Footnotes and Exile

An e-mail exchange in Russian just reminded me on this: In Russian, "a reference in a footnote" and "internal exile" (often as a form of criminal punishment) are the same word, ссылка (ssylka). Odd but true.

Or maybe not so odd, given the root "send"; the footnote sends you to another source, the exile to another city. So remember: Footnotes are the Siberia of your article or your brief—and endnotes, I suppose, the Kamchatka (the peninsula, not the vodka).

Comments

[cmcc_aus]

Where would a sidenote go?

[John F. Carr]

In legal writing footnotes that contain more than a bare citation make the article harder to read. If I need to know, put the text inline. If I don’t need to know, use an endnote. There was a comment here some months back about a blind federal judge who did not like footnotes.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I read a book recently, Origins by Lewis Dartnell, which has the best footnoting I have ever seen in any popular book. All numeric footnotes were citations in the back, one very compact paragraph per chapter, which each reference being the book and page numbers, and all those books were in the bibliography.

Some pages also had an asterisk, and a very few had a dagger too. These were actual notes at the bottom of each page.

What I detest the most is endnotes which are mixtures of citations and comments.

[Mwhittlaw]

And the body is Moscow? Or does Petersburg retain that prestige?

[Jaypd]

fun fact: in English, a footnote also means something that is unimportant and unlikely to be remembered

[santamonica811]

I’m trying to figure out, linguistically, why a language would “allow” words to start with two identical letters. We have some in English, with vowels (aardvark, eerie). But I can’t think of any that start with bb___, or ss____, for example. (The only such consonant word I can think of is “mmm” which–as onomatopoeia–barely counts.)

But Russian seems to have many of these, and not limited to vowels. ссора vs сора I get…copa is a completely different word. But I don’t understand the need for ссылка, as сылка is not a word at all. Did some Russian wake up some morning, yawn, stretch, and think to herself, “Hmmm…сылка is a great word for “exile.” But not enough elan…it really needs an additional “c” in the front!”???

Actually, I guess the non-smart-ass question is: For native speakers of Russian; can one hear a difference between, say, copa and ccopa? If there is an audible difference, then of course it makes intuitive sense to be able to add this sort of duplicate letter.

[Mwhittlaw]

The Cyrillic alphabet may not yet have evolved to changing orthography and oral custom. Isn’t the situation similar to the historical creation of the diGamma in Greek and double-U in English and Roman alphabet languages, whose pedigrees are older than Cyrillic?

[Gandydancer]

Well, “aardvark” sounds different to me than would “ardvark”. Not so much with “eerie” and “Erie”, but maybe a little.

To not bother to write separate replies, :”Moscow” or “[St.] Petersburg” is era-dependent, and “side-note” brings to mind Vladivostok.

[Doug Huffman]

Ardbeg was my introduction to single malt whisky, with vastly more flavor than Kamchatka vodka.

From Ardbeg Distillery (Taigh-staile na h-Àirde Bige) Ardbeg, Islay (An Àird Bheag)

[Michael P]

Eels ooze ppast Lloyd’s llama? (Okay, two of those are cheating because ll is a single letter in Spanish.)

[santamonica811]

I could not find any examples of “ppast” in a Google search. And using ngrams, it does show a non-zero usage, but pretty damn close to zero. What does it mean? If it’s an alternative to “past,” can ppast be used for all meanings? Or only for one or two uses of ‘past?’

[cmcc_aus]

In English, doubled vowels EE and OO are used as spelling conventions to represent something other than their single-letter versions (however crazy and inconsistent English spelling is. We use doubled consonants such bb, dd, ff, gg, … for certain purposes, but not in word-initial position. The double LL whether from Welsh names or Spanish terms, is limited to borrowings, in some cases whether the original language distinguishes between different sounds. The AA in aardvark is a borrowing. I can’t think of other cases of doubled letter beginning a word in English. I await EV’s response.

But I think a ssidenote would be not as far into Ssiberia. It might just be YYkaterinaburg.

[David Nieporent]

Well, Lloyd is Welsh, not Spanish, but it’s still one letter rather than two in that language.

[Kevin Smith]

In German “s” is pronounced differently than “ss” so it may be the same in Russian.

[Currentsitguy]

I’m far more of a bourbon, rye, and scotch aficionado, but still, Kamchatka is for people who are far more interested in effect than taste.

[santamonica811]

Oh, I forgot to mention (and EV did not think it worthy of noting): ссылка also refers to an internet link. Which makes complete sense. I’ve been trying to determine approximately when ссылка took on this new meaning, but I know only baby Russian and my search results have yielding nothing in this inquiry. 🙁