pseudo

Back in 2015, I prepared a new English translation of a New Testament apocryphon titled Life of John the Baptist by Serapion (LJB) for the first volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures. This text, preserved only in Arabic, seems to have been quite popular, considering the number of extant manuscripts (17 as of this writing). It's easy to see why: it involves a fan fave side character from an extended universe on a hero's journey, orphaned at an early age, then as a grown up fighting one of the major villains in the universe; even the main character of the universe makes a cameo appearance at one point. And although the story does end tragically for the main character, the bad guys ultimately get their comeuppance and then some. LJB is not a cult classic like other works in the extended universe, say Thomas' miracle skin or Andy and Bart's excellent adventure, yet it still contains enough fantastical elements like - spoiler alert! - Jesus and Mary traveling on a cloud or John's head preaching even after being cut off to be up there.

In the course of researching the text, I came across another text that was not identical, but definitely related. It is preserved on ff. 218r-223v in a 15th-century manuscript housed in the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) with the shelf mark Arabe 258. The beginning is missing, so there is no title, but someone (possibly later) added "On Herod and John the Baptist" (OHJB) in the margin. This is also the title I assigned to it when I prepared an edition and translation of the text. OHJB is indeed not a recension of LJB, however, it contains the same striking motifs thought unique to LJB before OHJB came to light:

• Herod (Antipas) and Herodias have begun an affair behind her husband's Philip's (who also happens to be Herod's brother) back
• A reference to a room filled with stench 
• A reference to Gabriel inspiring John’s rebuke of Herod 
• Herod and Herodias hear John's voice and search for it, but cannot find it 
• Herodias entices Herod to have John killed and when this fails, Herodias intends to enlist the help of sorcerers
• John's head continues to decry Herod's transgressions even after being cut off and continues to do so while flying over Jerusalem

To be sure, there are major differences between LJB and OHJB - for one, OHJB is obviously framed as a sermon, with citations from the Gospels, moralizing passages ("And where there’s drink and song and carnal desires, there is not a single good thing."), and on multiple occasions, the author addresses the audience as "dearly beloved" or alike. Additionally, both narratives disagree on the ultimate fate of those involved in John's murder and some details of it, such as Herodias' involvement and the details of the demise of her daughter. OHJB is nevertheless related to LJB and it is exciting to find a new witness to a text that has been known for quite some time.

Over the last decade, I occasionally came across new manuscripts of LJB, but nothing similar to OHJB. That was until last year when a colleague pointed me to a book by Delio Vania Proverbio on Ethiopic and Arabic recensions of a number of homilies purportedly written by John Chrysostom (henceforth: Proverbio 1998). These include three homilies on John the Baptist (Proverbio 1998: 82-83, 86) and according to my colleague, the Ethiopic text he consulted was nearly identical in terms of content with OHJB. I turned to Proverbio 1998 and found out that there are actually three pseudo-Chrysostomic homilies on John the Baptist, two extant in Arabic and the third extant in both Arabic and Ethiopic (the latter presumably a translation of the former):

• Arabic I: Sinai ar. 153, ff. 138r-146r; Tripoli Dayr Sayyidat al-Balamand 119, 40r-44v [1]
• Arabic II: Sinai ar. 153, ff. 146r-154v.
• Arabic III: Rome Bibl. Casanat. 2237, ff. 98r-107r; BnF Syriaque 237 (1553 CE), ff 245v-265r; Vat. copt. 77 (1480), 72v-55v (sic Proverbio and Graf p. 148 from whom Proverbio got this information).

Arabic I is obviously a different text than OHJB, being much shorter and focused only on the circumstances of John's birth, Arabic II is also too short, so the only candidate is Arabic III. Of the three manuscripts, only BnF Syriaque 237 is available to me and after a quick check, it turns out its text is nearly identical to that of OHJB. Compare the beginning of OHJB with the equivalent section in the Paris manuscript of Arabic III; the single difference is highlighted in bold:

OHJB (BnF Arabe 258, fol. 218r):    واتخذ امرات اخيه له زوجه في السر. وكان اذا وجد خلوه اختلا بها في المقبره المنتنه. اعني بيته المملوا نتن.

BnF Syriaque 237, fol. 293r-293v:  ܘܐܬܟܕ ܐܡܪܐܗ̈ ܐܟܝܗ ܙܘܓܗ ܦܝ ܐܠܣܕ ܘܟܐܢ ܐܕܐ ܟܠܘܗ ܐܟܬܠܐ ܒܗܐ ܦܝ ܐܠܡܩܒܪܗ ܐܠܢܬܢܗ ܐܥܢܝ ܒܝܬܗ ܐܠܡܡܠܘܐ ܢܬܢ

English:  "... and he took his wife’s brother for his own in secret and he found an opportunity to be alone with her in a stinking tomb – that is, his room filled with stench..."

Mystery solved, then: OHJB is not OHJB, but rather a pseudo-Chrysostomic homily which integrates motifs from LJB. Time to update the e-Clavis entry no. ECCA 590, obtain the remaining manuscripts listed by Proverbio for Arabic III (the one from Rome should be here next week) and redo the edition. 

Also, maybe someone should look at every homily that mentions John the Baptist, like the one in Wādī al-Naṭrūn Dayr al-Qiddīs Anbā Maqār Hag. 37 (17th c. CE), pp. 26-71. This text contains many of the familiar motifs from LJB, but it is quite interesting in other ways, right from the rubricated (written in red ink) introduction. The introduction describes the text as a mīmar and identifies the author as "one of the believers in our Lord Jesus the Messiah". The text then goes on to say that this mīmar contains "his sīra from his childhood to the fullfilment of his (earthly) journey". The use of term sīra (pl. siyyar) right within the first few lines stands out. The term has two major meanings: first, it is used generically to mean '(way of life), conduct, life story, biography'; secondly, it is used as a technical term for two types of literary compositions, the biographies of Muhammad (sīra nabawīyya), and popular romances (sīra šaʕbīyya). I have argued that works like LBJ or the so-called Arabic recension of the Testament of Solomon are exactly that, original Christian compositions in the style of Muslim Arabic siyyar to educate and possibly even entertain the listeners. Now it is much more likely that in the case of Hag. 37, the author/editor/copyist uses the term sīra in the first sense, but considering the cultural context, one has to wonder what it is the author/editor/copyist was doing.

The second interesting thing about the homily in Hag. 37 is the large amount of attention it devotes to the conflict between Herod and his brother Philip. In the text (pp. 41-42), Herod writes to Tiberius accusing his brother of trying to dodge taxes and declare independence. This conflict - which has no basis in the historical record - is hinted at in LJB, but it is discussed in much more detail in two Coptic panegyrics to John the Baptist, one in Bohairic (henceforth: De Vis 1922), the other in Sahidic (henceforth: Kuhn 1966) attributed to Theodosius of Alexandria. I have argued that these panegyrics were mined for content by the author of LJB, considering the similarities in the motifs. In the case of the homily in Hag. 37, however,  the connection is much stronger; for one, it includes details of Herod's betrayal of his brother only found in the panegyrics. Also, there is this Bohairic line on p. 41:

The Bohairic line reads "John witnessed" [2] and serves to introduce - rather abruptly, following a page or two of homiletic material - a section detailing John's involvement in the conflict; compare De Vis 1922:22 and Kuhn 1966: 39 which feature a similar sharp section division.

