The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy, which this Dictionary attempts to make more accessible. than formerly, has been also termed by some “The Amoy Dialect” or “The Amoy Colloquial;” and it partially coincides with the so-called “Hok-kien Dialect,” illustrated by the Rev. Dr. Medhurst in his quarto Dictionary under that title. But such words as “Dialect” or “Colloquial” give an erroneous conception of its nature. It is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois; it is spoken by the highest ranks just as by the common people, by the most learned just as by the ignorant; learned men indeed add a few polite or pedantic phrases, but these are mere excrescences (and even they are pronounced according to the Amoy sounds), while the main body and staple of the spoken language of the most refined and learned classes is the same as that of coolies, labourers, and boatmen.

Nor does the term “dialect” convey anything like a correct idea of its distinctive character; it is no mere dialectic variety of some other language; it is a distinct language, one of the many and widely differing languages which divide among them the soil of China.

The so-called “written language” of China is indeed uniform throughout the whole country; but it is rather a notation than a language; for this universal written language is pronounced differently when read aloud in the different parts of China, so that while as written it is one, as soon as it is pronounced it splits into several languages. And still further, this written language, as it is read aloud from books, is not spoken in any place whatever under any form of pronunciation. The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves. It is in fact a dead language, related to the various spoken languages of China somewhat as Latin is to the languages of South-western Europe.

A very considerable number of the spoken languages of China have been already more or less studied by European and American residents in the country, such as the Mandarin, the Hakka, the vernaculars of Canton and Amoy, and several others. These are not dialects of one language; they are cognate languages, bearing to each other a relation similar to that which subsists between the Arabic, the Hebrew, the Syriac, the Ethiopic, and the other members of the Semitic family; or again between English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, &c.

There is another serious objection to the use of the term “dialect” as applied to these languages, namely, that within each of them there exist real dialects. For instance, the Mandarin, the greatest of all, contains within itself at least three very marked “dialects,” the Northern, spoken at Pekin; the Southern, spoken at Nanking and Soo-chow; and the Western, spoken in the provinces of Sze-chuen, Hoo-peh, &c.

In like manner the language which for want of a better name we may call the Amoy Vernacular or spoken language, contains within itself several real dialects, especially those of Chang-chew, Chin-chew, Tung-an, and of Amoy itself. In this Dictionary the form of the language spoken at Amoy itself is taken as the standard, and the principal variations of the Chang-chew and Cliin-chew dialocus are marked, as also a considerable number of the variations occurring in Tung-an, Chang-poo, and some other regions.

I call that an extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of language for the year 1873, and it makes me want to shake Douglas’s hand and buy him a drink. And as for the name Amoy (which I will always prefer to the currently fashionable but unpronounceable in English Xiamen), this Wiktionary page finally gave me an understanding of what was going on with the various names:

Mandarin: Xiàmén
Cantonese: haa6 mun4
Hakka: ha4 mun2
Northern Min (KCR): Hā-mo̤̿ng
Eastern Min (BUC): Â-muòng
Puxian Min (Pouseng Ping’ing): or5 muei2 / or5 mui2
Southern Min
  (Hokkien, POJ): Ē-mn̂g / Ēe-mûi / Ěe-mûi
  (Teochew, Peng’im): ê6 mung5
Wu (Shanghai, Wugniu): 6gho-men

Which explains why what I heard in the Hou movie sounded like Ē-mn̂g, and suggests that the A in Amoy was originally intended to represent “long a” (AY-moy); compare the (obsolete) Spanish name Emuy. And I note that Japanese has both Shiamen [ɕia̠mẽ̞ɴ] and Amoi [áꜜmòì], both, of course, written with the same characters (廈門). Furthermore, the traditional Swatow for what is now called Shantou is explained here: the Southern Min form is Sòaⁿ-thâu.

(Should you happen to want a nicely detailed 1915 map of Amoy, here you go.)

Although Taiwanese interpreters left few written accounts from Xiamen, recollections published in The China Incident and Kyokuei Academy (1940) provide a brief glimpse—albeit through the lens of Japanese censors—into their activities. According to Xu Rongzong, he and his Taiwanese colleagues in Xiamen translated for the navy and helped supervise Chinese construction workers. Xu’s Japanese colleague, Gotō Kaoru (also a teacher from Xiamen Kyokuei Academy), recalled that their duties included interpreting for Japanese interrogators of Chinese prisoners and spies; serving as local guides for military personnel; and promoting Japanese war propaganda.

There were occasions when Taiwanese interpreters could not understand the spoken Chinese of GMD soldiers, whether it was Mandarin or a dialect from outside South China. Most Taiwanese had never received formal Mandarin education in Taiwan, and their spoken Chinese was generally limited to the southern Chinese dialects. In Guangzhou, they also had trouble with the Cantonese dialect, which was mutually unintelligible with the Taiwanese dialects. Indeed, some Japanese army commanders complained that most Taiwanese could not understand Cantonese. In cases where Taiwanese had problems understanding the Chinese, they resorted to “brush talk” (J. hitsudan, C. bitan)—written communication through Chinese characters.

To meet the military’s increasing demand for trained Taiwanese interpreters in various Chinese dialects, the Taiwan Government-General inaugurated three-month-long “Training Workshops to Prepare Those Entering South China.” Held five times in Taipei Commercial Higher School from 1938 to 1940, each workshop offered a “South China Curriculum” for one hundred Taiwanese males at least eighteen years old with upper-level primary education or equivalent Japanese-language proficiency. Over two-thirds of the curriculum consisted of Chinese-language classes: Mandarin (96 hours), Cantonese dialect (50 hours), Xiamen dialect (12 hours), and Fuzhou dialect (12 hours).

Since most Taiwanese spoke a form of the Xiamen or Fuzhou dialects or could learn them quickly, more hours were spent studying Mandarin and Cantonese. While Taiwanese teachers were placed in charge of the Fujian dialect classes, Japanese were assigned to teach Mandarin and Cantonese. The Taiwan Education Bureau appointed Tanemura Yasusaburō, a high-ranking translation official, for Mandarin and Yamashita Noboru, a Japanese businessman with years of experience in Guangzhou, for Cantonese. The curriculum also offered two content courses: “South China Affairs” (24 hours), taught by Taipei Commercial Higher School professor Satō Tasuku, and “Elevating the Imperial Spirit of Those Entering South China” (12 hours), taught by Taipei Imperial University professor Gotō Shunzui. Thus the workshops relied on existing Taiwanese linguistic skills for Xiamen and Fuzhou dialects, yet delegated instruction of Mandarin, Cantonese, and ideological content to Japanese experts. Hundreds of Taiwanese youth completed the training workshops before being deployed to South China as interpreters and policemen.

Yet the linguistic training did not account for the local dialect in Hainan, which was distinct from the Fujianese and Cantonese dialects. So when several thousand Taiwanese military assistants were sent by the navy for guerrilla warfare against Chinese troops in Hainan in 1939, many were unprepared to communicate with local residents. According to Zhang Zijing, the Cantonese he studied in Taiwan did not help him understand Hainanese, so he had to learn the latter from a local Chinese teacher. To help Japanese and Taiwanese learn the various southern Chinese dialects, the Government-General published a series of language primers. In 1941, Wang Jinxiu and Chen Shaozong—Taiwanese interpreters and Japanese-language teachers in Hainan—compiled A Practical Intensive Hainanese Reader, while the Taiwan Southern Regions Association published Colloquial Hainanese.

