The Bitter Scroll

An Apologia for Sad Songs

2009-12-30T22:09:00.005-05:00

This is a reply ... well, a tangential musing, on something Mikaela said in her post on Sad Songs vs. Happy Songs.

"Does the audience really need my help processing good emotions?" In other words, what is the purpose of writing happy songs?

Why does beauty bring a tear to the eye? It seems like beauty at its highest degree is too beautiful to say it inspires mere "happiness". Rather it seems to instill a type of wisdom, which transcends happiness. Similarly great suffering has the potential to instill a type of wisdom that transcends mere "sadness". In his creation myth at the beginning of the Silmarillion, Tolkien assigns to Nienor among all the Vala the unique combination of mourning and wisdom. As a personality of melancholic temperament, Tolkien had I think an insight into the connection between wisdom and sadness. And as a Catholic, he had access to that Faith's at-first odd combination of ultimate optimism and immediate resignation to suffering. John Paul II wrote of something similar in his letter on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, saying that there was a profound depth of meaning and wisdom to be found uniquely in profound suffering. There are always people embittered by the Problem of Pain. But the fact that there are some people like Immaculee Ilibagiza and Walter Ciszek show that such hard-earned wisdom is there to be found.

Also related to this probably is an essay Edgar Allen Poe wrote about The Raven (I read it a while ago and don't have it in front of me): Poe wanted his poem to invoke beauty, and he felt it was easier to invoke beauty from the context of tragedy: in the case of The Raven, a lost love.

All this is to say that I think Mikaela is on to something when she is at peace with the predominantly melancholic nature of her inspiration. "Even when I am offering something more positive," she says, "there is still an element of the bittersweet."

Art's object is beauty, and beauty and its attendant wisdom are usually appreciated better through suffering, when we have a chance to grow our souls, than in happiness, where we have no incentive to change. And suffering in general cuts deeper than happiness, reaching to parts of our soul that, being human, are destined for the divine, and for which nothing on this earth can ultimately suffice. So a certain restraint in happiness, a knowledge that no present happiness is truly enough, a certain "element of the bittersweet" is appropriate to beauty, and wisdom, and art. In the same way, a certain restraint is also required in sadness and mourning, due to the knowledge that no good thing is truly gone if we are destined for God, and no bad thing can ultimately conquer us if He be with us.

Despair, apart from its being psychologically damaging and generally unpleasant, is a factual error, since Forgiveness exists beyond our most awful capacity to sin or even dream of sinning. But while God wants us to be happy, He does not want us to be taken in by anything less than the Best, so programmed into us is a nagging melancholy, stronger in some of us than others, the slightest of twitches from our deepest depths, meant to recall to us that whatever makes us happy here, is not ultimately enough.

We have as humans an infinite capacity for happiness, and we seek pleasurable highs, mimics of real happiness, in all the most intense experiences in life: from sex to drugs to bungee-jumping to mathematics (or whatever floats your boat). But we only really do justice to this amazing human capacity when we temper each happiness and enjoyment with a reminder that there is always a Higher and a Greater, and what is more tragic than losing a great love and a great reward at the end of the road because we were distracted along the way by a shiny toy? It's so easy to be distracted by whatever plays the role of Shiny Toy at various stages in my life, but it seems that only true beauty, and art that is truly beautiful, manages to remind me of the Greater Beauty waiting for me.

Learning to Love the Watcher in the Water

2009-12-30T17:14:00.004-05:00

"It is hard for one man to catch another's spirit and put into print the things that drive him on."

Fr. Ciszek said this about the challenge of communicating what was inside him to the priest that helped him write the book he really wanted to write. I don't know what book I really want to write, but I do know it is difficult to communicate deep realities inside oneself--whether you're communicating to others or just setting them out for your own understanding. There is such infinity and depth to what lies underneath the human person. Most of the time it lies undisturbed. Occasionally it is stirred and we would rather it had not been, for we do not know what to do with it once we have accustomed ourselves to living on the surface of things. Yet there is a watcher in the waters of our souls, and it does not have its origin in us. Not to say it is foreign to these waters, for it alone knows them thoroughly, and it is we that have our origin in It. So the Watcher stays beneath the depths, the powerful accepting a humble place in the soul of the weak; the expert letting the amateur sail the ship; and only occasionally does the Watcher stir the water so we can see ripples, but usually we think the ripples are from the winds above and outside, not thinking--not even daring to think--it could be something beneath. And surely never guessing that when the Winds are worst, the Watcher has begun to sail while we, cringing, would give up the ship.

We see what is outside ourselves, but we only understand with great difficulty, and then only by relating it to what we find already inside. Conversely, what is inside ourselves we cannot see, yet we have the capacity--oh the infinite, divine capacity, the highest of all that is human!--to understand without seeing. So we live for sight, clinging unnaturally to our eyes. But we die without understanding, cloven unnaturally from our minds. For our minds are a great and terrible thing, and incomplete without the heart.

The Watcher is the heart, or rather is closer to our heart than we are, we who live safely in our minds. We have sought the truth with our minds, but what we have found was not enough, because man does not live on truth alone. There are other categories that cannot be broken down, and we live on them all, and die a little when they are gone like a parent who sees their child leave them, or better, like a child who does not know he hurts himself when he seeks to hurt a loving parent.

So it is that I found truth, so much truth, but I could not make it make me good, for I still had fear, and fear is not the enemy of truth, but of love, and love I did not understand, and therefore thought I was not capable of it -- either of giving, or receiving, or meriting. And thus I was not the whole person I know God means me to be: one who is good as God is good, by knowing myself and knowing Him more like He knows me and knows Himself, and by loving in both what I know to be true).

And by serving, in love, the good I am granted to see in myself and in God, I understand truth all the better, and I love better, and become more good, more like God, and in being more divine, am most fully human.

But most of the journey toward this true, good, and beautiful wholeness of being, and of being human, we fear the Watcher, and the Winds, and anything that would stir the surface, for we do not easily grow up. And by grow up I mean growing altus, for altus means tall, but also deep, and a man may only truly stand tall if he is deep. So we do not see, from reading the ripples above, that what the Watcher actually traces in the water is our answer to the Winds. We wish for a change in the weather, to give us calm for one evanescent moment, or for a god that would control the chaos from outside. Instead we have a God that allows us to control the calm on the inside, but only if we are willing to duc in altum, to put out into the deep, and find that which makes all weather meaningless, because that which has true meaning, true Beauty, and unspeakable Goodness that we fear to dare we may taste, is already With Us.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I pray you all are granted the gift of seeing the extraordinary and poetic in what has become prosaic to us only because we have forgotten our sense of wonder, and what is closely akin to wonder: gratitude. Cheers!

Today's Cool Etymology

2009-10-03T10:56:00.006-04:00

First of all, we've gotten several interesting comments and questions over the past few months, and I wanted to say that I look forward to responding to all of them soon. Thanks to everyone who expressed support of The Bitter Scroll. :-)

Anyway, on to my cool discovery of the day. I was already aware of the collection of words related to measuring, stemming from the Indo-European root *med-. We get words like measure, meter, and metric. The first thing I noticed on wikipedia's list of PIE roots is that this root also yields the Latin meditari and English meditate. But perhaps even cooler is the list of English descendants: there's metan/mete, which makes sense since meting things out implies measuring how much everyone gets; and then there's this item: ǣmtig/empty in Old/Modern English. Seeing the mt root surrounded by the adjective ending -ig and the privative æ- meaning "not," led me to realize that "empty" simply means "unmeasurable, unmeasured."

Incidentally, does anyone know what happened to the online Index of Indo-European Roots on bartleby.com??

Tolkien, Anglo-Saxon Melancholy, and Depression

2009-07-09T22:32:00.003-04:00

I imagine when one learns to survive with and manage depression, seeing the happy phrases and manner of those who haven’t suffered from it must be like someone from war-weary Middle Earth looking in at the innocent and oblivious residents of the Shire. Either you are bitter, and both envy and resent the peace of the Shire and seek to waken its residents to the "real world," or you somehow manage to use your dark experiences for good, seeking to protect its peace, because somehow you value its very innocence and obliviousness. And just as you are in a world that they do not know, and in which they could not (and one eventually realizes, should not) live, so also, they are in a world that you can only visit but not fully live in (this side of death / a great sea-voyage to the undying West). I hope when I am out of the darkest parts of my depression, I will have the strength to be a Ranger, with enough patience to respect the Shirelings of life, specifically for their ignorance of the Dark.

So as you may deduce, this blog suffers from its writer’s chronic lack of interest even in interesting things that is typical of depression sufferers. This being a rather recent diagnosis, I’m finding that writing about it does indeed serve a purpose, and conversely as well, that the inspiration I feel from the whole creative and artistic world (including writing, even my incomplete snippets of poems) seems to come closer than anything else to lessening the cold grip on my heart which is typical of my ironically named subtype: atypical depression.

Yet I’m not about to turn this blog into a journal of all my dark thoughts and feelings; I have something which serves that purpose already. Instead, I’m noticing a very great affinity, which I may explore here, between my own experiences and moods from depression and those of both Tolkien and the Anglo-Saxon worldview generally. Tolkien wrote to one of his children that he felt he was a “kindred spirit” with the Beowulf poet: melancholy, anticipating future disaster in this life, a Christian hoping for victory after this world's long defeat, yet a Christian with a deep respect for his pagan ancestors. I have long felt myself a kindred spirit with Professor Tolkien, and our Germanic predecessors, for reasons linguistic, literary, religious, as well as of personality and worldview. We even like autumn best of all seasons, for much the same reasons. I expect eventually I’ll start blogpost drafts unpacking many of these ideas, since it is a way that my depression and related feelings and interests seem to help me explore and even understand much of the world of Germania and Tolkien. With any luck I’ll finish and publish one or two of those drafts.

An Unexpected Revival of Elizabethan English

2009-06-16T19:35:00.002-04:00

This is a great little story I picked up from Per Omnia Saecula:

Convicts use ye Olde Elizabethan slang to smuggle drugs past guards in prison.

This shows in one fell swoop the ingenuity of the human when pressed (even in bad things), and the perpetual adaptability of the tool that is human language.

A Note on Spelling: The word "ye" is not actually the form of "you" seen in phrases like "She canna dew it, Capt'n; she's givin' ye all she's got!" In this usage, it is simply the word "the", pronounced quite normally as "the". The "th" used to have one letter to represent it, which my middle English times looked enough like the letter y that people started just using the letter y to represent the "th" sound in such cases. This usage continued after the original "th" letter ceased being used altogether.

The Ends of Man, Society, and Reason: A Beginning

2009-04-22T18:16:00.003-04:00

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the purpose of society and government, and therefore of life (yes, I know, it’s 42). So in the context of my current studies in American founding principles and the whole concept of a “western” moral tradition however distinct this tradition may be from overtly religious moral teaching, I want to outline some of where my thoughts have been going.

First, I think that people’s answers to the “big questions” like Why are we here? and What is the meaning of life? and Is there a God or an afterlife? -- well, I think they can’t not be answered in each heart, and that different answers lead to very different value systems (whether acknowledged or not) and therefore, very different choices and lives. I think that they are difficult questions, and that some of the best lives in history have been dedicated answering one or more or even a portion of these questions. Moreover, I think everyone has some form of an answer for them: whether we experience certainty or overwhelming uncertainty, whether we believe they can or even should be asked, whether our answers feel final or are only “working solutions,” even whether we feel satisfaction or resentment toward what we think the answers are – each of these has implications for our worldview and how we choose to act in it.

OK, with that preface, here’s a tentative outline of my thoughts currently. As humans, we seem to be most fulfilled when we are able to live lives that develop our “higher” powers, i.e., our intellect and will, as opposed to habituating our lives to act by greed or passion. Taking cues mostly from Aristotle here, I’ll say that a certain amount of empirical data, teased out with some inductive reasoning (reasoning from specifics to generalities), suggests that our “purpose” in the universe is most likely related to what we are best at and what will bring us the fullest level of happiness.

We use this logic very naturally with manmade objects. An object with no flat surfaces, pieces falling off, maybe spikes protruding randomly, and which doesn’t stay in one place easily, wouldn’t make a good chair, for example, and couldn’t possible have been meant to be one. (Except maybe as a prank, but only because humor derives from the juxtaposition of things that don’t go together.) So a life that makes us miserable, causes damage to ourselves and others, wastes the abilities that are best in us, is an equally unlikely purpose for being (humans) with such highly developed rational abilities and sensitivity to good and bad, happiness and sorrow, etc.

Now another thing we (that is, Aristotle and I, for a start) can’t help noticing is that there is a set of complementary (opposite?) ideas that live in tension together as one fact about humanity: that is, that we are both individual and social. Aristotle says we are social beings (“political” actually, but I don’t think he intended the distinction between society and politics that our vocabulary helps us to assume). Yet we are social beings with individual powers to deliberate and choose. So is the meaning of life to be attained together? Sure, to a large extent. Yet a key issue for me is the relationship between geographic and ideological proximity. There are cognitive and precognitive predilections in human nature that tend to make members of any kind of group think or feel somewhat similarly. Yet this fact is countered by things like pluralism in society, intercultural and interreligious contacts, and the modern world’s massive capacity for the communication of facts.

Insert here thoughts on the nature and purpose of government. For since we are social by nature, there must be some method for administering society. Abstracting from either the form or the method of establishing this governing function of society, it seems to me the most basic fact of this function is that it serves only half of the individual-social spectrum of human nature. But if man’s purpose is also discernible by (or identifiable with) his nature, neither purely individual nor purely social elements should hinder his (or others’) pursuit of that purpose. Hence the commonplace recognition of truths that, on the one hand, one’s personal choices should not endanger society (no flying planes into buildings), and that on the other hand, society has no claim to hinder personal choices that do not danger society (no legislating my favorite flavor of ice cream).

So whatever the purpose of life is, the purpose of government is subordinate to it. This isn’t to say the state has any role in answering the “big questions.” But society does. This is key. Remember, whatever your answers to the Questions are, they will determine how you seek to discover and live out your “purpose.” So in order to live together, people in the same community must be able to discuss and come to some common ground on the Big Questions. The more common ground, the less likely that community’s governing function will be to conflict with the Answers, and thus with people’s living out those Answers.

That much should make conservatives and xenophobes happy. However the other side of this is that uniformity isn’t the ultimate goal of our intellect, truth is. Here is where visionaries often seem anti-social or even counter-cultural: You have to be, in order to advance the understanding of society as a whole on a given topic. This is why pluralism is useful and good – provided we actually benefit from it by discussing the Big Questions. If people in a society commit themselves to journeying the road to truth together, and at the same time being at peace (to a degree) with not being there yet, that seems to be society at its best. Sometimes "conservatives" feel so happy and confident in the truths they have found, they indulge in an incredible amount of impatience in demanding that others accede to those truths instantly. This is not realistic or human, and ends up turning people away from those truths. (It is also nothing like the gradual method God takes in Scripture, starting where people actually are, and leading them gradually and patiently.) So pluralism is a good, beautiful, and exciting opportunity for personal and societal betterment.

The worst of both worlds, however, would be a society that attains neither the peace that comes from relative unanimity, nor the peace that comes from knowing the truth. This yields a pluralist society with only one trait truly in common: a despair of reaching meaningful truth, stemming from intellectual exhaustion, hypersensitivity to conflict, and simple frustration that it is so hard to reach answers to questions that seem so natural to ask.

This, I believe, is where nature most seems to suggest the possibility of something beyond it (etymologically, the words for this are “super-natural,” from Latin, or “metaphysical,” from Greek). The nature of humanity, our abilities, our natural inclinations, and our natural limitations, all seem to point to a gap, a blank space that goes back to the idea I mentioned at the top of this post: It doesn’t make sense that either creation or evolution would yield such a strong need for something that doesn’t actually exist. I’m talking about anything you can conceive of as supernatural or metaphysical: humanity’s seemingly infinite capacity to seek truth, beauty, and goodness, alongside our historically very finite capacity to achieve these things.

In another post, I’ll think more about what this means for the natural limitations of government (as in, not just shouldn’t, but can’t). As well as how something personal like the natural impulse toward religion (or at least any outward-focused sort of reverence or humility stemming from acknowledgement of our own natural limitations as humans), can possibly have a happy interaction with the public/social side of human nature.

Bitter Scroll Now Hungrier, Bitterer Than Ever

2009-04-20T17:57:00.002-04:00

Well, I’m finally giving up on the whole idea of limiting my blog to certain subject matters. My problem is that I have very many interests, and they seem to come in waves. As far as I can discern, the three general passions that I always come back to are linguistics, theology, and political science, and within each, I have progressed through focused interest in various subfields. So rather than limit my blog to one field (of the three) or subfield (say, comparative Germanic linguistics), I finally officially declare this to be a truly personal blog: a web log of my thoughts on what interests me. I still resist the idea of putting up random awkward posts about emotions or deeply personal issues; but all academic or interesting topics that I find myself into at a given time are hereby fair game. This will make it easier to use the blog for my own personal benefit: forcing myself into the process of writing more often, and using that process to clarify my thought processes on topics of relevance to school or elsewhere.

The Truth of Irony

2009-01-07T00:01:00.007-05:00

There's a great description of the nature of irony in this article by Anthony Esolen, entitled "Emptying Ourselves of What We Think We Know." The whole article is interesting, but click on page three just for the treatment of irony.

Esolen gives several divergent examples of irony, and manages to boil down the essence as something beautifully oriented to truth and reality, rather than the common conception of irony as simply "saying one thing but meaning another."

Irony arises, rather, from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder), from the failure to note subtleties, or from seeing subtleties that are not there, especially when the ignorance and the failure are highlighted before observers in a better position to see the truth.

I really learned a lot from the five examples he gives on page 4, along with the subsequent elucidations for each one. Esolen very brilliantly and clearly manages to show irony's versatility: one example uses irony to teach theological subtlety while another points to the laughability of blind pride; one highlights a common sense of justice, while the last efficiently portrays a complex of relationships, intentions, and levels of ignorance that are dizzying when he explains it all out.

Irony provides humans with a way to communicate certain realities in a way that really does them justice: sometimes that feeling of unexpectedness shows just how amazing a truth really is, sometimes communication needs to play on the audience's sense of morality or poetry to drive home a point's real significance. Plus, when we have had to think a bit to figure something out, it stays longer in the brain than. So irony is a higher level of communication than just-another-declarative-sentence, and as Esolen point out, one that applies to communication with and without words (verbal and dramatic).

The Language of Machiavelli

2008-07-15T18:41:00.002-04:00

I have recently been reading a great translation of Machiavelli's The Prince done by Angelo Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University. Codevilla’s translation presents to the English-speaking reader much of Machiavelli’s brilliance in using language for his own ends. Codevilla gives a very good editor's introduction, clearly showing the role and impact of The Prince in intellectual history--noting some important patterns of thought that we take for granted today, whose predominance is attributable to Machiavelli. Even more interesting, though, is the subsequent essay on "Words and Power." In this, Codevilla demonstrates some of the devices not of argumentation but of linguistic manipulation that Machiavelli employed to get his readers to adopt his own new (and quite revolutionary) moral standards.