It should be noted that LJB and the pseudo-Chrysostomic homily are composite texts that borrow heavily from other texts, from Gospels to the Coptic panegyrics. Same applies to the homily in Hag. 37, except it would seem that it cribs a whole lot more from the panegyrics than either of the other two texts. As always, only a careful and detailed study of the text can elucidate the relationship between these texts and other parts of related traditions. Those of us interested in this sort of thing have our work cut out for us.

[1] I added the folio numbers, Proverbio only gives the number of text in the volume.

[2] My thanks to my homie Alin Suciu for the translation and analysis. 

dizzjunarju

Last Friday marked a momentous occasion for the Maltese language: at a fancy shindig at the Valletta Campus of the University of Malta, a new national dictionary of Maltese was unveiled. Edited by Michael Spagnol and Dwayne Ellul and accessible to all at dizzjunarju.mt, it will eventually become the main reference for the Maltese lexicon.

The event was very well planned and fun - there were musical and spoken word performances, there were talks; even the building was decked out with all things lexical (see below).

One of the talks, delivered by Dwayne Ellul, surveyed the history of Maltese lexicography. In Dwayne's telling, it begins with Hieronymus Megiser's works. His 1603 Thesaurus Polyglottus only contains nine Maltese - Melitens. - words where Maltese is sometimes equated with Punic. The closest thing to a dictionary of Maltese authored by Megiser, however, is his 1610 Propugnaculum Europae, a description of Malta, which contains a list of Maltese words.

The first real dictionary of Maltese in the modern sense is a booklet titled Regole per la lingua Maltese compiled by a knight by the name Thezan some time between 1600 and 1647. This Maltese-Italian grammar and dictionary was unknown (save for a few scattered references) until a manuscript copy was discovered in Rome's Biblioteca Valliceliana in 1987 by Arnold Cassola who later published an edition.

Cassola was also responsible for the publication of what is possibly chronologically the third dictionary of Maltese and Italian, an anonymous work now known under the title Mezzo vocabolario maltese-italiano. This manuscript contains 1909 entries and its dating is uncertain; according to Cassola, it may have been composed as early as 1672 or as late 1798. Most likely, however, it was composed in mid-1700s. As such, it may even be contemporaneous to another item on the list.

That item is the manuscript titled Ḋamma Tal Kliem Kartaginis mscerred fel Fom tal Maltin u Ghaucin (or, in modern orthography, Damma tal-kliem Kartaġiniż imxerred fil-fomm tal-Maltin u l-Għawdxin) compiled by Ġan Franġisk (Gio Pietro Francesco) Agius de Soldanis (1712–1770). Like the previous two works, its other language is Italian; like Regole and Mezzo vocabolario it also languished as a manuscript on a shelf somewhere for centuries. Unlike the previous two works, it ended up being pulished, but only in 2016, edited by Rosabelle Carabott. And unlike Regole and Mezzo vocabolario, the language of Damma is not that of Malta the island, but rather the dialect of Gozo, de Soldanis' native variety of Maltese. Other works by de Soldanis ended up being published in his lifetime, such as this grammar of Maltese that, nota bene, adheres to the view that Maltese is a variety of Punic.

The first actual dictionary of Maltese that was published in proper printed form is of course Mikiel Anton Vassalli's Ktŷb yl-klŷm mâlti (Ktieb il-kliem Malti). Vassalli (born in the village that is about a mile away in that direction) was a skilled linguist (and not just for his time) and so his dictionary is even more valuable that all those that came before him, despite Vassalli's view on the Punic origin of Maltese. These he also expounded upon in his 1827 grammar of Maltese. 

19th century saw a veritable explosion of lexical resources for Maltese. First there is the 1843 Dizionario portatile delle lingue maltese, italiana, inglese by Francesco Vella. The same author had in 1831 published the first grammar of Maltese in English. Both the grammar and the inclusion of English in the dictionary reflect the changed geopolitical role of Malta.

In 1845, Giovanni Batista Falzon published Dizionario maltese-italiano-inglese (1882 printing), notable for its size, depth of coverage, and mixed orthography (Falzon uses some symbols from Vassalli's trippy alphabet).

In 1885, Salvatore Mamo published the first dictionary with Maltese as the target language titled - appropriately enough - English-Maltese Dictionary. In 2023, the manuscript of an expanded version, once thought lost during WWII, was rediscovered and an edition is now being prepared.

The final dictionary of Maltese published in the 19th century actually consists of two volumes published by V. Busuttil in 1900: Diziunariu mill Malti ghall Inglis. Giabra ta dwar 30,000 chelma ("Dictionary from Maltese to English. A collection of some 30.000 words") and its counterpart Diziunariu mill Inglis ghal Malti. Giabra ta dwar 90,000 chelma ("Dictionary from English to Maltese. A collection of some 90.000 words"). Busuttil's dictionary is an interesting beast: in the Maltese-to-English direction, it more often than not provides a single-word equivalent. In the other direction, however, the entries consist of not so much of Maltese equivalents, but rather explanations of the meaning of the English word, especially if it is a rare one. And so, to pick a random example, we learn that the English FORAMINOUS (a word that I have not been familiar with until now) means "mimli (collu) tokob", i.e. "filled (entirely) with holes".

The 20th century is where the SOTA for Maltese lexicography is, but before that, there was the 1939-1940 Dizionario maltese-arabo-italiano by Giuseppe Barbera. This four-volume dictionary published in Beirut is the first one that takes etymology seriously. Naturally, Barbera's point of reference is Classical Arabic and at times, he adjusts the meaning of the Maltese word to correspond as closely as possible to the original word. And so in his entry for ŻEUG (żewġ) we will find the sense "paro, paio, coppia; coniuge, martio, consorte" derived from the classical Arabic meaning of the root, but not the basic Maltese meaning of "two" (so presumably "due"), ubiquitous in Maghribi Arabic varieties. Still, if taken cum grano salis, Barbera's dictionary remains an important source for diachronic lexicography.

An observant reader may have noticed that all the dictionaries listed so far are bi- or trilingual ones. It  took until 1975 for the first monolingual dictionary of Maltese to appear, or rather begin appearing. 1975 is the publication date of the first volume of Il-Miklem Malti ("miklem" being a neologism meaning "dictionary" coined for this project). This monumental work was compiled by Erin Serracino-Inglott and it is hard to overestimate the enormity of the task. Serracino-Inglott sadly died before he could complete the dictionary and so it was his son Mario who finished the work when the tenth and final volume was published in 2003.

One item missing from Dwayne's list and yet important to me is Kelmet il-Malti by Kaptan Pawlu Bugeja. A work of lexicographic genius it is not, yet the copy I bought in a small store in Mellieha in October 2023 served me well for a long time.

And then there's of course Ġużè (Joseph) Aquilina whose work is the foundation for those of us who do stuff with Maltese. This is especially true of his two-volume Maltese-English Dictionary and four-volume English-Maltese Dictionary. Sure, some of the definitions are iffy and many etymologies have been shown to be incorrect; still, Aquilina - as the dictionary referred to by people engaged in the study of Maltese is known - is the state-of-the-art reference. "Aquilina jgħid" ("Aquilina says") or "Aquilina jagħti" ("Aquilina gives") is as close as it gets to "Roma locuta, causa finita" when it comes to Maltese lexicon.

As the article in Times of Malta that reports on the Friday event notes, it is Aquilina that dizzjunarju.mt seeks to replace. After all, it is not an adaptation of Aquilina, but rather a brand new dictionary, done with cutting-edge lexicographic tools and based on corpora. Right now, there are only a handful of entries, but hey, it's just the first step.

