by | 7 February 2007 · 7:54 pm

Romanian Synonymy: Latin and Slavic

Romanian synonym sets formed from Latin and Slavic components.

Nouns (Latin ~ Slavic ‘English gloss’):

  • lac ~ iezer ‘lake’
  • cale ~ drum ‘road’
  • călare ~ potecă ‘path’
  • pulbure ~ praf ‘dust’
  • nea ~ zăpadă ‘snow’
  • timp ~ vreme ‘time’
  • secure ~ topor ‘axe’
  • piuă ~ dârstă ‘mortar, fulling vat’
  • mâncare ~ hrană ‘food’
  • stup ~ ulei (regional) ‘beehive’
  • scoarţă ~ coajă ‘bark, crust’
  • vită ~ dobitoc ‘cow, ox, cattle’
  • fiară ~ dihanie ‘beast, monster’
  • vacă ~ ialoviţă (obsolete) ‘cow’
  • corp ~ trup ‘body’
  • cap ~ glavă (obs.) ‘head’
  • faţă ~ obraz ‘face’
  • popor ~ norod ‘people’
  • şerb ~ sclav, rob ‘serf’
  • spaimă ~ groază ‘fear’
  • tristeţe ~ jale ‘sorrow’
  • ştire ~ veste ‘news’
  • ceartă ~ svadă ‘quarrel’

Adjectives (Latin ~ Slavic ‘English gloss’):

  • deşert ~ gol ‘empty, barren’
  • roşu ~ rumen ‘red, ruddy’
  • umed ~ jilav ‘damp, moist’
  • sănătos ~ citov (obs.) ‘healthy’

Verbs (Latin ~ Slavic ‘English gloss’):

  • a lucra ~ a munci/trudi ‘to work, labor’
  • a treiera ~ a îmblăti (regional) ‘to thresh’
  • a săpa ~ a prăşi ‘to dig, weed’
  • a înnegri ~ a cerni ‘to blacken’
  • a păcătui ~ a greşi ‘to sin, err’
  • a se deprinde/învăţa ~ a se obişnui ‘to get used to’
  • a vindeca ~ a lecui ‘to cure’

SOURCE: “Synonymy and dialects” (4.1.1.4) in Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vinţeler (Bucureşti: Editură Sţiinţifică şi Encliclopedică, 1983) [my translation].

The nature of the borrowings that gave rise to these synonym sets suggests to me intermixed language communities with high degrees of bilingualism, and not contact between old and new technologies at a linguistic frontier, as was typical during the expansion of colonial languages across the globe.

UPDATE: There are also synonym sets of purely Slavic origin, but some of the alternates are rare, regional, or even obsolete:

  • nămol ~ tină ‘mud, silt’
  • mlacă ~ mlaştină ~ mocirlă ‘marsh, swamp, mud’
  • stog ~ claie ~ căpită ‘hayrick, shock (of hair)’
  • coteţ ~ cocină ‘sty, kennel’
  • război ~ stative ‘loom’
  • cobiliţă ~ coromâslă ‘carrying pole’
  • cârpă ~ zdreanţă ~ otreapă ‘rag’
  • lele ~ nană ‘auntie’ (term of address for older women)
  • doică ~ mancă ‘wetnurse’
  • a osteni ~ a obosi ‘to tire’

Leave a comment

Filed under language, Romania

by | 6 February 2007 · 8:57 pm

Truman’s Other Atomic Initiative

Harry S. Truman claimed, for the rest of his life [after ordering that nuclear weapons be used in warfare], to have lost no sleep over his decision, but his behavior suggests otherwise. On the day the bomb was first tested in the New Mexico desert he wrote a note to himself speculating that “machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.” A year later he placed his concerns in a broader context: “[T]he human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.” “It is a terrible thing,” he told a group of advisers in 1948, “to order the use of something that … is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had…. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.”

The words were prosaic—Truman was a matter-of-fact man—but the implications were revolutionary. Political leaders had almost always in the past left it to their military chiefs to decide the weapons to be used in fighting wars, regardless of how much destruction they might cause. Clausewitz’s warnings had done little over the years to alter this tendency. Lincoln gave his generals a free hand to do whatever it took to defeat the Confederacy: well over 600,000 Americans died before their Civil War came to an end. Civilians imposed few constraints on militaries in World War I, with devastating consequences: some 21,000 British troops died in a single day—most of them in a single hour—at the Battle of the Somme. Anglo-American strategic bombing produced civilian casualties running into the tens of thousands on many nights during World War II, without anyone awakening Churchill or Roosevelt each time this happened. And Truman himself had left it to the Army Air Force to determine when and where the first atomic weapons would be dropped: the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” were no more familiar to him, before the bombs fell, than they were to anyone else.