From a later chapter:

Unlike Malaya and the Philippines, where the number of Taiwanese quickly declined, Siam offered new Taiwanese opportunities after 1937. In part, this was because the Thai government quickly cracked down on overseas Chinese boycotts to maintain good relations with Japan. It was also due to support by the Taiwan Government-General, which provided financial aid to Taiwanese merchants who remained in Siam to market Japanese products; it also dispatched Taiwanese graduates of Taipei Commercial Higher School to the Bangkok offices of Japanese companies. Taiwanese youth were given travel and language-study funds to work as business interns in Siam, where they quickly picked up the Thai language. By 1940, the Japan Trade Office head in Bangkok observed: “Japanese merchants are at a disadvantage competing with the overseas Chinese, but we now have Taiwanese who share their language, customs, and lifestyle and serve as our commercial warriors (shōgyō senshi). Before 1937 there were only ten Taiwanese stores in Bangkok, but now there are sixty successful ones.” There were over 150 Taiwanese in Siam by the eve of the Asia-Pacific War, with the majority working in commerce.

The Taiwan Southern Regions Association, founded by the Government-General in 1939, was also instrumental in training prospective Taiwanese settlers to Southeast Asia. Enlisting scholars from Taipei Imperial University and Taipei Commercial Higher School, the association taught relevant foreign languages including French, Vietnamese, Dutch, Malay, Thai, and Tagalog. Taipei Imperial University professor Shimada Kinji oversaw French instruction while other languages rarely studied in Taiwan, such as Vietnamese, were taught by native speakers recruited from Indochina. Asai Erin, a Taipei Imperial University linguistics professor, edited language textbooks such as Malay Primer and Vietnamese Primer.
[…]

Indigenous Taiwanese had a linguistic advantage over other colonial subjects that allowed them to mediate between Japanese soldiers and indigenous residents. With their shared Austronesian linguistic affinities, indigenous Taiwanese quickly picked up local indigenous languages in the Philippines and New Guinea. Pasao (b. 1924, C. Zheng Wangjinzong, Amis tribe) recalled learning Visayan and Tagalog in his spare time from Filipino children, noting that his native Amis language was quite similar to Visayan since they were from the same Austronesian family. In New Guinea, Pawan Taimo (b. 1924, J. Satō Toshiaki, C. Liao Xinyi, Atayal tribe) quickly learned the local Papuan language and interpreted for his Japanese officers. He established cordial relations with indigenous chiefs by exchanging gifts such as Japanese cigarettes and alcohol for pigs. Pawan also taught the Japanese language and agricultural skills to residents and recruited spies against Allied forces that landed in Rabaul.

We’ve discussed Hainanese a couple of times (Bathrobe’s comments in 2007 and 2020).

Matisse was no stranger to hats. His grandmothers were hatmakers, his aunts were hatmakers, his mother was a hatmaker, and so, too, was Amélie. She opened her own shop in Paris, on Rue de Châteaudun, the year after she and Matisse married, and they lived in the attic above it. One can imagine the kitchen table littered with bobbins, pins, and feathers, as the paraphernalia of the milliner’s life floated up into their private quarters. These were hard years for Matisse: years of professional failure and doubt, when his father shamed him for being an artist and cut off support; years of bronchitis and insomnia, when Amélie would stay up until dawn and read to him; and years of financial strain, when her trade effectively subsidized his. The hat business sustained Matisse and their three children, at least until 1903, when Amélie, in poor health, was forced to close the shop.

Matisse couldn’t have felt neutrally about Amélie making crowns for the same class of wealthy patrons who refused to support him. In the portrait, there’s more than a touch of resentment in the object on her head (Enough with the hats, Amélie!)—it’s ridiculous even by late-Belle Époque fashion standards—and there’s some lingering ressentiment, too. As a law student in the eighteen-eighties, Matisse lived on the sixth floor of a cheap hotel in Paris and would use a glass peashooter to fire little balls of putty at the hats of people on the street below. Even before he was “bitten by the demon of painting,” he chafed at the constraints of bourgeois respectability while feeling compelled to uphold them. Hats were a convenient target.

For those who, like me, are interested in such things, rue de Châteaudun, named for a battle and massacre, was originally rue Ollivier, named for a banker and politician. It’s too new to have a truly interesting name.

Lagniappe: the word trasquilar ‘shear’ is a prefixed form of esquilar, “from Old Spanish esquirar, from Gothic *𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌰𐌽 (*skairan), from Proto-Germanic *skeraną,” so it’s a cognate of English shear. I did not see that coming.

Addendum. Pancho provides important information in the comments:

“Lana” as “money” is very common in and distinctive of Mexican Spanish (South Americans would say “plata” or “silver” instead.) Reading about the movie on Wikipedia, that it’s about an attempt to steal a pile of money, has me convinced that the Mexican title was chosen with that allusion in mind along with or instead of the old saying.

Makes sense to me.

The peoples who preceded the Indo-Europeans—called Early European Farmers—spoke any number of Paleo-European (a.k.a. Old European) languages. Very few of these left any written evidence (just Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, and a handful of others), and only one survives today (Basque). Even so, these Old European languages left an indelible mark on the Indo-European languages that succeeded them.

Imagine you’re a band of early Hellenic (Greek) speakers whose ancestors had migrated over generations from the Pontic–Caspian Steppe into the eastern Mediterranean. Along the way, those ancestors encountered all sorts of novel foods, plants, animals, and terrain—things like olives, hyacinth, figs, and cypresses. Even the sea was unfamiliar at one point, migrating as your ancestors did from a landlocked steppe. What do you call all these things?

One option is to recruit existing vocabulary for new purposes. […] This strategy of coining new terms for novel experiences was, however, the minority one. Why invent new words for things the local Paleo-Europeans already had names for? Why not simply adopt the local name? That’s exactly what Indo-Europeans did as they settled across the continent, casually borrowing hundreds of words for plants, animals, types of terrain, places, and other natural phenomena. […]

Because the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived outside the native range of these plants, their language lacked words for them. They only borrowed the words upon arriving in the eastern Mediterranean. Speakers coin or borrow new words as they need them, and migration events often trigger such a need, leaving a trace of that migration in the language’s lexicon (and grammar, but that’s a point for another article). In this way, all languages contain a fossil record of their history. They are a catalog of what the population lacked when they arrived in an area or came into contact with new peoples. In this article, we’ll use that linguistic fossil record to discover what the language that existed in the Aegean prior to the Greeks—which we’ll call Pre-Greek—was like.

He defines superstrate and substrate languages, then continues:

At this point you might reasonably be asking, “How do we know that some substrate language influenced Ancient Greek? How do we know that the mystery words were borrowed? Can’t they just be random exceptions?” This exact problem has vexed historical linguists working on the Pre-Greek problem for over a century. Nonetheless, we not only have good reasons for thinking a word might be borrowed, but we can even be highly certain when a word can’t come from Indo-European. Sometimes, the answer is obvious because there’s a similar word with a clear etymology sitting right in a nearby language. The Ancient Greek word ἔβενος (ébenos) ‘ebony’, for example, has no Indo-European etymology, but just across the Mediterranean Sea was the Egyptian word 𓍁 𓈖 𓏭 𓆱 hb‑n‑j‑WOOD (hebni) ‘ebony’, and we know that the Ancient Greeks traded extensively with the Egyptians. But the evidence for a loanword is often more subtle. Below are some of the different types of evidence (or non-evidence) linguists use to determine which words are borrowed (in Ancient Greek in particular). As a fun bonus, at the end of this article I’ve also provided a big list of words in English that are thought to ultimately derive from a Pre-Greek language.

He lists a bunch of examples and goes the evidence of borrowing, going into some detail:

That’s all to say: mere variation is not sufficient evidence of borrowing. The variation must not be attributable to regular sound changes in the language; it must be largely random instead. In fact, part of the evidence that thálassa ‘sea’ is borrowed is that it also shows random variation in addition to the regular dialectal variation. […]

In other cases we see variation in the presence of an initial /w/ sound, which is especially neat because Greek originally had a /w/ sound but then lost it! In Mycenaean Greek (c. 1400–1200 BCE), the /w/ was still present, as shown in words like 𐀷𐀙𐀏 (wa‑na‑ka) ‘king; lord’. Many dialects (Aeolic, Doric [including Cretan], Elean, Boeotian, etc.) retained that /w/ and wrote it with the letter digamma ⟨ϝ⟩ as ϝάναξ (wánax) well into the Classical period (5th–4th C BCE). But the Attic and Ionic dialects lost /w/ before the emergence of alphabetic writing (8th C BCE), so they wrote the word as ᾰ̓́νᾰξ (ánax). But even though Homer never writes a digamma, the meter of his poems often behaves as though the /w/ were still there, because they were originally composed when it was!