Now excuse me, I just noticed the entry on investa (verb) is wrong with regard to verbal valency. I need to write to the editors stat.

absurdistan

A random assortment of language-related news from Slovakia.

1. Our present government (may its reign be shortened) is a bunch of MAGA* assholes whose main ideology is the same as that of their counterparts in the US: get as much money as possible, remain in power for as long as possible laws be fucked, and - most importantly - be anti-woke and nationalist. They are also, like their US counterparts, a bunch of incompetent idiots, so any implementation of said ideology inevitably ends up being incredibly stupid. A case in point, a gentl... a per... a human-shaped entity by the name of Lukáš Machala, a Flat-Eath-curious former journalist with legal education who currently holds a high position (and, according to the grapevine, all the strings) in the Ministry of Culture. Said ministry is among other things tasked with the preservation and protection of the Slovak language. And so couple of weeks ago, Mr. Machala took time from his busy day of funneling taxpayers's money to his MAGA friends to comment on the state of Slovak used in public broadcasting:

"Nie je to USA, ale SŠA, Spojené štáty americké. Začnime používať tie skratky tak, ako sú v slovenčine..."

"There is no USA, there's SŠA, Spojené štáty americké. Let's use initialisms the way they are in Slovak..."

Spojené štáty americké is of course the Slovak name for the federation of 50 states that include North Carolina (where I am writing this) known as United States of America. The generaly used initialism for this political entity, however, is USA (pronounced [ʔuːʔesʔaː] or [ʔuːesaː]) and this is prescribed by the normative Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (pdf, section 2.1). Mr. Machala now insists this should be replaced with an initialism corresponding to the Slovak translation of the country's name, i.e. SŠA.

People were quick to point out that this is how USA is referred to in Russia, making a covert reference to how far up Putin's ass the entirety of the current Slovak government is. People were equally quick to ridicule the idea and so I have been fielding questions of the "how is life in SŠA?" for the last few weeks.

2. The government is currently trying to fill a giant hole in the budget and so naturally the first priority is to harass small businesses about bureaucratic bullcrap. One such bureaucratic bullcrap is the legal obligation of printing receipts and handing them to the customer. One such small business is a langoš stand in the small town of Kvetoslavov whose owner was issued a 1500 Euro fine on May 4th. Did they fail to print and hand the customer the receipt? No, far from it. Their crime was much more serious and insidious: the printed out receipt did not contain any diacritics. This is in fact a violation of section 5 subsection 5 of the respective act, but the punishment surely does not match the crime which was, in any case, remedied immediately via a push update. The Slovak people, God bless them, once again responded with ridicule. Leading the pack is as usual the bunch of masked shitposters known as Zomri with my favorite meme below.

3. The shitty paper I keep reading (despite my better judgment) occasionally does something right. Most recently, they have published a book by Daša Bombjaková, a Slovak anthropologist. The book titled "Hovor ústami Yaka" ("Speak with a Yaka mouth") recounts her experiences conducting fieldwork among the Bayaka Pygmies in the Republic of Congo while working on her dissertation. The dissertation is utterly fascinating with much of the discussion focused on the concept of mòsámbò, a public speaking event where members of the community air their grievances or just express their emotions.

Now I am of course mostly interested in language, so I was wondering a) what language do the Yaka speak and b) whether Dr. Bombjaková** pulled a Margaret Mead.*** Turns out a) it is a Bantu language called Aka or Yaka and b) she did not; in fact she has acquired full command of the language. On her website, she even offers a course in Mbendjee Yaka. Sadly, the Memrise link is now dead.

Kudos to her, certainly, but I guess the spirit of Margaret Mead is still alive and well, since we can also find comments like these in Dr. Bombjaková's dissertation (p. 72): 

"While in the field, I reached fluency in Mbendjee Yaka. However, I grasped the grammatical rules rather 'intuitively'. Studying the languge in detail after returning from the field has shed considerable light on many of the issues that I did not understand fully in the field. Through micro-analysis of people’s speech by making careful transcriptions and transliterations, and learning about the semantics of Bantu prefixes helped in understanding literal meanings of people’s expressions as well as understanding the metaphors of ripening."

Huh, who would have thought that a thorough understanding of a community's language would provide insight into said community...

And speaking Dr. Bombjaková and the shittiness of Denník N, let us consider the scientific reporting by the latter. It is often handled by a gentleman named Otakar Horák who seems to have a certain obsession with ... size. At one point, the paper was churning out articles in praise of Slovak scientists with high h-index numbers, especially one. Then it turned out that one of those scientists may have been fudging the numbers by publishing in predatory journals. Horák never names them, just refers to them as a "top scientist", and then ends the article with a weasely "if there is any interest, we will look into it further". Narrator voice: he did not. Even where he rightly criticizes scientific misconduct and mismanagement of science, he unquestioningly accepts the narrative about "top journals" or "highly cited papers". And so when he conducted an interview with Dr. Bombjaková about her work, he could not help but insert the following:

"Miestny jazyk ovláda Bombjaková najlepšie na svete."

"Bombjaková's command of the local language is the best in the world." 

I can't even with this guy.

-------------------------------- 

* Or rather MSGA, obviously; there is an interesting word in Slovak for this, on which perhaps later 

** I'm getting all formal on yo asses up in here because just giving her last name sounds ... weird, like we're both in elementary school. 

*** tl;dr: Mead did not consider it necessary for an anthropologist to learn the language of the people they were studying beyond a few commands. A small example: "But twenty or thirty locutions at the most, with allowance for inflection, of course, is usually enough to permit the investigator to ask the who, how, when, where, for what reason, what relationship, by virtue of what status, as a result of what previous event, etc. something is happening or has happened." (Mead 1939: 197). Read the whole thing and also Kulick's take.

quiet

In a recent paper (Gatt 2025), Kurstin Gatt examines the perception of Malta in the imagination of its Arab neighbors and, by extension, their language. Specifically, Kurstin looks at Arabic idioms, proverbs, and sayings featuring Malta, and classifies them according to the semantic role Malta plays. These sayings range from classics like the Tunisian mālṭa l-ḥnīna ḫubza w-sardīna "Malta the kind, bread and sardines" (meanwhile also adopted in Maltese as an expression of love of the country or a nostalgia for a past version of it or as satirization of both previous sentiments) to various forms of "VERB after the destruction of Malta" meaning "a day late and a dollar short" (or what we in Slovakia express as "coming with a cross after a funeral"). As Kurstin reports, the latter can even be found in contemporary Egyptian popular music as gāy baʿd mā ḫirbit mālṭa "you came after Malta was destroyed". Go read the whole thing, it is fascinating; in fact go read the whole book, it is free.

The meaning Kurstin discusses for the bread+sardine proverb/saying references Maltese migration to North Africa, specifically Algeria and Tunisia. By mid-19th century, there were some 6000-7000 Maltese in Tunisia who formed the majority of European population in cities such as Sfax and Sousse. Their presence was also quite prominent, so much so that there was a street in Tunis called "Rue des Maltais". Incidentally, one of the businesses located on that street was the publishing house of Uzan Père & Fils, the publisher of many fine books in Judeo-Arabic.

"Rue des Maltais" is also the subject of a book with the same name written by Marc Donato, author of multiple books on Maltese emigrants in North Africa. I got the book yesterday and in a moment of serendipity, I cracked it open on page 28 which happens to discuss the place of Malta in the imagination of their Tunisian neighbors. Specifically, it mentions a man at the end of the 19th century trying to calm his child by saying to them:

Lukân mä toskòtš tòwwa nebbàetek fi mâlta

If you don't stop crying (lit. "don't become quiet") right now, I will send you to Malta!

