And then the other inconvenience of every Analytical Idiom: you *don't* want similar words for similar concepts, because they are the ones that are hardest to distinguish when there is any noise. If you hear a word that could mean either "horse" or "sand", it's easy to tell from the context; if the word means either "horse" or "donkey", though...
Yes, I was instantly reminded of the standard layout of our keyboards, being developed at the time of mechanical typewriters which necessitated maximum distance between typically adjacent letters (to prevent the mechanics from interfering when typing fast). It is a somewhat analogous problem.
I also just thought of my very(!) cursory knowledge about Chinese. It usually works just like you described - I don't know about horse and donkey, but I know that sheep and goat are the same word, and if you need to distinguish them specifically you add "mountain" to one of them, and "fluffy" to the other. Another example is "alcoholic drink", another catch-all term. If you really need to distinguish wine from beer, you will say "alcoholic drink from grapes" and "alcoholic drink from grain", etc, but often it is clear from context. But if you are already drinking beer with friends and ask for another "alcoholic drink", you get another beer.
It can be the complete opposite in writing though: The same pronounced word might have hundreds of different exact characters for specific meanings.
Sure, we can draw a moral! Even if you are a terrible fit for your circumstances, or even your initial ambitions, if you keep plugging away earnestly then you can generate something worthwhile.
Far far away from this, I'm currently rereading "Breaking Through", Katalin Karikó's memoir. (Because her English is poor, it had an uncredited co-author, Ali Benjamin, so I don't know how many of the lovely turns of phrase or ideas are directly from her.)
One of the recurring themes is that she's not particularly smart, certainly not smarter than her peers. It took her longer to learn things, and she never really nailed English.
She credits her success to insane persistence, to try one more thing over and over and over again. In one case, that's what led to the discovery of non-immunogenic mRNA. And in another case, she ran out her funding and was never able to make 2-5A into a useful medical product. One imagines that if she had never run into Drew Weissman at a photocopier, she would have labored her entire life in obscurity.
I've been reading some other medical history, and I'd also recommend "Vaccinated" by Paul Offit, which is mostly about the life of Maurice Hilleman, likely the greatest vaccine developer in history. Two things that struck me:
First, he grew up in rural Montana surrounded by childhood illness (he nearly died of diphtheria), saw that the world was inadequate and at himself to the task of fixing it, and he spent his entire adult life doing just that. He took on intractable problem after intractable problem, and just kept at it.
Second, people who make big contributions generally stop and rest on their authority. Albert Sabin invented the inactivated polio vaccine, and was right lauded for it, but spent a lot of time throwing his authority around and didn't invent anything particularly meaningful.
Not Hilleman! He was making vaccine from mouse brains in kitchen blenders in the 1940s, and he was successfully purifying (unknown at the time) HIV-infected blood to make Hep B vaccine in the 1980s. He was at the forefront of his field for something like fifty years. Just incredible story after incredible story.
At one point I told a Chinese friend about Unsong and she said she might want to read it and asked if there was a Chinese translation.
When I said there probably wasn't she suggested she might have fun trying to translate it. After telling her a bit more about it we both realized how insane and impossible translating Unsong would be.
I have had the honor of meeting the translator once, just before she died. It was her life's work. I never understood how it could be possible, myself.
James Joyce is pure Ne, a fever dream. The ideas without the form. Stream of consciousness, except not the consciousness of everyone. Something about it feels familiar to me but not quite natural. It's like the layer right before conscious thought.
I tried to read Ulysses once, then just skipped to the good part: yes I said yes I will Yes.
One of my favorite translation stories is about how GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) Is obviously untranslatable, except it's not, and the author wrote another book about translation, which has an entire chapter about translating it, and the Chinese title is 集异璧, pronounced Jí Yì Bì, which Hofstadter translates back as "A Collection of Exquisite Jade", which works on a number of levels, both phonetically translating the original English title while transculturating the reverence for precious metals into a reverence for jade.
It is both a wonderful gift and a bit of a loss that the art of translation is mostly done by machines, because the really interesting stuff is legitimately hard, but most of the translation work that needs to be done is very workaday, so we kind of lose that stuff.
There's an entire chapter about crossing the Panama Canal where everything that isn't a pallindrome (everything except the radar) gets corrupted. Ana's stuck by herself trying to fix it while the other crew members are seizing (none of their names are pallindromes) and a dog appears on the ship that she prays to (God backwards) while moving everyone to the poop (pallindrome) deck.
The whole thing is a joke on the pallindrome "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"
How the hell do you translate a chapter like that.
The book is full of wizard duels where people rearrange words into weapons based on the phonetics.
Half the book is biblical whale puns:
"To no avail"
"That's backwards: it's Noah Ark, _Jonah_ whale"
"Joan of Arc"
"We just went over this, it's Noah Ark, Jonah Whale"
One of the characters is named Tomas just so a big final reveal can be done in the form of a Tom Swifty
I WAS thinking of the duels - many of them go through words in several different languages, so English would be featured heavily but if you're using Hebrew words why not - but the palindromes thing is gonna be rough.