Moral standards are not something that people give up freely, being ingrained in our values and prejudices, and at a level deeper than many people can reason to. What are the two topics supposedly banned from polite conversation? Religion and politics. Why? Because they are the two areas in which, for decades now, politeness gives way to defense mechanisms meant to mask the insecurities we feel when trying to explain (and thus, justify) the beliefs we hold so deeply. (Or maybe why those beliefs have a hold on us).

There are so many human reasons why we believe things--because our parents believed them, because our parents believed the opposite, because there is so much suffering in the world (or our own lives), because we're convinced we're supposed to believe them, because we're afraid of changing our actions or our lives, because we need the stability of being told what to believe, because we're afraid to reason for ourselves, because of the sins of those who believe otherwise, etc.

I bring this up because it was on this level that Machiavelli seems to have meant primarily to engage his readers. He knew he couldn’t get his readers to adopt his new standard of good and evil by reasoning them to it. So he chose to use language on the level of those deeper-than-reason human reasons for belief (fear, pride, desire to succeed, etc.).

Codevilla highlights the significance of Machiavelli's way of using language by contrasting it with Dante. This description of the two writers makes Niccolo look almost ... Machiavellian:

In short, Dante crafted his language to follow the dictates of reason, not of men or of chance. Dante thought language was not to be imposed by power or by convention but to be accepted by reason. . . . Machiavelli knew exactly what Dante meant. He disagreed. He believed that language, like every other human tool, serves the interest of some to the detriment of others. But Machiavelli did not argue against Dante. Instead he baldly accused him of speaking the language of a rival city, of being insufficiently committed to Florence. This did not advance the cause of truth, but it did help Machiavelli prevail with his Florentine audience.

If this sounds too commonplace to be worth pointing out, just remember to keep two things in mind. First, while people did this before Machiavelli, they knew they were doing something "wrong." Machiavelli legitimized this is a method that was "good" by literally redefining the words good and evil (more below). Second, Niccolo wasn't just lying (that's an ancient practice to be sure!), he was crafting a strategy using words deliberately as weapons. Thus Codevilla asserts that for Machiavelli, "Language, therefore, is a most powerful weapon in the struggle for primacy, and one peculiarly suited to the unarmed."

Codevilla didn’t stumble upon the fact that this was Machiavelli’s preferred way of using language by just reading The Prince extra carefully; he found that Machiavelli laid this method out explicitly in other writings: specifically his Florentine Histories and Discourses upon Our Language. Codevilla used to work on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, so unlike most Americans he probably doesn’t have a problem seeing the deeper, sometimes subversive, layers under the surface of much oral and written communication.

Let's look at some details, then. "The most important questions regarding The Prince," says Codevilla, "hinge on Machiavelli's use of words.

Does he in fact confuse the adverbe bene (well) with the noun bene (good) so as to collapse the distinction between doing well and doing good? How does Machiavelli change his readers' notion of virtue and goodness? As we shall see, he regards the meaning of such words as wholly plastic. Therefore, he gradually alters their meaning by changing their context.

He does this by forcing his readers to think of the words in the midst of an onslaught of situations and images that are unpleasant to deal with -- so many that in the end, the tired reader is weakened into granting, perhaps semi-wittingly, that what good is what eliminates such situations:

[Machiavelli's] work, especially The Prince, is filled with tales of gore and treachery. To what end? Everyone knew such things happened. Why did Machiavelli insist on mentioning them so frequently and in such detail? . . . The answer becomes clear when we remember that Machiavelli did not mean to argue as much as he meant to act. The vivid portrayal of political defeat is a fearsome thing. Machiavelli never argues explicitly that earthly suffering and death are the worst fates; he just omits any discussion of the possibility that they are not.

Thus Codevilla shows Machiavelli to be exploring and playing with the aspects of human nature upon which modern advertising would be based -- more than 400 years before Edward Bernays, the man called the father of modern advertising and nephew of Sigmund Freud, encapsulated the psychology of crowds and of the subconscious in his interesting little, rather Machiavellian book, Propaganda.

Marx and later the Soviets would perfect what Bernays had learned from Gustave LeBon's study of crowds into the very simple strategy of making people believe lies (one reliant upon total control of the media): constant, relentless repetition of your message, and mercilessly stamping out any dissent. People start to believe not because they have been convinced, but because they have no mental energy left to resist.

When Foreign Laws Silence Americans' Speech

2008-07-15T17:06:00.003-04:00

I’m glad to see a couple of important Senators drawing attention to this subject (and I'm proud of my native state of New York for taking the initiative on it). Sens. Specter and Lieberman co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pointing to how easy Americans can be sued in foreign courts (like the UK) under libel laws that are heavily weighted against publishers. Note the scenario they use as example:

In 2003, U.S. scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld asserted in her book, "Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It," that Saudi banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz helped fund Osama bin Laden. The book was published in the U.S. by a U.S. company. But 23 copies were bought online by English residents, so English courts permitted the Saudi to file a libel suit there.

As in many areas of modern life, laws are struggling to keep pace. Either they assume outdated business models in the face of creative collaboration and the prospect of name recognition for young artists through file sharing, or the very international nature of communication and information brokering today.

If I make a point to buy a book in German from amazon.de, I don’t have the expectation that I could sue the author in this country, since there was no intention to have major distribution here, even though it was always possible. Maybe our laws do allow me to sue the author in an American court, but I don’t know if they should. Does the truly tiny distribution of Ehrenfeld’s book in the UK really give British courts the right to allow a Saudi to sue an American?

The ability to speak freely and challenge people to give reasons for public actions is a beauty of the First Amendment. While I don’t think it was meant to protect “art” depicting obscene desecrations of the symbols of my (or anyone else’s) faith, the First Amendment was meant for just the type of thing Ehrenfeld is trying to do. Even if she doesn’t have all of her facts straight, the idea is that getting her assertions out in public is worth encouraging, b/c our Founders thought that the public should be the judge of speech, not the government.

The war on terror has (or at least needs to have) a major public diplomacy component. IMHO, the West should be challenging the radical segments of the Muslim world to justify themselves intellectually before the court of public opinion, insisting that you can’t riot or kill people when you don’t get what you want like someone who hasn’t grown psychologically past early childhood. If you are right, you have a legitimate chance to convince everyone. It is this very open and terrifyingly just invitation to justify themselves in public that prompts the terrorist propagandists (and don’t think there aren’t any) to use tactics like suing in British court. It is a type of procedural warfare that allows them to silence unpleasant voices without having to argue reasonably. Hence this interesting facet of the proposed law: “If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.” I don’t know how easy or impossible this would be to prove in court, but it’s good that they recognize it as a strategy.

It would be nice if the US and the UK could come up with some joint advisory committee to look at protecting our citizens from their laws when neither plaintiff nor defendant have ever set foot in Britain. In the meantime, if the UK doesn’t do anything, we definitely should. It’s too bad the UK doesn’t see the public diplomacy value to itself in moderating speech laws that are begging to be abused.

You'll Think What I Want You to Think

2008-05-01T16:04:00.001-04:00

I made a discovery on Netflix recently. The British show Yes, Prime Minister from the early 80s is simply brilliant in its portrayal of the real workings of government and society in all their ridiculousness.

The three main characters are the Prime Minister Jim Hacker, Sir Humphrey, and Bernard Wooley. Sir Humphrey is the cynical Cabinet Secretary, with an admirable loyalty to the civil service (and only the civil service), and Bernard is the naive and pedantic personal secretary to the Prime Minister. Humphrey is always trying to teach Bernard more cynical ways, such as in the following:

We run a civilized, aristocratic government machine, tempered by occasional general elections. Since 1832, we have been gradually excluding the voter from government. Now we've got them to a point where they just vote once every five years for which bunch of buffoons will try to interfere with our policies ...

But that's not even what I wanted to blog about. In the Episode titled "The Ministerial Broadcast," Sir Humphrey and Bernard are discussing the Prime Minister's radical plan to bring back the draft ("National Service"), and Humphrey gives what has to be the best demonstration of how easily polls can be manipulated to suggest exactly the answer the pollster wants. Enjoy:

Humphrey: A nice young lady comes up to you, obviously you want to create a good impression--you don't want to look a fool, do you?

Bernard: No.

H: No. So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Wooley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?

B: Yes.

H: Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?

B: Yes.

H: Do you think there's a lack of discipline in our comprehensive schools?

B: Yes.

H: Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?

B: Yes.

H: Do you think the respond to a challenge?

B: Yes.

H: Would you be in favor of reintroducing national service?

B: Oh, well I suppose I might.

H: Yes or no?

B: {sigh.} Yes.

H: Of course you would, Bernard, after all you've told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one.

Alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result: . . .

Mr. Wooley, are you worried about the danger of war?

B: Yes.

H: Are you worried about the growth of armaments?

B: Yes.

H: Do you think there's a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?

B: Yes!

H: Do you think it's wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?

B: Yes!

H: Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?

B: Yes! . . . Oh.

False Friend # 1

2008-04-28T22:44:00.000-04:00

False friend is the linguistic term for a word in another language that looks just like a word in your own, and so you assume it means the same thing. Be careful! It's wonderful to make friends of new words, but make sure you really know them, or they'll only hurt you.

English has very many words that were borrowed from French, or that English and French both took from Latin, which have kept the same meaning: préparation, longue, noble, thème, champion, etc.

For future reference, if you're ever in southern France and you need new batteries for your camera, it is better not to go into a store asking for "Les batteries." The better word here is piles.

Une batterie is a drumset.

Speaking of Propaganda, Comrade . . .

2008-04-24T15:09:00.002-04:00

Periodically if you read the Washington Post (I don't personally, but I like to look at the pictures), you'll see something that looks like an article, smells like an article, and is written like an article. Don't be fooled! Check the fine print and you'll see it's a full-page ad taken out by the Russian government's Tourism/Cover-up Board. They buy space in a newspaper in America's capital, and present the message they want us to hear, in a package we are more likely to trust. (I think even conservatives in this country trust the average report in the Post more than they trust, say, this.) Check out this and this, for example.

Well, the Post finally caught on to what the Russians were doing, and on March 6th, decided they might as well make a story out of it, so they wrote this article on Russia's "global propaganda machine." One page two of the article is a reference to the recurring "feature" in their own paper:

The official government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta is using its healthy profits to fund monthly supplements in newspapers in India, Britain, Bulgaria and the United States. "Russia: Beyond the Headlines," as the publication is called, is a paid advertising supplement in The Post.

One of my favorite lines is this one:

The campaign is designed to counter what the government and many people here see as unrelenting and unfair Western criticism of declining political freedoms under President Vladimir Putin.

Let's see ... counter ... criticism ... declining ... Well, there are at least three negatives here, but I think they mostly cancel out to show Putin himself as the biggest negative in the whole picture. As the article admits, there are skeptics that simply won't be fooled by such blatant tactics. But we would be foolish ourselves to dismiss Russia's campaign as harmless. Propaganda works because it understands that people can, and in many cases, deep down they want to be fooled. No one wants to think that the Russians are deceiving us and spying on us so deeply that they have spies in positions of high authority in the CIA and the FBI ... but then we discover Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

One of the primary tactics of propaganda is relentless repetition of the message. It doesn't really matter what you think of the message on your first hearing--that's long gone when you hear it in the back of your head after the 30th hearing. That's why "Beyond the Headlines" is a regular feature. This is the same tactic used by advertising campaigns. Advertising is propaganda. The father of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, laid out how it all works in a very important and influential little book truthfully titled, Propaganda.

Another tactic of propaganda is the form the message takes. I don't care if you tell me a hundred times the world is round, if your commercial has Hitler saying it, I'll probably start to doubt the message. That's why commercials use every day people (usually women) selling every day products--if we saw the CEO of Frigidaire asking us to buy his product, our mind would drift to what he gets out of it--profit. So he has to redirect your mind to what he want you to get out of the commercial--that attractive people just like you use it. "They do? Well, I don't want to be left out," your mind says, while you think you're logically weighing pros and cons.

So the Russian government puts out its party line in newspapers: its own mouthpiece Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and features in the Post meant to look real, b/c if you don't look too carefully, you'll assume it is real. And of course that's what Putin wants you to think: that his government, his democracy, his new puppet president--that they're all real.

Btw, for more on His High Putinage, stay tuned to Someone Like Putin.

New Focus

2008-04-20T02:34:00.001-04:00

So at long last, I've realized why I haven't been posting, and what I can do about it. As I have floated from point to point in the vast ocean of my interests, my blog came to feel too limiting, so I'm refocusing it. That is, I'm putting back on the wide-angle lens, based on all of my myriad interests. Now, don't worry, all that Germanic and obscure linguistic stuff isn't going anywhere--like curious explorations of how Vatican and Wednesday come from the same root. Still, I have a few areas in particular I'm looking forward to exploring, all in some vague way related to language.

I'd like to serve a slightly more definite "public diplomacy" purpose by looking at some aspects of other languages that have lessons for understanding other cultures--something Americans are so tragically bad at. The sad part really is not that Americans are bad at languages--you can't know you're bad at something you don't try. But by not opening those horizons for ourselves, we do keep ourselves needlessly from the opportunity for more precise thought. George Orwell makes this point famously--and brilliantly--in his 1946 essay on Politics and the English Language.

I'd also like to look again at the whole prescriptivist/descriptivist approaches to language. The prescriptivist grammar school approach to what is "correct" in language is certainly inadequate--to what other field do we feel it is sufficient to apply a grammar school understanding in our adult lives? Yet the strict descriptivism that I think I see in linguistic academia seems a bit restrictive in its own way: If Keynesian prescriptivism ignores the unpredictability of human nature and therefore the fact that languages evolve naturally over time, laissez-faire descriptivism may be too afraid to view language as a tool--one which others will master even if we don't.

In other words, I'm interested in the the whole idea of language being a tool of humanity, and the various applications this has for strategic communication, rhetoric, propaganda, semantic battles in public discourse--the conscious use of language as a tool by people, or the unconscious use of people as tools by language.

Most Unread Books Meme

2007-11-19T21:26:00.000-05:00

Meme: The 106 Most Unread Books (according to LibraryThing)

(Bold is for books you've read. Italics for books you've started but haven't finished. Strikethrough is for books you found unreadable. And, finally, leave the ones you haven't read as they are.)

I have a lot of reading to do. And I've enjoyed everything I've bolded below.
=================

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged 

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - Present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit

In Cold Blood

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

A New One

2007-09-05T17:05:00.000-04:00

Here's one I haven't heard of before: documentation of a Basque-Icelandic pidgin that developed about 400 years ago. Sailors and traders have to communicate somehow, so they ended up with this interesting combination of languages. Also mentioned in the link: evidence of a 16th-century basque-algonquinian language.

H/t languagehat.

Linguistic forced adoption

2007-09-04T19:55:00.000-04:00

I wish more linguists were language teachers.

In the last couple of years I've done some tutoring in Latin. Part of the program in teaching Latin usually includes a specific focus on what English words have descended from the vocabulary taught in each lesson. I discovered a small pet peeve on my part when I noticed that the kids' teacher often gave them words that, while related to the Latin word, did not come from them. E.g.: English night from Latin nox, noctis. Yes, we have very many words that come from Latin (let's see, so far I've already used: tutoring, usually, includes, specific, focus, descended, vocabulary, discovered, part, noticed, related). But we do speak a Germanic language, after all, and lots of our words go back from modern English to Old English to Proto-Germanic to Indo-European. (I'm skipping steps here, of course, but the route is clear nonetheless, and doesn't pass through Latin.)

So if Indo-European is the parent language, then the languages that descended from her dialects into their own separate languages are the daughter languages: Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian, Slavic, Germanic, etc. That makes Latin a sister of (proto-)Germanic. She may be an elder sister, but a sister nonetheless. So if an Indo-European root yields words in both Latin and Germanic, then we say they both come from IE, not that the Germanic word comes from Latin, or vice-versa. Let's trace a few random words to get this distinction down.

Night. Not from Latin. There is a direct line from Modern to Middle to Old English (niht, neaht) to proto-Germanic naht, which also yields nahts in old Gothic, Nacht in German, natt in Norwegian, etc. Parallel to the Germanic naht (sisters, again) would be Latin nox, noct- and Greek nyx, nyxt-, as both descend from the Indo-European root nek^w-t-.

Cry. From Latin. This word has an interesting etymology, recently posted at Language Hat. It is one of many words that came into Middle English through Old French and Latin. It doesn't appear in any form in Old English, and therefore doesn't come from Proto-Germanic.

Picture. From Latin. Pictus, past participle of pingere, plus the -ura suffix, came directly into Middle English. (The pingere form, having morphed to peindre in old French, finds itself with a new past participle form--peint--that also comes into English as paint.)

At. Not from Latin. The Latin preposition ad is related, but as a sister (not a mother) to the Germanic at. (Ado also comes from Germanic at, but through Norse.)

I'm not sure why it bothers me that people attribute to Latin words that came from Germanic; it's not like the English language has its feelings hurt, and either way kids are learning that languages are connected. And yet, Latin is so obviously important, it doesn't need help from false attribution; whereas I always enjoy pointing out the Germanic character still strong in our language (since it is the most Romancified of the Germanic family). Mostly I guess I just like it when people are precise, and while I know too much about how languages change to expect precision from the average speaker, I would like teachers to be able to make the distinction, or know enough to look it up.

Cool Quotes #11: The Decline of English

2007-09-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

There seems to have been in every period in the past, as there is now, a distinct apprehension in the minds of very many worthy persons that the English tongue is always in the condition approaching collapse and that arduous efforts must be put forth persistently to save it from destruction.

--Thomas R. Lounsbury, grammarian (1908).

China Fixes Signs, For Great Justice

2007-09-02T21:20:00.001-04:00

This article is from back in February, but I just came across it while browsing funny signs and bad translations. Apparently the coming of the Olympics has Beijing all embarassed with the prospect of the rest of the world seeing the horrendously funny translating job displayed on many of their signs, and there's a campaign underway to fix the signage around Beijing:

For the next eight months, 10 teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city's parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.

(Eight months starting last February, and lasting the rest of this year.) You absolutely must click on the picture and enjoy the ~~horror~~ slide show.

The funniest part to me is the actual resistance to removing such signs on the part of nostalgic Westerners. It's ok, guys, we'll always have Zero Wing.

Language Stops Plane

2007-08-31T02:18:00.000-04:00

Language Log reports that the mere speaking of Arabic got air passengers suspicious enough to alert authorities to ... the speaking of Arabic. Now that I'm studying Arabic in more earnest than previously, I hope this won't cause undue concern--ok, I admit, I don't really care if people have a problem with it. And anyway, my pasty white northern Europeanness probably will work in my favor in the eyes of similar suspicious passengers. Seriously: you can't live in the modern world and be terribly surprised to hear just about any language, especially one spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. (And I'll admit here I was spoiled growing up in Brooklyn and hearing everything!) But if you do think of Arabic primarily as a language that many of our enemies speak, wouldn't you want more people speaking it? Anyway, Bill Poser's point about what languages terrorists actually speak is well made--I better be careful who I speak French around.