After that happened, though, Truman demanded a sharp break from past practice. He insisted that a civilian agency, not the military, control access to atomic bombs and their further development. He also proposed, in 1946, turning all such weapons and the means of producing them over to the newly established United Nations—although under the Baruch Plan (named for elder statesman Bernard Baruch, who presented it) the Americans would not relinquish their monopoly until a foolproof system of international inspections was in place. In the meantime, and despite repeated requests from his increasingly frustrated war planners, Truman refused to clarify the circumstances in which they could count on using atomic bombs in any future war. That decision would remain a presidential prerogative: he did not want “some dashing lieutenant colonel decid[ing] when would be the proper time to drop one.”

There were elements of illogic in Truman’s position. It made integrating nuclear weapons into existing armed forces impossible. It left unclear how the American atomic monopoly might be used to induce greater political cooperation from the Soviet Union. It impeded attempts to make deterrence work: the administration expected its new weapons to keep Stalin from exploiting the Red Army’s manpower advantage in Europe, but with the Pentagon excluded from even basic information about the number and capabilities of these devices, it was not at all apparent how this was to happen. It is likely, indeed, that during the first few years of the postwar era, Soviet intelligence knew more about American atomic bombs than the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff did. Moscow’s spies—having penetrated the top levels of the British intelligence establishment—were that good, while Truman’s determination to maintain civilian supremacy over his own military establishment was that strong.

In the long run, these lapses proved less important than the precedent Truman set. For by denying the military control over atomic weapons, he reasserted civilian authority over how wars were to be fought. Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around. Little in Truman’s background would have predicted this outcome. His military experience was that of a World War I artillery captain. He had been a failed businessman, and a successful but unremarkable politician. He would never have reached the presidency had Roosevelt not plucked him from the Senate to be his vice-presidential running mate in 1944, and then died.

But Truman did have one unique qualification for demanding a return to Clausewitz: after August, 1945, he had the ability, by issuing a single order, to bring about more death and destruction than any other individual in history had ever been able to accomplish. That stark fact caused this ordinary man to do an extraordinary thing. He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used.

SOURCE: The Cold War: A New History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin, 2005), pp. 53-55 (multiple reviews here)

Leave a comment

Filed under U.S., war

by | 5 February 2007 · 8:47 pm

Pamuk on Tristesse vs. Hüzün

Tristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual [like melancholy]; hüzün and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by millions. But the words and the feelings they describe are not identical, and if we are to pinpoint the difference it is not enough to say that Istanbul is much richer than Delhi or São Paolo. (If you go to the poor neighborhoods, the cities and the forms poverty takes are in fact all too similar.) The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner—the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques—inflict heartache on all who live among them.

These are nothing like the remains of great empires to be seen in western cities, preserved like museums of history and proudly displayed. The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins. Many western writers and travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture. It is no more possible to take pride in these neglected dwellings, which dirt, dust, and mud have blended into their surroundings, than it is to rejoice in the beautiful old wooden houses that as a child I watched burn down one by one….

The tristesse that Lévi-Strauss describes is what a Westerner might feel as he surveys those vast poverty-stricken cities of the tropics, as he contemplates the huddled masses and their wretched lives. But he does not see the city through their eyes. Tristesse implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice color his impressions. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not a feeling that belongs to the outside observer. To varying degrees, classical Ottoman music, Turkish popular music, especially the arabesque that became popular during the 1980s, are all expressions of this emotion, which we feel as something between physical pain and grief. And Westerners coming to the city often fail to notice it….

Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it too expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world. The screen he projects over life is painful because life itself is painful. So it is, also, for the residents of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty and depression. Imbued still with the honor accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: They all gave the impression that because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.