(The whale puns won't translate, but I do feel like you could substitute different arbitrary puns without it being an issue.)
A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal - Panama
(Guy L Steele)
I seem to recall there was a much longer one by the same author, but I can't find it at the moment.
Alphabetic languages can probably find a parallel construction, but I feel doing it with Chinese, where characters are whole words, would be on another level.
In other alphabetic languages, the cultural connection between the Panama Canal and pallindromes is missing, so just finding other pallindromes to use doesn't solve the chapter.
It would be like coming up with a Tom Swifty pun that works in another language. It doesn't matter because Tom Swifty puns aren't an established recognizable pun form.
Honestly the Paname chapter doesn't seem that hard, just write something like "Then Ana realized: the correct language to understand this phenomenon must be English. The canal was built by the Americans. [...] And in English God backwards is Dog [...]"
Same here. I also heard about an incomplete Hinduist fanfic that a guy from our (wildbow's Worm) translation team was attempting, I don't know about its current state. I had actually read Unsong aloud to my then-girlfriend while translating into Russian on the fly, but I had to explain a lot of things in the process.
I liked this one a lot! Mostly because Urquhart sounds like quite the character.
My only prior knowledge of Urquhart is that he is apparently the author of the first prose sex scene in Scottish literature (in my memory, it was English literature, but apparently that's not so). But, because he was the kind of guy as described above, it came out like this:
"Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both. The visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that passion was active and action passive, they both being overcome by other and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness"
TBH I thought it might have been from an old links post from back in SSC days, but a half-assed Google failed to turn anything up.
If not that, maybe from the website futilitycloset, which was a source of many delightful random facts to me for many years.
I would love to lie and say "yes" to your last question, but the truth is, as with so many things I remember being delighted by this for like a week, and then let it completely slip my mind.
So there's something else above your bed or do all your delights just slip your mind? What stays? Or maybe what stays is the vague sense of it, and just the exact details slip your mind?
There is nothing above my bed, and most things slip my mind... But some residue remains, and if triggered I can usually use Google to track down the rest
The review often mentions some fact or another about Rabelais writing, yet says they never read the original.
Usually this is fair, plenty of works I've only read in translation and still believe to know the contents of.
But isn't contrasting the original with the translation exactly the time you cannot do that? How can the review say things like "Rabelais is excellent at moving things along quickly, at varying his scenes, and Urquhart is equally adept at matching his style to warfare, marriage, court cases or whatever else Rabelais wants to touch on." without having actually read the original?
This is virtually a perfect ACX review: lively style, plenty of historical context, and introducing us to a true tragi-comic 'character' in Urquhart. Great work!
Same for me. The first paragraphs made me think 'why am I doing this' but then it picked up pace and I actually finished it, not always the case with these book reviews.
> At this point, you’re probably thinking that Urquhart was some kind of baroque troll. This is a fair suspicion. But if you read his writing, it’s really hard not to feel that he is being serious. There’s almost nothing conventionally funny in any of Urquhart’s original work. [...] Perhaps the first or second impossible claim is amusing, but surely not the sixty-third? And what’s more, he genuinely needed the money. He can’t have expected an extended practical joke to make his fortune, right?
I mean, there's a word for this, and that word is *crank*. Or crackpot. I'm not sure why the reviewer thinks we should be so surprised at the idea that some Scottish nobleman was also a crank. There's always cranks!
Good point. And we're almost able to express "a number which had more digits than grains of sand you could fit into the volume of the earth [with] two letters". We can write 10^100, or even better 1e100, if it's clear from context we could even just write e100. That's just 4 digits. And we probably don't even need a number that large, if e70 is enough we're at 3 digits, almost there.
It provokes in me the hypothesis that the enjoyment of that kind of prose should be viewed as a kind of neurodiversity rather than a matter of taste. I'm a good writer [citation needed]; I have an excellent ear for language; I overuse semicolons assiduously exactly because they "sound" different than commas and I know which one I mean. And I have exactly zero patience with rococo prose. I have begun to suspect that enjoying it requires some kind of perception that some people have and I (and probably the majority of humans, in this particular case) just don't.
Maybe you are conflating multiple senses of taste.
One is having a refined palate, meaning the ability to understand and describe what you are tasting. By analogy, it's knowing through flavor what variety of grape made the wine and the manner in which it was aged.
Another is having a refined palate, meaning your enjoyment derives from attributes like nose and complexity rather than how quickly it gets you drunk.
The third way people think about taste is simple preference; 'De gustibus non est disputandum.' People with refined palates in both the previous senses can still have polar opposite views on whether dry whites or sweet reds are more fun to drink.
I didn't really "get it" (although knowing there's backstory context for the Lilliputians or whatever is interesting), but fortunately this was a brisk and straightforward read that never overstays its welcome, which is somewhat ironic given the subject matter. Also no mention of AI, despite the obvious reachy parallels one could make about UrquhartGPT. More of this, please.
Do find the inclusion of an imgflip meme format somewhat jarring on ACX, even if it's not Scott's content.