Aryanland

2007-08-29T23:40:00.000-04:00

Reading up on Central Asian history and names and such took me to the word Turan, a vague term used in medieval Persian literature for the land of Turkic and other peoples beyond Persia, meaning literally "land of the Tur". Interesting enough, especially given the article's attempt to sort out historical common usage from actual ethnic, geographic, and linguistic distinctions (always a tricky job), but what struck me was the analogy provided for the formation of the word:

Tūrān ("land of the Tūrya" like Ērān, Īrān = "land of the Ārya")

I never realized the etymology of the name of Iran before.

Incidentaly, the A-to-E vowel change also gives us the name of England out of Angla-lond, as well as word pairs like man-men, Denmark-Dane, and even ultimately star-steer. In Old English this is called I-mutation, since you mutated the sound of the first vowel by anticipating the sound of the I in the following syllable. This mutation remained even after the syllable with the I, often a inflectional (grammatical) ending, had been dropped. There are other examples in Old English that don't look like they apply in Modern English because lots of Old English a's have become modern O's.* But if you allow for this, you can see the effect of I-mutation in pairs like whole/hale and heal (OE hal/hæl, halian), strong and strength (OE strang, strengþu), long and length (OE lang, lengþu), old and elder (OE ald, ieldra), know and knew (OE cnawan, cneow).

*This is where we get off having the O-sound represented by "oa" as in boat, throat, coat, etc. The A in Old English bat was pronounced close enough to an O that people noted it by writing an O next to the A. I assume the same origin for the Scandinavian letter Å, except scribes there wrote the O on top instead of to the side.

A Haiku

2007-08-24T23:57:00.000-04:00

New place, web access
computer that works again
and back to blogging.

Unlikely Germanic Book Ideas

2006-12-08T20:01:00.000-05:00

Because, you know, books are always my favorite gifts... ;-) Here are some unlikely gift/book ideas from Germanic history.

10. How to Win Friends and Influence People - by Aethelred the Unready

9. Dinner Guest Etiquette - by Grendel

8. One Family, One Land: Preserving Your Estate for Posterity - by Charles the Great

7. Peace and Mercy: Keys to a Happy Realm - by Ermanaric the Ostrogoth

6. "For I am Meek and Humble of Heart": A Treatise on the Passive Virtues - by Eirikr Blood-axe

5. Glories of the Frankish Realm - by Widukind the Saxon

4. Your Word is Your Bond: The Importance of Honoring Treaties - by Guthrum of Danish East Anglia

3. 101 Great Tips on Beauty and Diplomacy - by Egil Skallagrimsson

2. Keepin' it Real: Function Over Form - by Childeric III the Merovingian

1. Winning the Two Front War - by Harald of Wessex

As if there had been any doubt

2006-11-30T03:09:00.000-05:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

This actually was a pretty cool quiz: By which I mean I like it b/c it asks mostly about things I tend to listen for on my own. The Mary-marry-merry test is one of the first things I came up with when I moved from Brooklyn to Virginia--as most of my friends know.

Two cheers for the new Tolkien Encyclopedia!

2006-11-06T21:52:00.000-05:00

Not three, b/c as Mike Drout relates, plenty of disappointments surround it. Nevertheless, it exists, and there is moderate rejoicing. It sounds like a worthy tome either way, but when you know the great height something could have been, it's adequacy often doesn't seem adequate. Regardless: thank you, Mike, for your hard work on what I'm sure is still an awesome accomplishment.

Internets and Englishes, Preciousss

2006-11-05T15:06:00.000-05:00

Lauren over at Polyglot Conspiracy has an interesting post on a NYT Magazine article on the Internet and the Oxford English Dictionary. I'm a little surprised that there are still so few linguists that are internet-savvy; despite the strictness of the current attestation requirements that Lauren points out, still you'd think more people would be studying what must be one of the greatest conduits for language change (in English at least) since the Normans. For example, the article mentions how words extinct in one place (perhaps considered more "standard") may still survive somewhere else--i.e., the internet allows for documentation of the many world "Englishes". An interesting article and post.

Building a Fantasy Language Team

2006-11-03T11:27:00.000-05:00

It's the early middle ages, and you and your friends are putting together your Fantasy Language Teams when a three-way deal starts to suggest itself. You're playing Old English, but your word eagðyrl, just hasn't been scoring the usage you'd hoped. You look over to Old Norse and see the word vindauga, who's languishing where he is, but you think, with a little retooling, a little training, he could have a place on your team and really become a household name.

Meanwhile, Team Norse is looking to replace vindauga with something else, but they're not interested in your eagðyrl. They're more interested in the Romance player fenestra. Fenestra's all the rage: he'll end up winning the Vocabulary League's highest prize--the Import Cup--both in France as fenêtre and in Germany as Fenster.

So what can you, Old English, give to Old High German or Old French to persuade them to send fenestra north, thereby allowing Norse to release vindauga? Well, there were many borrowings throughout history, but to pick one, let's go with Sonnabend. (You don't have to trade for the same position, after all.) The day before Sunday has several names among Germanic lands. One of the German words, Samstag comes from sabbath. If you say Samstag with a cold, you'll hear the inherent relationship between b's and m's: hence sabb[ath]'s Day > sab's Tag > Samstag.

In England, the day's dedication to pagan Saturn prevailed in the name Saturday--an irony, since the Christian missionaries to the continent preferred 'Sun-eve', or sunnanæfen, cognate of what would become the other German word for Saturday, Sonnabend. So the English word is Roman-influenced, but the German word is Old English.

<aside>Note that German did already have the Germanic roots for sun and eve. Strictly speaking, this isn't a word borrowing, but a borrowed translation. Case in point: The telephone allows you to hear things far away, hence its name from Greek tele-, far, and phoné, sound. The English word is put together from words borrowed from Greek. But German puts its word together from native Germanic roots: Fernsprecher = fern, far + sprecher, speaker. The same thing applies to Sonnabend: native (German) roots, influenced by Old English construction (sunnan + æfen > Sonn + Abend).</aside>

Anyway, with the contribution of OE sunnanæfen to German Sonnabend we can call our three-way Fantasy trade complete. Fenestra goes to Team Norse where it will become, e.g., Swedish fönster. Norse vindauga, literally 'wind-eye', comes to Old English where it will become window. OE eagðyrl is cut from the team. And Old English sends sunnanæfen to German where it becomes a household name every week as Sonnabend.

Bottom line: no one kept their original word for 'window', except possibly Old French. German and Norse took the Romance root. English has a Germanic root, but not the original Old English one. And while French kept the Romance root, it has plenty of words of Germanic origin as well (matter for another post some day).

There are no A's buried in the cemetery

2006-11-02T20:51:00.000-05:00

A little mnemonic device for All Souls' Day.

Speaking of mnemonic, here's a root that spans Indo-European. That odd pair of nasal consonants at the beginning of the word shows up in various forms all over the place. The word's Greek ancestor was mnémōn. It also comes into English (memory) from Latin memoria. Germanic languages had their own version, too. Old English had the verb gemunan 'remember', and its umlauted version gemyndgian, whence modern English mind.

Other relatives in this far-flung family include amnesia, money, monster, (auto-)matic, mandarin, mantra, Muse, and German minnesinger. For more, check out the entry in the Indo-European Roots Index.

Cool Quotes #10: How to Read a Saga

2006-09-30T18:40:00.000-04:00

If you've ever been annoyed by a friend who criticizes a book or a movie for not being realistic enough--if the words "Just be quiet and watch the movie" have ever dangled from your tongue--then know this is an age-old problem. The author of Göngu-Hrolf's Saga is right there with you.

Since this tale nor anything else can be made to please everyone, nobody need believe any more of it than he wants to believe. All the same the best and most profitable thing is to listen while a story is being told, to enjoy it and not be gloomy: for the fact is that as long as people are enjoying the entertainment they won't be thinking any evil thoughts. Nor is it a good thing when listeners find fault with a story just because it happens to be uninformative or clumsily told. Nothing so unimportant is ever done perfectly.

And the best line comes at the end:

I'd like to thank those who've listened and enjoyed the story, and since those who don't like it won't ever be satisfied, let them enjoy their own misery. AMEN.

German is Chic!

2006-09-29T22:07:00.000-04:00

At least, "chic" is German, apparently. I've been periodically picking up the two volumes I have of Bastian Sick's Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, a sort of German version of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves I suppose. Since I'm such a sucker for interesting or ironic etymologies, I loved reading about the word chic (that's French for 'chic'), which was borrowed into German with the spelling Schick.

But where did French get the word? From Latin? Nope. Says Sick: "The middle low German word schick stood for likeness, form, custom; schicklich had the meaning 'appropriate, becoming'." So the modern German Schick is a German-French-German loanword. And you thought the French had the monopoly on chic!

English: It's In There!

2006-08-10T02:17:00.000-04:00

Looking back at the post I just wrote, my eyes (as always) gravitate toward the foreign words, and my mind (as usual as well) gravitates to any related words in English (or other languages.) I love how all 9 of the Latin, Old English, and Old Norse words in that post have cognates or descendants in modern English:

Villa is English, but so are villain + related forms, the -ville suffix, and nasty. Insula gives us insular of course, but also the 's' in 'island', which otherwise comes from Old English. No really: the 's' was added to iland by people mistaking the word's etymology as coming from French isle, from Latin insula. (Check out the Word Origins section at dictionary.com, s.v. "island".) Domus yields 'domestic' and related words.

The Old English words cot and hám, beget 'cottage', and 'home'. Seld is a tough one, but the same root can be found in familiar proper names like La Salle (one of many Germanic roots that survived in French).

Old Norse hýbýli became Norwegian hybel, and I'd be surprised if it isn't related to English 'hovel'. Hús, of course, is the same word in Old English that yielded 'house' (so that Scottish and Eastern Canadian pronunciation of house is really quite ancient), and garðr's Old English cognate geard had its 'g' pronounced like a 'y', hence the modern form 'yard'.

Postcasts and Podcards

2006-08-10T01:21:00.000-04:00

Did I get that right? Anyway, I just got a postcard from Winchester from Agent 9, a friend whom I see too infrequently. It's got a picture of the statue of King Alfred I use as my avatar, as well as Winchester's High Street, and the Butter Cross (no, it's not a monument to Christian dairy farmers). Thanks, Nine! I deeply envy your trapsing around the British Isles while I schlepp around northern Virginia.

I also uploaded a bunch of files to the Bitter Scroll podcast. They're the recordings I made for the Gallery of Germanic Languages at AncientWorlds.net, so they're not new, but at least they're all in one place. (Thanks to Aelfwine Scylding to hosting them for a while.)

Other news at AncientWorlds includes the continued development of "neighborhoods"; they're about to start beta testing the ability to "move in" to places, in any of three types of houses (social levels). So in Rome they'll have insula, domus, and villa. What's more, it sounds like the more multilingual "worlds" like Germania and the Orient will have terms appropriate to each location within it--i.e., that if you move into, say, Winchester in Wessex you'll be able to choose to live in a cot, a hám, or a seld, but if you want your persona to live in Trondheim, he may have a hýbýli, a hús, or a garðr to choose from. More interactivity will be good. There are always interesting things coming down the pipeline at AW.

An Awesome Soccer Side-Effect

2006-07-12T00:56:00.000-04:00

[slightly updated/edited]
These two articles, on a side-effect of the World Cup in the homeland I've never seen, heartens me to no end. I remember when the "collective depression" remark was made and was depressed for Germany; now I'm happy for her. Wow, do I wish I could be over there right now!

Feelings of patriotism stifled for decades by the Holocaust came to the fore...

Finally! I've always been patriotic both for the USA and for Germany, but when people around you have knowledge of German history that stops at 1944 ... It's hard to explain to some people how you can be patriotic for what's good about a country that's done something bad, or for what came after the bad. The answer, of course, can be gleaned from statements like this:

Germany was always full of friendly and optimistic people like Klinsmann -- it's just that they were often drowned out by all the complainers and pessimists.

The good was always there. It's just sometimes like trying to explain to a friend why you still love your brother, who hurt your friend deeply long ago, but has since grown better and wiser. Still, I wonder if this German patriotism wasn't still easier here than in Germany sometimes. (How do my German readers feel about this?)

You know something seismic has happened when England fans who came to Germany with inflatable Spitfires singing " 10 German Bombers" suddenly start supporting the German national team.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed out this unprecedented phenomenon in an opinion piece for Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, and declared: "The old clichés have been replaced by a new, positive and more fair image of Germany."

Again, I'm gladdened to no end, both that Germans are/feel different, and that people are starting to feel differently about them. I don't mind all that much that there are stereotypes of countries out there. Positive stereotypes, if rather useless, can be fun. (E.g., I now know to plan transportation for any outing with my friends, even ones I'm not technically organizing, and I'll just tell Mikaela it's b/c I'm half German.) ;-) Negative stereotypes, however, regardless of how often you think you see them coming true, are not only uncharitable, they're rather pointless and only hinder you from actually knowing someone.

Anyway, I'm glad Germany was able to put such a great showing of hospitality, friendliness, and yes, organization. They've done a lot to get past their somewhat recent history; now maybe everyone else can do the same in their preconceived ideas about them.

Said Britain's Times newspaper,

"Never mind the final, Germans are the real World Cup winners."

And this despite the temptations to despair and depression that preceded the Cup. A great line from the article:

It seems the only people who had any concerns ahead of the World Cup were the hosts themselves. In fact, capital-A "Angst" dominated the run-up to the tournament. Not just the normal jitters any organizer would have, but deep, ponderous Angst. The German kind.

Hm. Speaking of stereotypes, I guess I do get that quite a bit... At least I can also be organized when I need to be. And friendly. (When I need to be.)

Herzlichen Glückwünsche, Deutschland!

Update: The International Herald-Tribune has this article, perhaps a better expression of what has happened, and in context of Germany's "psychological journey" since WWII.

Simplified Spelling

2006-07-08T16:20:00.000-04:00

From sauvagenoble's post on LingNews.net, I found this story about the ongoing desire to simplify English spelling. Here is an attempt to organize what I think about this.

1. Even if we start spelling English with the International Phonetic Alphabet, we will never be able to represent spoken English with complete accuracy. Every language, even more "phonetic" ones, like German and Spanish according to the article, has discrepancies between spoken and written forms. This comes about both from change over time and change across regions. How will you represent "talk"? With a closed aw-sound, like in England and New York, or with the more open ah-sound of the rest of North America? Will my three separate pronunciations of Mary, marry, and merry be taught as wrong if simplified spelling means there are no longer three different vowels (long a, short a, short e) in these words? Even the transcription on the IPA's own page chooses the r-less pronunciation of international, taking one side of a division that spans the entire Anglophonic world.

Language change over time is also a challenge to simplified spelling. Everytime we look at a word and realize we (or some of us) have changed how we say it, do we change spelling accordingly? It seems like simplified spelling will only reflect the pronunciation of those who enact it, at the time they enact it. And as for change over longer periods, simplifying spelling means Shakespeare--writing in early modern English and thus a challenging version of the same language we speak--will instantly become for students about accessible as Chaucer or even Beowulf.

The goal of matching spoken with written English will never be met because they serve two different purposes: Spoken language matches the varying situations of life, while written language holds them all together just close enough to preserve a fragile unity. We all have multiple versions of spoken language: public-speaking, job-interview, talking to grandparents, chatting with friends, talking to pets, cursing wayward computers, etc. And this doesn't just entail variance in vocabulary ("stupid" vs "ill-advised"; "not my F-ing problem" vs. "perhaps you should check with..."), but pronunciation as well ("gonna" vs. "going to", "nah" vs. "no", "yeah" vs. "yes"). And of course the fine line between what constitutes a different pronunciation vs. a different word (Southern "cuss" vs. standard "curse") itself only highlights the difficulty of trying to nail down standard English pronunciation into a simplified spelling.

2. Moreover, simplified spelling rests upon the idea of representing spoken speech in written. Certainly this has been the goal of writing throughout history, but in this age of literacy and electronic access to written data, the relationship between a word's spoken and written versions is more complex, with each affecting the other. E.g., when I see the word pin, my mind thinks of the word as it sounds when I say it. Yet when I hear a word spoken, my mind really does three things: 1) it registers the sounds it heard and classifies them based on the categories I've already formed (learning more languages here definitely broadens the mind), 2) it recalls the spelling of that word, and 3) it recalls how I pronounce it (the 'right' pronunciation, in a purely referential sense). So when I hear my New York friend M say pin, I hear the sounds in my head, imagine the word 'pin', and automatically compare what I heard with how I say it myself. Ah, but when most of gaetanus' family says pin, I know that's how they say the word 'pen'. It's the written form that helps us both know what we're saying, as is obvious from the very simple act of saying "How do you spell that?" when you don't understand a word spoken by someone with a different dialect from you. This easy solution, referring to the unifying written form of a word, would be lost with simplified spelling; and when we have to ask someone to describe what they mean, rather than simply spelling it, we are talking about a completely different word from ours, which can mean the difference between two dialects and two languages.

3. The article says of simplified spelling proponents:

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.

[To transliterate the last sentence, "They say the bee celebrates the ability of a few students to master a difficult system that stumps many others who could do just as well if spelling were simpler."]

First off: "th ability" ? Why not "the", or even "thee" in this case? And "fue"? Why not "fyu"? Granted, these were written by the reporter, not the proponents of simplified spelling, but I'd love to know what their system will be, because it's bound to have inconsistencies of its own.

Seriously though, the spelling bee isn't just a matter of fabricating a system for a few people to be good at, and then congratulating those few that they're good at it. The reason those talented young spellers are encouraged to be good spellers--and rewarded when they are--is because to be a good speller of English you must study a lot of worthwhile stuff from other languages. In learning the why behind the spellings of many even basic words, those bright young boys and girls learn a lot about Latin, Greek, Old English, German, Hebrew, French, Anglo-Norman, and myriad other languages that have contributed to the language we have today. They also learn rules for how English typically assimilates words from each language. One of the reasons English always seems like it has more exceptions to spelling and pronunciation rules than other languages is because we have multiple sets of rules we're drawing from.

(Note that I'm not talking about syntax, which in English has always been predominantly Germanic, even with non-Germanic vocabulary: Hence "attorneys general" is a construction that English speakers are generally aware of, but that always feels a bit foreign and awkward, hence the tendency to turn it from noun-adjective to compound noun and pluralize it as "attorney generals" (which is still currently grammatically incorrect). Anyway, the native Germanic syntax of English highlights again the absurdity of saying that we shouldn't split infinitives because they weren't split in Latin or some such. If we're going to not split infinitives, it should be for a reason internal to English, and be natural to native speakers, and serve some purpose related to communication: clarity, expressiveness, etc.)

Anyway, the rules of English are definitely complex, especially in America where foreign language are usually taught waaaay too late in school, and English is only taught as having a basic set of rules with a million exceptions, instead of several interacting sets of rules with a more typical amount of exceptions. As a learning tool, though, English can't be beat for what our own native words teach you along the way, and you might try teaching it better before you ditch its historical and international richness.

Mass Metrics

2006-06-21T20:56:00.000-04:00

[Update: fixed links]

caelestis over at sauvage noble has written a series of posts on the new draft English translation of the Roman Catholic Mass, not from a theological point of view, but from one of metrics. Check out his analyses of the mea culpa, the gloria, and the credo. Those who know me know how much I appreciate translations that capture the rhythm and feel of their original (e.g., Tolkien's Gothic poem, Bagme Bloma), so caelestis' analyses were relevant to me, perhaps more than to fellow Catholics of mine who focus on meaning alone. I really like the words I say every day/week to be pleasing to the ear.