SOURCE: Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2006), pp. 101, 103-104

Leave a comment

Filed under philosophy, Turkey

by | 4 February 2007 · 5:16 pm

Two New Books on the U.S. Supreme Court

Other priorities prevented me from blogging about an interview with two guests on Monday that was one of the best I’ve recently witnessed on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Both experts had surprising things to say that were well researched, well articulated, and (best of all) anathema to conventional wisdom—unlike every single interview with political spokespeople (Sen. Tempest, R-Red State, vs. Sen. Tantrum, D-Blue State), and unlike the increasingly predictable punditry of the dynasty of Republican sympathizers (David Gergen, Paul Gigot, David Brooks, and many likely heirs) who debate the durable Democratic dinosaur (Mark Shields, the NewsHour equivalent of Special Report‘s Fred Barnes, neither of whom can think outside the party line).

RAY SUAREZ: Now, two veteran court watchers offer some perspectives on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America,” George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen examines the importance of judicial temperament throughout the court’s history.

Jan Crawford Greenburg, former NewsHour regular and now a legal correspondent for ABC News, looks at the making of the current court in “Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.”

I talked with them recently in the Moot Court Room at the George Washington University Law School.

Well, Jeffrey Rosen, Jan Crawford Greenburg, between your two books we get 220 years of court history. Was it always clear that the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Rosen, was going to be the important institution that it became?

JEFFREY ROSEN, George Washington University: Certainly not. When John Marshall, the greatest chief justice, took over, it was a backwater. The court met in the basement of the Capitol. People kept turning down the job of chief justice, because it wasn’t considered important enough. Congress refused to allow the court to meet for two years.

It was not a prestigious job, by any means. And the progress of the court from that embattled backwater to the strong, self-confident institution we know today is largely a reflection of the personalities that made it up. That’s what’s so striking: It really is character and temperament that made the court into the strong institution.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, you put a lot of store in your story in the personal attributes of these men who became both associates and chiefs over the years. Was this something that you even understood at first? How important personality, temperament was?

JEFFREY ROSEN: No, I was so struck by this. I just thought, why not pair justices? Take a pragmatic justice who’s able to compromise with a brilliant justice who’s more interested in ideological purity. And I found in these pairings that the brilliant ideologue was less successful than the pragmatic justice.

And it’s surprising. Take Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Marshall Harlan. Holmes is a great liberal icon. People think he was a great defender of civil rights, but it was actually the opposite.

He was a radical majoritarian, based on his experience in the Civil War. He said, “I hate justice. If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell, I will help them. It’s my job.” He almost never met a law he was willing to strike down, and he upheld some of the darkest laws that were passed by Congress, including those subverting African-American voting rights.

By contrast, John Harlan, a former slaveholder, the only southerner on the court, less brilliant than Holmes. Holmes condescended to him and said, you know, he was the last of the great “tobacco-spitting judges.” He was very emotional and moralistic.

But Harlan, based on his experience in the Civil War as a practical politician, understood the central achievement of Reconstruction, wrote that great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, objecting to the court’s decision to uphold railway segregation, and, because of his personal experience, was able to foreshadow the great Civil Rights revolution that the Warren Court wouldn’t recognize for almost a century.

It’s an incredible lesson about the importance of judicial temperament.

Personalities on the bench

RAY SUAREZ: Now, Jan Crawford Greenburg, Jeff Rosen’s personalities and also events in history shape, mold the court, and sort of leave it at the doorstep for you to begin your story with the modern court and how the table was set for the struggles of today.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, Legal Correspondent, ABC News: Right. And I focus on the Rehnquist court, which was together for 11 years, longer than any other Supreme Court of nine justices in history, and how that court, with those justices, came to be and, in many ways, came to disappoint conservatives and the Republican presidents who nominated them.

And personalities had something to do with it. Some of the justices just didn’t turn out to be as conservative as conservatives had believed. But others who came on the court with very strong conservative views affected the court in unexpected ways.

One of the most surprising stories that I came across during my research was the role, the real role of Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Now, he came on the court in 1991. And immediately he was portrayed as kind of following in Scalia’s footsteps, that Antonin Scalia was his mentor, you know, that he wasn’t necessarily just thinking for himself.

But I found all these documents in the Library of Congress that showed just the opposite was true and that, if any justice that year was changing his vote to join the other, it was Scalia changing his vote to join Justice Thomas. That wasn’t the storyline that we heard at the time.

Thomas came on the court with such strongly held, clear, independent views. So what happened that term is the court went inexplicably to the left. He replaced this liberal icon, Thurgood Marshall. But that year, the court moved to the left.