This obsession with long lists, for which Rabelais was among the most famous exemplars, apparently tracks to Erasmus' 1512 textbook "Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style."
From Wikipedia: "Erasmus' purpose was to contribute to the existing scholarship on style. To that end, he put forth in De Copia that style must be abundant in order to be effective, and that the abundance consists of two primary elements: variety of expression and variety of subject matter. Variety, he says, "is so powerful in every sphere that there is absolutely nothing, however brilliant, which is not dimmed if not commended by variety"."
In the 17th Century, the French switched to their classic style of prose, which was much more lucid. But it took the English a lot longer to clean up their prose style. The English were long more obsessed with poetry than prose.
For a long time, a lot of prose was, more or less, showing off.
For example, John Milton's 1644 prose polemic "Areopagitica" introduced the important argument for freedom of speech that the best argument would win in the marketplace of ideas.
But it's an ordeal to read: e.g., "When a man hath bin labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnisht out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battell raung'd, scatter'd and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please; only that he may try the matter by dint of argument, for his opponents then to sculk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licencing where the challenger should passe, though it be valour anough in souldiership, is but weaknes and cowardice in the wars of Truth."
By that point, French writers like Descartes and Pascal were introducing a classic style of French prose that emphasized clarity.
Shakespeare has a few lists like that. I remember performing part of King Lear for some school project, and being really excited that I got to whip out:
Oswald: What dost thou know me for?
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.
but the vibe is different if you're right and Bill was holding back.
"he was born in an era when Isaac Newton split time evenly between physics and alchemy"
Not even! I happen to have just written a blog post about Newton, so I can tell you that he spent quite a bit *more* time on theology and alchemy than he did on physics. He did his best work in just the two years after he finished college. People of that age were just really, really into theology and alchemy...
Anyway, nice review! I doubt I'll ever read this book but... maybe? It definitely made me curious to try it. If nothing else, it makes me happy to know that such a book exists, like some crazy artistic work of genius that I will never understand.
"how to wield a lance on horseback — already antiquated in this era of rifles and cannons"
The 1600s are nothing like an era of rifles and cannons. They were barely starting to figure out muskets. And 200 years later lance cavalry still charged wearing bullet-proofed breastplates.
It's a tangent, sure, but how can I take anything else at face value after such a breezily stated piece of nonsense?
This is far too harsh. Sword + pistols were the preferred cavalry weapons broadly in the 1600s, as infantry still often used pikes. My impression is that lancers came back in fashion by the Napoleonic wars, as the pike was dropped for the bayoneted rifle and infantry could not mass as tightly due to more accurate and powerful cannons. Cromwell’s famous cavalrymen did not carry lances.
Sure, but mounted lancers were very much in use at the time, and did well vs reiters, so I'd say the point stands. Not an antiquated weapon by any means, and remained in serious use for another 200 years.
Good read but wondering if Urquhart was a “medieval troll” very much tells us more about the author than about the guy.
If you were Urquhart, you would have learned French and read the original book before attempting to do a literary analysis. And it’s exactly that perfectionist mindset plus that strong persistence and passion for language and patterns (math and linguistics), which the author then loves how it shines through in the translation, that would explain Urquhart’s lofty ambitions. How would you even think it might be some weird medieval troll behavior?? It’s insulting to Urquhart but also not a good look for this author’s subject matter expertise.
All that love and fascination that was extended to Urquhart’s words should have also been extended to his person, no matter how ungraspable.
I've read most of the book reviews over the last couple years. They're always long and rewarding. To the extent I remember well enough the specific finalists to make a stab at voting for the best, I do. This one on Thomas Urquhar's translation of Rabelais, with a wonderful foundation in Urguhar's life as an eccentric, polyglot aristocrat in the Highlands of Scotland from1611-1660 is delightful. I recommend it highly and specifically Urguhar's translation of Rabelais. Especially for those of us who love language rich in the mouth that makes the heart sing. Yes!
" I can’t speak French, but I have a hard time believing that Rabelais’ original can be any better than this."
For this part at least, the translation is almost word by word. And the original Rabelais text can still be well understood by french speakers :
" Vous entendez assez, ià besoing n'est d'adventaige vous l'exposer, que les Utopiens avoient les genitoires tant feconds, & les Utopiennes portoient matrices tant amples, gloutes, tenaces, & cellulées par bonne architecture, que au bout de chascun neufviesme moys, sept enfans pour le moins, que masles que femelles, naissoient par chascun mariage, à l'imitation du peuple Iudaic en aegypte: si de Lyra ne delyre."
As a French speaker, I must say I find Rabelais's writing much less flowery and much more comprehensible. Translating "matrice" with "matrix" and "cellulées par bonne architecture" by "architectonically cellulated" is on the verge of nonsense in English, whereas it's plain humor in French.
So as I read it, Rabelais sounds trite - perhaps good humor for the time, but too obvious and simple for today. I can find better humor in theaters, and better stories in YA fiction.
"I'll picturabolate this humoid with the sicklicious fattenence of a pachyderm" is certainly not something I'd like to read everyday, but for one crank every year, it can be pretty funny.