In any case, notice how the /w/ was simply deleted from wánax to yield ánax. But for many Pre-Greek loanwords, we see attempts to render a /w/ sound even in the dialects that lost it! The city of Axos on Crete, for example, is written as ϝαξός (Waxós) in the Cretan dialect but Ὀαξός (Oaxós) outside Crete. If this word had already existed in Greek, the /w/ would have simply disappeared in the non‑/w/ dialects, like it did for ánax. Instead, those dialects attempted to write the /w/ sound they heard when they adopted the name of the place from the Pre‑Greeks. Since the /w/ sound and ⟨ϝ⟩ letter were already lost to them by that point, they approximated it with ⟨Ὀ⟩ /o/ instead. This shows that the Greeks adopted the Pre-Greek place name after /w/ had disappeared in most dialects.

There are sections “Words in certain semantic categories,” “Pairs of words that mean the same thing,” and so on; eventually he gets into more contentious territory (“What was the Pre-Greek language like?” “Was Pre-Greek one language or several?”), but on the whole it’s sensible and informative — not the vibe-based guess-fest I feared when I saw the title. Thanks, Dmitry!

Law. historical.
A person who has stayed in a household for three nights, and so becomes the legal responsibility of the host; a member of a household; a dependant.

1607 Hoghenhine, is he that commeth guestwise to a house, and lieth there the third night. After which time he is accounted of his familie in whose house he lieth.
J. Cowell, Interpreter sig. Mm2ᵛ/1

1630 He which commeth guest-wise to an house..the third night, is called an Hoghenhine (or Agenhine;)..and if he offend the Kings Peace, his Oast must be answerable for him.
M. Dalton, Countrey Justice (revised edition) xl. 98

1753 Agenhine, in our old writers, signifies a guest that has lodged at an inn for three nights, after which time he is accounted one of the family.
Chambers’s Cyclopædia Suppl. (at cited word)

1848 The third night, an agenhinde, a domestic.
J. J. S. Wharton, Law Lexicon 662/2

1959 Agenhine, otherwise, but less correctly ‘Hogenhine’, and also ‘Third-night awne hine’, a guest at an inn, who having stayed there for three nights, was then accounted one of the family, and if he offended the king’s peace, his host was answerable for him.
Earl Jowitt & C. Walsh, Dictionary of English Law vol. I. 85/1

2007 The dulcet word hoghenhine..denotes a houseguest who stays more than two nights.
A. Freedman, Party of First Part 7

I’m not sure I’d call it dulcet, but it’s definitely a great word. And the etymology is interesting:

< early Middle English aȝen hine (also oȝen hine), lit. ‘own servant’, member of one’s own household < own adj. + hine, variant of hind n.² (see hind n.² 2), via representations of this early Middle English phrase in Latin and Anglo-Norman texts.

Notes
The following examples show various representations of early Middle English aȝen hine or oȝen hine in Latin and Anglo-Norman texts:

a1175 (OE) Quodsi tercia nocte eum hospitatus fuerit.., habeat eum ad rectum tanquam de propria familia, nam Angli dicunt: tuo niht gest, þridde niht owen hine [c1175 MS Paris agen hewe, c1185 MS Rawlinson oghan hyþen, a1200 MS Lambeth agen hinen, c1300 MS Harley 746 agen hine, 1568 Lambarde Αρχαιονομια agen hine].
Leges Edwardi Confessoris: Version 2 (MS Holkham) xxiii. §1 in F. Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903) vol. I. 648
[Composed OE]

c1290 Soen hoste..la premere nuyt soit tenu pur estraunge..le autre nuyt geste, et la terce nuyt oune hyne.
Britton (1865) vol. I. i. xiii. §1. 49

a1300–a1400 (a1268) Item, secundum antiquam consuetudinem dici poterit de familia alicuius qui hospitatus fuerit cum alio per tres noctes, quia prima nocte dici poterit uncuth, secunda vero gust, tertia nocte hoghenehine.
H. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (1922) vol. II. 351 (Middle English Dictionary)
[Composed a1268]

The expression was subsequently adopted from such texts in the 17th cent.

The addition of the h- is striking (note the wrist-slap in the 1959 citation); I wonder what prompted it? At any rate, the word provides a different angle on the “guests and fish” cliche.

From the beginning (Hirohito’s speech) to the end (Tachikawa’s music), A City is permeated through and through by Japanese sounds. Not only is the moody, emotional theme music heard at key moments, creating an aural scansion that contributed to the aesthetic success of the film, but a number of diegetic songs, in addition to Aka Tonbo, are Japanese. When Wen-ching is in jail, in a distant background, unseen prisoners break into a Japanese song, mourning the fate of young men going to war. That, at the moment of dying, victims of the Kuomintang repression turn to Japanese culture to express their feelings, is no accident. Like all film-makers forced by censorship to use subtle forms of expression, Hou resorts to discreet, apparently ‘non-political’ elements to make a point. The ‘official history’ the Nationalist Party sought to carve, in blood if necessary, onto the ‘recovered’ island was that Taiwan was an integral part of mainland China: the rupture in historical continuity created by 50 years of Japanese occupation had to be denied. Consequently, Japanese language and culture became the signifiers of the specificity of the Taiwanese experience. Which Kuomintang official could guess, by listening to an apparently innocuous nursery rhyme, that its hidden meaning was ‘We are Taiwanese, not mainlanders’?

Taiwanese from all walks of life were deeply marked by Japanese culture. The ‘Taiwanese dialect’ itself, as it is spoken by the ‘native’ characters in the film, is laced with Japanese words and phrases. Moreover, among intellectuals and politically active people – like the ones most likely to be in the same jail as Wen-ching – turning back to Japanese culture meant taking a certain stance in relation to their own agency. As expressed many times in the film, by Hinoe’s bookish friends as well as by the grass-roots ‘Big Brother’ Wen-heung, Taiwan kept being ‘handed over’ without being consulted, first by the Qing Dynasty to the Japanese and then by the Allies to the Nationalist Party. Kept in a state of submission by the Japanese, the Taiwanese had hopes of becoming full citizens once they were reunited with the motherland. Instead, mainlanders were behaving in Taiwan as if in occupied territory. Reverting to Japanese mores and culture, to the language of the previous occupying forces, now defeated, was an understated way of making a choice, of rejecting the present occupation, of defiantly asserting that the gap between Taiwan and the mainland was unbridgeable.
[…]

In addition to Japanese, four languages are spoken throughout the film: Taiwanese, Shanghaiese, Cantonese and Mandarin. The members of the Lin family speak Taiwanese, with a few Japanese words interjected – as do Hinoe and Wen-ching’s intellectual friends, except for a sympathetic mainland journalist, who expresses himself in Mandarin. Third Brother Wen-leung, who has learnt Shanghaiese during the war, switches back and forth between this dialect and Taiwanese. Big Brother’s mistress and her brother Ah-ga come from Guangdong province, so they speak Cantonese, also mixed with Taiwanese.