And the reason why is that Justice O’Connor, the justice that we look to in the middle, the moderate justice who saw herself as kind of a balanced person, she moved over to the left that term, in response, I argue, to some of Justice Thomas’ very strongly argued views.

Read the whole thing. The new PBS documentary on The Supreme Court, based on Rosen’s book, is also worth watching (reviewed here).

Leave a comment

Filed under U.S.

by | 4 February 2007 · 12:27 pm

Romanian Synonymy: Horse Traders and Maize

Regional synonyms constitute a “pair” of two or more words identical in sense, known and used by a group in at least one locality at a given moment in time [emphasis in original]. Thus, with regard to regional synonymy as well, the degree to which we accept words as synonyms depends on how they fit in time and place.

Sever Pop (cf. 1929) used to note that, within the territory of Romania, the following terms can be found to denote the concept of ‘horse trader’: barâşnic, craşcadău, cupeţ, factor, fleşer, geambaş, gheşeftar, ghiambabău, gârgez, făznar, hendler, herghelier, hâmbluitor, liverant, mecler, năstrăpaş, negustor, peţer, pilar, potlogar, precupeţ, precupitor, semsar, sfârnar, sfârnăroiu, şmecher, ţânzar, ţigan, tuşer. No one doubts that all the terms listed denote the same concept. The question that arises is the following: can each and every one of these words be considered synonyms? According to some definitions, still in circulation, all words that express the same notion are considered synonyms. Glancing over the list of words above, we observe that only the word negustor, which is the general term, and to a certain degree the word geambaş, are more widely known and can be considered synonyms; the rest are known only in more or less restricted areas. For the great majority of Romanians, words like barâşnic, gârgez, hendler, mecler, tuşer, and so forth do not mean anything; they are just as unintelligible as any others in a foreign language. Of course, in many places negustor can be a synonym of făznar, and geambaş with herghelier [‘herder’], and so on, but this only happens in certain places and not across the whole territory where Romanian is spoken.

These examples prove once again that for two or more words to be considered synonyms it is not sufficient that they express the same notion. And in cases of regional synonymy, the notion of synonym must be localized and made concrete.

Situations like those discussed above are very common in Romanian; they may be found on almost every linguistic map but are not mentioned except sporadically. So, for example, Marius Sala (1958), after analyzing the distribution of terms for ‘maize’, established that porumb is synonymous with păpuşoi [cf. păpuşă ‘doll, puppet’], cucuruz [usu. ‘corncob’; Russian кукурузы, South Slavic kukuruz], mălai [usu. ‘cornmeal’]. All of these words are fairly widely distributed (cf. map 900 in the Atlas of Romanian Linguistics). At present, porumb, being the general, literary term, is synonymous with păpuşoi, cucuruz, mălai in those areas where the latter are used. But the question arises whether păpuşoi, cucuruz, and mălai can be considered synonymous with each other. In the first place, at their points of intersection, they can be completely synonymous, except in cases where certain semantic differences intervene. Second, because of their wide usage, even in literature by great writers, we can admit that they form a set of synonyms at the level of literary language, if not everywhere, at least widely enough. But what do we do with the term tenchi, borrowed from Magyar and recorded at just one locale on the same map? In every other zone, tenchi is a foreign word, and therefore cannot be synonymous with the other words that denote ‘maize’. (Tenchi may eventually become synonymous with porumb or with mălai to the extent that the latter are known and used in the locality where tenchi was recorded.)

SOURCE: “Synonymy and dialects” (4.1.1.4) in Probleme de sinonimie, by Onufrie Vinţeler (Bucureşti: Editură Sţiinţifică şi Encliclopedică, 1983) [my translation].

I don’t have any problem with considering terms in different languages to be synonyms. That’s what translationese, calques, and 直訳 are all about.

UPDATE: In response to Language Hat, I need to clarify that when I accept “synonyms” across separate languages, I’m thinking of communities where nearly everyone speaks at least two languages, and where people switch between them as frequently and as easily as they or others might switch between dialects of the same language. I’ve spent some time in such communities. In fact, my first published paper in graduate school after returning from fieldwork in a New Guinea village whose unique language I had been sent to describe was not a paper just about the new , undocumented language but one on “multilingualism and language mixture” among the people of that village. People borrowed and calqued all the time, and even recreated for my benefit “pure” equivalents (rarely used by anyone else) in their own language by calquing backwards out of either the local church lingua franca, whose usage has since faded to the point that young people are no longer likely to recognize the source of those words; or else Tok Pisin, which supplies nearly every community in New Guinea an extra set of very general synonyms for specific words in their own languages. Romanians did much the same a few centuries ago when they borrowed a load of new vocabulary from French, then creating Romanianized shapes for many of the words. Those pairs became synonyms. Sometimes the synonyms carved up semantic space in complementary fashion, and sometimes one form gave way to the other.