“Matrix” originally meant “womb” in English as well as in Latin and French. For example the Tyndale Bible of 1526 has “Every man chylde that fyrst openeth the matrix shalbe called holy to the lorde”.
Urquhart's use of “matrix” here is hard to understand _now_ because it is archaic. It would not have been obscure at the time.
Rough summary: The Covenanters were fighting for Presbyterianism, and against Charles I's attempts to impose Episcopalianism (and his suspected Catholicism). But they were still monarchists, so when Cromwell executed Charles I they were outraged. Partly because it's scandalous to kill a king, but also because Scotland and England were different countries who shared a king - and the English had just killed the Scottish king.
So the Covenantors came to an agreement with the future Charles II: they would support his restoration if he supported their right to Presbyterianism when he got the crown. This is where they invaded England, Covenantors and Scottish Royalists together, and they were soundly beaten. This is the point where Urquhart would have joined up with people he'd previously fought against.
Eventually, Charles II was restored, and he completely went back on his agreement with Scotland, giving the Covenanters a particularly unpleasant period, known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Time
Regarding Urquhart's inexplicable decision to take with him the entire three thousand page manuscript of his artificial language, Denton Fox writes:
“Before jumping to the conclusion that the plunderers must have been illiterate, one should remember that there is not likely to be the slightest bit of truth in this story: it speaks well for the morality of modern scholars that so many of them should have speculated why Urquhart took all his manuscripts to war with him.”
It may interest you to learn about John Wilkins' “Philosophical Language”, along the same lines at Urquhart's pretended one. Wilkins divided the universe of concepts into a hierarchy, and each object or concept in the hierarchy was assigned a word whose spelling was essentially its address in the hierarchy, so, as you said, the words for horse and donkey were similar to each other, and less similar to words like tree or carpet.
Unlike Urquhart, Wilkins was not a crackpot; he was one of the founders of the Royal Society and its first secretary. Wilkins actually finished developing his language, and the book is still available. Along the way he invented a system of measurements based on powers of 10, nearly a century before the invention of the metric system.
I think it's typical of the Baroque science and philosophy that these projects were tried, though they seem completely bananas now. But I think the reason they seem bananas now is partly _because_ they were tried in the 17th and 18th centuries and turned out not to work. It would have been much less obvious at the time; civilization was still finding out how to do science.
Wilkins' philosophical language is a plot point in one of Neal Stephenson's “Baroque” novels, and there is an essay about it by Jorge Luis Borges.
Umberto Eco had a wonderful book about this kind of philosophical attempts at a perfect language: _The Search for the Perfect Language_. Not too long or hard to read from what I recall.
Linguistic virtuosity can emerge from rich combinatorial structures without any subjective awareness behind the words. The gap between syntactic mastery and conscious understanding remains as wide as ever. Wrote about LLMs and philosophical zombies here:
> Thus the word for horse and donkey will be similar to each other, and less similar to words like tree or carpet.
The man invented embeddings but was too far ahead of his time...
He probably also discovered the difficulty of building a universal ontology too.
Not so much "discovered" as "ignored", but yes :-)
And then the other inconvenience of every Analytical Idiom: you *don't* want similar words for similar concepts, because they are the ones that are hardest to distinguish when there is any noise. If you hear a word that could mean either "horse" or "sand", it's easy to tell from the context; if the word means either "horse" or "donkey", though...
Yes, I was instantly reminded of the standard layout of our keyboards, being developed at the time of mechanical typewriters which necessitated maximum distance between typically adjacent letters (to prevent the mechanics from interfering when typing fast). It is a somewhat analogous problem.
I also just thought of my very(!) cursory knowledge about Chinese. It usually works just like you described - I don't know about horse and donkey, but I know that sheep and goat are the same word, and if you need to distinguish them specifically you add "mountain" to one of them, and "fluffy" to the other. Another example is "alcoholic drink", another catch-all term. If you really need to distinguish wine from beer, you will say "alcoholic drink from grapes" and "alcoholic drink from grain", etc, but often it is clear from context. But if you are already drinking beer with friends and ask for another "alcoholic drink", you get another beer.
It can be the complete opposite in writing though: The same pronounced word might have hundreds of different exact characters for specific meanings.
I carried that book with me on backpacking trips decades ago.
Sure, we can draw a moral! Even if you are a terrible fit for your circumstances, or even your initial ambitions, if you keep plugging away earnestly then you can generate something worthwhile.
Far far away from this, I'm currently rereading "Breaking Through", Katalin Karikó's memoir. (Because her English is poor, it had an uncredited co-author, Ali Benjamin, so I don't know how many of the lovely turns of phrase or ideas are directly from her.)
One of the recurring themes is that she's not particularly smart, certainly not smarter than her peers. It took her longer to learn things, and she never really nailed English.
She credits her success to insane persistence, to try one more thing over and over and over again. In one case, that's what led to the discovery of non-immunogenic mRNA. And in another case, she ran out her funding and was never able to make 2-5A into a useful medical product. One imagines that if she had never run into Drew Weissman at a photocopier, she would have labored her entire life in obscurity.