On the other hand, I also acknowledge that theology is a science, and words that are synonymous in everyday usage can be the difference between orthodoxy and heresy, and I'd rather have people repeating something that's a little awkward metrically if it means they don't drift into an incorrect understanding of something important. Other bloggers, more qualified (or at least louder) than I, have already and will continue to pick apart the current (to be honest, kinda free and loose in places) translation of the Latin of the Mass. For my part, I can remember even as a kid looking at facing-page English-Latin missals and wondering if there was extra significance to phrases like "and with your spirit" instead of just "and also with you", or "that you should enter under my roof" instead of "to receive you". Knowing theology, there usually is--words mean things--and I hate that nagging feeling like I'm missing stuff, especially if it's because of a silly translation issue.

Maybe in a perfect world, or at least in the perfect language, what we say would be perfectly mirrored by our speech, so that words would always sound like what they meant. I suppose that would mean we'd be speaking a form of poetry all the time (maybe in heaven?).

I also noted caelestis' mention that English tends to have a higher register when more Greek and Latin/French-rooted words appear, versus a lower, more common feel when native Germanic roots dominate more. I'm sure this is an accepted observation by many linguists, and I've noticed it myself (before I heard others confirm my thoughts). I guess I just think it's interesting, and admittedly (given my stated interests), a wee bit gratifying, that after all this time, there's a deep-rooted, almost unconcious linguistic sense that Germanic words are more native or down-to-earth or something, even when the synonymous Latinate word has been around for centuries.

Finally, the Word Nerds podcast did an episode a while back about language registers, and (for example) how we are often able to recite prayers we have't said for decades, all because we remember that particular prayer-style rhythm it had. (Be forewarned: Howard Shepherd gangsta-raps the beginning of Beowulf!) I think this is related to the times in which religious training often proves useful in life: not just when we feel like talking or praying, or when we're deliberating what's right or wrong in a given situation, but (perhaps more importantly) when we're at a loss and don't know who to turn to, or when we don't deliberate about our actions. The reflex habits built into us, when done right, make us better prepared not just for the challenges life hurls at us, but for the challenges we breeze by and don't even recognize as challenges--but they would have been without a bit of training, or at least some vestige of a good habit (virtue).

Ite, blogga est.

[Go, it's gebloggedt!]

Old Germanic Sound Gallery & the Languages of the Franks

2006-06-18T23:54:00.000-04:00

So I finally got myself to record something in six of the old Germanic languages that we have documents in (sorry, I didn't get to Old Frisian this time around) for a little event at AncientWorlds called the Thousand Years Faire. There's a thread there called the Gallery of Germanic Languages, and for each language I put together a little description, together with at least one audio resource. I'm the most confident about my pronunciation of the Old English since I've studied it the longest, then of the Gothic (just because I love its sound so much), down to the three Old High German dialects, which I'm the least confident about my pronunciation of. (Dangling preposition alert: deal with it.) :-)

Here are the posts for each (my persona on AW is Eirikr Knudsson, a nice Old English-Norse combo-name). Those of you who are actual current students or teachers of these languages are very welcome to correct my pronunciation (please). [Note: it's not supposed to work this way, but if you navigate to these links with Firefox, the embedded sound files of my readings start automatically (except for the OHG one).]

Gothic

Old Saxon

Old High German

Old English

Old Norse

Old Frankish

I called "Old Frankish" any language/dialect associated with the Franks, which as you'll learn when you read the last post, were a span of dialects mostly mutually intelligible, but which fall into what are today classified as two separate "languages": Old Low Franconian and Old High German. (Old Low German is the same as Old Saxon.) Funny how much human knowledge tries to chop up into measurable units realities that are in fact fluid and stretch across spectrums.

I've been especially interested in Old Low Franconian and the Franconian dialects of Old High German recently--an interest sparked several months ago by my musing at the Frankish tribe's switch from a Germanic to a Romance language, and wondering what language Charlemagne spoke. Does anyone know anything solid about when this change took place? It seems to me that the Franks moving into Gaul would have meant a lot more contact with native Latin (and even Celtic?) speakers. But surely it takes a while for an entire nation to switch languages. I imagined Charlemagne would have done much to effect this change himself, both by his promotion of schools and learning, and his (family's) close relationship with the Catholic Church. (My namesake in the kingdom of Wessex had similar interests in both regards, but found himself so frustrated at the state of Latin education in his land that he had scribes translate important texts into his native English until such time as people's knowledge of Latin good enough to render translations unnecessary.)

Back to the language of the Franks, then: the earliest example of Old French is the Strassburg Oaths of A.D. 842. This Wikipedia article has a great description plus the original Latin/Old French/Old High German text. (Notice the German dialect used by Louis the German's troops is Rhenish Franconian: politically it's Frankish, but linguistically it's High German.)

So sometime between the arrival of the Germanic Franks into Gaul in the 3rd century, their conversion to Catholicism in the 4th, and the Strasburg Oaths in the 9th, this wholesale language change took place. My sources list the Old Low Franconian dialect I recorded as being "east", associated with Limburg and Aachen. Obviously these areas retain Germanic dialects today (Dutch and German respectively). Moreover, not only was Aachen Charlemagne's palace-home, but the Eastern section of the Frankish kingdom (Austrasia), covering roughly northern Germany and the Low Countries, was the home of Charlemagne's line of Mayors of the Palace (pre-Pippin) / Frankish Kings (post-Pippin). Thus my conclusion that Charlemagne's line would still have spoken Germanic dialects--something between Rhenish Franconian (=Old High German) and Old East Low Franconian.

Feedback is welcome!! (Must ... refrain from ... obvious ... pun about ... being frank ...)

GGL Repost: Old English

2006-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old English

Old English is probably the most familiar (if any) of the old Germanic languages. Bede lists the tribes that sailed over to Britain in the fifth century as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. the Angles came from the small area jutting out into the Baltic Sea called Angeln (named for the people's primary occupation of fishing—hence 'angling'—not for its shape, since this geometric meaning of 'angle' is ultimately Latin, not Germanic). The Saxon homeland, of course, was and still is in northern Germany; and the Jutes came from what is now mainland Denmark (Jutland, now called Jylland).

Besides these three tribes, it seems likely that the migration also included a fair number of Frisians, both because their home, Friesland or Frisia, lay in the Angles' and Saxons' path to the sea, and because Frisian even today is arguably the closest language to English.

The different tribes settled in different areas, creating the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, as well as different dialects. The Angles formed the kingdoms of East Anglia in the east, Northumberland in the north, and Mercia in the midlands. (JRR Tolkien, whose family was from the west midlands, made the Mercian dialect of Old English the language of his Riders of Rohan.) The Saxons settled the very logically named Essex, Sussex, and Wessex ("East Saxons", "South Saxons", and "West Saxons"). The Jutes settled in Kent and southern Hampshire.

The standard form of Old English first encountered by students today is West Saxon, due to the great efforts of King Alfred of Wessex, not just to increase learning, but also his shrewd policy of having important religious and cultural works translated into English until his subjects' knowledge of "book Latin" (boc-læden) had improved enough to make translations unneeded. See this post for more on the dialects of Old English.

In some ways, modern English has retained much of its Germanic heritage. Some sentences can be fashioned that are exactly the same in Old and modern English. E.g.: "Harold is swift; his hand is strong and his word grim." "His cornbin is full and his song is writen; grind his corn for him and sing me his song."* For the most part, though, Old English is undecipherable to the modern English speaker. Partly this is because of the influx of vocabulary from Romance languages that English experienced, even while its basic grammatical structure remained Germanic. Between the Norman Invasion in 1066 and the incredible influence of scholarly Latin in the Middle English period, English is like a Germanic tree with Romance leaves grafted over one side. (Approx. 25% of the English words in this post are ultimately of Romance origin.)

Old English has some characteristics in common with its long-lost cousin on the continent, Old Saxon, such as dropping nasals (n's and m's). Compare:

us: OEng/Sax ús/ûs, versus OHGer. unsih, OFrank. uns, Gothic unsis.
known: OEng/Sax cúð/cûð, versus OHGer. kund, OFrank. kundo, Gothic kunþs.
five: OEng/Sax fíf/fîf, versus OHGer./Gothic fimf.

Following are several sound files demonstrating Old English. First is the Lord's Prayer, recorded by yours truly in the standard West Saxon dialect. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier.

The Lord's Prayer, in Old English

Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama gehálgod.
Tó becume ðín rice.
Gewurde ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.

Urne dægwhamlícan hlaf syle ús tódæg.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd ðu ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþlice.

The second sound file is from the Lowlands-L website, dedicated to preservation of languages and dialects related to the Lowlands (Low German, Dutch, and the like).

The Wren, in Old English

The modern English version of this story is here. Samples of many other languages are here.

Finally, I read, translate, and discuss the first part of the Dream of the Rood in this episode of my Bitter Scroll podcast.

* Taken from Bruce Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England.

GGL Repost: Old Franconian

2006-06-12T23:48:00.000-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old (Low) Franconian

The Frankish tribes, and later, the Frankish Empire, spanned across Germany and France, and from the Netherlands to southern France. Obviously the language spoken by the people was bound to develop regional dialects. And although speakers of these dialects could all pretty much understand each other, in some of the Frankish dialects, people started pronouncing b’s like p’s, g’s like k’s, and in general, participating in the High German Consonant Shift.

Since this particular shift is what modern linguists use to distinguish the High German language from the Low Franconian (and Saxon) languages, we have the interesting factoid that some of the Franks spoke High German dialects, while others spoke "Low Franconian" dialects. But don’t worry—they didn’t know!! As far as they knew, they all spoke (with inevitable variations) roughly the same Germanic language: the language ‘of the people’ (diutisc, hence the modern word deutsch), or specifically ‘of the Franks (frankisc, hence the words ‘Frankish’ and ‘French’). Only when the language of the Franks was no longer Germanic, but Romance, did frankisc mean something different from diutisc.

The Frankish dialects that are NOT classified as dialects of the Old High German language are called Old Low Franconian. The dialect in the west (around Flanders, Brabant and north in Holland) would end up being the ancestor of modern Dutch; this dialect is called by the logical but long name of Old West Low Franconian.

The dialect in the east, probably what Charlemagne would have spoken, is the only dialect that we have anything written in (at least not until the "Middle" stage of its history); this dialect is called—you guessed it!—Old East Low Franconian. This dialect was spoken around Limburg, and Aachen, where Charlemagne had his capital.

Old Low Franconian as a language obviously shares many characteristics in common with Old High German (such as retaining nasals [n’s and m’s] where continental Saxon and Anglo-Saxon dropped them). It also shares others with its fellow "low" Germanic language, Old Saxon (such as dislike for diphthongs in some cases).

Here is one sound file in Old Low Franconian. The Lord’s Prayer is not documented in this language, as far as I could tell, so I’ve recorded Psalm 61 (60 in King James or Douay-Rheims bibles). Given the special relationship the Franks had to the Church, we can certainly imagine some young lad in a monastery or school around Aachen in the 9th century, struggling with his Latin and praying the psalm in his own Germanic tongue…

Psalm 61 (60) in Old Low Franconian

Here's the text of this Psalm:

2. Gehôri, got, gebet mîn, thenke te gebede mînin.
3. Fan einde erthen te thi riep, so sorgoda herte mîn. An stêine irhôdus-tu mi;
4. Thû lêidos mi, uuanda gedân bist tohopa mîn, turn sterke fan antscêine fiundis.
5. Uuonon sal ic an selethon thînro an uueroldi, bescirmot an getheke fetharaco thînro.
6. Uuanda thu, got mîn, gehôrdos gebet mîn, gâui thu erui forhtindon namo thînin.
7. Dag ouir dag cuningis saltu gefuogan, jâr sîna untes an dag cunnis in cunnis.
8. Foluuonot an êuuon an geginuuirdi godis; ginâthi in uuârhêide sîna uua sal thia suocan?
9. Sô sal ic lof quethan namin thînin an uuerolt uueroldis, that ik geue gehêita mîna fan dage an dag.

And here's the English:

2. Hear, O God, my supplication: be attentive to my prayer,
3. To thee have I cried from the ends of the earth: when my heart was in anguish, thou hast exalted me on a rock. Thou hast conducted me;
4. For thou hast been my hope; a tower of strength against the face of the enemy.
5. In thy tabernacle I shall dwell for ever: I shall be protected under the covert of thy wings.
6. For thou, my God, hast heard my prayer: thou hast given an inheritance to them that fear thy name.
7. Thou wilt add days to the days of the king: his years even to generation and generation.
8. He abideth for ever in the sight of God: his mercy and truth who shall search?
9. So will I sing a psalm to thy name for ever and ever: that I may pay my vows from day to day.

GGL Repost: Old Norse

2006-06-12T23:18:00.001-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old Norse

Old Norse refers to the dialects of Old Germanic that made up the North Germanic branch—i.e., the languages of Scandinavia. (Do you remember what the two other branches are? East Germanic includes the speech of the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and other smaller tribes. West Germanic includes everything else: Old English, Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old High German, Old Frisian, as well as the mostly undocumented languages of the Lombards and others.)

Strictly speaking, the North Germanic languages are collectively called Old Scandinavian. In this usage, "Old Norse" refers just to the Western dialect—that of Norway and places west, such as Scotland, Dublin, and Iceland. The Old East Scandinavian dialect covered Sweden and Denmark, and their related enclaves in places like Russia and Latvia. But when listing the languages of the entire Germanic family, Old Norse can refer to all the dialects of Old Scandinavian.

Very convenient indeed for students of old Germanic languages is the fact that the language of Iceland today is practically the same as what the Vikings spoke when they settled the island. Since the time of the founding of Iceland in the ninth century, most other Germanic languages have passed from "old" to "middle" and "modern" stages, each stage being essentially a different language. (In English: compare the language of, say, Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, respectively.) In the case of Iceland, however, Old Norse and modern Icelandic are considered basically the same languages, the only real differences being, to a modest degree, in pronunciation and in spelling. (E.g., the name Eric is Eirikr in Old Norse, but Eirikur in modern Icelandic.) And in my humble and limited opinion, the Vikings share with the Goths the fascinating paradox of having a (perhaps) surprisingly soft, smooth-sounding language for a comparatively aggressive historical track-record.

And the sounds of their language did not go unnoticed by the Norse themselves. More than any of their linguistic cousins, the Norse not only contributed many great works in the great Germanic poetic tradition of alliterative verse (only Old English comes close to Norse in this regard), they also did the most experimentation and variation of their inherited poetic structure. Check out these posts (Part 1 and Part 2) for more on the poetic form inherited by all the old Germanic tribes, and this blog post for more on the variations peculiar to Old Norse. With the Poetic Edda and the many works of prose (the sagas and Prose Edda), the corpus of Old Norse literature vastly outweighs the corresponding "old" stages of all the other Germanic languages put together. (Old English literature is a clear second.)

Old Norse has many unique features that distinguish it from all of its Germanic cousins. For instance, the masculine –s ending that we see on many Latin, Greek, and even Gothic nouns survives in Old Norse, but in the process it got turned into an R. (Compare the following words for 'middle': Latin medius, Gothic midjis, Old English midd, Norse miðr.)

Also, Old Norse alone exhibits a form of "sharpening", where a word like proto-Germanic trîwa gets a hard g-sound, turning it into Old Norse tryggva; contrast with Old English triw (hence modern 'true') and Old High German triu (hence modern German treu).

Finally, many words that begin with a diphthong (two vowel sounds together) like eo or ea in English (old or modern) have been made into a consonant (a y-sound) in Old Norse, and are spelled j–. Compare:

earl: OE earl, ON jarl
earth: OE eorð, ON jörð
York: OE Eorwic, ON Jorvik

Notice also that the modern pronunciation of York shows Norse influence, since it was a Norwegian kingdom for a time.

Following is a sound file demonstrating Old Norse: the Lord's Prayer, recorded by yours truly. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier. (I admit some modern Icelandic pronunciation may have crept in.)

The Lord's Prayer, in Icelandic

Here's the text of the prayer in Old Norse:

Faðir vor; þú sem ert á himnum. Helgist þitt nafn. Til komi þitt ríki. Verði þinn vilji, svo á jörðu sem á himni. Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð. Og fyrirgef oss vorar skuldir; svo sem vér og fyrirgefum vorum skuldunautum. Eigi leið þú oss í freistni, heldur frelsa oss frá illu. Amen.

GGL Repost: Old High German

2006-06-11T11:15:00.000-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old High German

Old High German (Althochdeutsch) refers to the group of Germanic dialects that exhibited the High German Consonant Shift which originated in the highlands of southern Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. Some of these dialects include: Bavarian, Alemannic (southern rhine and Switzerland), Swabian (around Augsburg), East Middle German (around Erfurt), East Franconian (around Würzburg). Some dialects participated in this Shift only partially, so while they’re still "German", the dialects are called "Middle": such as Ripuarian Franconian (around Cologne) and Rhenish Franconian (around Frankfurt).

NOTICE! Even though many of these dialects have the word "Franconian" in their names, they are classified as dialects of Old High German, not of Old Frankish, since they participate (all in varying degrees) in the High German Consonant Shift. This is why parts of Germany are called Franken, ‘Franconia’. A different language entirely is Old Low Franconian (Old Frankish), which scholars identify as having at least two dialects, Old East Low Franconian and Old West Low Franconian. (See the lists below.)*

Old High German shares some characteristics with Old Low Franconian (language of the Franks and ancestor of modern Dutch): for example both tend to turn the vowel e into ie, and the vowel o into uo. (The second one’s just like Italian from Latin – compare buono, from bonus, ‘good’.) Both languages also retain nasals (n’s and m’s) where Old Saxon and Old English drop them: e.g. the words for ‘us’: Old High German unsis and Old Low Franconian uns, versus Old Saxon ûs and Old English ús (the same sounds, but with the respective long-vowel markers used by modern scholars).

Here are several sound files of Old High German: The first three are the Lord's Prayer in three different dialects, recorded by yours truly. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier. Obviously these dialects will sound very similar. But notice also how similar they sound to the Old Frankish recording, in the next post.

The Lord's Prayer, in the Bavarian dialect of Old High German

Fater unsêr, dû pist in himilum, kawuuîhit sî namo dîn,
piqhueme rîhhi dîn, uuesa dîn uuillo,
sama sô in himile est, sama in erdu.
pilipi unsraz emizzîgaz kip uns eogauuanna,
enti flâz uns unsro sculdi,
sama sô uuir flâzzamês unsrêm scolôm,
enti ni princ unsih in chorunka,
uzzan kaneri unsih fona allêm suntôn.

The Lord's Prayer, in the Alemannic dialect of Old High German

Fater unseer,
thu pist in himile,
uuihi namun dinan,
qhueme rihhi din,
uuerde uuillo din,
so in himile sosa in erdu.
prooth unseer emezzihic kip uns hiutu,
oblaz uns sculdi unseero,
so uuir oblazem uns sculdikem,
enti ni unsih firleiti in khorunka,
uzzer losi unsih fona ubile.