The mainland gangsters with whom Wen-leung and Ah-ga tragically associate speak Shanghaiese, which creates a most interesting linguistic situation, when Big Brother Wen-heung and Ah-ga try to secure Wen-leung’s release from the Kuomintang jails by negotiating with the gangsters who denounced him. Wen-heung’s Taiwanese speech is translated into Cantonese by Ah-ga; one of the gangsters translates it in turn into Shanghaiese for the ‘Big Bosses’, and the conversation thus goes back and forth, with the translator sometimes inserting his own comments. In the international version, the subtitlers opted to paraphrase the different lines of dialogue. Wen-heung says: ‘Our Wen-leung is in prison. I know you’re well connected with officials. I would like to ask for your help. See if Wen-leung can be freed before the new year.’ Ah-ga speaks in Cantonese: ‘Wen-leung has been arrested. You know people in the right places. What Big Brother means is, we’d like to see him freed before the new year.’ Finally, the Shanghaiese translation (done by a gangster sporting dark sunglasses) says: ‘They are talking about Wen-leung’s case. They hope he can be freed before the new year.’ Nonchalantly, the Shanghai boss, always seen wearing black silk robes, replies: ‘When was Wen-leung arrested? I didn’t know.’ The bilingual gangster translates into Cantonese: ‘They didn’t know Wen-leung was arrested. What can we do to help?’ This prompts a violent outburst (in Cantonese) on the part of Ah-ga: ‘Don’t fuck with me! I know you’re behind it!’ In turn, Wen-leung scolds him (in Taiwanese): ‘Stupid idiot! Why are you telling them this?’

It was the scene described in that last paragraph that convinced me I had to post about the movie. This later passage is also of interest:

From the outset, Hou orchestrates the different layers of the narration through two different instances of voice-over: a male voice (first Hirohito, then Governor Chen Yi), representative of an unseen authority imposed from the outside, and two female voices (Hinomi reading her diary and Ah-shue exchanging letters with Hinomi) that, by contrast, come from within the diegesis. Both are instances, albeit radically opposed ones, of what Michel Chion calls an acousmêtre – a voice-over, often endowed with authority, whose source is invisible. In the case of Hirohito’s voice, the radio that transmits it is hidden within the house of Wen-heung’s mistress. While Chion states that every voice speaking on the radio is acousmatic, it could be argued, however, that when a radio voice is used in cinema, the absence or presence of the receiver in the image endows this voice with a greater or lesser omnipotence and ubiquity. In the case of Hirohito, it matters little whether or not there is an actual radio in the room – his message carries huge consequences for the entire island, and everybody can hear it, or hear about it. Radio voices are often used in Hou’s cinema as a medium to carry authoritarian or official messages and to create a tension between the disembodied, mechanical quality of their source and – conversely – the domestic settings in which they are heard, the living bodies receiving them and whose steps, mundane gestures, breathing, moaning and small talk can be heard in counterpoint. In a significant scene in The Time to Live, the women in A Ha’s family – his sister, mother and grandmother – are doing domestic chores, while the radio talks about the heroic duty of the Taiwanese army to recover the mainland. The women talk and gossip among themselves without alluding to or commenting on the broadcast – reducing it to an insignificant background noise.

In A City, the use of radio voices creates another contrast – between the language of the broadcast and that of the listeners. The radio speaks in a foreign tongue, clearly imposed onto Taiwanese reality – giving a poignant meaning to the concept of voice-over. As noted before, Hirohito expresses himself in a rarefied, classical form of Japanese only used by the ruling class – and certainly not by his Taiwanese subjects. In the second instance when the radio plays a significant narrative role – the broadcasting of ‘security measures’ following the 28 February incident – Governor Chen Yi speaks a Shanghaiese-accented Mandarin, marking him as a hated mainlander, an invader.

Chen Yi was one of the vilest rulers in a time and place full of such men; ever since I learned about his career, first on the mainland and then on Taiwan, he’s been way up there on my list of historical villains. And Taiwan’s progress from poverty and authoritarian rule to prosperity and democracy has been one of the bright spots in the history of the last few decades. In any case, the movie is great, and I wish someone would put it out in the kind of Blu-ray edition it deserves, with commentary and extras. (I bought it from Prime Video, something I do only under duress, since electronic copies can disappear without warning, and who wants to make Amazon richer?)

If Jean-Luc Godard is the cinema itself, he is also heir to the printed page. Layout design, and in particular typography, is for him the privileged means of experiencing at every opportunity the paradoxical relationships of text and image. A particular facet of his graphic work concerns the use he makes of type fonts. Three stages emerge through his filmography, marked by the use of a unique typography, whose subtle choice indicates significant aesthetic and political stakes.

For the first two phases it is about the very French Antique Olive, designed by Roger Excoffon between 1965 and 1967, which was followed by the symbol of Swiss typography, Helvetica, from the 1980s to 2010. The third phase is distinguished by the use of so-called screen fonts (Tahoma or Verdana) designed by Matthew Carter. Godard uses them in his last two works to date, Adieu au langage (“Farewell to Language”, 2014) and Le Livre d’image (“The Picture Book”, 2018). If the primary function of typography is to show the text, Godard’s underlying question, whatever the medium (video, paper or film), is a painter’s preoccupation: How to represent thought and what colour (political and pictorial) to give it. How to print a thought in movement and free oneself from the fixation of the text on the page? How to make a book while making a film? Typography is the privileged visual mediation through which Godard tries to put an end to the competition between text and image in the production of thought.

She goes into detail about the history and nature of the typefaces and the use Godard made of them; here’s a bit from her discussion of Antique Olive:

When it was released between 1958 and 1960, the Antique Olive was a radical novelty, which Dutch type designer Gerard Unger comments in retrospect as follows: “An Excoffon’s response to the style dominated by Swiss pragmatism and objectivity.” As a sign of the filmmaker’s keen attention to typography, this sanserif commonly used in advertising is identified by Godard for its originality, and unexpectedly used in numerous screenplays that punctuate his films, among them Pierrot le fou (Pierrot the Madman, 1965); La Chinoise (1967) and Week-end (1967), which are also distinguished by the use of the colors of the flag. In its chromatic and typographic alliance, this ensemble constitutes a condensed version, here referred to as “French taste”, an expression modelled on “Dutch taste”, in reference to the classification established in Pierre-Simon Fournier’s Manuel typographique (1764-1766). […]

Not only was the filmmaker able to grasp the salt and singularity of the Antique Olive, but also, through its exclusive and repeated use, to experience the first radicality of this character whose ambition was to constitute a French counterweight to the regulatory and normalising influence of the international Swiss style, then in strong expansion during the sixties. The typographer and historian Roger Chatelain analyses the resistance that this current engendered in France during this period. “During the inter-war period and from the 1940s and 1950s onwards – when the new Swiss typography took off – French opposition and reticence (…) manifested itself violently. (…). The said typography, advocated and disseminated by Swiss Germans, was directly derived from the work of the Bauhaus and the theories of its followers (…). How could one have, before and very quickly after the war, praised and recommended in France graphic forms which had originated in Weimar, Dessau, Berlin… Paris was not going to find its way in the ruins left by Hitlerism!”

Here’s some of what she says about Helvetica:

In principle, Helvetica, abandoning the logic of handwriting in favour of modernist aesthetics, was designed to erase all forms of expressiveness or affects and to constitute a typeface particularly suited to corporate communication or advertising messages. Its associated attributes of rationality, whiteness, sobriety, purity of form do not exempt the typeface of ideological colour.

The German type designer Erik Spiekermann, for example, loathed Helvetica for its design and its extreme regulating principle. […] The font infiltrates every level of communication and insidiously acquires a status of passive omnipotence that is all the more relentlessly diffuse and everywhere present. […]

As with all political and aesthetic issues, Godard, in his typographic choices — French versus Swiss typography — places himself at the core of a most acute debate which, beyond typefaces, questions the ways in which thought is represented. […]

In his article “La Suisse: le cinéma comme interprétation”, Alain Badiou is particularly enlightening on two points: His historical vision of Switzerland on the one hand, and his definition of Swiss art, in which he places Godard, who “hunts down on the smooth surface of the overwhelming Swiss consensus (…) the stigma of History” […]

With regard to this specific period of Godard’s film production, Badiou’s observations support my analysis in interpreting the filmmaker’s exclusive recourse to a typography praised for its extreme neutrality: “Switzerland”, he says, “is that middle point from which Godard observes the world, and where nothing excessively disturbs his problem.” Similarly, using Helvetica as a symbol of the “overwhelming consensus” is equivalent to adopting a middle point of typographical writing, where the filmmaker abandons all forms of graphic expressiveness for minimal and rational compositions. The inserts of Film socialisme are exemplary in this respect: black background, centred or flag composition, capital letters of the same size, colours used with measure. Where we notice that Godard abandons the blue-white-red palette. […]

If the first period with Antique Olive directly questions the issue of heritage – be it French, family, cultural; in an ostensibly graphic and provocative way through the use of blue-white-red, staged puns and expressive typography, the Helvetica phase looks more soberly at what it is possible to transmit as Switzerland, as Badiou points out, but also as a filmmaker who is more reflexive about history.