This warning serves - at least according to Donato - as a reminder of the era when Muslim inhabitans of North Africa (especially the Barbary Coast) were often abducted to slavery in Malta, possibly in the galleys. Whether this is the real origin of the saying or it is another example of Malta serving as an exemplum for a far-away place (Gatt 2025: 324), it is definitely a worthy addition to Kurstin's collection.

 

cowgirl

My (at this point future) wife is currently writing her dissertation that involves late antique rhetoric and theology and their view of women. To avoid going crazy dealing with medieval Latin, she regularly switches to reading more theoretical or similarly themed works. I am not sure it works as a distraction, because theoretical works give her migraines (which, you know, makes sense) and similarly themed works often just end up pissing her off. She then shares her annoyance with me (and now with everyone as well) and then I get pissed off too, because goddammit, some people...

A case in point, yesterday's distraction: Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore. In chapter 20 on p. 144 (the 2005 Jonathan Cape edition), in her discussion of the salacious description of Helen's - alleged - sexual practices in Joseph of Exeter's De bello Troiano (3.330-338), Hughes makes the following statement:

"When Joseph was writing in the 12th century, it was considered a sin for women to be on top during intercourse. Anything other than the ‘missionary position’ was unnatural because it made the woman physically superior; it was the mark of a whore and was thought to pervert the course of semen."

This gave both of us a pause. Neither of us is a medievalist proper, but both of us know enough of medieval theology, canon law and church history to be extremely suspicious of such sweeping statements. So naturally, we both strained our eyes to check the citation, only to find that there is none. The next paragraph cites a different text, Alain de Lille's Liber de planctu Naturae ([0431D]), in which Helen is blamed for Paris' homosexuality. Hughes then goes on to discuss penances for 'unnatural' sexual positions, but again, only in generic terms and no citations are given for this particular sin. Adultery is mentioned with reference to Canones Theodori and Payer's book on sex in the penitentials, but nothing on sexual positions. At the end of the paragraph, Hughes repeats her claim, with even more detail (p. 145, emphasis mine):

"In the 11th century, St Peter Damian preaches a required period of twenty-five years fasting and penance for married couples over the age of twenty who have indulged in ‘deviant’ sexual positions. These ‘bestial acts’ and ‘whorish embraces’ were thought to lead to all kinds of human misery; one late medieval theologian went so far as to say that God had sent the biblical Flood because he’d espied a couple having sex with the woman on top.¹⁰"

This time, there is a citation, hidden behind endnote no. 10: 

Brundage (1993), 87

i.e. 

Brundage, J. A. (1993) ‘“Let Me Count the Ways”: Canonists and theologians contemplate coital positions’, in J.A. Brundage (ed.), Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages. Aldershot, Hants: Variorum.

This volume being a collection of Brundage's papers, the citation comes from Brundage's seminal (so the clanker Google keeps pushing tells me) paper of the same title published in 1984 in Journal of Medieval History. The page numbering remains the same, so let us now turn/scroll to p. 87 in Brundage 1984 and...

Well, here's the thing: p.  87 in Brundage 1984 discusses specifically changes to theology of coital positions. It contains 3 specific claims:

1. "The evidence seems to show that late medieval society had reached no general consensus concerning the seriousness of deviations from conventional marital sexual behavior. There seems to have been a popular belief, on the one hand, that whatever their personal peculiarities, the sexual relations of married couples were by definition without sin..."

2. "A few late medieval theologians adopted a moderate view of sexual transgressions within marriage. Marcus von Weida, for example, maintained that sexual sins in marriage were common but not serious enough to require confession and formal penance. Those guilty of such sins, Marcus taught, could earn forgiveness simply by blessing themselves with holy water, saying a pater noster, or giving alms."

3. "Others saw the matter quite differently; and a few of the major moral writers of the Reformation period considered non-standard coital positions a heinous kind of “unnatural” sex. After all, one of them remarked, it was the practice of having sexual intercourse with the woman on top that caused God to send the Biblical flood (Romans 1.26-7) - a drastic cure for this perversion (Lindner 1929: 162)."

If you pay close attention, you will notice that Brundage's claim 1 indirectly contradicts Hughes' claims about some sort of consensus in medieval Christianity - or at least in the 12th century - regarding sexual positions. Brundage's claim 2 undermines it further: if there is indeed such a thing as a sin relating to sexual positions within legally and theologically sanctioned marriage (at least in the 15th-16th century, at Marcus von Weida's time), it is far from "the mark of a whore ... pervert[ing] the course of semen", as Hughes' insists.

And finally - and more importantly - there is no trace of the "one late medieval theologian" whose opinion she relies on. Brundage's claim 3 contains the story of the flood sent by God as punishment for the sin of cowgirl recounted by Hughes, so maybe Brundage's source is where we can find this theologian. Lindner 1929 refers to Dr. Dominikus Lindner's Der usus matrimonii: Eine Untersuchung über seine sittliche Bewertung in der katholische (sic Brundage) Moraltheologie alter und neuer Zeit, so off to p. 162 we go and... nothing. This page concludes book's section 3 on high and late Middle Ages and contains the same description of Marcus von Weida's teachings summarized in Brundage's claim 2. No flood, no cowgirl, nothing.

So to sum up: Hughes makes a claim about a medieval Christian practice and supports it by a reference to "one late medieval theologian" which is in turn supported by a citation to Brundage. The place in Brundage contains the same story Hughes narrates which is supported by a citation of Lindner which, however, does not contain anything even remotely relevant.

I wish I could say this is a uncommon occurrence. It is not. I can't count the times I followed a footnote or endnote in an academic work - or hell, even a popular work - only to find out that this source says nothing even remotely close to what the author claims it does or that it even contradicts it directly. But bulbul, you may retort, people make mistakes, surely we should be more forgiving and less nitpicky. To which I reply, who are you and how did you get in my house, and also, not these kind of mistakes and maybe people who make these kinds of mistakes should not have publishing contracts and endowed chairs.

But what makes it even worse is what this says about the work before us, i.e. Bettany Hughes' Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore. Chapter 20 where this can be found is one of 44 and the only one that directly addresses Helen's alleged sexual transgressions - the chapter title is literally "Helen the Whore". In this chapter Hughes argues that 

"...after the 2nd century AD, in an increasingly Christianised world, the notion of ‘Helen the wanton’ takes firm hold. She becomes typecast not simply as a wilful woman but as a tart."

Her main evidence is Joseph of Exeter's poem and Dante and then... nothing, at least for the Middle Ages; the remaining sources are early modern, late 16th century. And even the argument is weak: Joseph's text hinges on the interpretation of the word 'incumbens' which, according to Hughes (in footnote 6 on p. 143):

"supports either the notion of Helen being ‘on top’ or of her pressing into Paris’ body." 

Hughes obviously chooses the former interpretation and then proceeds to make the claim about how cowgirl was this horrible sin in the Middle Ages which she then completely fails to support, as shown above. In the course of the attempt, she

• cites irrelevant material (adultery is not the same as the horrible sin of cowgirl) 
• gives one source (11th century Peter Damian) without any citation 
• fails to check her sources
• possibly confuses what her sources say (I think that the "one late medieval theologian" she refers to is Marcus von Weida based on her misreading of Brundage 1984: 87)
• thinks it is completely fine to use an unnamed "late medieval theologian" as a source
• and thinks she can cover one entire aspect of the reception of a literary figure in one entire period of human history in 5 pages

It's the last part that is infuriating. But then again, it makes sense: I would expect nothing less from a classicist than to dismiss all of Middle Ages as a single unified period where all the people thought the same, believed the same, and were just a bunch of ignorant superstitious yokels anyway.

