Mother Tongue

From The New Yorker:

Oswaldo Vidal Martín always wears the same thing to court: a striped overshirt, its wide collar and cuffs woven with geometric patterns and flowers. His pants are cherry red, with white stripes. Martín is Guatemalan and works as a court interpreter, so clerks generally assume that he is there to translate for Spanish speakers. But any Guatemalan who sees his clothing, which is called traje típico, knows that Martín is indigenous. “My Spanish is more conversational,” Martín told me. “I still have some difficulties with it.” He interprets English for migrants who speak his mother tongue, a Mayan language called Mam...

Pedro Pablo Solares, a specialist in migration and a columnist for the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre, travelled throughout the U.S. between 2010 and 2014, providing legal services to migrants. He found that the “immense majority” of Mayans were living in what he called ciudades espejo—mirror cities—where migrants from the same small towns in Guatemala have reconstituted communities in the U.S. “If you are a member of the Chuj community and that is your language, there are only fifty thousand people who speak that in the world. There’s only so many places you can go to find people who speak your language,” Solares told me. He described the migration patterns like flight routes: Q’anjob’al speakers from San Pedro Solomá go to Indiantown, Florida; Mam speakers from Tacaná go to Lynn, Massachusetts; Jakalteco speakers from Jacaltenango go to Jupiter, Florida.

Rachel Nolan, "A Translation Crisis at the Border" (January 6, 2020 issue)

V is for ...

A case of a ghastly linguistic muddle involving, in one sentence, no fewer than five languages:

Euclides da Cunha, who was a fanatical republican, a man totally convinced of the necessity of the republic in order to modernize Brazil and create social justice in the country ... was working at that time as a journalist in São Paulo and wrote vehement articles against the rebels in the northeast, calling this rebellion "our vendetta" because of the French reactionary movement in Britain against the French Revolution.

The passage above is from Mario Vargas Llosa's A Writer's Reality, based on a series of lectures he delivered (in English) at Syracuse University in 1988. The context is a discussion of the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha, whose non-fiction work Os Sertões, regarded as one of the foundation stones of his country's literature, describes a millenarian (and, at least in part, monarchist) uprising in Northeast Brazil towards the end of the 19th century. (Vargas Llosa used the same revolt as the basis for his own novel, La guerra del fin del mundo.) But Euclides da Cunha, who wrote in Portuguese, never called the events in Canudos (where the revolt was centered), "our vendetta"; he called them nossa Vendée, that is, "our Vendée," in allusion to the French counterrevolutionary uprising of 1793. Not writing in his native Spanish, Vargas Llosa has mistakenly employed a false English cognate of Italian origin that in fact has no relation to the French word used in the Portuguese text; moreover, he has apparently confused Britain with Brittany, which is at least vaguely in the same part of France as the department of the Vendée.

The moral of the story, perhaps: never be your own translator.

NB: Os Sertões has been translated into English at least twice, once by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands, and in a recent Penguin Classics translation as Backlands: The Canudos Campaign. Vargas Llosa's novel, which has considerable merit of its own, has been translated as The War of the End of the World.

Odd, off, oft, old.

The artist and printmaker Annie Bissett has discovered this wonderful bit of found poetry, which she has posted on her Tumblr blog. Adapted from Thomas Dilworth's A New Guide to the English Tongue, an oft-reprinted 18th-century schoolbook, it reproduces part of a table of "Words of Three Letters, viz. One Vowel and two Consonants."

Although it may not be immediately apparent, there is a logical order to the table. It is alphabetized first by last letter, then by central vowel, and finally by first letter. The first word in the table (which actually begins at the bottom of the unshown preceding page) is Dab, and it is followed by Web. Bib fib nib rib. and so on until it reaches Box sox. It then begins again with words that don't fit the consonant-vowel-consonant spelling pattern: The. Who. Cry dry fly etc. (although Two., in the second paragraph, would seem to belong further down). The words in parentheses appear to be ones whose vowel is pronounced differently from those of the rest of their respective groups. The book uses the old-style ſ for initial s.

