.” Yirka’s executive summary: Nichols’ techniques involve the use of linguistic typology, a field that involves comparing languages and organizing them based on shared criteria. To learn more about early Nor ..read more