Wait, what is that? "[Hughes] graduated with a degree in ancient and modern history." 

So careless and lazy, then. 

mesolect

In the introduction to his Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect (Benjamins 1999), Peter L. Patrick writes (emphasis and annotation mine):

Accordingly, creolists have often focused on ‘folk speakers’: people living traditional lives in rural areas, especially the elderly, who are usually the best source for archaic speech (Kurath 1949: 7ff). Their conservative varieties, called basilectal, are idealized and opposed conceptually to the most standard local speech, characteristically used by people at the top of the social scale, which is known as the acrolect. Varieties intermediate between the two are referred to as the mesolect; and the scale along which all these are ranged, as the creole continuum. Many creolists have until recently been primarily concerned with describing and analyzing the basilect, which is typically idealized as “the creole” in opposition to everything else — for example, Jamaican Creole as opposed to Jamaican English (the acrolect conceived as a dialect of international English). (Patrick 1999:5) 

I was somewhat stunned to read these words, not because I learned anything new, quite the opposite: these 11 lines (in the physical book) perfectly summarize a problem I have been trying to wrap my head around for the last two or three years. Except where Patrick speaks to and about creolists, my problem involves Arabic varieties and Arabic dialectologists. Disregarding the issue of the creole continuum, Patrick's diagnosis fully applies to a large portion of research in Arabic dialectology:

• focus on elderly rural speakers
• focus on archaic varieties/features
• the idealization of said archaic varieties as "the dialect"

Don't believe me? Then consider the following passage from a recent description of an Arabic variety of ... Well, I don't want to put the authors on the spot and also I am writing a commissioned review of the book, so names shall be changed to protect the not-entirely-innocent. Let's call the rural town Ayn Wadi and the country Watan, the book would then be titled The Dialect of Ayn Wadi (Watan) (emphasis mine):

The major data collected during the field research are free speech audio recordings of improvised narratives about customs and activities in the town. Many informants I tried to work with were unable to narrate facts and stories in front of a recorder without mixing the local dialect with standard Watani. With these informants, I could only check lexemes without recording them to verify the recorded data with a broader spectrum of speakers. All the speakers were over 50 and many recalled the dialect spoken by their parents. The younger generation represented by youths and children were only briefly interviewed and they seemed to preserve only a few of the archaic features..."

It's all there: elderly speakers, archaic features, and the idealization of varieties spoken by elders as THE dialect of Ain Wadi. Only data from speakers over 50 is taken into account and on top of that, all the texts in the book were produced by people in their late 70s and early 80s. And then they are exactly what you would expect if you have ever read any description of an Arabic variety: memories of the old world, religious traditions and holidays, and traditional crafts.

Now there is nothing wrong with collecting spoken data from elders, far from it; there should be thousands upon thousands of field researchers armed with RØDE Wireless GO III doing exactly that all over the world. The problem here is that if you discount all the speakers younger than 50 - many of whom, nota bene, report not on their language, but on the language of their parents - is the variety you describe really the dialect of Ayn Wadi? No, of course not. Such research is not only misleading at best and disingenous at worst, but also - and this is far more important - constitutes a missed opportunity. Variation within the dialect could have been studied in multiple dimensions,  the contact between the local dialect and standard Watani or even between the local dialect and the other varieties spoken in the immediate area could have been examined, and of course we could have so much data on the speech of young people in a complex linguistic landscape, not to mention data on standard Watani (if there even is such a thing). But alas, speakers were apparently turned away (or, worse, their data was discarded) because they did not "preserve... the archaic features". That is less than ideal for the field, not to mention a questionable use of the money provided by whatever funding mechanism financed the research.

Don't get me wrong, this is not how things are done everywhere in Arabic dialectology and The Dialect of Ayn Wadi (Watan) is not a bad book. It is, however, a perfect example of one way of doing Arabic dialectology, a way that we should leave behind for good.

fry

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for an announcement. My colleague and friend Hiram Smith (Bucknell University) has written a book for popular audiences titled "Wassup, My Nigga: The Hidden History of a Controversial Word". As the name may suggest, the book tackles the history and the sociolinguistics of the n-word(s?) within the context AAVE, as well as outside of it. The book is now available for pre-order in all the usual places and will be available in September this year.

The book has already received a glowing recommendation from John R. Rickford, one of the preeminent experts on AAVE. In light of this, y'all probably dgaf as to what I have to say, but since I've read the book (more accurately, a draft of it), I will say it anyway: the book does an excellent job discussing the word, its history and the fine points of its usage  in a very entertaining way, using recent examples from media and tapping into current discourse. What I like even more about the book is the metadiscussion Hiram engages in, where he considers not only the role of linguistics can and should play in the discussion of - shall we say - sensitive matters of language, but specifically on the role of native, i.e. African American, linguists in this discussion. As someone who is white as could be and also works on creoles, this is a topic I am quite sensitive to and I very much appreciate Hiram's insights.

With Hiram's permission, I am reposting here an overview and the table of contents.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the title of the post, it comes from this scene from episode 2x11 of the cartoon TV show The Boondocks that perfectly illustrates some of the complexities the book addresses.

 

 

 

order

A few weeks back, an article titled "Interactions Among Morphology, Word Order, and Syntactic Directionality: Evidence from 55 Languages" (henceforth: Li & Liu 2025) came across my link aggregators. It checked a few boxes for me: it had "word order" and "directionality" in the title, it promised to examine the interaction between word order/directionality and morphology using quantitative methods, and it used data from Universal Dependencies (henceforth: UD) treebanks. There's three of my major research interests right there, so I was very much hooked, but also suspicious; such studies tend to go two major ways and only one of them is a good one. It only took 8 pages for me to realize that this one will not fall into that group. More specifically, it was this part that gave me pause (Li & Liu 2025: 8):

"The Afro‑Asiatic Semitic family exhibits distinct word order preferences. Arabic and Maltese strongly favor verb‑initial (VSO) patterns (about 70%), reflecting a consistent syntactic profile." 

The data underlying this observation comes from the Maltese UD treebank, i.e. MUDT, as Table 1 of the paper (reproduced partially below) confirms.

Language/Data	Type	SVO(%)	SOV(%)	VSO(%)	VOS(%)	OVS(%)	OSV(%)
Arabic	(PUD + NYUAD)	18.1	0	72.8	NA	3.9	0.2
Maltese	(MUDT)	24.1	0	69.9	NA	4.1	1.9

Now I am somewhat familiar with MUDT, seeing as I manually annotated the whole damn thing and then used it to get my PhD. In fact, a significant portion of my dissertation was dedicated to doing the exactly this kind of analysis - except I speak of "constituent order" - and my results were completely different. To compare, consider Fig. 7.5 and Tab. 7.5 from p. 190 (click to embiggen). 

Even if we focus just on the dominant order - or linearization, as Li & Liu (2025: 4) call it in line with common practice - the difference is striking: Li & Liu 2025 have 24% for SVO and 70% for VSO. In my analysis, VSO is nearly non-existent: only 3 sentences show that order (see p. 190); the vast majority of sentences (93.86%) exhibit SVO order.