I plan to translate several more chunks from Vinţeler’s chapter on borrowings and synonymy. He compiled a lot of good examples.

Leave a comment

Filed under language, Romania

by | 3 February 2007 · 6:02 pm

Two Chinese Views on Mongol Writing, 1237

Peng Daya:
As regards their matters of administration, they write with wooden twigs. Their writing looks like frightened snakes and writhing earthworms; it looks like the magical writing in the Books of Heaven; their characters look like the wu, fan, Gong[?] and chi of musical notation. They are closely related to the characters of the Uighurs.

Xu Ting:
I, Ting, have concerned myself with this. The Tartars originally had no writing. Today, however, they use three different kinds.

For written communication in the Tartar lands proper they always use small pieces of wood, three or four inches in length on which they make incisions in the four corners. If for instance ten horses are to be sent, they make ten notches. As a rule they only cut the required number. Their customs are pure and their thoughts honest. Hence also their language is without ambiguity. According to their laws, liars are punished by death. Thus nobody dares to betray. Even if they had no writing, they would still be capable of founding an independent state. These small pieces of wood are the same as the wooden tablets of antiquity.

For their written correspondence with the Uighurs they utilise the Uighur system of writing. Chinqai is the master of this. The Uighur system of writing has only 21 letters. The others are formed by adding something on one or the other side of the letter.

For written correspondence with the conquered Chinese states, with the Kitan and the Jurchen, they make use exclusively of Chinese writing. Chucai [Ch’u-ts’ai] is the master of this. But apart from this, before the date at the end of the letter, Chinqai in his own hand writes in Uighur letters the words: ‘To be sent to NN’. This is presumably a security measure that is directed only at Chucai. Hence every piece of writing has to be marked with such a confirmation in Uighur; without it it has no official validity. This is obviously a measure to make sure that all correspondence passes through Chinqai’s hands, in order to ensure mutual control.

In the city schools in Yanjing it is mainly the Uighur writing that is taught along with translation into the Tartar language. No sooner have the pupils learnt to translate, than they begin to function as interpreters and then in company with Tartars go on violent rampages, where without inhibitions they begin to act as masters of punishment or favour and extort bribes, goods, services, and foodstuffs.

The systems of writing that the Kitan and the Jurchen originally possessed are never used by the Tartars.

“Heida Shilüe (Brief Account of the Black Tartars),” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 109-111

2 Comments

Filed under China, language, Mongolia

by | 1 February 2007 · 6:11 pm

Pamuk on Cihangir, Istanbul

It was in Cihangir [named for Mughal Emperor Jahangir] (where we too would move as our fortunes dwindled) that I first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives—a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what—but an archipelago of neighborhoods in which everyone knew one another. When I looked out the window; I didn’t see just the Bosphorus and the ships moving slowly down the familiar channels, I also saw the gardens between the houses, old mansions that had not yet been pulled down, and children playing between their crumbling walls. As with so many houses that look out on the Bosphorus, there was, just in front of the building, a steep and winding cobblestone alley that went all the way down to the sea. On snowy evenings I would stand with my aunt and my cousin and watch from afar with the rest of the neighborhood as noisy, happy children slid down this alley on sleds, chairs, and planks of wood.

The center of the Turkish film industry—which put out seven hundred films a year in those days and was ranked second largest in the world, after India—was in Beyoğlu, on Yeşilçam Street, only ten minutes away, and because many of the actors lived in Cihangir, the neighborhood was full of the “uncles” and tired, heavily made-up “aunties” who played the same character in every film they did. So when children recognized actors they knew only from their hackneyed film personae (for example, Vahi Öz, who always played the fat old card shark who seduced innocent young housemaids), they’d heckle them and chase them down the street. At the top of the steep alley, on rainy days, cars would skid on the wet cobblestones, and trucks had to struggle to get to the top; on sunny days, a minibus would appear from nowhere, and actors, lighting men, and “film crews” would pile out; after shooting a love scene in ten minutes flat, they would disappear again. It was only years later, when I happened to see one of these black-and-white films on television, that I realized the true subject was not the love affair raging in the foreground but the Bosphorus glittering in the distance.