The Lord's Prayer, in the Rhenish Franconian dialect of Old High German

Fater unsêr,
thu in himilom bist,
giuuîhit sî namo thîn,
quaeme rîhhi thîn,
uuerdhe uuilleo thîn,
sama sô in himile endi in erthu.
Broot unseraz emezzîgaz gib uns hiutu,
endi farlâz uns sculdhi unsero,
sama sô uuir farlâzzêm scolôm unserêm,
endi ni gileidi unsih in costunga,
auh arlôsi unsih fona ubile.

Finally, the next sound file is from the Lowlands-L website, dedicated to preservation of languages and dialects related to the Lowlands (Low German, Dutch, and the like). Notice the name of the language on this page is "Diutisk". This is where the German word Deutsch comes from, and comes from the word for ‘people’ (diut in Old High German, þeod in Old English).

The Wren, in Old High German

(This seems to me to be in either one of the "Middle" dialects or in East Franconian, since past participle forms have the prefix ge-, like modern German, instead of ke-/ki-, which Old Bavarian and Old Alemannic tended to have.)

The English version of this story is here. Samples of many other languages are here.

* Just to recap, since I’m sure everyone’s confused, here’s a list of the main West Germanic dialects on the continent in the latter half of the first millennium AD, listed by language:

OLD LOW GERMAN Language
= Old Saxon (Dortmund, Hamburg)

OLD LOW FRANCONIAN Language
Old East Low Franconian (Limburg, Aachen)
Old West Low Franconian (Flanders, Brabant, north Holland) [became Modern Dutch]

OLD HIGH GERMAN Language

(a) "Middle" dialects:
Old Ripuarian Franconian (Cologne)
Old Moselle Franconian (Trier)
Old Rhenish Franconian (Frankfurt)
Old East Middle German (Erfurt)

(b) "High" dialects:
Old East Franconian (Würzburg)
Old Alemannic (Bern)
Old Swabian (Augsburg) [Swabian is sometimes classified as a subset of Alemannic.]
Old Bavarian (Munich, Regensburg)

GGL Repost: Old Saxon

2006-06-11T11:14:00.000-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Language: A Look at Old Saxon

Old Saxon was also called Old Low German, since it was one of two languages spoken by West Germanic tribes in the lower-lying northern region of central Europe. It is distinguished from Old High German, which was spoken in the higher elevations to the south.

Old Saxon had Germanic neighbors to the south (Old High German), west (Old Low Franconian), northwest (Old English), north (Old Norse), and at least originally, east (Gothic). Old Saxon shares many characteristics with all of them, but especially the West Germanic languages (those of the Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons). One thing that distinguishes Old Saxon from all of them is its almost universal dislike of diphthongs—turning one vowel into two sounds. Compare:

‘dead’: Old Saxon dôd, Old High German tôt, Old English dead, Old Norse dauðr, Gothic dauþs.

‘baptize’ (literally, ‘dip’): Old Saxon dôpian, Old High German toufan, Old Norse deypa, Gothic daupjan.

Here are two sound files of Old Saxon: The first is the Lord’s Prayer, recorded by yours truly. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier. [A special note about the Old Saxon version of the prayer in particular: unlike the other languages, this version is in typical old Germanic alliterative verse. This means that some words are added to fill up lines, but it also is a good chance to listen to how each line has one sound that tends to dominate by alliterative repetition.]

The Lord's Prayer, in Old Saxon

Fadar ûsa firiho barno,
thu bist an them hôhon himila-rîkea
geuuîhid sî thîn namo uuordo gehuuilico
cuma thîn craftag rîki
uuerþa thîn uuilleo obar thesa uuerold alla
sô sama an erþo sô thar uppa ist
an them hôhon himilo rîkea.

gef ûs dago gehuuilikes râd, drohtin the gôdo,
thîna hêlaga helpa, endi alât ûs hebenes uuard
managoro mênsculdio al sô uue ôþrum mannum dôan
ne lât ûs farlêdean lêþa uuihti
sô forþ an iro uuilleon sô uui uuirþige sind
ac help ûs uuiþar allun ubilon dâdiun.

The second sound file is from the Lowlands-L website, dedicated to preservation of languages and dialects related to the Lowlands (Low German, Dutch, and the like).

The Wren, in Old Saxon

The English version of this story is here. Samples of many other languages are here.

GGL Repost: Gothic

2006-06-11T01:45:00.000-04:00

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Gothic

Gothic is the oldest attested Germanic language, the Gothic translation of parts of the Bible being dated to the 4th century, and the first instances of Old English, Old High German, Saxon, or Norse not coming until at least 4 centuries later. Because Gothic is relatively close to the original primitive Germanic language, it is of great interest to linguists.

Gothic differs from its Germanic cousins in many ways. It is the only Germanic language to retain (in some cases) the Indo-European –s ending for masculine nouns and adjectives: compare Gothic hunds ‘dog/hound’ with its cognates, Latin canis, and Greek kunos. (Notice how the Indo-European k got softened to an h in Germanic.) Gothic is also the only Germanic language that didn’t change any of its inherited s’s or z’s into r’s. Compare:

‘teach’: Gothic laísjan, Old High German lêren, Old English læren (‘lore/learn’).
‘hoard’: Gothic huzd, Old High German hort, Old English hord.

Here are three sound files for Gothic: The first is the Lord's Prayer, recorded by yours truly. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier.

The Lord's Prayer, in Gothic

Atta unsar, þu in himinam,
weihnai namo þein,
qimai þiudinassus þeins,
wairþai wilja þeins,
swe in himina jah ana airþai.
hlaif unsarana þana sinteinan gif uns himma daga,
jah aflet uns þatei skulans sijaima,
swaswe jah weis afletam þaim skulam unsaraim,
jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai,
ak lausei uns af þamma ubilin.

The second file is found here: it’s the first episode of my own occasional Bitter Scroll podcast, where I read and translate a poem composed in Gothic by Germanic scholar J.R.R. Tolkien. I think this poem in particular shows just how beautiful and melodic Gothic is.

The third sound file is from the Lowlands-L website, dedicated to preservation of languages and dialects related to the Lowlands (Low German, Dutch, and the like).

The Wren, in Gothic

The English version of this story is here. Samples of many other languages are here.

Always a Godfather, Never a God ...

2006-05-22T00:16:00.000-04:00

I have the distinct pleasure of being godfather to several of my friends' children, including all 3 of gaetanus' awesome kids, to whom I am known as Gaffer for reasons of etymology and ease of pronunciation. The older two (5 years old and below) always fascinate me with all the various ways they absorb and use language. For instance, when the second child, D, wanted to offer to the general public a gamepiece he didn't need, he announced, "Whobody needs a ....?" Sure, he could have just said "Who"--it's not like he didn't already know the word--but instead he chose to create the word "whobody" at 3 years old by analogy with words like nobody and anybody.

When I play hide-and-seek with members of my god-horde, I rarely count in English: it's a perfect opportunity to familarize them with other languages in a context that's fun, while not taking away at all from their understanding of what's going on, since they already know I'm counting. I did this recently, and while we were taking a break, I had the following exchange with the oldest, T. Oh, and keep in mind that her father, gaetanus, is a Semitics scholar.

Me: Do you guys know what language I was just counting in?
T: French!
Me: Very good! Now do you remember what language I used the first time I counted?
T: um....
Me: I'll give you a hint; this is what I said: eins, zwei, drei, vier, ... [etc.]
T: [after a moment's thought] Is it Coptic??

T is almost 5. Coptic is just more a part of her world than German is. (I promise to get out to their house more often and insert more German into her life.) :-)

One more story. T went through a phase a while back that reminded us of Tolkien's musing about why it was wrong to say "a green great dragon". Whenever she would get something new--shoes, a shirt, a jacket--she would say, "Gaffer, see my new nice shoes?" or "I got a new nice jacket!" I believe gaetanus' theory was that the adjective that we conceive of as more inherent to the nature of the thing tends to go closer to it. Hence we say "great green dragon" b/c a green dragon is a thing that may or may not be great. Greatness is more accidental, greenness is essential to what it is. So also with why we feel "new nice shoes" is "wrong": we say "nice" to indicate how we feel about the thing, not really to describe the thing, the way we use "new". But, for its part, "new" is only relatively essential; "green" is more so, so that we would say "Do you like my nice new green dragon?" (hypothetically, of course). Notice that I don't have a comma even though I have three adjectives. I think this is because a comma (replacing "and") would erroneously imply an equal footing or level of attribution for whatever words are so linked. We would never speak of a "green new nice dragon", and even T would at least have said "new nice green dragon".

The best part of the "new-nice" phase T went through came several months after we all spent a day checking out my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Somebody said something about the trip, which prompted T to add, "we got to see Gaffer's New nice York!"

That's right: It's my island! :-)

American Inklings tonight!

2006-05-10T14:08:00.000-04:00

Just a reminder for anyone in the area who's interested: the first meetings of the American Inklings is tonight in Reston, VA. Details here.

Internet Movie Dead-a-base

2006-05-09T22:46:00.000-04:00

You know it's happened to you: You're trying to think of a movie, but you can't remember the title. You can't remember who was in it. You can't even remember when it came out. But thanks to one preposterously violent scene, you remember every detail of how that one guy died.

Well, you're in luck: Wikipedia has a list of movies organized by what kind of gory death they died. That's right, you can browse movies including death by chainsaw (Section 6), death from being eaten (Section 1), death from slicing by a sharp object where it takes some time for victim to fall apart (Section 19), even death by blendering (3).

This one's just for you, W.W. Enjoy!

I-Verb-Meme

2006-05-04T20:45:00.000-04:00

Got tagged by sauvage noble for another meme:

I am: King of Wessex and all England.
I want: my subjects to be better educated.
I wish: the Danes would stop attacking.
I hate: bad translations.
I miss: Rome (I barely remember being there as a child).
I fear: overattachment to the things of this world.
I hear: Asser's planning something special for me.
I wonder: who really wrote Beowulf.
I regret: my sins in this life.
I am not: as tall as that statue in Winchester.
I dance: but only after enough mead.
I sing: occasionally, but not in front of my scops.
I cry: when appropriate.
I am not always: as stern as I seem.
I made: the Danes withdraw from Wessex: Yay!
I write: less poetry than I'd like.
I confuse: Franks for Frisians (again, after enough mead!)
I need: more educated monks.
I should: build more Englisc ships.
I start: more translations than I can manage sometimes.
I finish: the priest's prayers in my own heart.
I tag: Emperor Charles of the Franks; Guþrun of the Danelaw; King Haraldr Hárfagri of Norway.

Another Drop in the Meme Bucket

2006-05-02T02:11:00.000-04:00

[I copied this from somewhere, and now I can't remember where.]

A. Four Jobs I’ve Had:
1. Course Development Director
2. Parish Youth Coordinator
3. Desktop Publisher
4. King of Wessex and of all England ;-)

B. Four Movies I’ll Watch Over and Over:
1. Serenity
2. The Matrix
3. various Muppet movies
4. zombie movies generally

C. Four Places I Called Home:
1. Front Royal, VA
2. Brooklyn, NY
3. North Hampton, NH
4. Toms River, NJ

Four TV Shows I Love:
1. Firefly
2. Law & Order(s) (but I much prefer Michael Moriarty as ADA to anyone else)
3. MST3K
4. SG-1/SG:A/BSG (considered as one show)

E. Four Places I’ve Been on Vacation:
1. Rhode Island
2. Michigan (even got to see the Dead Sea Scrolls that week)
3. Cape Cod
4. Alberta (one of the most beautiful places on God's earth)

[I'm adding the next one:]

E-2. Four Places I’ve Been on Pilgrimage:
1. Rome
2. the Holy Land (for Holy Week no less: wow)
3. Lourdes
4. Atlanta (World of Coke) ;-)

F. Four Websites I Visit Daily:
1. www.gmail.com
2. www.bloglines.com
3. www.dictionary.com
4. www.ancientworlds.net

G. My Four Favorite Foods:
1. Dead cow that has been briefly introduced to a heatsource.
2. Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch
3. Pizza, but only if made in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or maybe Queens.
4. Coffee. (Caffeine's a food group, right?)

H. Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:
1. Rome
2. New York
3. Coast of Maine
4. Coast of pretty much anywhere

I. Four People I’m Tagging:
1. Whoever
2. Wants
3. To
4. Participate

J. Four CD's to which I have most recently listened
(I rarely listen to whole CD's, just playlists; but if I must:)
1. TMBG, Mink Car
2. Mozart's Requiem
3. BNL, Stunt
4. Arvo Pärt, Kanon Pokajanen

Linguistic May Day

2006-05-01T17:21:00.000-04:00

From the Speculative Grammarian, this article is appropriate for the next 30 days. Below are some of my favorites.

Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists
James D. McCawley
University of Chicago

May 3, 1955. Mouton & Co. discover how American libraries order books and scheme to cash in by starting several series of books on limericks. The person given charge of this project mishears and starts several series of books on linguistics. No one ever notices the mistake.

May 5, 1403. The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door.

May 7, 1966. r-less pronunciation is observed in eight kindergarten pupils in Secaucus, N.J. The governor of New Jersey stations national guardsmen along the banks of the Hudson.

May 9, 1917. N. Ja. Marr discovers rosh, the missing link for Japhetic unity.

May 11, 1032. Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II orders isoglosses erected across northern Germany as defense against Viking intruders.

May 13. Vowel Day (Public holiday in Kabardian Autonomous Region). The ceremonial vowel is pronounced by all Kabardians as a symbol of brotherhood with all speakers of human languages.

May 18, 1941. Quang Phúc Ðông is captured by the Japanese and interned for the duration of hostilities.

May 19. Diphthong Day (Public holiday in Australia).

May 23, 38,471 B.C. God creates language.

May 26, 1945. Zellig Harris applies his newly formulated discovery procedures and discovers [t].

May 27, 1969. George Lakoff discovers the global rule. Supermarkets in Cambridge, Mass. are struck by frenzied buying of canned goods.

May 29, 1962. Angular brackets are discovered. Classes at M.I.T. are dismissed and much Latvian plum brandy is consumed.

May 30, 1939. Charles F. Hockett finishes composing the music for the Linguistic Society of America’s anthem, ‘Can You Hear the Difference?’

May 31, 1951. Chomsky discovers Affix-hopping and is reprimanded by his father for discovering rules on shabas.

Carnival of Blog Translation!

2006-05-01T05:41:00.000-04:00

Welcome, and thank you all for coming to the April [sic] Carnival of Blog Translations. First, a warm thank you to Bev Traynor at Em duas línguas for hosting last month's carnival. This month we have various sideshows, in the form of the various interesting links you'll find on the sidebar: everything from Old Frisian texts to an index of Indo-European roots to other, very fine blogs.

And now to our main attractions. Many of our contributors were held up by the harsh winter in their home parts. Or else the beautiful explosion of spring. Making it through thick and thin this month are the following:

Angelo Mercado, at sauvage noble, has the distinction of being the first-ever two-time-in-one-month participant of a Blog Translation Carnival: Check out his translations of Birth of a Curmudgeon (from Laudator Temporis Acti) into both Latin and Tagalog.

Yours truly (you will not help but notice) just posted a translation of a short post on the Inklings blog: a quote by C.S. Lewis describing his friend JRR Tolkien's general OCD-ishness with respect to revising and perfecting.

Four languages were represented this month: English (the source language for all three translations), Latin, Old English, and Tagalog.

Though garnering the smallest turnout, this month's translationfest has yielded many firsts: the first double contributor, the first time all originals are themselves quotations, the first carnival with no modern European languages represented among the target languages, the first carnival with any, much less a majority of dead languages among the translations, and the first carnival with all target languages as debutants to the Carnival scene.

If you worked on a translation but didn't finish in time, have no fear: you can post next time at the May Carnival of Blog Translation, at sauvage noble.

Thanks for coming, everyone, and please feel free to browse, touch, click, and ask questions. My subjects will be happy to show you around the castle. Westu hal!

Lewis ymb Tolkien

2006-05-01T01:15:00.000-04:00

[It's still April somewhere, so this too-quickly composed post is for the imminently to-be-posted Blog Translation Carnival. From the Inklings Blog post Lewis on Tolkien. I can relate, too.]

Þæt is formicele man; his onasettode geweorc, ge gescieplice ge larcræftlice, scolde nu scylf magan afyllan; hwæðere he is þara þe nis na eaþhylde miþ gewrit. Unmicloste onasettodnesse tyhting þa andsware forþgeclipaþ: Gea, ic huru þurhseo þone ond æthrinum þurhteo -- seþe tæcnað soðlice þæt he eall þæt wiht gen onginnað.

Tolkien at the OED

2006-04-29T15:29:00.000-04:00

Just stumbled onto this book, which is going right to the top of my wishlist:

The Ring of Words : Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary

From Amazon's book description:

"Tolkien's first job, on returning home from World War I, was as an assistant on the staff of the OED. He later said that he had 'learned more in those two years than in any other equal part of his life.' The Ring of Words reveals how his professional work on the Oxford English Dictionary influenced Tolkien's creative use of language in his fictional world.

"Here three senior editors of the OED offer an intriguing exploration of Tolkien's career as a lexicographer and illuminate his creativity as a word user and word creator. The centerpiece of the book is a wonderful collection of 'word studies' which will delight the heart of Ring fans and word lovers everywhere."

Contents (from the page at Oxford U. Press):
Preface
1 Tolkien as Lexicographer
2 Tolkien as Wordwright
3 Word Studies
Epilogue: Tolkien's influence on the English Language
Bibliography
Index

Procrastinator's Respite

2006-04-28T16:49:00.000-04:00

I know you. I know what you're doing. You're half-way through a translation and it's already the day for the Blog Translation Carnival. Well, you're in luck! You've got two more days to finish those translations! April's Carnival of Blog Translation will occur on Sunday, April 30 -- National Honesty Day. Don't be left out: get translating!
:-)

The American Inklings

2006-04-28T16:17:00.000-04:00

For all those in the D.C./Northern Virginia area:

-------------------------
Announcing the first meeting of the American Inklings

When: Wednesday, May 10, 7:00pm,
and every 2nd and 4th Wednesday

Where: Cosi's, in the Reston Town Center
11909 Democracy Drive, Reston, VA (Map)

The original "Inklings" were a group of mostly university colleagues who got together to discuss literature and poetry--either things they'd read or things they'd written. Theirs were the first ears to hear original drafts of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and theirs the first mouths to offer critique.

Modeled after that group, the American Inklings are artisitic souls who meet twice a month to share, critique, and possibly collaborate on various creative projects: poems, stories, songs--whatever the Muse inspires!

There's no commitment: Come as you're able, share your writings or ideas, or just listen and be inspired!

For more on the original Inklings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings
http://www.mythsoc.org/inklings.html

For more on the founders of the American Inklings:
King Alfred: http://bitterscroll.blogspot.com/
Mikaela: http://www.dilectusmeusmihi.blogspot.com/
-------------------------

Gratulerar, Sverige!

