Google Books

I just discovered a new use for Google Books - when you own a thick reference book with an iffy index, you can search the full text in Google Books and grab the page number!

Retro Monday

It felt like 1995 at my desk today. First an engineer friend called and asked me to translate a technical term for her. My computer was switched off, so I reached for my two-volume scientific/technical dictionary and found what she needed in a few seconds.

About two hours later I finished what I was working on and headed over to look at the day's translation questions on Proz.com (for some reason I enjoy looking at other people's questions a lot more than I enjoy asking questions of my own - probably because I like digging around). A fellow translator wanted to know what the heck is the difference between the terms attachment, annex, addendum and schedule in a contract. Why waste time Googling when you have the book with the answer literally right at hand? I cracked open Ken Adams' Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and made a colleague's life a little easier. Good times.

And this evening I got an email from a reputable translation agency asking for a copy of my resume.

My resume?!

I was about to check the year on the calendar when my phone went off - project manager texting me about a new job. Whew. It's 2010.

Грызть

Грызть (gryzt) - to chew or gnaw. From here we get the word for rodent, грызун (gryzun).

The other day it occurred to me to wonder whether or not the Russian word had any connection with the English word grist. Remember the old cliché "grist for the mill?" I turned to the OED and found out that grist is the name for grain to be ground at a mill. It can also refer to the act of grinding. The OED also cited an example from the 15th century where grist means to gnash one's teeth in anger.

So the two words don't just sound alike - they're related! Fascinating!

Architecture Glossary

Плужников В.И. "Термины Российского Архитектурного Наследия" Москва, "Исскуство" 1995

Pluzhnikov V.I. "Vocabulary of Russia's Architectural Heritage" Moscow, Isskustvo, 1995

I bought this book ages ago - well, ten years ago actually, but it feels like ages. I've only used it a few times to look things up for a translation, but it's fascinating reading and has illustrations for some of the entries. Here's a taste:

ОБЫДЕННАЯ ЦЕРКОВЬ - A church built in one day in gratitude for a military victory or in order to prevent or put an end to some calamity.

ЗАБОРОЛ - A wooden platform above the walls of a fortress from where one could throw logs at the enemy or pour boiling water or hot pitch on him.

ЕЗ (ЭЗ) - Piles or net stretched across the entire bed of a river to stop fish from moving upstream.

At the back of the glossary is a detailed chapter on how to decode the old Russian system of writing dates with letters instead of numbers, which you can sometimes see on very old buildings or works of art.

Кабак

I like to follow a wonderful blog on Turkish cuisine that features enticing closeups and simple recipes. A recent entry was on stuffed squash - Etli Kabak Dolmasi.

In Russian, squash is кабак or кабачок (ka-ba-CHOK), the Turkish word with a Russian ending. But кабак has another meaning in Russian that has always mystified me. A кабак is a loud tavern-style restaurant. As in the immortal "Если б я был матрос, я б уплыл по тебе, как по морю / В чужеземном порту пропивать башмаки в кабаке" ("If I were a sailor, I would sail away over you like the sea, / to a кабак in a foreign port where I'd sell my shoes for a drink").

I've lived here for years assuming that squash and taverns had somehow cross-pollinated in the Russian mind, but now I see I was wrong. Vasmer mentions theories that the term might come from a similar-sounding Turkish word for a boxing match (where the spectators would drink?), from Arabic, or even from German. A wee bit disappointing...

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...

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.