And on his final phase:

From the question of heritage to transmission issues, the typographical evolution follows the chronology of a lifetime of questioning and challenges to the different media (video, film, print). Both periods place at their centre the question of the hegemony of the text, considered by Godard as his “royal enemy”. If video marks a decisive step in Godard’s way of freeing himself from text, typography, in its application, is a subtle facet of it. The last period I entitled “pasteurized”, based on a term borrowed from Massin about the disappearance of lead types, corresponds to the use of so-called screen fonts, in this case Verdana or its equivalent Tahoma. The ordinary and transparent character of these fonts evokes what Massin describes in the loss of relief – which involves touch but also more symbolically the way of shaping thought; following the abandonment of letterpress printing in the sixties and seventies: “a pasteurisation, a levelling, the mark of lead is no longer inlaid on the paper”. These characters are no less complex in their function of ensuring optimal legibility on the screen. […]

This third period is distinguished by the abandonment of the specifically typographical fact by Godard, delegated to other hands, those of Fabrice Aragno in particular. The latter, in the continuity of Adieu au langage, continued his “mission of making, treating and assembling all materials according to Godard’s models”. The typographical composition becomes here one element among others made during assembly without any noticeable attention to the letter. If one examines Godard’s filmography, this detachment is a new phenomenon, which contrasts with the two main periods identified.

In these typographic choices, the filmmaker uses typefaces that are emblematic of an era, designed to respond to technological changes in printing but also to new modes of communication. Each typeface (Antique Olive, Helvetica or Verdana/Tahoma) has been tested in terms of legibility and chosen by virtue of its invisibility, its ordinary dimension, unnoticeable in its daily omnipresence.

I’ll never be able to watch a Godard film again without noticing the typefaces.

Not worth making a separate post of, but I have a complaint about the OED’s entry (entry revised 2016) for filmstrip, defined as “A length of film bearing a sequence of still frames.” Here are the three citations:

1896 The camera is provided with a continuous strip of sensitive film, and..a negative is made of it upon the sensitive film strip.
Weekly Irish Times 9 May 3/9Citation details for Weekly Irish Times

1962 Three new filmstrips, intended for training student electronic engineers.
Engineering 16 November 649Citation details for Engineering

2004 Each page is a ‘time slice’—like a still frame in a filmstrip.
B. Greene, Fabric of Cosmos (2005) i. iii. 53

Now, technically of course any strip of film is “a length of film bearing a sequence of still frames,” but in fact the word filmstrip has a more specific sense, well described in this NY Times piece by Christian Kriticos (archived) about collector Mark O’Brien:

Originating in the 1920s, filmstrips were a low-budget cousin to the movies. “You can think of them like slide shows,” O’Brien said. They contained 30 to 150 still images on a single roll of film, which was advanced manually frame by frame. The content was often educational, covering subjects as varied as teenage acne and the metric system. Teachers would project the pictures on classroom walls, while vinyl or cassette soundtracks provided narration, music and regular beeps to prompt the move to the next frame.

Obviously the 1896 citation does not refer to this but to a plain old strip of moving-picture film; to lump them together is like including a quote about a very warm canine in an entry for hot dog ‘frankfurter.’ Come on, OED, you can do better.

It is one thing to worry about labels, but it is quite another to examine the typology of the linguistic systems on East Slavic territory and uncover the relationship among specific changes. The goal is to establish not simply a list of distinctive characteristics, as Shevelov would have it, but to reveal a hierarchy of change and therefore a more accurate evaluation of linguistic data.[6] Thus, we are not as interested in registering Change A and Change B as we are in the assertion that Change B implies Change A and if B is in place it is no longer possible to return to the status quo ante, that is pre-A. My intent here is to make use of advances in Slavic historical linguistics since the publication of Shevelov’s encyclopedic Ukrainian historical phonology three and a half decades ago, knowledge that sheds new light on the chronological layering of East Slavic and thus provides a relative time frame for marking such fundamental typological shifts.

I will focus here on internally motivated sound change precisely because it is based on linguistic data least subject to conscious alteration on the part of speakers. We want to consider the language of speakers throughout Ukrainian territory, especially those at a far remove from the scriptoria and bureaucratic offices of urban elites. Members of this latter group are much more likely to be affected by the need for new abstract vocabulary or socially prestigious speech, desiderata that often lead to calques or direct borrowings, particularly from neighboring languages of power such as Polish or Russian. En passant we might note that both of these prestigious and influential languages have had a heavy steady stream of borrowing and calquing of their own. For now we will forget the self-reflective elites: we will be interested in when and how the non-elite speech communities of East Slavic began to diverge phonologically, never to proceed along the same trajectory again.

The Late Common Slavic speech community that resulted from the great Slavic migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries yielded some major changes that permit us to distinguish typologically the Slavic south from the Slavic north, and within the latter, the Slavic east from the Slavic west. […]

With the vast geographical expanse of East linguistic territory in mind, I’d like to focus attention on one particular isogloss (here, Isogloss 1), one dramatic linguistic boundary line, that bisects East Slavic territory laterally where modern Ukrainian dialects are juxtaposed to Russian, Belarusian, and Polish dialects (see fig. 1). Isogloss 1 looks like the marker of a fairly straightforward, simple difference in pronunciation. In the environment before the front vowel e from Late Common Slavic *e and strong front jer *ĭ (both hereafter symbolized by *e), dialects north and west of Isogloss 1 permit only the reflexes of sharped (palatalized, soft) labial and dental consonants, e.g., R p’eči ‘stove’ (GEN-LOC-DAT-SG), z’el’en’i ‘green; greenery’ (GEN-LOC-DEN-SG), d’es’at’ ‘ten’, p’en’ ‘stump’ (пень/пня), d’en’ ‘day’ (день/дня); Br p’eči (печы), z’el’en’i (зелені), ʒ’es’ac’ (дзесяць), p’en’ (пень/пня), ʒ’en’ (дзень/дня). Polish shows analogous distribution, e.g., P p’ec ‘bake’ (piec, INFINITIVE), źeleńi (zieleni), ʒ´eśęć (dziesięć), p’eń (pień/pnia), ʒ´eń (dzień/dnia).[8] Dialects south and east of Isogloss 1 permit only the reflexes of hard (nonpalatalized, plain) labial and dental consonants in this environment, e.g., U peči, zelen’i, des’at’, pen’ (пень/пня), den’ (день/дня).[9]

In early East and West Slavic, sharping was predictable and thus not phonemic for any consonants.[10] They were either inherently sharped (palatals) or plain (velars), or contextually sharped or plain (labials and dentals).[11] […] Sharped and plain variants of labials and dentals could not contrast with one another, and were thus not distinctive, not phonemic.

But the apparently simple Isogloss1 turns out to be more complex than it appears, representing the effects not of a single change, but of a cluster of changes resulting from the last historical event shared by all the Slavic languages: the so-called jer shift. […]

The presence of Isogloss1 would seem to indicate that at some point, dialects to the south simply reinterpreted sharped labials and dentals before e as plain, but exactly when has not been easy to determine. The orthographic evidence from East Slavic texts is moot, with sequences such as ПЕ, БЕ, МЕ, ТЕ, СЕ, НЕ indicating nothing about the presence or absence of sharping (печи, тебе, мене, село). Indeed, after examining all the traditional evidence concerning the presence or absence of subphonemic sharping in East Slavic, in particular on Ukrainian territory before the jer shift, Shevelov came to no conclusion, but ultimately leaned towards the idea that labials and dentals were not sharped before e from Late Common Slavic *e.[15] But contemporaneous work on the development of the vowels e and ê in East and West Slavic permits a reassessment of that position.