2006-04-27T00:25:00.000-04:00

There's a new member of the Swedish orthographic family: It's a W! The Swedish Academy has officially granted the letter W its own section in the dictionary. (Note the article's file photo of an actual W! :-P

Until now, words beginning with W were listed in the V section, since they are pronounced the same in Swedish, and any words with W were foreign borrowings anyway.

We usually think of the V sound in English as characteristic of Germanic accents (Nordic, German, Dutch, etc.), but in fact, the W was original to all Germanic languages in the beginning, even though only English preserved the sound. (Compare Lat. ventus; Eng. wind; Ger. wind; Sw. vind)

The German and Scandinavian dialects underwent the same change, from [w] to [v]. German, using the latin alphabet kept the w-spelling, while Norse changed to v. The original Germanic runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark had from the beginning a separate rune for W, but not for V. The letter V was sometimes represented by F (in Old English, where F surrounded by vowels was pronounced like v: hence knife/knives, wife/wives, etc.), sometimes by W (in places where it would end up becoming a V). Notice in the Dalrunes set of Younger Futhark how the runic V is simply a modified F.

Germanic Genealogy #3: Watch!

2006-04-26T04:25:00.000-04:00

Waiting witches keep watch on vigorous vegetables.

Well, ok, maybe they don't, but this sentence is interesting nonetheless: All the adjectives and nouns in the sentence are traceable to a common great, great, very great grandfather. The Proto-Indo-European root weg- led to words in Old English, Old High German, Old French, Middle Dutch, and Latin, and sure enough, modern English has drawn from them all. Among others, it gave us the words:

wait: from Old North French waitier, to watch;

witch: from Old English wicca, sorcerer, wizard (feminine wicce, witch), from Germanic *wikkjaz, necromancer (< “one who wakes the dead”);

watch: from Old English wæccan, to be awake, from Germanic *wakjan;

vigorous: from Old French, from Latin vegēre, to be lively, from suffixed (causative) o-grade form *wog-eyo-;

vegetables: from Latin vegēre, (see 'vigorous')

The common thread is strength/liveliness: To wait meant to watch, which meant to be awake, which meant to be lively. A witch was one who wakened/enlivened the dead. Vigorous still means lively/strong. And vegetables are things that are alive (before the dinner plate stage, obviously). The two main strains come to us through Latin, preserving the meaning of being lively, and through Germanic, with the main idea of being awake.

Last Call

2006-04-25T15:21:00.000-04:00

Last call for translation for the Blog Translation Carnival this Friday. Post your translations and send me your links in the next couple of days!!

Cool Quotes #9: For Lange Frigedæg

2006-04-14T16:34:00.000-04:00

For Good Friday ("Long Friday" in OE), here's an excerpt (and loose translation) from the Dream of the Rood. I covered this part in my last podcast, for which see the link on the sidebar. (For the rest of the poem, I've decided to break up into two separate podcasts so I have more time to look at individual lines and words (by request). I had thought to get at least one up before Easter, but this whole podcast experiment, while fun and fruitful and totally worth it, is still a little more work than I planned, and anyway most of the rest of the poem is about the resurrection or afterwards anyway.)

Update (about 20 minutes later): I've colored the words in the translation that are alliterated in the original. As I mentioned in the last podcast, this may approximate the subtle way alliteration causes the words to be connected in the reader's mind. Sometimes the colors jump out, other times they're hardly visible; this just makes it match the effects of alliteration all the more.

Syllic wæs se sigebeam,     ond ic synnum fah,
forwunded mid wommum.     Geseah ic wuldres treow,
wædum geweorðode,     wynnum scinan,
gegyred mid golde;     gimmas hæfdon
bewrigene weorðlice     wealdendes treow.
Hwæðre ic þurh þæt gold     ongytan meahte
earmra ærgewin,     þæt hit ærest ongan
swætan on þa swiðran healfe.     Eall ic wæs mid sorgum gedrefed,
forht ic wæs for þære fægran gesyhðe.     Geseah ic þæt fuse beacen
wendan wædum ond bleom;     hwilum hit wæs mid wætan bestemed,
beswyled mid swates gange,     hwilum mid since gegyrwed.
Hwæðre ic þær licgende     lange hwile
beheold hreowcearig     hælendes treow...

      Gestah he on gealgan heanne,
modig on manigra gesyhðe,     þa he wolde mancyn lysan.
Bifode ic þa me se beorn ymbclypte.     Ne dorste ic hwæðre bugan to eorðan,
feallan to foldan sceatum,     ac ic sceolde fæste standan.
Rod wæs ic aræred.     Ahof ic ricne cyning,
heofona hlaford,     hyldan me ne dorste.
þurhdrifan hi me mid deorcan næglum.     On me syndon þa dolg gesiene,
opene inwidhlemmas.     Ne dorste ic hira nænigum sceððan.
Bysmeredon hie unc butu ætgædere.     Eall ic wæs mid blode bestemed,
begoten of þæs guman sidan,     siððan he hæfde his gast onsended.

Feala ic on þam beorge     gebiden hæbbe
wraðra wyrda.     Geseah ic weruda god
þearle þenian.     þystro hæfdon
bewrigen mid wolcnum     wealdendes hræw,
scirne sciman,     sceadu forðeode,
wann under wolcnum.     Weop eal gesceaft,
cwiðdon cyninges fyll.     Crist wæs on rode.
(ll. 13-25, 40b-56)

    *     *     *
Wonderful was that victory-tree     while I was spotted with sins,
maimed by my defilements.     I beheld that tree of glory
adorned with vestments     shining so beautifully
decked with gold;     gems had
honorably clothed     the tree of the Almighty.
Yet, through that gold,     I came to discern
the former strife of wretched men:     and that it first began
to bleed on its right side.     I was overcome with grief;
afraid before that fair vision.     I saw that noble symbol
change its robes and appearance:     now it was wet with blood,
drenched from its bloodflow,     now it was adorned with jewels.
I lay there yet     a long while
gazing in repentant sorrow     at the tree of the divine Healer...

      Up the high gallows He climbed,
bold, in the sight of so many,     for now mankind he meant to redeem.
I trembled then, as the hero embraced me;     yet I dared not bow to the ground,
dared not fall to the surface of the earth;     I was to stand firm.
A cross was I raised,     the powerful King I raised up,
the Lord of heaven;     I dared not bend.
With dark nails they ran me through,     my wounds visible to all,
open, treacherous wounds;     yet I dared not harm any of those fiends.
They derided both of us together.     I was drenched with blood,
which gushed from the side of the man,     when he had sent forth his spirit.

Often on that hill     I have had to endure
terrible deeds.     I beheld the Lord of hosts
stretched with violent force.     Darkness then
did cover with clouds     the corpse of the Lord,
a radiant twilight;     a shadow went out
strove under the clouds.     Then wept all creation,
mourning the fall of its king.     Christ was on the cross.

Cool Quote #8: Like Father Like Son...Not!

2006-04-10T15:39:00.000-04:00

No commentary needed here; just another blunt saga quote on the generation gap.

Thorstein, Egil's son, was a very handsome man when he grew up, with fair hair and a fair complexion. He was tall and strong, although not on his father's scale. Thorstein was a wise and peaceful man, a model of modesty and self-control.

Egil was not very fond of him.

A Reminder

2006-04-09T19:11:00.000-04:00

Tents are going up, mead is being stirred, and language barriers are being toppled!

Don't forget to be looking out for blogposts to translate for this month's Carnival of Blog Translation, which will take place here on 28 April. (Yes, even this post counts, technically.)

Germanic Genealogy #2: Ants (and Aunts)

2006-04-09T17:23:00.000-04:00

The modern word ant comes from Old English æmette. With the standard Germanic stress on the first syllable, if you say æmette often enough and fast enough (try it!), you'll stop bothering with the e's, and end up with something like æmt. Once there, it's a short jump to ant, by a process called assimilation: the bilabial m (pronounced with the lips) is assimilated by the dental t. If you make an m dental, you have an n. This is a common linguistic occurance: hemp, from OE henep; as well as all those words with Latin prefixes like in + logical = illogical, and actually, ad + similis > assimilate.

This process also happend to a word that many (I suppose most) Americans pronounce the same as ant: aunt.

Aunt comes from Middle English aunte, from Anglo-Norman, ultimately from Latin amita. Here again, once the middle syllable is dropped, the t plays Borg to the m's futile resistance. So you have something like anta/ante. Except there's a u. Why is there a u? Well, it seems to have originated with Anglo-Norman. There are many au-words in Anglo-Norman whose Parisian French (and often modern English) versions lack the u. For example:

aume (= English soul), beside French ame from Latin anima
aumuce (amice), from Old French amis, from L amictus
aunsien (former, ancient), beside F ancien
auprés (after), beside F aprés
ausmes (> E alms)
ausuager (> E assuage)

Now, of these, only aunt retained its au-spelling. Why? I'm not sure; I could speculate that later contact with French kept words like amice and ancient closer to their Parisian spellings than the Anglo-Norman ones, but it could just as easily be due to a change of spelling conventions internal to English. Perhaps one of my knowledgeable readers could fill in this gap?

Either way, it's fun to watch the process work on words from such different sources.

Podcast #2: The Dream of the Rood

2006-04-04T02:34:00.000-04:00

Latest on the podcast: Part 1 of 2 going through the Dream of the Rood. Part 2 will finish the poem by the end of Holy Week next week. After going through the OE text so closely in preparation for this cast, I found lines of it coming back to me in church on Sunday. Not that that's a bad thing. Anyway, some relevant links:

Wikipedia on The Dream of the Rood

Text in Old English

The latter is useful if you want to follow along. Each word is linked to the glossary in the frame below. Enjoy!

The Scottish Collaboration

2006-04-03T03:03:00.000-04:00

(Cuz, you know, you're not supposed to name it. Bad luck and stuff.)

First off, the new issue of Dappled Things is out, featuring one or two contributions by yours truly, and a poem by Mikaela. The songs we wrote last fall inspired her poem in this edition, while the poem I have there inspired her to write one of the songs in our current collaboration, which Mikaela has already been blogging about.

So after the huge success of our collaborative efforts in writing a trilogy of songs loosely inspired by Old Germanic poetry (success being defined as our having thoroughly enjoyed the whole project), Mikaela and I are now gettin' our Shakespeare on. The Scottish Play is really a perfect candidate for our collective attention: It's dark. It's tragic. It's overcast. It's psychological. And it's Scottish.

Anyway, we have four songs in mind this time: one between Macbeth and the 3 sisters; one between Macbeth and Lady M.; one vaguely inspired by the lament for the state of Scotland in the scene in England between Malcolm, Macduff, and Ross; and a fourth song, which Mikaela wrote, inspired by the aforementioned poem, in turn inspired by the aforeunmentioned play.

Lyrics for the first one were written weeks ago. But the Muse just didn't have a melody for poor Mikaela yet. Maybe it would have helped if I'd been able to get together sooner to work on it, because when we did, the music came fast and furious. And for the first time I realized that when I'd written the lyrics, I'd had in mind not just the rhythm of the words, but something approaching an actual melody. Or, at least something that felt like a memory of a melody. God bless Mikaela for her patience--and amazing talent, being able to take my vague descriptions and turn them into music I suddenly realized was exactly what I wanted: "So, like, start with rain. Well, but higher up. And faster. Not the gentle rain from that other song, but kind of frantic, ominous. Yeah, that's it. Maybe even an octave higher. Ok, now keep that going, but then a really low note ... like those pedal tones Arvo Pärt uses to ground a tune with deep roots. Yeah ... hey, that's like thunder, that makes sense. Ok, now a little bit lower for the next one ... then higher, then way down, and hold it there ... no lower, like ... yes, YES! Man, you know that would really sound great with [both, in unison:] a cello! I wish you knew a cellist ... Ok, now Macbeth speaks ... [a little later] now the witches, you'll notice, finish each other's rhymes, b/c they're really like one mind, so can you make it sound ... whoa, yeah, like that. Maybe even more chant-y, like more monotone ... yeah, no even to here ... oh wow, perfect! So here at the end, where Macbeth's lines use the witches' rhyme scheme, maybe he should sound more ... whoa, yeah, like that. Cool, ok, I think we're done."

I love music, and listen to a huge variety, but I don't think I've ever personally known a musician more talented than Mikaela--and in a very deep, intuitive way. I asked her what the time signature was for one of her songs, and she wasn't even sure; she just felt, thought, and started playing. It flows so freely from her fingers that some bits of composition here and there have been lost b/c she doesn't even write it down: it's all "up here". But even if she forgets the music, she remembers whatever it is that the music came from, so she's usually able to recompose something close or better.

Anyway, We have two complete songs now -- the first and last -- and now we're filling in the middle. Our remaining "homework" has her working on song 2 (the anti-love duet, or competing monologues between M and Lady M) and me writing lyrics for song 3, although we always allow ourselves to pursue inspiration for any song if it comes. And of course we each have had diversions. She's gotten into Portuguese Fado (as I may too, now, with my next paycheck), and I've got other poems to write and languages to study. But eventually I have no doubt we'll have a pretty cool-sounding ... er, quadrilogy that will have very much of the feel of Macbeth.

[Doh! I said it.]

You -- Yes YOU -- are Invited!

2006-04-01T00:19:00.000-05:00

Preparations are already in the works for the third-ever Carnival of Blog Translations! The Carnival, which The Bitter Scroll hath this month the honour of hosting, shall take place on April 28th.

My castle and the surrounding fields will be filled with tents and pavillions displaying the translational talents of visitors from around the world, as well as sideshows and games, and candy and balloons for the kids.

What is a Blog Carnival, you ask? A blog carnival is a travelling signpost that puts together a series of links about a particular theme. Contributors post something relevant on their blogs sometime during the month, and on the day of the carnival (towards the end of the month), the host compiles one big post with links to all the participants. It can be quite a to-do!

To participate in this Carnival, you need merely translate anything posted during this month by another blogger and post it on your own blog, with a link to the original. Fill out the following information and email (see my profile) me before April 28th:

My Name:
Name of My Blog:
My Blog's URL:
Title of Post, in Target Language:

Name of Blog I'm Translating From:
Name of Person Whose Blog I'm Translating From:
Their Blog's URL:
Title of Post, in Source Language:

The first and second carnivals were hosted by Liz Henry of ALTALK Blog and Beverly Trayner of Em duas línguas. If you fancy playing host to the fourth Carnival, let me know.

To date, the following languages have been represented at a Translation Carnival: Bulgarian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

I do have two suggestions for the carnival this month, but it's totally up to contributors: if no one does either of them, it'll still be a successful carnival:

1. Given the location of this month's carnival (viz., here), I would be just tickled to see some translations into dead languages ... Anybody up to the challenge??

2. After I posted my contribution last month, the author of the original had some interesting comments on the unique challenges of that particular translation. I think it'd be fascinating if contributors, either in the comments section or in a separate post, noted briefly some of the unique challenges they encountered. But again: better to contribute something without it, than wait and never contribute!

Email me if you have any questions. Happy Translating!!

[Note: Despite the date, this is not an April Fool's joke.]

Germanic Genealogy #1: Nice!

2006-03-31T19:07:00.000-05:00

As a philological complement to the more literary Cool Quotes feature, the Germanic genealogy feature will occur at odd times to focus on the linguistic family tree of a randomly chosen word. Today's word: nice. And today's method: cheating, because I'm just linking to another page that's already done the work. (It hasn't been in the English language as long as Anglo-Saxon times, so you can't really expect it to keep my interest, can you?)

Bitter Scroll Podcast

2006-03-30T13:20:00.000-05:00

Previously, I tried out Blogger's feature for uploading audio files, which involves recording into a phone. It was ok. But it wasn't enough. My wish for more sound files of Old Germanic languages on the web has led me to experiment with the world of podcasting. I can't say I really know what I'm doing, but I'm learning. Anyway, as a supplement to this blog, I've set up The Bitter Scroll Podcast. The first podcast seeems to be working well enough, so perhaps this will be a good way to offer a way for people to hear what the various languages sound like. Expect mostly Old English at first; there are some passages in Beowulf that I think sound really great when read aloud. If anyone has any requests, I'm open as well. (E.g., I'll probably do the Our Father in Gothic for the guys over at Holy Whapping.)

Carnival Time!

2006-03-29T17:19:00.000-05:00

Beverly over at Em duas línguas hosts today the 2nd Carnival of Blog Translation. A little bit lower attendance than the first one, this one features English, German, Swedish, and Portuguese. Topics range from what is a language, to waking up one's inner parent, to the limits of face-to-face communication, to reflection on a recent loss.

The next carnival will be here at The Bitter Scroll (and not just in my castle, Beverly, but all over Anglo-Saxon Winchester!). I'll post soon to officially open the festivities.

"The Spiraling Shape Will Make You Go Insane..."

2006-03-29T02:46:00.000-05:00

First there was the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Now there's the Turning Torso of Malmø. Also more info here.

[Disclaimer: Use of They Might Be Giants titles does not in any way suggest, infer, or imply insanity on the part of the Swedish government, people, or construction industry, or of those who visit or view pictures of buildings therein.]

A Linguistic Manifesto

2006-03-27T21:46:00.000-05:00

Update: I've incorporated some of Johan's comments and corrections, but some things simply need explanation. Please see his very informative comments, below.

[In my ongoing attempt to learn Swedish (and every other Germanic language), I’m offering this imperfect translation for the Carnival of Blog Translation. This is a translation from Swedish of Johann Jönsson’s blogpost Ett ideologiskt manifest, from his blog Månskensdans. He makes some interesting points about prescriptivism, the degree to which linguistics is a science, what exactly a language is, and incorporating the inevitability of change into our own approach to language. It’s a perspective that would be useful for English speakers to hear, since we don’t have the experience of encountering speech that’s technically a foreign language, but that’s largely comprehensible to us. I'll add my own thoughts in a subsequent post; for now I’m just getting this translation in under the wire for the Carnival. I’m sure Johan will have corrections, so look out for updates. :-)]

------------------------------------------

The individual language

The only language that’s relatively static is a dead one. The Swedish language, fortunately, doesn't belongs to this group, and won’t yet for a good while, whatever some may say about the anglicization and abandonment of our mother tongue. The idea that language is an absolute unity stems from the myth that there should be one way to express a language, the idea that there’s Swedish, Norwegian, English, etc., all with razor-sharp borders, and that everything within a given language should be the same and uniform. It’s an opinion that blissfully ignores the fact that what makes a language what it is stands on the most arbitrary grounds, more often on political than linguistic grounds. For example, few will dispute the assertion that Swedish and Norwegian are two different languages. Yet the majority of Swedes have a significantly easier time understanding the Norwegian spoken in Oslo than the Swedish of Älvdalen [wiki.]. We have been characterized by the nationalist ideal: one country, one people, one language. Everyone who spoke one language was thought to belong to the same cultural zone and therefore to be grouped together under the same flag -- which by extension meant that those grouped under the same flag ought to speak the same language. Certainly this is how we think: If someone is Swedish, they must speak Swedish. If they’re German, the German language must apply; if they’re from Holland, they must speak Dutch. An exception is made only in the case where a person speaks a language that can be clearly identified as something different from the expected: but whatever does end up on “our” side of the imaginary language border is simply heaped into the bigger language, and all of a sudden a person can be accused of being wrong, and expressing himself incorrectly because he was adopted by a language that wants to constrain him by rules for how his speaking and writing ought to be done.