While I was looking at the Bosphorus through the gaps between the apartment buildings of Cihangir, I learned something else about neighborhood life: There must always be a center (usually a shop) where all the gossip is gathered, interpreted, and assessed. In Cihangir this center was the grocery store on the ground floor of our apartment building. The grocer was Greek (like most of the other families living in the apartments above him); if you wanted to buy anything from Ugor, you’d lower a basket from your floor and then shout down your order. Years later, when we moved into the same building, my mother, who found it unbecoming to shout down to the grocer every time she wanted bread or eggs, preferred to write her order down on paper and send it down in a basket much more stylish than those used by our neighbors.

SOURCE: Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2006), pp. 85-87

UPDATE: This post was noted by the Carpetblogger, who not only comes from a neighborhood neighboring Cihangir, but also offers some useful advice for those who wonder whether they’re fit for expat life, which concludes thus:

The Buddha said the root of all suffering is desire. It’s one of the four noble truths. That dude clearly spent a lot of time abroad.

1 Comment

Filed under Turkey

by | 31 January 2007 · 8:52 pm

Ibn Battuta’s Impressions of Mali, 1352

This desert is bright, luminous. Traversing it, one breathes deeply; one is in good spirits, and safe from robbers. The desert here contains many wild cattle. A flock of them might come so near to a caravan that people can hunt them with dogs and arrows. However, eating their meat creates thirst and, as such, many people avoid it as a consequence. If killed, water is found in their stomachs and I have seen the Massûfa squeezing the stomach and drinking the water. There are also many snakes.

A merchant of Tilimsan known as al-Hajj Zaiyân was in our caravan. He had the habit of catching these snakes and playing with them. I had asked him not to do this but he would not desist. He put his hand into a lizard’s hole one day and found a snake there instead. He grasped it and was about to mount his horse. But the snake bit the finger of his right hand, inflicting severe pain on him. The wound was cauterized, but in the evening the pain worsened. He cut the throat of a camel and kept his hand in its stomach all night. The flesh of his finger loosened and then he sliced off his finger at the base. The Massûfa told me that the snake must have drunk water before biting him, or the bite would have killed him.

When the people coming to meet us with water had reached us, our mounts were given water. We entered an extremely hot desert. It was not like the one we had just experienced. We would leave after the afternoon prayer, travel all night and stop in the morning. Men from the Massûfa and Badama and other tribes brought us loads of water for sale. We reached the city of Iwalatan at the beginning of the month of rabi’i [17 April 1352] after a journey of two months from Sijilmasa. It is the first district in the country of the Blacks. The Sultan’s deputy here is Farba Husain; farba means ‘deputy’.

On arriving, the merchants deposited their goods in a clearing and the Blacks assumed responsibility for them. The merchants went to the Farba who was sitting on a mat in a shelter. His officials were standing in front of him holding spears and bows, and the Massûfa notables were behind him. The merchants stood in front of him, and he spoke to them through an interpreter as a sign of his contempt for them even though they were close to him. On observing their bad manners and contempt for white people, I was sorry I had come to their land. I retired to the house of ibn Badda’, a kind man of Sala from whom I had let a house by request.

The inspector of Iwalatan, named Mansha Ju [lit. Royal Slave], invited those who had come in the caravan to a reception. I refused to attend. My companions urged me very strongly to accept, and finally I accompanied the rest. At the reception coarsely ground anli was served mixed with honey and curdled milk. This was put in a half gourd shaped like a large bowl. Those present drank and then left. I asked them: ‘Is it for this that the Blacks invited us?’ They replied: ‘Yes. For them it is the greatest hospitality.’ I became convinced that no good could be expected from these people, and I wished to join the pilgrims travelling out of Iwalatan. But I decided to go and see the capital of their king before leaving. I stayed in Iwalatan for about fifty days in all. Its people treated me with respect and were hospitable… The town of Iwalatan is very hot. There were some small palms and they had sowed melons in their shade. Water came from underground sources. Mutton was plentiful. Their clothes were of fine quality and of Egyptian origin. Most of the inhabitants belong to the Massûfa. The women are of exceptional beauty and are more highly respected than the men.