Shevelov saw inexplicable inconsistency in the way that original sequences of CeCŭ rendered the consonant preceding e as sharped before a later i < e, but plain before a retained e, e.g., Rs selŭ ‘village’ (GEN-PL) > U s’il but Rs klenŭ ‘maple’ > U klen. In a comprehensive analysis of evidence of the e > o change in East and West Slavic and the ê > a change in West Slavic, Henning Andersen has provided strong support for the presence of subphonemic sharping of labials and dentals in the environment before front vowels before the jer shift.[16] […]

Relevant here is the most startling hypothesis in Andersen’s study, namely, that the presence of pitch accent instead of stress accent during the jer shift in all but northern regions of Ukraine resulted in the shortening of all syllables except the pretonic, a Central Slavic feature that Ukrainian shared with Polish and Slovak.[19] […]

These developments, occurring at the time of the jer shift in the twelfth century, meant that in all of Rus´, the opposition sharped/plain was neutralized as sharped in the environment before ê of any origin. In the environment before e, however, the sharped/plain opposition was neutralized as sharped in dialects north and west of Isogloss 1 and as plain in dialects south and east of Isogloss 1—that is, in proto-Ukrainian territory. This remarkable fact about Ukrainian distinguishes it from all of its neighbors, current and historical, that might have had any influence on the development of Ukrainian, namely, Russian, Belarusian, and Polish.[24]

He goes into a great many details that I have omitted; interested parties will want to click through and examine the evidence, and I hope those with more understanding than I of this sort of thing will give an informed judgment on the plausibility of the idea. Me, I can’t help but notice the use (unfamiliar to me) of “sharp” to mean ‘palatalized’; I like it because it’s a lot shorter, but I wonder how widespread it is. It is not, for example, in the OED, which has only “8.c. Phonetics. (a) Used to express the acoustic quality of the high-front vowels; (b) a designation for unvoiced consonants. Obsolete in technical use.” And I thank my old MeFi pal clavdivs for sharing the link with me.

1. The action or process of seeing with one’s own eyes; personal observation, inspection, or experience. Now rare.

1607 It is apparently knowne, especially to them which are skild in the autopsie of Anatomie, the seat or fountaine head of it, is..a great hollow veine.
T. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors. Or The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or The Philosophers Stone to Make a Golden Temper f. 59

1647 For we question whether..a man by the bare light and instruction of the Book could attaine to a dextrous practice of a trade, whereunto hath been required seven yeares Autopsia.
W. Petty, Advice to Hartlib 19

1651 Or by autopsie [Latin per autopsiam], when by our observation, wee get a certaine knowledge of things.
R. Wittie, translation of J. Primrose, Popular Errours i. xiv. 53
[…]

1722 The extreme Capillaries of these Vessels are not to be prov’d by Autopsy, no more than those of the Veins and Arteries are.
J. Wainewright, Anat. Treat. Liver 60
[…]

1818 It is also this kind of evidence which places beyond dispute the autopsy of a traveller; and distinguishes him from the mere writer of Travels, who never himself saw what he relates.
E. D. Clarke, Trav. Europe, Asia & Afr. Part III (1824) vol. IX. p. viii

1839 The defect of autopsy may be compensated by sufficient testimony of a multitude.
T. De Quincey, On Hume’s Argument in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine July 95/2

1901 The evidence..that he is describing from personal autopsy the scenes of the great events which he narrates is overwhelming.
G. B. Grundy, Great Persian War & Preliminaries vi. 223

1988 [He] has collated (usually from photographs or facsimiles, only rarely by autopsy) all the manuscripts cited except for [etc.].
Classical Philology vol. 83 151

2003 Pliny was procurator of Hispania Tarraconensis, and the Natural History contains information about the area which Pliny seems to have derived from autopsy.
J. N. Adams, Bilingualism & Latin Language iv. 450

Sense 2.a., “Examination of the organs of a dead body in order to determine the cause of death, nature and extent of disease, result of treatment, etc.; post-mortem examination; an instance of this,” only goes back to 1805 (“The distinguishing signs of peripneumony and pleurisy are so uncertain that they have been doubted by some celebrated physicians; they have been so often belied by cadaverous autopsia,” Philosophical Magazine vol. 21 240). I note, more in anger than in sorrow, that they once again show their indifference to authorship; the 1988 citation under 1 is by Donald J. Mastronarde, and the 2.a. citation is from “An Essay on Medical Entomology” by François-Pierre Chaumeton.

The etymology goes into commendable detail on the sense development:

< (i) post-classical Latin autopsia act of seeing with one’s own eyes, careful visual examination (1586 or earlier in a medical context), careful visual examination of a patient for the purposes of diagnosis (1605 or earlier in medical contexts),

and its etymon (ii) Hellenistic Greek αὐτοψία act of seeing with one’s own eyes, in medical contexts (e.g. in Galen) also with reference to careful visual examination of a patient for the purposes of diagnosis < Byzantine Greek αὔτοπτος self-revealed (although this is apparently first attested slightly later (4th cent. a.d.); < ancient Greek αὐτο- auto- comb. form¹ + ‑οπτος: see optic adj.) + ‑ία ‑y suffix³; compare ‑opsy comb. form.

In sense 2a probably after French autopsie post-mortem examination (1671 or earlier (and now chiefly) in this sense: see below; 1801 or earlier in (now disused) autopsie cadavérique, 1821 or earlier in (rarer and now obsolete) autopsie cadavéreuse; 1594 in Middle French or earlier in sense ‘careful visual examination of a patient for the purposes of diagnosis’; the general sense ‘action or process of seeing with one’s own eyes’ is apparently not paralleled in French until later: 1640, in a scientific context). Compare German Autopsie (1750; early 19th cent. (and now chiefly) in sense 2a).

Notes
French autopsie is attested in 1573 in Middle French (in a medical context), and subsequently in 1665, in two instances which recent authoritative dictionaries of the language assign to the sense ‘post-mortem examination’. However, the context of the 1573 instance (as given in Trésor de la langue française at autopsie and the source cited there, C.-A. Desmaze Curiosités des anciennes justices (1867) 128) does not make the precise sense clear, and the 1665 instance is cited in Le français moderne vol. 14 290 (and hence in Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch vol. XXV. 1117/2) without any context at all, in a list of scientific terms used by a 17th-cent. French physician in his unpublished letters. In view of these facts, of the widespread objections on religious grounds to post-mortem examinations before the 18th cent., and of the scarcity of French instances of the sense ‘post-mortem examination’ before the early 19th cent., it seems more likely that the sense at least in the first of these two instances was ‘careful visual examination of a living patient’.

For a piece of peevery (is it still current?) about how “Technically you can’t perform an autopsy on a different species,” see this 2008 post.

Elsewhere, too, the adoption of Indian ideas was selective rather than wholesale. While writing systems were borrowed and Indian languages used for the earliest local writing, the languages both of the court and the common people remained the local Austronesian or Khmer ones. Sanskrit for a while may have served the same priestly and official role as Latin in medieval Europe. But in time Indian Pallawa script was used to write local languages, the oldest found so far being in old Malay dating to the seventh century in Sumatra. The following century saw the development of Kawi script, derived from Pallawa but used to write old Javanese.

This script became the basis for other scripts including later Javanese and Balinese, which are still in use today. The first writing in Khmer also dates to the seventh century and uses an adaptation of Pallawa script. Six hundred years later this became the basis of Thai writing. The origin of Indian language influence also varied. Only Sanskrit words, those of religious and classical texts, not Prakrit or other common Indian speech, entered early writing in Java, but Tamil ones appeared in Sumatra. Despite the import of Indian religions, social structures appear to have remained indigenous. The maritime cultures borrowed Indian ideas in art and architecture but then adapted them so that they have distinctive aspects which are readily recognizable.

