Гуталин

Let's say you just watched Простоквашино (the one where Dyadya Fyodor ditches his parents at the train station) for the umpteenth time and are wondering where the word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, "shoe polish") came from.

Sounds German, right?

So you pop over to the Russian Wikipedia to get the lay of the land. You find out that:
A) гуталин was invented in France during the reign of Charles II (no reference)
B) гуталин was made of eggs mixed with ashes and either vinegar or beer (again no reference)
C) the word гуталин comes from the Mongol word for shoes - "gutal" (who needs references, anyway??)

Never, never put your faith in the Russian Wikipedia. The English WP has a whole lot more people inputting on the articles, and even so you can run into impressionistic articles. But the Russian Wikipedia is like a phone book put together by a deaf insane asylum patient ("Snip, snip, what fun! Cutting and pasting little bits of information from around the web into this nice template! The Mongol word for shoes! Delightful!")

Shutting the door on all the noisy RWP fun, you think of all the possible spellings for goutaline/gouthalene/guttaline and search Google books.

Guttaline returns a snippet of an article in an 1892 edition of "Electrical Engineer," where the following intriguing definition is given:

"Guttaline - A new preparation for the purpose of replacing indiarubber and guttapercha, has been brought out and protected by MM. Worms and Zwierchowski. To a quantity of Manila gum tempered with benezene is added 5 per cent. of Auvergne bitumen, also mixed with benzene..."

That reference to gutta percha caught my eye as being possibly relevant. These two guys invented a replacement for a natural material and patented it with a name that reminded people of that natural material.

Not as interesting as a medieval Mongol-French cultural exchange on the subject of shoe polish, but somehow more convincing. I am still very interested in this word and will keep digging...

Чечевица

This morning I found myself pondering lentils as I made soup. I always assumed that чечевица (che-che-VEET-sa, "lentils") was a borrowed word because it didn't sound particularly Russian. When my paper etymologycal dictionary failed to turn up anything (oh yes, it has Чебоксары, but no чечевица), I went online and discovered Max Vasmer.

According to Vasmer and a couple of other dictionaries I cross-referenced, чечевица used to be called сочевица (so-che-VEET-sa) in the olden days after a vegan dish that people made to eat on fasting days. I've only had the gruel made of wheat, but apparently lentils were incorporated as well. That's a recipe I'll have to try...

Think you know the Russian alphabet?

А Б В Г Д Е Ё... right?

Not always. I'm translating a series of documents that have long lists of items starting at A, Б, В...

But when they get to E, the lists skip right to item Ж without including Ё. They also exclude Й.

Summer Reading and Murder

I move a lot, and that means that my huge collection of books is stored in a number of places on two continents. Where is Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? Good question.


But the flip side of that coin is that sometimes I find things I wasn't even looking for.


For example:

This is the kind of book you can pick up and start reading in the middle, which is what I did as soon as I found it in a box of miscellaneous household goods. On p. 125, Crystal explains that in Anglo-Saxon society, the word murder meant any killing that was "particularly wicked or hateful." It also had to be done in secret to count as murder.

Now if only I could find Beowulf...

Kolomna and gramophones

I've been to Kolomna a few times to see the beautiful Kremlin and churches (click here to see some good pictures).

One of my new clients is a newspaper in Kolomna, and I learned from one of its articles that apparently the city was once home to a large phonograph (or gramophone) manufacturer. A group of volunteers is putting together a gramophone museum. When I go back for another visit that will definitely be on my list of places to see.

The Russian word for gramophone is patefon. It seemed like an obvious borrowing from French, but a Google search for the word only turned up Russian hits. Hmm... Then I stumbled across a Wikipedia article about the brothers Charles and Émile Pathé. They originally leased an Edison phonograph for a cafe they owned, but after a while they decided to make their own devices and sell them under the Pathé brand. The pathephone! Interestingly, the photo in the Wikipedia article shows a record labled "Pathé Frères Phonograph Co." So the Pathés used the word phonograph.

In Radio Drama, Tim Crook describes Soviet director Dziga Vertov complaining that post-production is a pain with pathephones. I just bet it was.