Thank you for the comment! I never heard of her before. Just read her german wiki article.. incredible. I might just read that memoir
I've been reading some other medical history, and I'd also recommend "Vaccinated" by Paul Offit, which is mostly about the life of Maurice Hilleman, likely the greatest vaccine developer in history. Two things that struck me:
First, he grew up in rural Montana surrounded by childhood illness (he nearly died of diphtheria), saw that the world was inadequate and at himself to the task of fixing it, and he spent his entire adult life doing just that. He took on intractable problem after intractable problem, and just kept at it.
Second, people who make big contributions generally stop and rest on their authority. Albert Sabin invented the inactivated polio vaccine, and was right lauded for it, but spent a lot of time throwing his authority around and didn't invent anything particularly meaningful.
Not Hilleman! He was making vaccine from mouse brains in kitchen blenders in the 1940s, and he was successfully purifying (unknown at the time) HIV-infected blood to make Hep B vaccine in the 1980s. He was at the forefront of his field for something like fifty years. Just incredible story after incredible story.
amazing, thanks I want to read all their memoirs now
At one point I told a Chinese friend about Unsong and she said she might want to read it and asked if there was a Chinese translation.
When I said there probably wasn't she suggested she might have fun trying to translate it. After telling her a bit more about it we both realized how insane and impossible translating Unsong would be.
I once was walking through a Chinese bookstore and saw translations of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
I'd like to shake the hand(s) of whomever accomplished those!
Finnegan’s Wake would be equally comprehensible in Chinese as in English to just about every English speaker, except for (possibly) Joyce himself.
And Anthony Burgess.
He read the Farsi translation. FW is straightforward in Persian.
I have had the honor of meeting the translator once, just before she died. It was her life's work. I never understood how it could be possible, myself.
James Joyce is pure Ne, a fever dream. The ideas without the form. Stream of consciousness, except not the consciousness of everyone. Something about it feels familiar to me but not quite natural. It's like the layer right before conscious thought.
I tried to read Ulysses once, then just skipped to the good part: yes I said yes I will Yes.
One of my favorite translation stories is about how GEB (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid) Is obviously untranslatable, except it's not, and the author wrote another book about translation, which has an entire chapter about translating it, and the Chinese title is 集异璧, pronounced Jí Yì Bì, which Hofstadter translates back as "A Collection of Exquisite Jade", which works on a number of levels, both phonetically translating the original English title while transculturating the reverence for precious metals into a reverence for jade.
It is both a wonderful gift and a bit of a loss that the art of translation is mostly done by machines, because the really interesting stuff is legitimately hard, but most of the translation work that needs to be done is very workaday, so we kind of lose that stuff.
I would think the trickiest parts of Unsong are the parts you wouldn't literally translate, since they jump around between languages anyway.
There's an entire chapter about crossing the Panama Canal where everything that isn't a pallindrome (everything except the radar) gets corrupted. Ana's stuck by herself trying to fix it while the other crew members are seizing (none of their names are pallindromes) and a dog appears on the ship that she prays to (God backwards) while moving everyone to the poop (pallindrome) deck.
The whole thing is a joke on the pallindrome "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"
How the hell do you translate a chapter like that.
The book is full of wizard duels where people rearrange words into weapons based on the phonetics.
Half the book is biblical whale puns:
"To no avail"
"That's backwards: it's Noah Ark, _Jonah_ whale"
"Joan of Arc"
"We just went over this, it's Noah Ark, Jonah Whale"
One of the characters is named Tomas just so a big final reveal can be done in the form of a Tom Swifty
Yeah, fair points.
I WAS thinking of the duels - many of them go through words in several different languages, so English would be featured heavily but if you're using Hebrew words why not - but the palindromes thing is gonna be rough.
(The whale puns won't translate, but I do feel like you could substitute different arbitrary puns without it being an issue.)
A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal - Panama
(Guy L Steele)
I seem to recall there was a much longer one by the same author, but I can't find it at the moment.
There are now (to my surprise) several translations of Unsong, including Hebrew and Russian!
How did they handle the Panama Canal chapter?
Alphabetic languages can probably find a parallel construction, but I feel doing it with Chinese, where characters are whole words, would be on another level.
In other alphabetic languages, the cultural connection between the Panama Canal and pallindromes is missing, so just finding other pallindromes to use doesn't solve the chapter.
It would be like coming up with a Tom Swifty pun that works in another language. It doesn't matter because Tom Swifty puns aren't an established recognizable pun form.
Honestly the Paname chapter doesn't seem that hard, just write something like "Then Ana realized: the correct language to understand this phenomenon must be English. The canal was built by the Americans. [...] And in English God backwards is Dog [...]"
Complete Unsong in Russian?! I am only aware of some very partial translations.
Same here. I also heard about an incomplete Hinduist fanfic that a guy from our (wildbow's Worm) translation team was attempting, I don't know about its current state. I had actually read Unsong aloud to my then-girlfriend while translating into Russian on the fly, but I had to explain a lot of things in the process.