But knowing how the table is constructed is much less fun than simply reading it (especially aloud), enjoying the music of English speech sounds, and reflecting on the strangeness of human language. It may remind us that these everyday words, the essential building blocks of English, are, in the end, just arbitrary signs, ones that would mean nothing, or perhaps different things, to someone who knew nothing of the language.

The Language of Dreams

"It is very remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and matter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances."

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, writing of Laura Bridgman. Bridgman, left blind, deaf, and unable to speak after an early illness, learned to communicate by means of a manual alphabet while in residence at the Perkins Institution near Boston, Massachusetts.

The mind habituates itself to whatever tools it has at hand. If I converse in Spanish for a while and then return to English, it sometimes takes me a moment to realize that I no longer need to mentally translate before speaking. After reading Dickens's lengthy description of Bridgman, (much of which reproduces the written account of her teacher Samuel Gridley Howe), I found myself only slowly returning to a world in which the senses of sight and hearing could be taken for granted.

Laura Bridgman eventually learned to write with ink and paper. Among her writings are descriptions of her dreams.

Babel

According to historian Bruce Watson, when William Wood's massive textile mill on the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts was completed, in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, it was regarded, at least by the locals, as "the eighth wonder of the world":

The size of the building simply boggled the imagination. The mill had two parallel wings each 1,937 feet long, 500 feet longer than the Empire State Building if laid on its side. The mill's sprawling floors housed 1,470 power looms along sixteen miles of aisles... Enclosing thirty acres under one roof, employing a small city of six thousand workers, the Wood Mill was to textiles what Pittsburgh was to steel -- the very symbol of consolidation and power.

Its workforce, and the workforce of the city's other mills, included representatives from some 30 nationalities, among them Armenians, East European Jews, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Russians, Scots, Syrians, and Turks. Many of the groups had their own newspapers, businesses, and places of worship.

On January 11, 1912, angered by a pay cut, workers at one of the city's mills walked out. The strike quickly spread, and over the next several months the city witnessed one of the most intense struggles between labor and management in 20th-century America, drawing in everyone from "Big Bill" Haywood and the Wobblies of the IWW to Harvard students assigned to serve in the local militia. (Watson's Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream tells the story in full.)


This postcard of the Wood Mill was mailed six years after the strike and four days after the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War. There are many other contemporary postcard views of the Lawrence mills; this one, published by L. L. Lester, a firm in nearby Lowell, is not the most aesthetically pleasing and in terms of lithographic technique it's pretty crude, but it does convey the vast scale of the mill. It was addressed to a Mrs. J. Liverman at "Suit 25," 888 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The sender's name could be "Jos.," maybe her husband Joseph or Josef. He or she wasn't necessarily a mill worker, perhaps just a traveling salesman on business.


I have no idea even what language family this message belongs to (Slavic? Baltic?), but would love to hear from someone who does, and who could perhaps even transcribe and translate it. The only words I can pick out with reasonable certainty are "Malden Sq."

Update: I'm told that the language is Russian and that the message is something like:

Dear Shura,

I'm thankful to say I'm alive and well, and wish you the same. Go tomorrow to the station at Malden Sq. and wait for me, I'll be there half past six or a bit later. Be well. See you tomorrow[?]

Thanks to the good folks at WordReference.com for identifying and transcribing this.

Postscript: According to federal census records from 1920, the Joseph Liverman at 888 Massachusetts Avenue was a sign painter, aged 35, who lived with his wife, Anna. He was born in Russia and had immigrated to the US in 1910. By September 23, 1923, according to U.S. Naturalization Records indexes, he had moved to 30 Upham St. in Malden, Massachusetts; here his date and place of birth are listed as May 6th, 1885 in Odessa, and his occupation as "sign writer." According to the 1930 census he was still living in Malden and working as a house painter; his wife's name is given as Adelia but since her age matches Anna's she was probably the same woman. It's interesting that although the 1920 census lists the couple's native tongue as "Russian," the 1930 census instead indicates "Yiddish."