Apart from religion and script, the biggest influence was on legal and governance issues. The Indian text on statecraft, Arthashastra, and the ancient Brahman legal code, Manusmriti, were widely studied by ruling elites and had a major influence on the development of state systems. The Arthashastra, written in the fourth century BCE during the north India-based Maurya empire, which supposedly followed the peace-loving Jain religion, required rulers to be ruthless in protecting the interests of the state but disciplined, hardworking and learned. It was a secular recipe for enlightened despotism applicable to rulers of any faith. The Hindu notion of divine kingship was especially attractive to rulers, seeming to make the exercise of power something higher than mere personal leadership: a mandate from above. Buddhism on the other hand (and also Jainism) was more sympathetic to merchant interests and the accumulation of wealth. Its practitioners were also less constrained by caste issues and religious rituals, which for the devout were an obstacle to long sea journeys.

What a fascinating part of the world! For more on its complexity, see my 2005 post It’s Never That Simple.

Lewis finds Burton in his voice, which Burton himself described as “the deep, dark answer” to the Welsh valleys. “I think our voices were born with coal-dust and rain and some sort of authentic mystery from those dark and tortured valleys,” he told an interviewer in 1974. For Lewis, Burton’s voice is “one of the twentieth century’s great noises,”

roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns, the articulation and diction very precise—and it’s what I hold most dear, what I find most engaging, about him, too, the inflections, nuances, elaborations and grain of his voice, the fire and the flint of things spoken. Everything one would want to know with Burton is present in the voice, which was rich and artificial, carrying a sense of fracture, of mournfulness.

Welsh was Burton’s first language, and it took years of elocution to iron out his vowels. “Unless you are Welsh,” he said of his friend Stanley Baker, “you couldn’t possibly understand him,” and the same is true of Burton. “He suffers from this intoxication with words,” Taylor said. “It’s Welsh verbal diarrhea.” “The Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses,” explains Lewis, “because flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.”

I’d never heard of Lewis, and I can’t say I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance; from the review:

The Roger Lewis persona is an amalgam of music hall tradition, pantomime, and Restoration bawdy. It is a niche joke about an irate dinosaur Welshman doing battle with the London literati, which may not translate for an American readership. Feeding off what Dr. Johnson called the “buzz” of the theater, the role Lewis assumes in all his books is Embattled Everyman. His petty grievances, aired in Seasonal Suicide Notes, are legion: despite his brash and boastful performance pieces—The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (1994), Anthony Burgess (2003), and The Real Life of Laurence Olivier (2007)—Lewis has been turned down four times as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. “So there we are: I am officially the least recognised and most non-esteemed author in Britain, perhaps in Britain’s literary history going back to Chaucer and to The Mabinogion.”

Sorry, Roger, no esteem from me! The book sounds like complete piffle.

Tere Schultz delivers a new literary and typographic divertimento for passionate readers. This time she follows one of her personal fixations: the Tuscan letters. Those ornamental objects, delicate or extravagant, that inhabit streets and typographic catalogs of all times, without losing an iota of expressive force. The product of decorative ingenuity, Tuscan vernaculars dress the street signs of Mexico as much as the stained glass windows of Paris, the ‘fileteado porteño’ of Buenos Aires signs or the hulls of fishing boats in the Amazon waters. However, this decorative ubiquity, notorious and implausible, alarms many. Fortunately, like a healing balm, Schultz will deploy here her original hypothesis, suspiciously unexplored, of how the Tuscan style would have been born from a mischievous interpretation of the stone inscriptions (wrongly) called lapidary. Although perhaps here the term ‘lapidary’ is appropriate, since the idea caught the author strolling through a cemetery. (Warning: sensitive material. Agnostic typographers and designers of little faith, please refrain).

Here’s a definition:

Basically, a typeface is considered Tuscan when its serifs are bi- or tri-furcated (sometimes with a greater number of extensions) to achieve a certain degree of fantasy or ornamentation. The examples are infinite since, apart from the terminals, all the other elements of the anatomy of a letter can vary: the strokes contrast, the ratio of proportions, the absence / presence of diamonds and other elements within the strokes, shadows, textures and other external additions.

And here’s a discussion of the name:

No one knows for sure the origin of the term Tuscan in typography. Nicolete Gray, a passionate researcher of decorative lettering, suggests that it may have been invented by Victorian type founders, there being no historical trace of such a designation [1]. Remember that Tuscan, the cultured and literary language of Alighieri, Boccaccio and Petrarch, is the one that eventually prevailed over the other dialects of northern Italy, and it is therefore likely that ‘Tuscan’ was a generic name given to everything that was believed to come from that region. [2]

On the other hand, Tuscan is only a name. We do not know with historical rigour whether it is legitimate to call it Tuscan or whether the style would have been born in Tuscany, although we could well imagine that, northern Italy having been for so long the fundamental source of all artistic novelty, in the eyes of the rest of the continent, it is likely that any innovation devoid of name or place of origin would be called Italian or Tuscan. We already know that all roads lead to Rome (or Florence) and that the traces of the Roman Empire throughout its territory are still warm.

If that sounds appealing, click on through for much more, with glorious illustrations and (in the second part) examples localized to Paris, Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Brazil; having been for a while a porteño myself, I will quote that section:

Caminito, the famous tourist promenade in the La Boca neighborhood, south of the city of Buenos Aires, adopted what is called fileteado porteño, a technique that exists in other popular cultures but here with very own characteristics. There is also a series of historical signs in the mosaic technique, of great subtlety, to recall significant figures of the culture.

The images make me intensely nostalgic. And the word fileteado is “From Spanish fileteado, ultimately from Latin filum (‘thread’), referring to fine painted lines.”

Perhaps from a dialectal variation of smack. Compare also Low German smok (“a kiss, a smouch/smooch”), Alemannic German Schmutz, Schmützle (“a kiss, a smooch”).

Wiktionary has nothing on the cited German dialect forms. Now for the verb schmooze; OED (entry revised 2019): “< Yiddish shmuesn to talk, converse, chat < shmues chat, gossip (see schmooze n.).” And the noun:

Either (i) < Yiddish shmues chat, gossip < Hebrew šĕmūʿōṯ, plural of šĕmūʿah rumour < šāmaʿ to hear (see Shema n.),

or perhaps (ii) < schmooze v.

Compare earlier schmoozing n. Compare also (in different senses) smouch n.², smouse n., which ultimately reflect the same Yiddish (and ultimate Hebrew) etymon.

Notes
Compare German Schmus chat, gossip, insincere behaviour, Schmu insincere behaviour, dodgy dealings (both 19th cent.; both < Yiddish, via Rotwelsch).

I doubt Schmu has anything to do with Al Capp’s shmoo, but you never know. Thanks, Peter!

This region is often referred to as ‘maritime South East Asia’, with the more general term ‘South East Asia’ dating only to World War II. Although Japan used the term ‘Tonan Ajiya’ (‘South East Asia’ [lit. ‘East South Asia’]) from the late nineteenth century, in European languages its use did not become widespread until the 1950s, bringing together mainland states between China and India with the islands. The formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 added to the notion that mainland and maritime were one, yet in practice they have divergent interests and religion, now as in the past.

Europeans had long termed the islands the ‘Indian archipelago’ or ‘Insulindia’. Alternatively they referred to them as the ‘Malay archipelago’, neither term distinguishing between the Indonesian and Philippine island groups. The area corresponded roughly to ‘Nusantara’, a name dating to the thirteenth century and the Java-based Majapahit empire. Nusa is a Sanskrit-derived word meaning ‘island’.