Aaaand here it is!
https://unsong-ru.org
This was a true joy to read!
This was quite the journey and I am happy to have read it.
Also, "scurvy sneaksbies." All that is needed now is "taffer."
I liked this one a lot! Mostly because Urquhart sounds like quite the character.
My only prior knowledge of Urquhart is that he is apparently the author of the first prose sex scene in Scottish literature (in my memory, it was English literature, but apparently that's not so). But, because he was the kind of guy as described above, it came out like this:
"Thus for a while their eloquence was mute and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both. The visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that passion was active and action passive, they both being overcome by other and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness"
Great stuff
Hawt.
It sounds sexier if you read it in a heavy Scottish brogue.
True, but what doesn't?
Resonantly temperature-affective.
Claude-3s would approve frenetidastically.
"his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal"
At once the funniest and greatest description 😁
If Urquhart were alive today, he'd be a songwriter for the Bloodhound Gang.
...wait, the Bloodhound Gang is alive today?
Er... maybe ? I haven't checked in a while, but Wikipedia says so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodhound_Gang#Current_lineup
Thank you for this. When was this prior knowledge acquired and do you have this framed above your bed?
TBH I thought it might have been from an old links post from back in SSC days, but a half-assed Google failed to turn anything up.
If not that, maybe from the website futilitycloset, which was a source of many delightful random facts to me for many years.
I would love to lie and say "yes" to your last question, but the truth is, as with so many things I remember being delighted by this for like a week, and then let it completely slip my mind.
So there's something else above your bed or do all your delights just slip your mind? What stays? Or maybe what stays is the vague sense of it, and just the exact details slip your mind?
There is nothing above my bed, and most things slip my mind... But some residue remains, and if triggered I can usually use Google to track down the rest
It's quadrobiquadr_e_quation, qu_a_esitum, cath_e_tobasall. (UMich library text here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?view=toc)
That's just great. Jacobean James Joyce.
The review often mentions some fact or another about Rabelais writing, yet says they never read the original.
Usually this is fair, plenty of works I've only read in translation and still believe to know the contents of.
But isn't contrasting the original with the translation exactly the time you cannot do that? How can the review say things like "Rabelais is excellent at moving things along quickly, at varying his scenes, and Urquhart is equally adept at matching his style to warfare, marriage, court cases or whatever else Rabelais wants to touch on." without having actually read the original?
This review is excellent, but there's a sense I can't shake off -- perhaps imagined -- of subtle contempt toward everything that isn't in English.
This is virtually a perfect ACX review: lively style, plenty of historical context, and introducing us to a true tragi-comic 'character' in Urquhart. Great work!
It's missing some connection to predictive coding. Maybe something something his temperature was set too high.
I expected to just skim, and I read the whole thing with interest and amusement. Great job!
Same for me. The first paragraphs made me think 'why am I doing this' but then it picked up pace and I actually finished it, not always the case with these book reviews.
> At this point, you’re probably thinking that Urquhart was some kind of baroque troll. This is a fair suspicion. But if you read his writing, it’s really hard not to feel that he is being serious. There’s almost nothing conventionally funny in any of Urquhart’s original work. [...] Perhaps the first or second impossible claim is amusing, but surely not the sixty-third? And what’s more, he genuinely needed the money. He can’t have expected an extended practical joke to make his fortune, right?
I mean, there's a word for this, and that word is *crank*. Or crackpot. I'm not sure why the reviewer thinks we should be so surprised at the idea that some Scottish nobleman was also a crank. There's always cranks!
> The mathematics of logarithms will be encoded into the numbers of this language.
Arguably the mathematics of logarithms are roughly embedded into written numbers (i.e. digit count).
Good point. And we're almost able to express "a number which had more digits than grains of sand you could fit into the volume of the earth [with] two letters". We can write 10^100, or even better 1e100, if it's clear from context we could even just write e100. That's just 4 digits. And we probably don't even need a number that large, if e70 is enough we're at 3 digits, almost there.
I appreciated this review.
It provokes in me the hypothesis that the enjoyment of that kind of prose should be viewed as a kind of neurodiversity rather than a matter of taste. I'm a good writer [citation needed]; I have an excellent ear for language; I overuse semicolons assiduously exactly because they "sound" different than commas and I know which one I mean. And I have exactly zero patience with rococo prose. I have begun to suspect that enjoying it requires some kind of perception that some people have and I (and probably the majority of humans, in this particular case) just don't.
Maybe you are conflating multiple senses of taste.
One is having a refined palate, meaning the ability to understand and describe what you are tasting. By analogy, it's knowing through flavor what variety of grape made the wine and the manner in which it was aged.
Another is having a refined palate, meaning your enjoyment derives from attributes like nose and complexity rather than how quickly it gets you drunk.
The third way people think about taste is simple preference; 'De gustibus non est disputandum.' People with refined palates in both the previous senses can still have polar opposite views on whether dry whites or sweet reds are more fun to drink.
