Ukraine War Day #172: Peski Has Fallen

Dear Readers:

Yesterday we were talking about salt, today we talk about sand. The big news, on the battlefront being the fall (confirmed yesterday by Russian Ministry of Defense) of the Donetsk town of Peski to Russian Allied forces.

Think of Peski as a suburb of Donetsk. It was even considered a “wealthy suburb”, back in the day. According to the 2001 census, 2160 individual human souls resided there. In 2014-16 Peski was ravaged by the civil war between Donbass Separatists and Ukrainian Nationalists. By 2019 only 9 people still remained in the town, somehow surviving in the ruins of their former homes. With no water, no gas, no transportation, no stores, no post office, no nothing.

Ukrainian soldiers transformed this bedroom community into an impenetrable fortress. From whence, for eight long years they tormented the people of Donetsk with bombs, shells and rockets. As if trying to kill or harm as many of the “Seps” as they possibly could. And then, yesterday, this fortress fell to the Seps, as the last of the Ukrainian troops fled. And this was actually quite a big deal, yea even unto the strategic level. Although, for sure, one should expect the Ukrainian Talking Heads to start brushing it off, like they always do. Yesterday: “We will never surrender Peski! […] Today: Ah, who cares about Peski, it’s just a tiny village and a heap of ruins…”

Having cracked this nut, Russian Allied forces now have several more degrees of freedom than they did before; they will be able to move in several directions and surround Avdeevka, a much bigger fortress. The ultimate goal, of course, being to take the major cities of Slavyansk/Kramatorsk and collapse the entire Donbass arc. Military experts say that, after the blooming of the Popasna Flower (which was the first real breakthrough on this front), this Peski Flower is the next biggest domino to fall. At the risk of sounding corny, it might be possible to say, now, that there is an actual light at the end of this dark tunnel.

Of Sand And Grains Of Sand

As the host of heaven cannot be numbered and the sands of the sea cannot be measured, so I will multiply the offspring of David my servant, and the Levitical priests who minister to me. (Jeremiah 33:22)

I know what you’re all thinking: So what’s with the name? Pesky in Russian literally means “sand“. So, the town is “Sandy”, I guess. Maybe that’s just a euphemism for “Dirt Poor”.

So, actually the name of the town is the plural form of the word песо́к (pesók). So, literally, pesok means “sand” (as in a single grain of sand), and peski means “sands” (plural). But “sand” is still the better translation from Russian to English, due to the different ways these two languages handle objects that are innately plural, or come in sets. The English language gazes at the beach and sees a singular entity: Sand. Whereas the Russian language visualizes the field as consisting of individual particles and denotes the whole thing as a plural: Sands.

Is “sand” a single object, or a set of many like-minded objects?

Same deal with “hair” versus “hairs”. In English you say, “I cut my hair.” [singular] whereas in Russian you say, “I cut my hairs.” Because, unless you are a baldy, you have more than just one of those things on top of your skull. A singular “hair” in Russian means literally one hair (on your head), whereas English would have to qualify this somehow: “A single hair”. Because, once again, English looks at that fuzzy thing and visualizes a single entity, like a nicely formed do, whereas Russian delves into the weeds (so to speak) and sees the individual strands which compose the whole. So “hairs”.

Before proceeding, let me urge people not to use these musings as an excuse to fall into the fallacy of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, nor start thinking there is something so deep (at a political or cultural level) about these differences in the way different languages categorize Reality. Sapir and Whorf were very great Linguists in their time, but they were wrong about this particular hypothesis, IMHO, which led to undue mystical thinking about matters that are, in essence, banal. People are forced to use the grammatical constructs which their native language decrees, but deep down inside, they know that it’s all just an agreed-upon formality and that there are other ways of getting the job done. Deep down inside our brains there is a universal semantics which recognizes various types of objects for what they are. Like the animals we descended from, we are innate pragmatists.

Edward Sapir was one of the most important founders of the “American” school of Linguistics, which emerged from the related field of Anthropology.

Hence, please don’t read more than is necessary, into the different ways that languages deal with objects which usually come in sets, or pluralities. Just because an Englishman says, “I like your hair,” that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know about the existence of individual hairs on the human scalp. Now, I don’t know a word of Chinese, but I have been told that Chinese grammar does a lot of business with various types of “container” objects. It seems to me that English does this as well, for example you wouldn’t say, “Give me a chocolate” (unless you mean a single bon-bon out of a box), you would say, “Give me a bar of chocolate.” Similarly, you wouldn’t say “Give me a salt,” you would say, “Give me a packet of salt.” Or “give me a carton of milk.” I have been told that Chinese “container” objects of this sort (like a bar, a box, a set, etc.) can get very specific as to size and shape. Because Chinese grammar was too simple, so they decided to make it more complicated! Having said that (and once again, as a refutation of Sapir-Whorf) I have heard Americans get lazy and just say something like, “I’ll take two milks,” because it’s just too much work to add “cartons of” or “bottles of”, and they know that you know what they mean.

While we are in the Wonderful World of Linguistics (which is a beautiful escape from war!) let us look at the etymology of this word.

So, the Russian word /pesok/ “a grand of sand” derives from the Proto-Slavic *pěsъkъ which was probably pronounced something like “piasuku”. The Ukrainian descendant word Піски is transliterated and pronounced as “Pisky“, which is why you will see that spelling on the Ukrainian maps. The Proto-Slavic word most likely descends from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European  *pē(n)s-u-ko- which would have been pronounced something like “peh-n-suko”. Cognate with Proto-Indo-Iranian *pānsúš and Sanskrit pāṃsú, all meaning something like “dust”. Or maybe “a speck of dust”, or possibly “crumbling soil”, depending on the semantic interpretation.

In conclusion: Peski has fallen.