So what giveth? It is of course, entirely possible that I was wrong, but surely I wasn't THAT wrong. Let's try to find out what happened and we might as well start with how Li & Liu got their numbers. And this is where we come across the first problem: they don't say. All we learn in the paper is that 

"All metric computations and statistical analyses, including correlation tests between variables, were implemented using the Python programming language (version 3.11)." 

(Li & Liu 2025: 3)

and 

"Our Python‑based tool extracts these linearizations directly from dependency structures, allowing the analysis to accommodate varied syntactic patterns and reflect actual language use." 

(Li & Liu 2025: 4)

and finally

"All metrics and values reportedin this study were computed independently using custom scripts developed by the authors."

(Li & Liu 2025: 12)

The code, however, is nowhere to be seen. Red flag number one.

OK, fine, ORANGE flag, because to be fair,  my data retention practices are not perfect either. The data I used is available online along with the text of the dissertation, but the instance of Annis I used to run queries on the treebank has gone to the eternal filesystem beyond. Then again, the queries I used are fully available online as Appendix C, so once I get Annis running again - or you do - all is good and my work can be fully reproduced

Except here's an issue: the treebank I used in my dissertation was UD version 1 and while it was current when I started annotating, by the time I finished, version 2.1 had come out.  Li & Liu (2025) write in 2025, by which time versions 2.15 and 2.16 were out. By that point, I had also updated MUDT to the current version, so we just need to find out which one they used... 

And here we have orange flag no. 2: they do not say. All we learn is that 

"The raw data used in this study are openly available from the UniversalDependencies (UD) treebanks at https://universaldependencies.org." 

(Li & Liu 2025: 12)

At the beginning of their paper, Li & Liu inform us that

"To ensure consistency and cross‑linguistic comparability, all treebanks in this study employed the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation framework [15]. "

(Li & Liu 2025: 3)

Maybe the reference behind [15] will tell us. Well, no, it does not, since it leads to J.A. Hawkins's Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Reference [17] which is supposed to point to a work by Xanthos and Gillis points instead to De Marneffe et al. (2021) which is a paper on UD, so maybe stuff just got mixed up. De Marneffe et al. 2021, however,  is a general description of the framework, so alas, no info on the version here either. Also, nobody noticed this mix-up? Orange flag no. 3.

Let us therefore assume that Li & Liu (2025) used the most recent version available to them, 2.16. As of this writing, the current version is 2.17, but I am reliably informed by the portly gentleman who brushes my teeth that there were no relevant changes between the versions, so let's go with 2.17. And since we are dealing with a single treebank, we don't have to write any custom code or even deal with Annis; the fastest way to access any UD treebank in 2026 is to use grew-match. 

Y'all know how dependency grammars work: an utterance/sentence consists of tokens (≈ words) where each token is a dependent of another token, called the governor. There is one exception: in every utterance/sentence, there is a token - prototypically a verb - that does not depend on any other token; we call it the root. The relationship between the governer and a dependent is referred to as a dependency and it can be unlabeled or labeled. In UD, all dependencies are labeled according to a specific framework and as a shorthand, the dependencies are referred to by their label.

grew-match is a graph-based search engine for treebanks which allows the user to search for all kinds of things. It works with nodes (= tokens) and edges (= dependencies). It is powerful, but the query language can be a bit tricky, so let's look at an example:  

pattern { V -[nsubj]-> S;
          V -[obj]-> O }

Here we have three nodes, V, S, and O. They are connected to each other as follows: S depends on V and the dependency label is nsubj (= nominal subject), O depends on V through the dependency obj (= object). In other words, this looks for clauses where we have a Subject, Verb (or any other predicate) and Object. We could further specify what kind of part-of-speech V should be, but in UD, if it has an object, it is a verb, so let's keep it at that.

Now if you ran the query like I just did, grew-match would report "395 occurrences". This means that there are 395 sentences total where we have a transitive verb with both an overt subject and an overt object. This is consistent with the findings in my dissertation (p. 190, see above), with one caveat: MUDT annotation contains one more dependency that I treat as a direct object for purposes of constituent order analysis, namely obl:arg. This covers prepositional objects and it exists as a separate category for compatibility purposes (don't get me started). If we include it in our query like so

pattern { V -[nsubj]-> S;
          V -[obj|obl:arg]-> O }

we will get 473 results which matches the data above perfectly (modulo fixes between v1 and v2). 

The queries we have used so far do not take into account the order of the constituents and so for example, the third hit is an OVS sentence (sentence id 02_02J01:10). To consider the order, we adjust the query as follows:

pattern { V -[nsubj]-> S;
          V -[obj|obl:arg]-> O;
          V << S;
          S << O }

The double "less than" sign specifies the order of nodes; in this case, V should come before S and S should come before O. This query will thus retrieve all VSO sentences in the treebank. Recall that according to Li & Liu (2025: 8), this should be 70% of all sentences with V, S and O; according to my analysis, we should get 3.

And lo and behold, 3 sentences is what we get. Go ahead, try all the permutations, it will more or less be the same as in my dissertation.

So, I repeat, what giveth? Well, we have already seen three orange flags that point to a certain degree of sloppines on the authors' part, so let's... Hang on just a minute, what is the name of the journal this was published in? Entropy? What kind of a name is that for a ling...

"Entropy is an international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open access journal of entropy and information studies, published monthly online by MDPI." 

And now everything clicks into place and you will excuse me while I recover from the dizziness induced by the huge amount of red flags suddenly unfurled in front of my eyes.

For those of you not in the know, MDPI is a paper mill and predatory publisher. I will not dwell on the predatory part, just point out the following: every journal published by MDPI levies an article processing charge of 2600 CHF (2850 EUR).

The paper mill part is much more interesting. As of this writing, MDPI publishes 511 open access journals. This is on par with Oxford University Press, but much less than Springer, so that might not be suspicious. But let's take a closer look, for example at Entropy: it is the end of March 2026 and they have already published three issues of volume 27 containing 362 articles. That's four PEER REVIEWED articles a day, including holidays. One analysis of MDPI's production refers to "concerns about how peer review can be conducted effectively at this scale". That's putting it mildly.

To answer my question above, what giveth is that a) the authors of the paper are incompetent and b) there was no peer review to catch their incompetence. No one at MDPI cares as long as they pocket their 2600 CHF.

Incidentally, the aforementioned analysis focuses on the proliferation of "special issues" which allows the publisher to expand the number of articles published and thus their revenue. It turns out that Entropy published a special issue titled "Complexity Characteristics of Natural Languages". This special issue was edited by the same people who appear as "Academic Editors" (what the hell is even that) for the bullshit word order paper: Stanisław Drożdż, Jarosław Kwapień and Tomasz Stanisz. None of them is a linguist, they are all physicists and work at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Science. They appear to be interested in what they call "quantitative linguistics" but what would better be described as "applying mathematical methods to texts". And don't get me wrong, this is a legitimate field of research, but maybe the gentlemen in question should devote more time to studying linguistics proper sparing us insights such as (emphasis mine)

"During their development languages have been gradually reshaping and adopting themselves under influence of other languages and dialects they have encountered. Especially English and Spanish experienced many of such encounters. Whether this made them as they are or they became global because they happen to possess some spontaneously acquired favorable intrinsic syntactic organization emerges an exciting issue for further interdisciplinary explorations."

or (emphasis mine)

"We found that although the global behaviour of words is described approximately by the Zipf-Mandelbrot law, the words from different parts of speech do not necessarily follow this global picture and one can show significant differences in functional dependence of frequency on rank between nouns, verbs and other types of words. This can be a manifestation of the existence of a non-trivial internal organization of language that cannot be reproduced in full detail by a simple power-law relation of the Zipf-Mandelbrot type."