SOURCE: “Ibn Battuta, World Traveller (b. 1304),” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 294-296

Also see Ibn Battuta and His Saharan Travels and Ibn Battuta on the Web.

3 Comments

Filed under Africa, Mali

by | 30 January 2007 · 9:17 pm

Montessori Schools Turn 100, Find New Fans

The Montessori approach to education is now 100 years old, reports today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Its teaching methods once revolutionary are now used in traditional classrooms, with many public schools, including a few in Seattle, making a home for Montessori programs. Still, the trend toward standardized tests — and the need to prepare students for those exams — is making Montessori a little less popular in public school districts.

At the same time, the unpopularity of standardized tests is driving some parents to Montessori schools….

“It’s a lot more free-form,” said Troy Basel as he finished his lunch. “It’s a lot easier to get to the teachers.”

Montessori does have structure. But classrooms are based on creating natural connections to reading, writing and arithmetic. Children study algebra, U.S. history, Shakespeare, physics, biology and chemistry, yet are also “free to be who you want to be,” added 14-year-old Kate Rzegocki.

Pacific Crest also is predominantly white — 10 percent of its students are members of minorities. Historically, people thought of Montessori schools as dominated by wealthier, and often white, families, even though Maria Montessori created the system to serve poor children, said Laura Holt, who is on the board of the Pacific North West Montessori Association.

The image is changing around the city. Today, the Islamic School of Seattle offers a Montessori program. On Capitol Hill, one quarter of the students at the Learning Tree Montessori preschool are members of minorities, and the same percentage receives tuition subsidies, said Holt, assistant director of the school.

After a very regimented year in a Chinese preschool when she was 2 (and passing for 3), our daughter attended Montessori schools from preschool through 6th grade, and still thinks fondly of those years. I still remember how excited her teachers were when she finally found the courage to cross the threshold into the room where slightly older kids were doing their activities.

Leave a comment

Filed under education, U.S.

by | 29 January 2007 · 9:18 pm

The Shah of Iran’s Travel Diary, 6 July 1873

I have noticed today a curious state of mind among the French: first of all they are still in mourning over this recent war with Germany and all of them, young and old, are sad and melancholy. The women of the people, ladies and gentlemen still wear mourning dress, with few ornaments and of a great simplicity. Some of them cried occasionally ‘Long live the Marshal! Long live the Shah of Persia!’ I heard one cry while I went for a promenade in the evening: ‘May his reign be firm and long-lasting!’

It seems that in France several parties want a return of the monarchy. Among them there are three tendencies: one wishes for the return of the son of Napoleon III; another that of a descendant of Louis-Philippe; another that of Henri V; who belongs to the Bourbon dynasty, and who is descended from the family of Louis-Philippe, but by another branch. The advocates of a republic are equally numerous, but they too are divided in opinion: some want a red republic, that is a radical one; others want a moderate republic which would have the institutions of a monarchy, but no king; others want something else again. At the moment, governing in the middle of all these parties is very difficult and this situation may have detrimental consequences, unless all these tendencies come to an agreement, and a real monarchy or a real republic is established. Once the French state was the strongest of all, and everybody had to take it into account. Now with all these numerous divergent opinions it is difficult to preserve order within the country …

The Palace in which we reside was previously that of the Parliament, that is, the assembly of deputies of the nation. After the fall of Napoleon III and the installation of a Republic, the deputies and all the figures of State have left for Versailles and have left the city of Paris completely deprived of government administration. The city of Paris, in fact, belongs to the plebeians and the peasants. They may do as they like, the government does not have the means to oppose them. The Palace of the Tuileries, which was the most beautiful palace in the world, is now totally destroyed: the Communards set fire to it. Only the walls remain. I was very sad about it. But thank God, the Palace of Louvre, which was next to that of the Tuileries, has been preserved and has not suffered damage. The City Hall, which was a beautiful monument, and the Palace of the Legion of Honour have both been burnt to the ground. The Communards have broken down and removed the column of Vendome, which Napoleon I had built from cannon conquered from the enemy, on top of which his statue had been erected and on which scenes from all his battles had been engraved. Now nothing remains except the plinth of the column.

Paris is a very beautiful city, pretty, pleasant, generally sunny; its climate is very similar to that of Iran.

SOURCE: Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 258-259

Leave a comment

Filed under France, Iran