This put a smile on my face. Both the reviewer and Urquhart have struck a cord with me.
Chudmaxxing
I didn't really "get it" (although knowing there's backstory context for the Lilliputians or whatever is interesting), but fortunately this was a brisk and straightforward read that never overstays its welcome, which is somewhat ironic given the subject matter. Also no mention of AI, despite the obvious reachy parallels one could make about UrquhartGPT. More of this, please.
Do find the inclusion of an imgflip meme format somewhat jarring on ACX, even if it's not Scott's content.
I just found it jarring to see a Simpsons meme that wasn't made with Frinkiac.
"prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets.”
Renaissance writers of most languages loved long lists like this. Shakespeare was less addicted to them than most.
This obsession with long lists, for which Rabelais was among the most famous exemplars, apparently tracks to Erasmus' 1512 textbook "Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style."
From Wikipedia: "Erasmus' purpose was to contribute to the existing scholarship on style. To that end, he put forth in De Copia that style must be abundant in order to be effective, and that the abundance consists of two primary elements: variety of expression and variety of subject matter. Variety, he says, "is so powerful in every sphere that there is absolutely nothing, however brilliant, which is not dimmed if not commended by variety"."
In the 17th Century, the French switched to their classic style of prose, which was much more lucid. But it took the English a lot longer to clean up their prose style. The English were long more obsessed with poetry than prose.
For a long time, a lot of prose was, more or less, showing off.
For example, John Milton's 1644 prose polemic "Areopagitica" introduced the important argument for freedom of speech that the best argument would win in the marketplace of ideas.
But it's an ordeal to read: e.g., "When a man hath bin labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnisht out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battell raung'd, scatter'd and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please; only that he may try the matter by dint of argument, for his opponents then to sculk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licencing where the challenger should passe, though it be valour anough in souldiership, is but weaknes and cowardice in the wars of Truth."
By that point, French writers like Descartes and Pascal were introducing a classic style of French prose that emphasized clarity.
I dunno, that seems plenty clear to me. Takes you on a very convincing emotional ride.
Shakespeare has a few lists like that. I remember performing part of King Lear for some school project, and being really excited that I got to whip out:
Oswald: What dost thou know me for?
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.
but the vibe is different if you're right and Bill was holding back.
"he was born in an era when Isaac Newton split time evenly between physics and alchemy"
Not even! I happen to have just written a blog post about Newton, so I can tell you that he spent quite a bit *more* time on theology and alchemy than he did on physics. He did his best work in just the two years after he finished college. People of that age were just really, really into theology and alchemy...
Anyway, nice review! I doubt I'll ever read this book but... maybe? It definitely made me curious to try it. If nothing else, it makes me happy to know that such a book exists, like some crazy artistic work of genius that I will never understand.
For some reason this reminds of Dr. Ferdinand Destouches/ Celines, Ralph Maniheim translated North, Castle to Castle and especially Rigadoon.
"how to wield a lance on horseback — already antiquated in this era of rifles and cannons"
The 1600s are nothing like an era of rifles and cannons. They were barely starting to figure out muskets. And 200 years later lance cavalry still charged wearing bullet-proofed breastplates.
It's a tangent, sure, but how can I take anything else at face value after such a breezily stated piece of nonsense?
This is far too harsh. Sword + pistols were the preferred cavalry weapons broadly in the 1600s, as infantry still often used pikes. My impression is that lancers came back in fashion by the Napoleonic wars, as the pike was dropped for the bayoneted rifle and infantry could not mass as tightly due to more accurate and powerful cannons. Cromwell’s famous cavalrymen did not carry lances.
Sure, but mounted lancers were very much in use at the time, and did well vs reiters, so I'd say the point stands. Not an antiquated weapon by any means, and remained in serious use for another 200 years.
Never mind the howler about rifles..
Good read but wondering if Urquhart was a “medieval troll” very much tells us more about the author than about the guy.
If you were Urquhart, you would have learned French and read the original book before attempting to do a literary analysis. And it’s exactly that perfectionist mindset plus that strong persistence and passion for language and patterns (math and linguistics), which the author then loves how it shines through in the translation, that would explain Urquhart’s lofty ambitions. How would you even think it might be some weird medieval troll behavior?? It’s insulting to Urquhart but also not a good look for this author’s subject matter expertise.
All that love and fascination that was extended to Urquhart’s words should have also been extended to his person, no matter how ungraspable.
Delightful review. :) I'm glad Urquhart finally found a project that fit him.
I've read most of the book reviews over the last couple years. They're always long and rewarding. To the extent I remember well enough the specific finalists to make a stab at voting for the best, I do. This one on Thomas Urquhar's translation of Rabelais, with a wonderful foundation in Urguhar's life as an eccentric, polyglot aristocrat in the Highlands of Scotland from1611-1660 is delightful. I recommend it highly and specifically Urguhar's translation of Rabelais. Especially for those of us who love language rich in the mouth that makes the heart sing. Yes!
" I can’t speak French, but I have a hard time believing that Rabelais’ original can be any better than this."