The point is that language, even within its own dialects, is not something absolute like mathematics, nor does it need the precision of nuclear physics, put into practice lest something should go wrong. Also, in some border areas, some of what serves to determine where one language begins and another ends also works for distinguishing one dialect from the next one; so actually usage is something that distinguishes not only between countries and languages, like Japanese or Catalan, but from person to person as well. Language is something personal, and it is up to each person to decide how to make use of it. I think, personally, that separated compounds [e.g. lastbils chaufför, truck driver, instead of lastbilschaufför, truckdriver] are enormously ugly, but there is nothing to say they’re wrong any more than to say that wearing a screamingly loud yellow jacket is wrong: It simply goes against the majority’s sense of aesthetics. One can admire purists in the same way one can admire King Leonidas of Sparta -– they lead a doomed struggle against superior odds, but deep down they must be aware that all they have to offer is a tiny postponement of what ultimately can’t be stopped. Unlike Leonidas, however, in this case there won't be any greater army to turn the tide of change -- and when you get down to it, language purism in its own way isn’t really much healthier than the ideal Spartan lifestyle. Both aim at lofty goals and an elitism that are in fact of no interest to most people.

“Swedish” must be seen as a generic name for several million individual ways of approaching language that more or less resemble one another. To see it any other way is to deceive oneself. There's naturally a certain standardization, but it’s nothing more than a loose agreement between people to be able to make use of speech and writing in an effective way. These compromises happen through communicative exchange more often than by decree from above: Kalle, a 43-year-old illiterate truck driver, can’t be more right nor wrong than anyone else in this case since there are no definite rules to follow, other than those of self-appointed prophets. But the language isn’t waiting for any messiah; we have it for only one purpose: to be able to understand each other. Will we be understood? This is what lies behind our striving after a norm; this is also why the language doesn't need any absolute rules, since those who deviate too long from that which is normal only punish themselves when they fail in their goal (to be understood). It lies in the nature of communication to make oneself readily understandable. It is this which lies behind a thousand years of change, leading to the language we have today. The [Swedish] language has been controversial before -– our present spelling (where hv, f, and v through reform have all simply become v) and grammar (today we don’t writan -- we write [idag skriva vi icke –- vi skriver; see comments]) were not accepted without protest; nevertheless they're simplifications that most people today are glad happened. When Sten [see comments] a thousand years ago erected a namesake with runes over his fallen brother, there were surely a handful of passersby that shook their heads at the youth’s overly creative take on the grammatical cases (even if ancient Swedish hadn’t yet been enriched with such a concept at the time). Still, many go around with the completely absurd idea that the language reached its highpoint some time in the middle of the twentieth century –- in other words, when they went to school -– and that, with the dubious concession that new occurences should have new words, it should be conserved in that state forever.

People want what they’re used to, and often rebel against change. Language is no different, but it is something that everyone uses and depends on, something so central to our lives that few things engender stronger opinions and feelings. Still, that a language should not develop and become more simple than it already has must be regarded as an image negative enough to challenge the most joyless philosophers, since it would mean that whatever happens, the language can only get worse, never better. Yet all historical development suggests the opposite, and probably many ideas that are prevalent today will be considered with great skepticism in a century or two.

I believe in development. I believe in renewal, and that our will to be understood will create an ever more easily accessible language. For when people begin to mutter about the twilight of culture and the impoverishment of language, there’s one thing that is easy to forget: Language wants to be understood.

Blogs Who've Cried Beowulf

2006-03-27T00:42:00.000-05:00

There've been a couple of posts on Beowulf in recent memory that I meant to blog about when they came out and never got around to. Consider them officially around-to-gotten.

First, and more recent, is Michael Drout's post on Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf. I don't have much to add, except that I'm excited and can't wait to get a copy for myself. I was also interested to see in the comments section that Bagby sang about the Volsung story with Sequentia. I have a CD of theirs of Norse music (as best as can be reconstructed, of course), and I know they've also set both Old English and even Gothic to music. (I wonder if Mikaela knows ... speak Gothic around her and she melts like buttah!)

The second post is Scott Nokes' post Beowulf Hobbyists of the World, Unite!, where he links to a LanguageHat post [2nd item] about Syd Allen's Beowulf site. Syd indeed has an excellent site, with detailed info pages on anything you can think of: various editions and translations, comic books, historical background, maps, a pronunciation guide, alliteration, even a word search. You want to know what the meadhall Heorot might have looked like? Syd's got this picture:
You want to compare the handwritings of the two scribes who copied the only existing manuscript of Beowulf? He's got this page. He's even got a whole page dedicated to the question of whether Beowulf, in his fight with Grendel's mother, pulled her hair (feaxe) or her shoulder (eaxle).

I consider Syd Allan's site, together with Ben Slade's Beowulf on Steorarume ("Beowulf in Cyberspace"), the two headquarters of Beowulf-studies on the web. The latter link also has many cool features, not least of which is a cool url: www.heorot.dk (since, after all, Heorot was in Denmark). Ben has also pimped his site with cool art from fan and Photoshop, a dual-language text which periodically sports audio files (which, oddly, while his, seem to live on Syd Allan's site), helpful lists of characters and monsters, and links to other Old English works like Deor, Waldere, and the Finnsburg fragment (which has a more detailed account of the Frisian kinslaying whose tale the poet ironically tells in Heorot before Hrothgar and his son (and Beowulf).

Finally, I'm in the process of rearranging my own sidebar. You'll see some additional links and resources (including the two I just mentioned). In the future, I'll probably try to categorize my blog links (I wonder if I need to create separate blogrolling accounts for that, or if I should just put them up manually. Any ideas?), and thereby add more to each category, especially medievalist blogs (after the spirit of this post).

All-Knowing-IPod Meme

2006-03-26T03:15:00.000-05:00

Well, you don't really need an IPod, just any playlist on shuffle. H/t Fr. Tucker.

Instructions: Go to your music player of choice and put it on shuffle. Say the following questions aloud, and press play. Use the song title as the answer to the question. NO CHEATING.

How does the world see you?
At the Agway (People Are Wrong / TMBG)

Will I have a happy life?
Full Circle (Loreena McKennitt)

What do my friends really think of me?
Rye or the Kaiser (Weird Al Yankovic)

What do people secretly think of me?
The Middle (Jimmy Eat World)

How can I be happy?
Walking on the Sun (Smashmouth)

What should I do with my life?
Hunt for Red Oktober (Soundtrack/Theme Song)

Will I ever have children?
um, Rock You Like a Hurricane (Scorpions)

What is some good advice for me?
You’re Not the Boss of Me (TMBG)

How will I be remembered?
Land Downunder (Men at Work)

What is my signature dancing song?
Stand (REM)

What do I think my current theme song is?
Redundant (Green Day)

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
Dreams (Cranberries)

What song will play at my funeral?
Who’ll Stop the Rain? (CCR)

What type of men/women do you like?
Money for Nothing (Dire Straights)

What is my day going to be like?
[yikes] The Godfather Theme Song

My New Neighbor Geoffrey

2006-03-25T16:29:00.000-05:00

A hearty welcome to Geoffrey Chaucer who hath moved his blog to Blogspot. Now you can post a comment on his blog without having to sign up for Friendster. If you haven't seen his blog before, he's moved most of his old posts over as well, for posterity's sake. Now that he's posting more often, you must go visit, it's always a fun read, though his new-fangled French-mixed Anglisc may take some getting used to. ;-)

Þú eart micel welcumen to þæm Blogspote, Godfrið!

No Rules, Just Write

2006-03-25T04:40:00.000-05:00

Lexicon: A Linguistic Game Without Rules

From HeiDeas, try your brain on this maddening little game. Frustratingly, I'm already stumped on Screen 3, and the first two screens were pretty easy. I'm going to dream of pears tonight....

Update: Ok, I've gotten up to level 17 now. Being the word-lover that I am, this puzzle with numbers is killing me. Worse, now I'm going to dream of numbers tonight....

Representing Deutschland

2006-03-24T16:29:00.000-05:00

I'm posting the following videos here because I can (thank you, Google), because I simply can never stop laughing no matter how often I've seen them, and because, after all, they're all Germanic and stuff.

VW has had these three commercials airing in the US for a while now, and having just watched The Brothers Grimm, I'm almost positive that the guy who played the Italian Cavaldi in the movie is the same guy "representing Deutschland" in the commercials. Can anyone confirm this?

If so, we have a Swede playing an Italian and a German. I think he overdid the Italian accent just a tad in the movie, but I've been trying to listen for hints of a Swedish accent in his assumed German accent. (Some of my readers are more qualified to assess this than I am.) I especially like the one with the green car, where he purposely tries to make his accent hard to understand. Oh, and his facial expressions are awesome.

Gleðileg Patreksdag!

2006-03-17T17:26:00.000-05:00

At least, that's my best attempt at "Happy St. Patrick's Day" in Icelandic. In honor Patrick Snakesbane, you've managed to navigate to a rather Germanically-focused blog. To get you back on track, here's something vaguely relevant:

The Viking Age in Ireland

Scandinavian settlements were pretty far-flung in the middle ages: North America ("Vinland"), Greenland, Iceland, Ireland (Dublin/Dyflin), Scotland, the Hebrides, Shetland, and Orkney islands, England (the Danelaw, York/Jorvik, etc.), Normandy, the Baltics, even into Russia and beyond.

Only in Iceland--"a retirement home for aging Vikings", as one modern editor of the sagas put it--did the language of Old Norse survive, and relatively unchanged at that. Everywhere else, linguistic indications of their presence are much more subtle: Mix Norse and Old French and you have the Old Norman dialect, which then was brought to England, mixed with the already Norse-influenced Old English, and Anglo-Norman is born, only to give way to Middle English by Chaucer's day.

Celtic and Germanic tribes have a long history of interaction--peaceful or otherwise. Celts already occupied much European land when Germanic tribes first moved down into Bavaria, west into Gaul, and over the sea into the British Isles. The Gauls saw rule by Romans and Franks, Celts in northern Italy dealt with Lombards and Goths, and the British Isles for the last 1600 years have been to varying degrees in varying areas a jumble of Pict, Irish, Scot, Welsh, Norwegian, Dane, Saxon, Norman, so that the very word "British", originally referring to Celts such as the Welsh, can refer to Celt or Germanic, depending on context and the time period you're talking about.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, and make sure you have a ride home tonight. ;-)

Norse Poetica

2006-03-16T03:30:00.000-05:00

[Note: blogrolling has been having problems, so I've commented it out in my blog template until they fix what's wrong, b/c it was keeping my page from loading.]

In my posts on old Germanic poetry I just barely touched on the varieties developed by the Norse. This page is a relatively straightforward easily readable rundown of Norse poetry. It doesn't have all the many variations of poetic form the Norse skalds developed, but it's got the basic ones, and is a good introduction. Note the features Norse poetry shares with Old English:

Alliteration is the main sound device used to connect words, not rhyme.
Vocabulary is increased by the fabrication of kennings ("whale-road" for the sea, etc.).
As usual, some archaic vocabulary survived in the poetry that didn't survive in prose.

It's the differences that are the most fascinating though. Many different forms developed, unlike in Old English which used one form for everything. The different Old Norse forms are all ultimately based on the common Germanic poetic form, but the skalds (poets) apparently had a lot more fun toying with meter and even introduced a form of rhyme (which they got from the Celts if I remember right).

Check out the form Fornyrðislag--it's basically the same as the Old English form. Now shorten every even line (to one half-line instead of two) and you have Ljóðaháttr. Or instead, add a bit of rhyme within a line (partial rhyme in odd lines, full rhyme in even lines) and you have Dróttkvætt. Actually strictly speaking you have Hrynhenda. Dróttkvætt has six syllables per line, not eight. Again, it's an introduction. For more, the Wikipedia article, with its links, is also helpful.

I also mentioned comparative terseness (not a lot of unstressed syllables per each stressed one) as one of the reasons the Norse were able to play with their language the way they did, at least compared with Old English, and especially compared with Old Saxon (check out the Heliand).* It's worth seeing for yourself: If you're ambitious, try composing your own verses in Dróttkvætt in English. Here are the precise rules:

Lines: 8 lines per stanza.
Syllable Count: 6 syllables per line for Dróttkvætt.
Meter: 3 stressed syllables per line. Every line must end in a trochee.
Alliteration: Each pair of lines is bound by alliteration: 2 out of 3 stressed syllables of the first (odd) line must alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the second (even) line.
Rhyme: This is slightly different from how we usually conceive it. There are two types. 1) For odd lines, the last stressed syllable must have partial rhyme with any other syllable in the line: i.e., they end in the same consonant and have close but not identical vowels. E.g.: up and weapon. (This is called skothending, 'a glancing hit'.)
2) For even lines, the last stressed syllable must have full rhyme with any other syllable in the line: i.e. they end in the same consonant and have the same vowel. E.g.: burn and learning. (This is called aðalhending, 'a direct hit'.)

Good luck! I think you'll find lines almost don't have enough room to say things the way the English language wants to say them.

* By the way, the Bibliotheca Augustana has a chronology of Old German (and Saxon) texts, all online. Enjoy!

Old Germanic Poetry, part 2

2006-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

A little more about Old Germanic poetry. (Part One here.)

The Varieties

While this overall poetic structure dominated the various Germanic languages, still the sundering of the tribes that resulted in different tongues also resulted in different poetic styles. This was done not so much by discarding the basic rules, as by working within them and at times adding additional ones. The main difference seems to have to do with the relative wordiness or terseness of the language. Old Saxon, for example, was much wordier than Old Norse or even Old English at times. Reflexive pronouns were more common, so that where OE would have ongann, ‘began’, OS would have bigan imu (thus doubling the syllable count). Moreover, even where OE and OS prose syntax might be similar, OS poets were more likely to fit more into a single half-line. Thus, while there are still only four main stresses per line, there were a great deal of unstressed syllables, making their verse long and rather belabored. The following line has seven weak syllables before the first strong one (note alliteration on the w-sound):

bigan imu an themu uuege uuahsen;         thô it eft thes uuerodes farnam,
it began to grow on the path;         then it afterwards [was] destroyed by the people, . . .

Old Norse was terse by contrast, expressing the same ideas in very few syllables. This led to a lot of stylizing by later poets, who revelled in the beautiful efficiency of their language and liked to explore just how succinct they could make it. To the existing rules of alliteration and meter they added further rules concerning syllables count and internal and external rhyme. Notice the almost complete lack of weak syllables in lines like these from the Hávamál (strong syllabes are bolded):

Deyr fé, deyja frændr
Die cattle, die kin. . . .

Ár skal rísa sá er annars vill
fé eða fjör hafa;
Early must he rise who would another’s
life or wealth have.

More in a subsequent post on the many and various ways poets devised of "using the Norse."

Old English might be thought of as midway between Old Saxon and Old Norse, both in terms of wordiness and vocabulary. (And historically, in a way, too: The Anglo-Saxons had their roots on the continent, yet had more Norse influence than their cousins back home.) Thus the OE flavor of poetry demanded at least one weak syllable for each strong one (thus four syllables minimum per half-line), and in fact usually had between 1 to 2 weak syllables for each strong one. Here is a sample of OE poetry from the poem-fragment of the Battle of Maldon:

"Gehyrst þu, sælida,         hwæt þis folc segeð?
Hi willað eow to gafole         garas syllan, . . .
Hear thou, seaman,         what this people sayeth?
They will give you         a tribute of spears, . . .

The great exception to this rule in OE poetry is the long verse. This is a phenomenon that contains three strong syllables per half-line, something that otherwise only occurs in Norse poetry. These long verses occur always in pairs (always with another long verse on the same line), and usually in groups. Here is a passage from the Dream of the Rood that has both long and regular verses (strong syllables are bolded):

"Þæt wæs geara iu,         (ic þæt gyta geman),
þæt ic wæs aheawen         holtes on ende,
astyred of stefne minum.         Genaman me ðær strange feondas
geworhton him þær to wæfersyne,         heton me heora wergas hebban.
Bæron me ðær beornas on eaxlum,         oððæt hie me on beorg asetton,

It was years ago         (I remember it still)
That I was hewn down         at the edge of the forest,
cut from my trunk.         Strong foes took hold of me there,
there made for themselves a spectacle of me,         commanded me to carry their criminals.
There warriors bore me there on their shoulders,         until they set me on a hill.

The Silent Tribes

The languages of many ancient Germanic tribes (Burgundians, Vandals, Gepids, etc.) are not fully known, at least not as distinct from other larger and closer tribes. Gothic, Old Frisian, and Old (Low) Franconian, while known languages with their own extant texts, nevertheless are not mentioned here because no poetry from these languages has survived. Still, one is probably safe in guessing that if they had, they would follow the same pattern. This guess led Tolkien to imagine what it would have sounded like, hence his composition of Bagme Bloma. (Here's another poem composed by a modern Gothic enthusiast, which in fact conforms more closely to Germanic alliteration rules than Tolkien's poem.)

Rebuilding Babel

2006-03-13T14:58:00.000-05:00

Forget Indo-European, learn to speak World! :-P

Proto-World Language

Call me cynical, but it seems to me that many sounds, under the right conditions, can be said to be associated with many other sounds. To wit: the letter 'g' is used in places where elsewhere are found 'w' (guard/ward), 'y' (OE gear > ModE year), 'c' (Germanic verbal prefix ge- is ultimately related to Latin prefix co-), or no letter at all (OE gear / Sw år). But this doesn't mean that any of these letters can fill in for any of the others. (E.g., you can't say that sag, say, saw, and sac have a common source just because, in other circumstances, those letters are related.)

So, if you ignore circumstance I suppose you can fabricate an etymology or linguistic connection for almost anything. Given the fact that all humans work with the same laws of physics and anatomy of mouth, throat, etc., it's probably inevitable for genuine coincidences to spring up now and then. Considering all the words of all the languages of the world not on that list, what is there might just as well be coincidence as a legitimate connection. Anyway you'd have to judge case by case, and I'm definitely unqualified for 99% of the languages listed.

Having said all that, I'll admit gaetanus and I had the great (albeit tongue-in-cheek) idea in college to reconstruct "Adamic", based on things like Greek kata and the downward aspect we saw in the word kowtow. We were like a linguistic mafia that could force a connection between any two words you liked: You need to establish a link between these two words? ... We have ways ... We'll make 'em an etymology they can't refuse....

Cool Quote #7: The Wonders of Iceland

2006-03-12T18:41:00.000-05:00

Exploring Northvegr.org's endless hoard of Germanic texts led me to the King's Mirror: "A 13th century text in Old Norwegian, in which a father instructs his son on the path to wise and virtuous behavior." Here's an excerpt from the father's description of Iceland, since my buddy baronius and I will be there in a few months.

Concerning the extraordinary fires which burn there, I scarcely know what to say, for they possess a strange nature. I have heard that in Sicily there is an immense fire of un-usual power which consumes both earth and wood. I have also heard that Saint Gregory has stated in his Dialogues that there are places of torment in the fires of Sicily. But men are much more inclined to be-lieve that there must be such places of torment in those fires in Iceland. For the fires in Sicily feed on living things, as they consume both earth and wood....