Whether such a conclusion is worth the effort put into it, I will leave to the reader, accompanied by the appropriate XKCD comic (h/t a colleague who shall remain unnamed).

 

In any case, Messrs. Drożdż, Kwapień and Stanisz should be ashamed of their role in the predatory practices of MDPI in general and of this bullshit paper in particular.

ová

I regularly read - God help me - Denník N, one of the major Slovak dailies. I realize I should have stopped years ago, considering the diminishing returns: for every interesting article or sharp analysis (almost always by a non-Slovak media outlet or expert), there are twenty incredibly stupid pieces, invariably authored by one the intellectual smallholders that are employed by the newspaper or by one of their circle of equally dimwitted and/or morally corrupt friends. Doyens of Slovak intellectual scene make idiotic assessments of Slovak history only to be corrected by actual historians, high-school teachers - who also engage (along with failed politicians and shitty translators) in the grift of "coaching critical thinking" - furnish us with their opinions on everything from appropriate mode of dress for chess players to how we have no records of people's personal lives from before 1800, and there are, of course, countless examples of the time-tested genre "here is how this thing happening to important people also affects my circle of friends". Add to that venerable intellectuals who produce incomprehensible drivel in defense of genocide and slightly less venerable - but equally lacking in coherence and sense - writers who went on a trip where they learned that you cannot become an expert on a country by going on a trip there and consider it absolutely necessary to share this insight while also painting a picture of said country in terms that racist British travel writers from two hundred years ago would consider too much, referring to the "ever-smiling Turkmens" and "the contrast between clay villages and mosaic-emblazoned palaces and mosques". In short, the entire newspaper is filled with the sort of loud faux-intellectual provincial mediocrity that is emblematic of Slovak society and I really should stop reading it, if only for the sake of my blood pressure.

But while I am, I have a few words on a recent piece on matters relating to language. In this piece, we are informed about the decision to no longer add the suffix -ová to last names of non-Slovak (lit. "foreign" which sounds weird...) female persons that the editorial board has taken. This process, referred to in Slovak as prechyľovanie (henceforth: modification) is described in the normative Orthographic Rules of Slovak (henceforth: PSP) and it is implied that it is mandatory: the final note in the chapter on modification (accompanying section 2.8) informs us that "foreign last names of known female artists" can be left in the original form, the assumption here is that this is the exception. The piece in question explains that the decision was taken and implemented a year ago and lays out the reasons for it, or, as they put it:

"Prechyľovanie či neprechyľovanie je pomerne zložitá téma. Preto náš korektorský tím pripravil na túto tému analýzu, ktorá pomenovala mnohé pravopisné a štylistické dilemy a pomohla nám zvážiť argumenty za a proti."

"Modification of feminine last names or lack of it is a somewhat difficult subject. This is why our proofreader team has prepared an analysis that pointed out many orthographic and stylistic dilemmas and helped us to weigh the pros and the contras."

Let's ignore the shudder induced by the words "our proofreader team" and "analysis". Let us also ignore the fact that the rules for modification laid out in PSP are somewhat clear, at least for now, and that despite of the name of the book, modification is not an orthographic issue, is it a morphological one. Instead, we consider the arguments the authors present. The very first one is, shall we say, suspect:

"Vďaka nej sme si uvedomili napríklad aj to, že ženské priezviská sa neprechyľujú len v slovanských krajinách a že majú rôzne podoby, čo má vplyv na ich skloňovanie a rôzne pravopisné nuansy."

"The analysis helped us realize that, for example, feminine last names are modified in non-Slavic countries as well and that this modification comes in different forms which influences their declensions and has various orthographic nuances."

I mean, yes, that is certainly true. So?

"Bývalá litovská prezidentka Dalia Grybauskaitė má na konci priezviska príponu -itė, typickú pre ženský rod, pričom mužská podoba je Grybauskas. Takže po prechýlení podľa slovenských pravidiel dostaneme Daliu Grybauskasovú – čo je oproti pôvodnému priezvisku dosť veľký rozdiel.

Alebo taká bývalá islandská premiérka Katrín Jakobsdóttir. Na konci má príponu -dóttir, teda dcéra. Správne prechýlená do slovenčiny by mala byť Katrín Jakobssonová. Ktovie, či by tieto ženy svoje mená spoznali, ak by ich uvideli takto poslovenčené." 

"The last name of the former Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė features the suffix -itė typical for the feminine gender; the masculine form is Grybauskas. Modifying her last name according to Slovak rules, we get Dalia Grybauskasová, which is quite different from the original.

Or take the former prime minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. Her last name features the suffix -dóttir meaning daughter. Her last name modified according to the rules of Slovak should then be Katrín Jakobssonová. Who knows if these women would recognize their names if they saw these Slovak forms." 

Well, that is certainly a line of reasoning. Let's take it from the top: the official rules as written in PSP do not lay out any general principles of modification. The sections 2.1-2.3 do discuss the morphophonology of the suffix -ová as combined with various roots, but only in terms of euphonics and orthography (hence the inclusion of this phenomenon in a guide on orthography), not in terms of morphological analysis. And so section 2.1 discusses what to do with masculine last names ending in a consonant, 2.2 addresses masculine names ending in the vowel a or o and 2.3 covers masculine last names ending in a vowel. Note 1 to 2.3 then addresses Romanian, Albanian and Turkish last names ending in u and Note 2 discusses English and French last names ending in e which is "silent" in English and indicates a specific pronunciation of the preceding consontant in French. Nothing on morphology, though, let alone on removing any suffixes. So whence this interpretation of the rules?

I have a guess: section 2.3 specifically says that the suffix is to be added to the "unaltered* masculine last name". Ergo, to execute such a derivation, we must first derive said "unaltered masculine last name". It does make sense from a certain standpoint. From a different one, it lays bare the inadequacy of PSP rules and so the ultimate futility of trying to come up with a hard and fast rule. In any case, I can see the logic behind the decision in these and similar cases and do not have a problem with it per se. I mean the other option, to simply attach the suffix to the already feminine name and end up with Grybauskaitėová and Jakobsdóttirová does strike me as weird. So yeah, to say that such names should not be modified makes sense, especially considering PSP rules already in force, specifically the aforementioned note to section 2.8 which covers such cases as Grace Kelly or Greta Garbo.

What I do have a problem with is the appeal to the Slovak modified feminine name being "different" and "unrecognizable". For one, well, yes, at the very least we are slapping an entire morpheme on the name, so yeah, it is gonna look different, even according to PSP rules (Sharon Stonová, anyone?). But also, why should we care? Even with unaltered masculine names spelled according to conventions of the language in question we add declension suffixes, just consider Shakespeare and let me count the w... you know what, I will leave the counting as an exercise to the reader. 

And speaking of bogus arguments, here is one:

"Do debaty o prechyľovaní teda vstupujú nielen pravopisné dilemy, ale aj to, aké predstavy sa nám s prechyľovaním spájajú. Vnímame ho ako zbytočný relikt patriarchálnej histórie? Ako funkčnú súčasť jazyka? Alebo ako oboje?" 

"The discussion on modification thus involves not only orthographic arguments, but also ideas associated with it. Do we perceive it as a useless relict of patriarchal history? A productive part of the language? Or both?" 