For this part at least, the translation is almost word by word. And the original Rabelais text can still be well understood by french speakers :
" Vous entendez assez, ià besoing n'est d'adventaige vous l'exposer, que les Utopiens avoient les genitoires tant feconds, & les Utopiennes portoient matrices tant amples, gloutes, tenaces, & cellulées par bonne architecture, que au bout de chascun neufviesme moys, sept enfans pour le moins, que masles que femelles, naissoient par chascun mariage, à l'imitation du peuple Iudaic en aegypte: si de Lyra ne delyre."
As a French speaker, I must say I find Rabelais's writing much less flowery and much more comprehensible. Translating "matrice" with "matrix" and "cellulées par bonne architecture" by "architectonically cellulated" is on the verge of nonsense in English, whereas it's plain humor in French.
So as I read it, Rabelais sounds trite - perhaps good humor for the time, but too obvious and simple for today. I can find better humor in theaters, and better stories in YA fiction.
"I'll describe this person as a morbidly obese elephant" is not a trivial thing to do right, but it's been overdone; that's Rabelais's style. If you want to read good writing in this style, go see Tomas Bjartur's work https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xskkLe8YaRpt3c86r/tomas-bjartur-the-last-prodigy
"I'll picturabolate this humoid with the sicklicious fattenence of a pachyderm" is certainly not something I'd like to read everyday, but for one crank every year, it can be pretty funny.
“Matrix” originally meant “womb” in English as well as in Latin and French. For example the Tyndale Bible of 1526 has “Every man chylde that fyrst openeth the matrix shalbe called holy to the lorde”.
Urquhart's use of “matrix” here is hard to understand _now_ because it is archaic. It would not have been obscure at the time.
Some promises of Urquhart's universal language have been fulfilled by Ithkuil!
I am confused about “surrounded by soldiers he had fought against” earlier in the religious war … is he not among Royalists both times?
Rough summary: The Covenanters were fighting for Presbyterianism, and against Charles I's attempts to impose Episcopalianism (and his suspected Catholicism). But they were still monarchists, so when Cromwell executed Charles I they were outraged. Partly because it's scandalous to kill a king, but also because Scotland and England were different countries who shared a king - and the English had just killed the Scottish king.
So the Covenantors came to an agreement with the future Charles II: they would support his restoration if he supported their right to Presbyterianism when he got the crown. This is where they invaded England, Covenantors and Scottish Royalists together, and they were soundly beaten. This is the point where Urquhart would have joined up with people he'd previously fought against.
Eventually, Charles II was restored, and he completely went back on his agreement with Scotland, giving the Covenanters a particularly unpleasant period, known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Time
Oh thank you!
Review should have been titled “A Confederacy of Macdunces”
I also thought of Ignatius.
I just got to the math part but I'm hoping it turns out he's the guy who popularized "sohcahtoa."
Okay, this wins.
This was outstanding. Made my day!
Every passage quoted reminds me of Moby Dick. Playfulness of language on every page
A trove of fun language facts! Another such is that Finnegans Wake has no possessive apostrophe.
Regarding Urquhart's inexplicable decision to take with him the entire three thousand page manuscript of his artificial language, Denton Fox writes:
“Before jumping to the conclusion that the plunderers must have been illiterate, one should remember that there is not likely to be the slightest bit of truth in this story: it speaks well for the morality of modern scholars that so many of them should have speculated why Urquhart took all his manuscripts to war with him.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n17/denton-fox/admirable-urquhart
It may interest you to learn about John Wilkins' “Philosophical Language”, along the same lines at Urquhart's pretended one. Wilkins divided the universe of concepts into a hierarchy, and each object or concept in the hierarchy was assigned a word whose spelling was essentially its address in the hierarchy, so, as you said, the words for horse and donkey were similar to each other, and less similar to words like tree or carpet.
Unlike Urquhart, Wilkins was not a crackpot; he was one of the founders of the Royal Society and its first secretary. Wilkins actually finished developing his language, and the book is still available. Along the way he invented a system of measurements based on powers of 10, nearly a century before the invention of the metric system.
I think it's typical of the Baroque science and philosophy that these projects were tried, though they seem completely bananas now. But I think the reason they seem bananas now is partly _because_ they were tried in the 17th and 18th centuries and turned out not to work. It would have been much less obvious at the time; civilization was still finding out how to do science.
Wilkins' philosophical language is a plot point in one of Neal Stephenson's “Baroque” novels, and there is an essay about it by Jorge Luis Borges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Character,_and_a_Philosophical_Language
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A66045.0001.001?view=toc
Umberto Eco had a wonderful book about this kind of philosophical attempts at a perfect language: _The Search for the Perfect Language_. Not too long or hard to read from what I recall.
Linguistic virtuosity can emerge from rich combinatorial structures without any subjective awareness behind the words. The gap between syntactic mastery and conscious understanding remains as wide as ever. Wrote about LLMs and philosophical zombies here:
https://gzambrano.substack.com/p/chatgpts-and-philosophical-zombies-a-reflection-on-consciousness-and-artificial-intelligence