Сакура

Знакомая американка, которая свободно владеет японским (и еще много чего умеет) разъяснила:

перый иэроглиф - сакура, "вишневое дерево"
второй иэроглиф - хана, "цветок"
третьий иэроглиф - ран, "хаос, много"
четвертый иэроглиф - ман, "наполненный"

Если их читать вместе, то получается либо "переполненный цветками сакуры" или "сакура бурно цветет".

A friend of mine who speaks Japanese fluently (and has a lot of other talents, too) explains:

the first character is sakura, or cherry tree.
the second character is hana, or flower.
the third character is ran, or chaos/disorder.
the fourth character is man, or full.

If you read them together, you get "full of sakura flowers" or "the sakura are blossoming like crazy."

I thought it said something like bon appetit!

Якитория

Заметили эти иэроглифы в Якитории сегодя вечером. Естественно, хочется узнать, что тут написано. Узнаю и доложу.

Кстати о названии "якитория" - соседка-японка в Сиэттле объяснила мне, что это слово означает "шашличная", и очень удивилась, что в московских якоториях дают и суши, и сашими, и всякие там супы...

We noticed these characters (is this Kanji?) in the Japanese restaurant Yakitoria around the corner from our apartment. I want to find out what they mean, and I'll post here when I do.

Interestingly, my Japanese neighbor in Seattle told me that Yakitoria means "barbecue restaurant." She was surprised to hear that the Moscow Yakitorias serve sushi, sashimi, soups, etc.

Тунеядец

Тунеядец (pronounced too-nee-YA-dets, meaning "bum," "sponger") - that sounds good in the current recession, doesn't it? It's so obviously intentional. The тунеядец hasn't lost his job. He never bothered to get one. I remember a Los Angeles Times journalist once describing the kind of people you see out and about in the middle of a sunny day "looking like work was never invented." That's the тунеядец. Although freelancers sometimes get mistaken for тунеядцы, we won't worry about that.

The word has a great sound. It doesn't really roll off your tongue - it kind of pops out of your mouth and offends someone before you can stop it. But where does it come from? What are its roots?

A friend and I were discussing this very point at the Molodaya Gvardiya bookstore, so I nabbed a two-volume etymological dictionary (Историко-этимологический словарь современного русского языка, Черных, П.Я., Медиа, 2007) and we headed to the checkout. Once I got the plastic wrap off the set I discovered that there was no entry for тунеядец. Oh, it had туннель (tunnel) and турист (tourist) - WTF? - but no тунеядец.

Later that evening I was having tea with another linguist friend who quickly thought through the question and laid it out for me.

The first part of the word, туне-, comes from втуне, which means "in vain," "to no good purpose." The second part, -ядец, means "one who eats."

So a тунеядец is a person who eats to no good purpose. Hangs out in the kitchen but doesn't buy groceries.

I have so many questions milling around without answers that I get really excited when I do find an answer.

The dictionary? Relegated to bathroom reading.

Psst...what did they say his name was again?

In the Spring issue of Slavfile Liv Bliss recommends Jim Shipp's Russian English Dictionary of Surnames for tracking down names that have been transliterated into Cyrillic. That's a book I'd like to see.

Ever heard of the famous French diver Kusto? Or Franklin Roosevelt's envoy to Moscow Josef Davis?

Okay, my first example is really easy, and the second one is really easy to find out.

But what about the Лорд Ридлинг (Lord Riedling? Lord Readling?) I encountered a while back? No name and no personal context, other than the fact that he was a well-known English Jew.

The general context is May 1939, and some of the mysterious lord's contemporaries are one Лорд Винтертон ("Lord Vinterton") and a German referred to as нацистский представитель Волтхат ("the Nazi representative Voltkhat").

Cyrillic masks removed, the men were: Lord Winterton (easy), Helmuth Wohlthat and...

Sir Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading!

I wasted a lot of time beating my head on the Internets searching for various English spellings of Ридлинг before it dawned on me that it wasn't a very English-sounding title and might be misspelled. In another 5 minutes I found the man.