‘Nusantara’ defined the region of islands and coasts over which Majapahit rule, tribute or mercantile influence extended. It covered most of what is now Indonesia, part of the Philippine archipelago, the central Vietnam coast and the Malay peninsula. Beyond its Javanese heart it did not rule directly but held sway over the many small mercantile states of the region. ‘Nusantara’ in Malay today has a narrower meaning: ‘archipelago’, specifically the Indonesian archipelago. So this book uses ‘Nusantaria’ to denote a broader zone, the single maritime region between the northern entrance to the Melaka and Luzon straits, and the Banda islands in the extreme east of the archipelago. While predominantly describing the wider Malay world, and touching too on Taiwan, Madagascar and the Marianas, Nusantaria links to the coastal Thai, Chinese, Tamil and other players in the history of the exchange of goods, people and ideas both within the region and with peoples to the west and north-east. It corresponds also to the use by the distinguished archaeologist of South East Asia, Wilhelm Solheim, of the term ‘Nusantao’ to define the mostly Austronesian-speaking peoples of the ancient trading networks of the islands and coasts (tao [from Proto-Austronesian *Cau — LH] means people in many Austronesian languages).

The maritime zone is now mostly associated with its largest component, the South China Sea. But even that is a misnomer. The Chinese themselves used the term ‘Nanhai’ or ‘Nanyang’ (‘South Sea’ or ‘Southern Ocean’) for seas that included the South China Sea but could also refer to southern seas generally. Likewise, the Vietnamese used geographical location, calling it the ‘East Sea’ as it lay to their east. More recently and in response to Chinese claims to almost the whole sea, the Philippines has begun to refer to at least its adjacent water as the ‘West Philippine Sea’. The term ‘Philippine Sea’ had been used by early seventeenth-century European mapmakers. Indonesia refers to its portion as the Natuna Sea, after the island group of that name off the Borneo coast. This includes its archipelagic seas north of the islands, which fall within China’s extravagant claims to sea extending 1,600 kilometres from its mainland.

The name ‘South China Sea’ is a European invention of relatively recent date. When the Portuguese first got there in the sixteenth century they called it the ‘Cham Sea’, after the mercantile state which had long existed on the coast of what is now central Vietnam. Arabs at one time called the southern part of it the ‘Malay Sea’ or the ‘Spice Sea’ because it was close to the Spice Islands. The more northern part was known as the ‘Sanf Sea’, a reference to Champa. Others called it the ‘Luzon Sea’ after the main island of today’s Philippines. Westerners long referred to these seas as part of the Indian Seas. The name ‘Indonesia’ (‘Indian islands’) reflects this. ‘China Sea’ only came into western use around 1800. ‘South’ was added in the early twentieth century.

A few hundred years ago, before the territorial expansion of China to Taiwan and southwards by Vietnam, Nusantaria was almost entirely Malay – to use the term ‘Malay’ in its broad cultural and linguistic sense. Even today these generic Malays of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei own most of its coastline. They are peoples who have traded with and occasionally paid tribute to China, and have absorbed Chinese immigration but, at least until very recently, have been more influenced by ideas from India, the Arab and Persian worlds and Europe than by China.

To the Chinese, the whole region was the ‘Nanyang’, meaning ‘Southern Sea’, a region inhabited by darker-skinned people and thus often seen as inferior in a system that associated skin tone with social status. For many Indians it was an overseas extension of their Hindu-Buddhist culture. Even now the marks left by Indian religion, writing and art are more evident than those of China. As for the peoples who actually lived in this region, they mostly saw it in terms of individual entities, of spheres of political influence, religion and trade, which had long been linked through dynasties and rivalries.

Having studied Sanskrit, I want to pronounce Nusantara with stress on the antepenultimate (अन्तरा antarā), but etymology is not destiny, and in Malay and Indonesian it’s /nusanˈtara/. As for the nusa part, it’s “Inherited from Proto-Malayic *nusa, from Proto-Malayo-Chamic *nusa, from Proto-Malayo-Sumbawan *nusa, from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *nusa,” an admirably consistent chain of offspring.

There’s also interesting stuff in Languages of Nusantaria:

The transience of states is one reason why the region’s history is poorly known. Modern states prefer to build their own identities, which may require ignoring the past, especially if it is inconvenient in the context of religious, border and other contemporary issues. Another is the lack of pre-colonial written history. Of the little that exists almost all comes from outside sources, many of which make references to places whose identity can only be guessed at. Yet another is the absence of major archaeological remains other than temples, and they are significant only in Java and coastal Vietnam. Indigenous work such as writings on palm leaves and palaces of wood rotted away long ago.

And Peopling Nusantaria:

The ending of the last ice age must have been a catastrophe for many of the people of Sundaland, the relatively flat land between what is now the Asian mainland and the coasts of Sumatra, Java and Borneo. While global warming enabled areas such as northern Europe to become habitable, in Asia it destroyed large numbers of human settlements in a region which previously should have been very conducive to habitation. By the same token, the creation of many islands and a huge expansion of coastlines produced the environment for the world of the Nusantarians, living on and by the sea, developing sailing craft and navigational prowess and building the coastal exchange networks which eventually evolved into ocean-spanning movements. They were behind the expansion of human settlement and of trade around half the globe. The same people, originating from Nusantaria, settled almost every island between Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Madagascar, between Taiwan and New Zealand.

Don’t do what I did at first and ignore the geographical information (they tell you in small print how many km/miles away the mystery language is, which helps a lot). Good luck, and thanks, Y!

Etymology

borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Italian capriccio “whim, fancy,” earlier and medieval Tuscan caporiccio “bristling of the hair with fear, shiver of horror, shudder,” probably from capo “head” (going back to Vulgar Latin *capum, re-formation of Latin caput “head”) + riccio “hedgehog,” going back to Latin ērīcius — more at head entry 1, urchin

Note: Italian capriccio has been a word of disputed origin, the principle issue being the peculiar semantic shift from “shiver of horror”—a meaning easily explicable from the compound’s bases “head” and “hedgehog”—to “whim, caprice,” and hence to various further senses. On these grounds M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli (Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana) consider the entire etymology uncertain, and speculate that two etyma of independent origin have somehow converged phonetically. Cortelazzo and Zolli state that the Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri (died ca. 1312) used caporiccio in the sense “desire, wish” (“desiderio, voglia”), but in the sole occurrence of the word in the sonnets attributed to him, the meaning is actually far from clear. With this use set aside, the sense “whim, fancy” is not attested before the sixteenth century according to the Lessico etimologico italiano (vol. 9, column 1055), when the word was borrowed by French. The earlier meaning “shiver of horror,” first attested as a translation of Latin horror by the Florentine author Bono Giamboni (died ca. 1292), is apparently rare in Italian after the eighteenth century, but derivatives such as raccapricciarsi “to be horrified,” raccapriccio “horror, disgust,” are still current. The sense “whim, fancy” has suggested a connection with capra “goat,” an animal stereotypically known for its sudden leaps (compare capriole). The lexicographer Francesco Alunno, in Ricchezze della lingua volgare sopra il Boccaccio (1543), notes both meanings of the word without attempting to reconcile them: “And a sudden and unreasoning inclination is called capriccio, such as seems to come in the manner of goats, which all leap if one leaps. Likewise those shudders, shivers of cold that appear at the beginning of a still doubtful fever are called capricci.” (“Et Capriccio si chiama un’ appetito subito et senza rasone, tale, qual pare che venga alle Capre; che se una salta tutte l’altre saltano. Item Capricci si chiamano quei ribrezzi, griccioli del gielo, che vengono nel principio della febre anchora incerta.”) Whatever its etymology, caporiccio/capriccio is likely at least as old as the thirteenth century, given its rich attestation in dialects throughout the Italian peninsula, as documented in Lessico etimologico italiano.

I love all the detail, but I note with extreme disapproval the use of “principle” in place of the correct “principal.” Where have all the copyeditors gone? (The OED’s 1888 entry adds no useful information in the etymology but does note “About 1700 ˈcaprice was a usual accentuation; Pope rhymed the word with vice.”)