A Map of Slavic Europe

This fold-out map (it's one of three in the book) is from Russian and the Slavonic Languages by W. J. Entwistle and W. A. Morison, a volume in Faber & Faber's Great Languages series. There's probably nothing here that would be news to a philologist or a Slavic historian, and I don't know to what degree the situation may have altered since the book was published in 1949, but it's interesting to have the extent and diversity of Slavic diffusion displayed in graphic form.

The big gap to the west of the Black Sea is the territory occupied by speakers of Romanian (a Romance language) and Hungarian (Finno-Ugric). Among other things, the map illustrates the little pockets stranded by the shifting of borders and the back and forth of migrations. Some of those pockets must now be extinct, like the "Wendish Slovenes of Lake Leba" (not to be confused with the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavian Slovenia, far to the south) who were said by the authors to have already dwindled to some 200-250 individuals.


Of the book's co-authors, William J. Entwistle was the general editor of the Great Languages series, succeeding L. R. Palmer. He was apparently not strictly speaking a Slavic specialist, as his title was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies in the University of Oxford, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Entwistle was also responsible for the volume in the series that was devoted to Spanish. Morison was a Slavicist at the University of London. Their work was performed under less than optimal conditions, but the combination of the recent devastation across Europe and the onset of the Cold War must have lent the book extra relevance, even urgency.

This book has been written under great stress, and cannot but show many faults. The war has absorbed the services of almost all the small band of competent students of Slavonic. One author has been wholly engulfed in public business, and the other partly, during the composition of the work, which has been elaborated too often in hotel bedrooms or railway carriages. Long neglect has left our libraries, despite the gallant efforts of the librarians, deficient in Slavonic works. Not infrequently we have been unable to consult essential works, and have had to rely on our own discretion.

Several of the projected volumes in the Great Languages series were never completed; the project seems to have petered out around 1960, though some of the individual books have since been reprinted by other publishers.

The Great Languages

This series was published by Faber & Faber beginning in the 1930s, under the general editorship of L. R. Palmer. At least some of the volumes were still being reprinted in the late 1960s, but the series as an ongoing project seems to have been abandoned, with a number of the projected titles unissued, probably around 1960. Some volumes may still be in print from other publishers. The following titles definitely appeared:

• B. F. C. Atkinson, The Greek Language 1931
• T. Burrow, The Sanskrit Language 1955
• W. D. Elcock, The Romance Languages 1950
• W. J. Entwistle, The Spanish Language, together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque 1936; second edition 1962
• W. J. Entwistle and W. A. Morison, Russian and the Slavonic Languages 1949
• A. Ewert, The French Language 1933
• R. A. D. Forrest, The Chinese Language 1948
• Einar Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages
• Bruno Migliorini, The Italian Language (“abridged and re-cast by T. G. Griffith”) 1966, 1984
• L. R. Palmer, The Latin Language 1946
• R. Priebsch and W. E. Collinson, The German Language 1934

The following were listed at various times as being in preparation, but as far as I can tell were never completed:

• R. A. Crossland, The Anatolian Languages
• G. Bonfante, Indo-European Languages
• G. R. Driver, The Hebrew Language
• Kenneth Jackson, The Celtic Languages
• Kenneth Jackson, The Gaelic Languages
• N. Davis, The English Language
• Helge Kökeritz, The English Language
• Alf Sommerfelt, The Scandinavian Languages

In two cases (English and Scandinavian), different prospective authors are given in successive versions of the list of forthcoming volumes. Neither N. Davis nor Helge Kökeritz apparently ever completed The English Language, but Einer Haugen's Scandinavian Languages did appear, replacing Sommerfelt's. The focus of Kenneth Jackson's volume was apparently shifted, since he is assigned distinct but related topics in different versions of the list, but in any case I can find no record that his contribution was issued. Unpublished titles were still being listed as forthcoming on reprints as late as 1968, presumably because Faber did not go to the trouble of changing the plates.

Of the volumes I've seen, Elcock's Romance volume is perhaps the most easy to recommend to a non-specialist like myself; the Spanish volume is also of interest to any devoted student of the language. All of the volumes have a certain amount of abstruse philological jargon in spots, but the historical sections and examples are accessible for anyone who's interests run to this kind of thing. Forrest's Chinese Language, however, is pretty forbidding for anyone without a linguistics background.