Now don't get me wrong, my position has always been "fuck the patriarchy and all its manifestations". But we are talking about non-Slovak names here, in the context of editorial decisions of a particular newspaper (or three, as it turns out), not a general language reform. The piece is titled (emphasis mine) "A year ago we stopped modifying the names of non-Slovak** women. Have you noticed?", after all.

The justifications for the decision continue and so do bogus arguments:

"Ak by sme žili vo svete ideálneho pravopisu, všetky Slovenky by mali prechýlené priezviská a všetky cudzinky by mali mená pripravené na prechýlenie." 

"If we lived in the world of ideal orthography, all Slovak women would have modified last names and all foreign*** women would have names ready for modification."

I, for one, would love to know more about this "ideal orthography". And also what this has to do with orthography, since this is - as noted above - a morphological issue. Ignoring this bit of nonsense, let's follow the argument:

"Aj napriek tomu, že od čias vrcholného stredoveku prevažovali prechýlené ženské priezviská v rôznej podobe a začiatkom 20. storočia sa ustálila prípona -ová, slovenčina zvládla Margitu Figuli aj Elenu Maróthy-Šoltésovú a určite zvládne aj Simonu Petrík a Miriam Lexmann. A taktiež novinárky Janu Shemesh, Vitaliu Bellu, Kristinu Böhmer a Martinu Koník."

"Despite the fact that modified feminine last names in various shapes have been the norm since the late Middle Ages and early 20th century saw the codification of the suffix -ová, the Slovak language has managed to cope with Margita Figuli, as well as Elena Maróthy-Šoltésová and will certainly cope with Simona Petrík and Miriam Lexmann. And also with journalists Jana Shemesh, Vitalia Bella, Kristina Böhmer and Martina Koník."

That is an excellent point and yes, I agree, the Slovak language can deal. But did you notice that one of these names is not like the others? In case of Vitalia Bella (the executive editor of the newspaper), the last name is declined while the remaining unmodified last names are not, even though all appear as direct objects which requires the accusative. So the issue here is not only the lack of modification, but also the place of the unmodified last names in the morphosyntactic system of Slovak. To be specific, they all - with some exceptions, apparently - are indeclinable now. What are those exceptions and why? Why is the accusative "Vitaliu Bellu" (where, nota bene, the last name should be analyzed as M.SG.ACC if this is the unmodified form of the last name of her husband or father, so there go the antipatriarchal arguments) and not "Vitaliu Bella"? We are not told.

And to their credit, the authors of the piece are vaguely aware of the issues involved (italics indicate original Slovak in translation):

"Prečo sa teda mená cudziniek prechyľujú? Z viacerých dôvodov. Ľahšie ich vieme skloňovať. Ľahšie v texte rozoznáme, kedy hovoríme o prezidentovi Obamovi a kedy o prvej dáme Obamovej. Je zrozumiteľnejšie v titulku napísať, že Williamsová porazila Osakovú, než že Williams porazila Osaka."

"So why do we modify non-Slovak (last) names? For multiple reasons. They are easier to decline. It is easier to recognize in a text when a reference is made to president Obama and when to the First Lady Obamová. It is much easier to understand when we write Williamsová [F.NOM] porazila [defeated.PAST.F.SG] Osakovú [F.ACC] than Williams [INDCL] porazila [defeated.PAST.F.SG] Osaka [INDCL]."

OK, but then considering the flexible Slovak constituent order, if you get rid of the declension suffixes...

"Urobiť z textu zrozumiteľný celok môže byť bez prechyľovania ťažšie. Vety treba pozornejšie štylizovať, pomôcť si skloňovaním krstných mien či okolitých slov, prípadne použitím všeobecných podstatných mien. Williams zvíťazila, Osaka sa prepadla v rebríčku."

"It might be more difficult to turn the text into an intelligible unit without modification. The sentences need to be formulated more carefuly, one can also decline first names or surrounding words or use generic nouns. Williams [INDCL] zvíťazila [won.PAST.F.SG], Osaka [INDCL] sa [REFL] prepadla [drop.PAST.F.SG] v [in] rebríčku [ranking.SG.LOC]."

But the meaning here is diff...

"Rozhodovanie o tom, či pri zahraničných ženských priezviskách zrušiť prechyľovanie, nebolo pre redakciu jednoduché." 

"The decision whether to stop modifying non-Slovak feminine last names was not simple for us on the editorial team." 

Yeah, sure, but ... 

"Dá sa to, len to niekedy chce trocha viac času a tiež šikovných ľudí, ktorí text napíšu, zeditujú a skorigujú."

"It [= dealing with stylistic issues resulting from the decision] can be done, it just needs a little more time sometimes and smart people who will write, edit and proofread the text."

OK, fine but let me ask you this: what problem did you solve? Aside from the bogus argument regarding the patriarchy, what actual issue has been addressed here? We are assured that the editorial team contains people capable with dealing with the stylistic problems resulting from - not to put a too fine point on it - creating an entire class of indeclinable nouns. I have my doubts about that and in any case, you yourself admit it takes more time and effort, and for what? For dealing with Grybauskaitė and Jakobsdóttir? All that so you end up with clumsy and unnatural sounding headlines like this?

"Prečo ľudia vidia iné veci, keď sa pozerajú na rovnaké videá zabitia Renée Good a Alexa Prettiho" 

"Why do people see different things when they watch the same videos of the killing of Renée [INDCL] Good [INDCL] and Alex-a [Alex-M.GEN] Pretti-ho [Pretti-M.GEN]?"

How is that better, in what world is it better?

It is not. My theory is that the faux-intellectual provincial Slovak mind is simply incapable of dealing with variation. That is why they worship standard Slovak and its "rules" or "grammar", by which they mean orthography, because that is all they know of language. That is why they come up with this sort of shit.

"S rozhodovaním nám pomohlo, že naše spriatelené redakcie v týždenníku Respekt a v českom Deníku N zrušili prechyľovanie ešte skôr ako my a vyjadrili sa, že to funguje pomerne bez problémov. Každá redakcia však má nejaké svoje usmernenia či výnimky." 

"What helped with our decision was that our allied editorial departments in the weekly Respekt and the Czech Deník N did away with modification before we did and were of the opinion that it works more or less without problems. Each editorial office, however, has their own guidelines and exceptions."

So it's not just our intellectual smallholders, but also our neighboring intellectual smallholders. Splendid. But hang on a second, exceptions? Why?

"My sme si povedali, že s prechyľovaním skončíme, ale Merkelovej vládu si ponecháme. To znamená, že príponu -ová uvidíte menej často, a keď už, bude to najmä pri privlastňovaní."

"We decided to do away with modification, but will keep Merkel-ovej [Merkel-ADJ.F.SG.ACC] vládu [government.SG.ACC]. This means that you will see the suffix -ová less often and when, it will be in the context of possession."

And here we have it. These people introduced a hard rule that will complicate their work, but then will have exceptions because the new rule complicates their work too much. I guess going by PSP rules and adding a completely reasonable exception for Lithuanian and Icelandic (and Latvian etc.) last names while applying good judgment and maybe have some variation is way too complicated for them.

I swear to God, I really should stop reading this fucking rag. 

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* The word used here is "celé" = "whole, entire". I believe it is to be interpreted in the context of the discussion of names ending in -ec, -ek and -ok (section 1.2). These suffixes are contracted in cases other than the nominative and so is the root used in modification, e.g. Strýček > Strýčková.

** The actual phrasing here is "women from abroad" where the Slovak word I translated as "abroad" is "zahraničie", lit. "beyond border land".

*** This just sounds... more racist than it is.