The fire of Iceland, however, will burn neither earth nor wood, though these be cast upon it; but it feeds upon stone and hard rock and draws vigor from these as other fires do from dry wood. And never is rock or stone so hard but that this fire will melt it like wax and then burn it like fat oil. But when a tree is cast upon the fire, it will not burn but be scorched only. Now since this fire feeds on dead things only and rejects everything that other fires devour, it must surely be said that it is a dead fire; and it seems most likely that it is the fire of hell, for in hell all things are dead.

He goes on to describe geysers (one of the few English loanwords from Icelandic):

I am also disposed to believe that certain bodies of water in Iceland must be of the same dead nature as the fire that we have described. For there are springs which boil furiously all the time both winter and summer. At times the boiling is so violent that the heated water is thrown high into the air. But whatever is laid near the spring at the time of spouting, whether it be cloth or wood or anything else that the water may touch when it falls down again, will turn to stone. This seems to lead to the conclusion that this water must be dead, seeing that it gives a dead character to whatever it sprinkles and moistens; for the nature of stone is dead.

But for all the seeming wonders the father recounts, he cautions his son:

Now it must not be regarded as settled that the facts are as we have just said; we have merely tried to bring together and compare various opinions in order to determine what seems most reasonable.

Modern scholars before their time. :-)

This Month's Translation Carnival

2006-03-12T00:02:00.000-05:00

This is a little late: Oh well.

This month's Carnival of Blog Translations is being hosted by Beverly of Em duas línguas. To recap: A blog carnival is a basically a whole bunch of blogposts about a certain theme, that are all linked to from one place (the host). In this case, the common theme translation: your post doesn't have to be about translation, but it does have to be a translation. Any blogpost posted this month that you find interesting enough to translate is eligible: Swedish to English, English to Latin, French to Korean, whatever. Maybe this month I'll even get on the ball enough to contribute. Glückliche Übersetzungen!

Old Germanic Poetry

2006-03-11T18:57:00.001-05:00

I thought I'd post here a very basic overview I previously posted elsewhere of the poetical form common to all the Old Germanic languages.

The Basics

Old Germanic poetry is very different from the poetry we are used to today, yet it is not at all difficult. The old Germanic poets had a very few basic principles, and stuck to them valiantly, preserving poetic traditions long after their languages had changed. We'll start with a few lines, drawn from throughout the old Germanic world, and see what commonalities they share. The following lines come, respectively, from the Old High German poem about the end of the world, the Muspilli; from an Old Saxon (Low German) amalgamation of the gospel stories into verse known as the Heliand; from the Old English poem Beowulf; and from the Old Norse Völuspá, the Song of the Sibyll. We'll call them all roughly 9th century, except for the Völuspá, which is from the late 10th. The bold indicates stressed syllables (see #3, below).

Old High German:
uuili den reht-kernon daz rihhi kistarkan.
he will the righteous' kingdom strengthen.

Old Saxon:
uuerod bi themu uuatare, thar uualdand Crist . . .
the crowd [stood] by the water, where the mighty Christ . . .

Old English:
Fyrst forð gewat; flota wæs on yðum . . .
Time passed further; the boat was on the waves . . .

Old Norse:
Hljoðs bið ek allar helgar kindir . . .
I ask attention from all the sacred holy peoples . . .

Notice in these lines the following commonalities:

1. Each line is divided by a space, which indicates the presence of a pause or caesura. The two halves of the line are fittingly called half-lines, or verses. These spaces of course were not written in either the manuscripts or the runic inscriptions, but suffice it to say that the half-line was the basic metrical unit of old Germanic poetry.

2. Each half-line has two main, stressed syllables, and any number of weak ones (at least two). This has some interesting consequences, the most interesting of which to me is that the meter is made to seem subordinate to the text (the text is primary), rather than vice-versa. It draws out the natural rhythm of the language itself. In other words, if you wouldn’t stress a syllable in normal speech, it doesn’t get stress in verse either. Contrast this with classical Latin or Greek poetry, where meter is based on the length of the syllable (long or short) rather than the weight or emphasis. Also contrast it with many poems and songs in English, where every syllable is counted, and words are often stressed that would not be in normal speech. The only other metrical system I know of that places text above meter in this way is Gregorian Chant, with its system of grouping notes into twos and threes so every important syllable gets an important place in the meter.

3. The syllables in a given half-line (almost) always match one of five metrical patterns. This does not contradict the last paragraph, as you will see shortly. While the number of weak-stress syllables is variable within a half-line, their placement between and around the strong-stress syllables has to match one of five configurations (with few exceptions). In this list, the ‘/’ indicates strong or primary stress, ‘\’ indicates secondary stress (not considered a strong-stress syllable), and the ‘x’ indicates weak or no stress. The modern English examples are those of J.R.R. Tolkien.

A-line:	/ x / x	(falling)	‘knights in armour’
B-line:	x / x /	(rising)	‘the roaring sea’
C-line:	x / / x	(clashing)	‘on high mountains’
D1-line:	/ / \ x	(broken, falling)	‘bright archangels’
D2-line:	/ / x \	(broken, rising)	‘bold brazenfaced’
E-line:	/ \ x /	(fall-and-rise)	‘highcrested elms’

[Grr. I can't seem to get rid of that space before my table.]

Anyway, these half-line types were compiled by Edvard Sievers, who put them thus in descending order of occurrence (Type A is the most common). Note that weak-stressed syllables in many cases (e.g., at the beginning of the half-line) don’t count, and therefore may be as numerous as the language requires. (E.g., the first OHG half-line shows the pattern x x x / / x which is a version of type C) Most commonly it is nouns and adjective that receive stress, then verbs, then (almost not at all) smaller helper words. In the examples above, we see: types C-A in the Muspilli, A-B in the Heliand, D2-A in the line from Beowulf, and E-A in the Völuspá.

4. Alliteration occurs between at least one strong syllable in each half-line. This has the effect of binding the two verses of a line together, so that while the basic metrical unit of old Germanic poetry is the half-line, the basic alliterative unit is the (full) line. In the first verse of a line, both stressed syllables in the first half-lines may often alliterate; it is common but not required. Thus the first half-lines in the OS and OE examples have two alliterating syllables, while the OHG and ON examples only show one. In the second half-line, only one stressed syllable alliterates, and it is always this first strong syllable of the second half-line that determines the alliterating letter or sound for the entire line. This is useful if one is unsure of the metrical pattern of a line, since alliteration is easier to spot than meter, and one can always count on alliterated syllables being stressed.

There are two more points to know about alliteration: A) All vowels alliterate with all other vowels. (I suppose technically what is alliterating here is the glottal stop that initiates vowels.) B) In OE, the letter ‘g’ is considered to alliterate, according to the rules, even when representing different sounds. Thus, gear (year), pronounced with the OE soft ‘g’ (like modern consonantal ‘y’) is deemed to alliterate with Grendel, clearly a hard ‘g’ sound. The is one of the ways we know that the Anglo-Saxons inherited their verse system from a time when all their g’s did sound the same.

Just how old is this form of poetry inherited by all the Germanic tribes? One of the oldest runic inscriptions, and probably the most famous, is from one of the the now lost Golden Horns of Gallehus. It has been called proto-Norse, but the forms it exhibits could just as easily be the ancestor of German, Saxon, or English, as of the Scandinavian languages (and it's not really all that far off from Gothic either). Here is the inscription, and its transliteration into Latin figures (those of you studying runes can read along):

ek hlewagastiR holtijaR horna tawidô
I, Hlegest of Holt [the] horn made [did].

This inscription dates from as far back as the 4th century, yet we can still see four major stressed syllables, connected by alliteration. The half-lines appear to be both of type A, the most common. Clearly, by the time the first lines of verse in English, German, and Norse arrive on the scene, the Germanic poetic tradition was already ancient.

Some Thoughts on Dragons, Beowulf, and St. George

2006-03-10T05:40:00.000-05:00

There's something very appropriate about the fact that the birthplace of fantasy literature, the homeland of JRR Tolkien and the author of Beowulf, has as its patron saint a dragon-slayer, according to legend.

This icon is one of my favorite Christmas gifts from this past season (together with the digital camera I took it with, and the Introduction to Sanskrit from gaetanus). It got me to thinking about what the St. George of the legend had in common with England's other non-native, adopted dragon-slayer, Beowulf.

There seems to be a certain veneration of the heroic ideal that the St. George legend has in common with pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture (or more specifically, with how the newly converted Anglo-Saxons viewed their recent pagan ancestors).

Obviously the dragon in the icon is Satan. I love the blood dripping almost into a vapor from the dragon's mouth: rather realistic for an icon. Also, his tail is wrapped around the heel of St. George's horse like the prophecy of about the devil in Genesis: "He will strike at your head, you will strike at his heel" (Gen. 3:15), "He" being taken to refer to Christ, the offspring of the Woman in the prophecy. In perhaps a mockery of the Woman and her Offspring, Grendel and his mother must be defeated by Beowulf before his own dragonfight. And while Beowulf defeats his dragon, he dies in the process. It's almost like Beowulf had the power to go to the very limits of what a pre-Christian warrior could do (Grendel's kin is traced to Cain, making Beowulf a kind of Old Testament warrior) but no more, while St. George had the power to fight the Dragon himself and live.

Killing dragons / defeating evil seems to be the kind of thing one does in public, if we are to judge by the tower crammed with royalty and soldiers like a phonebooth full of college students. And this public doesn't at first glance seem anymore helpful than Beowulf's cowardly comrades.

Yet Beowulf did at least have Wiglaf, and St. George has someone with him, too. The women (I think both are women) accompanying both St. George and the dragon brought to my mind the personified Wisdom and Folly from the Book of Proverbs, and obviously in the Christian tradition, St. George is victorious over evil only because Christ is with him. Beowulf represents a somewhat more lonely Germanic heroism, all the more impressive since it is so solitary.

So anyway, I haven't figured out all the symbolism of the icon yet (that's part of the fun of icons). To wit: What's with the urns carried by the women accompanying George and the dragon? And why is the one holding the dragon's leash walking back the other way? St. George and horse are facing uphill ... working their way to heaven? Is that what the tower of people represents? I wonder if the markings on the tower mean anything.

Finally (well, not finally really, but I have to end this post some time) I wonder if there's a reason the dragon is twisted in its wrath like an evil wreath. Another happy coincidence between the traditions of St. George and the English language.

Basic Words and the Translation of ωφθη, part 2

2006-02-28T05:05:00.000-05:00

Part of my fascination with "basic" words stems from my interest in developmental psychology and linguistics. I have now three children (my wife was actually in labor with our third as I was writing my last entry) and being an aspiring linguist I like to think about language from their point of view. What follows are all just my own observations; I haven't formally studied developmental psychology, though I'd really love to.

From a developing child's point of view, language seems to grow in two ways simultaneously. It moves from the particular to the abstract, and it moves from early and common experience to wider and more specialized experience. Thus, a child will first learn the words "circle", "triangle", "square", and only later learn the word for "shape"---I think about the same time they learn you can call things "chair-shaped" or "car-shaped". They might know, earlier, how to answer properly a question like "what shape is this?" when you point to a geometric shape, but before they realize something can be x-"shaped", they don't use the word "shape" themselves meaningfully. Much later (none of my children have reached this stage yet, my oldest being only 4 1/2) he will learn the word "form", which means the same kind of thing as "shape" but applies not just to physical things, but also to things like plots or arguments or grammatical patterns. This is one kind of growth in vocabulary and language.

Another kind is of growth is from the more common to the less common. A child will learn very early on words that apply to his ordinary, day-to-day life: "food", "clothes", "floor", "spank", etc. At a certain age, he starts taking a hard look around and noticing many things he doesn't know the word for, because they weren't terribly relevant to him at first. This stage (the "what's that called?" stage) never really ends, but is only a natural commensurate with broadening experiences.

Now, it seems to me that this same distinction is useful when thinking about words that can have multiple meanings or translations. I see three distinct patterns in words with multiple senses---if anyone can think of more, I would be happy to hear about it.

First, there are words which have multiple meanings simply because they are abstract, like the word "form". Abstract words can refer either to the abstract concept, or to any of the particular things from which the concept is abstracted. So, "form" can mean, depending on context, just the same as "physical shape", or else it can mean something more like "pattern". It is quite possible for another language to lack a word with precisely the same range of abstraction as our word "form", and so when translating to such a language from English, the word "form" will always necessitate a choice based on context.

Another kind of multiple senses a word might have represents a simple expansion of language referrents within a single vocabulary word. For example, the word "run" is first used to refer to a physical act of motion, but it is also extended to refer to what a politician does when he wants to be elected. Here you have what you might call a sideways rather than an upward expansion of meaning: a word goes from one concrete to a different concrete. Now this is typically done on the basis of some analogy: here the connecting idea is that of the race, of which a political campaign is one kind, and another kind of which is the sort you run physically. The connecting analogy, however, is often quite weak and may well not be understood at all by the person who uses the same word in two different ways.

A third kind of multiple sense is a sort of a combination of the previous two. A word may start with a simple and concrete meaning, but then also take on an abstracted meaning while retaining the basic meaning as well. "Shape" might be a good example, actually, as the word can be used as a synonym for "form", although you have more of a feeling of speaking figuratively when you use the word in that way. "See" is another good example, actually. It begins by refering to physical sight, but then also comes to mean any sort of knowing.

Actually, this is an excellent example, because it illustrates a very common way in which vocabulary is expanded: An abstract idea is represented by a word which, in its first use, refers to the most basic or primary instance of this abstraction. Sight, for humans, is the most important sense. It is the first and most basic way in which we come to know things; hence, "to see" is most naturally adopted as a synonym for "to know". I think this is the case, actually, in every language that I know.

Semitic languages have a lot of good examples of these. HLKH, "to walk," in Syriac (and I think in Hebrew) has also the meaning of "to proceed", as you might use in "to proceed to my next point"---walking is the first and most basic mode we have of proceeding from one place to another. The word for "to stand" in Hebrew (I forget it at the moment) also means "to begin", on the same principle: in a basic, physical sense, you typically have to stand up in order to begin anything. TOV, "to turn around" also means "to do again", or even just "again" or "furthermore".

English has, I think, fewer examples, proabably because it is so vocabulary happy, that if it could ever find a separate word for the more abstract meaning, it would do so. I would not be surprised at all, though, to find that originally the ancestor of the word "go" or "gehen" originally referred also to physical walking.

Ok, this post is already way too long, so I'll break off abruptly here and continue later. Next time, I'll try and draw some inferences for the task of translating from these three kinds of multiple senses.

The Grimm Truth behind Pigs and Razors

2006-02-24T22:52:00.000-05:00

Behold, the wonders of Amazon's all-knowing Automatic Recommendation System, Extraordinaire (ARSE), from whence the Amazon gods pull their divine wisdom. Clearly I should suppress my doubts and seek one day to learn the lesson it seeks to teach me about myself. I will obey, lest it be angered and recommend to me harsher lessons, such as Skating With the Stars or Pickled Herring-Wrapped Filet of Haggis.

I mean seriously, did someone actually program it so that any movie with at least 5 blades in it gives Gillette a free ad? And I'm sure there were pigs and cows in the movie somewhere, but honestly. (Mind you, not that I'm at all averse to bacon and sirloin...)

Cool Quote #6: Egil the Melancholy Viking

2006-02-23T18:15:00.000-05:00

The sagas, so far ahead of their time, were prose stories about regular people, and often show an amazing insight into human nature and personality. Egil Skallagrimsson was an ugly, irascible, unpredictable Icelander, yet composed some of the most beautiful poetry Norse literature has to offer. Isn't it funny the combination of traits we often find in people? Anyway, check out this quote from Egilssaga:

As autumn progressed, Egil grew very melancholy and would often sit down with his head bowed into his cloak.

Once, Arinbjorn went to him and asked what was causing his melancholy: "Even though you have suffered a great loss with your brother's death, the manly thing to do is bear it well. One man lives after another's death. What poetry have you been composing? Let me hear some."

Now that's a man who understands melancholic personalities! :-D

Actually, it has been suggested that Egil suffered from Paget's disease. The saga says he had exceptionally broad bone structure in his head, disturbingly mobile eyebrows, and was generally in a bad mood. Also, Paget's disease would have given him a low-level headache all the time, as well as another unusual characteristic, useful to a Viking: when a farmer dug up his skull a century or so ago, the bone did not chip or shatter or break when he hit it with an axe, it just turned whiter.

The saga writer obviously had no access to the science that would have explained Egil's condition, but he did have access to a more general explanation: human nature, something the saga writers seemed very good at analyzing.

Improve Your English

2006-02-19T19:19:00.000-05:00

Berlitz commercial. I almost spit when I first saw this. Watch and laugh.

Something Rotten in the State of ... Greece?

2006-02-18T00:11:00.000-05:00

This is cool: sauvage noble posts his translation into Greek of Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be speech.

Cool Quote #5: Beowulf

2006-02-17T19:14:00.000-05:00

Continuing my pericopeal efforts to demonstrate the joys of Germanic literature, here's some Beowulf to tide you over til gaetanus' next installment. Frederick Rebsamen's updated translation has the two huge benefits of a) being a clear rendering in modern English, if a bit of a paraphrase (inevitable if you're not doing prose), and b) quite successfully following the rules of Old English (Old Germanic, really) poetic structure. You must read aloud this passage about the Danes first discovering the carnage left by Grendel, noticing the patterns of alliteration that bind the lines together:

At dawning of day     when darkness lifted
Grendel's ravage     rose with the sun.
The waking Danes     wailed to the heavens
a great mourning-song.     Their mighty ruler
lord of a death-hall     leaned on his grief
stooped in shadows     stunned with thane-sorrow
bent to the tracks     of his baneful houseguest
no signs of mercy.     His mind was too dark
nightfall in his heart.     There was no need to wait
when the sun swung low     for he slaughtered again
murdered and feasted     fled through dawnmist
damned to darkness     doomed with a curse.
(ll. 128-137)

Rebsamen has no problems using modern English to imitate the Old in creating new compounds like death-hall, bloodgrief, heartstrong, slaughter-maid, and hell-mother.

I'll post later about the poetic form common to all the old Germanic languages, but for now, here are the roughly corresponding lines of the original for comparison (audio link below):

Ðá wæs on úhtan     mid aérdæge
Grendles gúðcræft     gumum undyrne·
þá wæs æfter wiste     wóp up áhafen
micel morgenswég.     Maére þéoden
æþeling aérgod     unblíðe sæt·
þolode ðrýðswýð     þegnsorge dréah
syðþan híe þæs láðan     lást scéawedon,
wergan gástes·     wæs þæt gewin tó strang
láð ond longsum.     Næs hit lengra fyrst
ac ymb áne niht     eft gefremede
morðbeala máre     ond nó mearn fore,
faéhðe ond fyrene·     wæs tó fæst on þám.
(ll. 126-137)

Basic Words and the Translation of ωφθη, part 1

2006-02-16T20:54:00.000-05:00

I've had some linguistic thoughts recently set off by the question of the proper translation of ωφθη in I Corinthians 15:5.

ωφθη is the first aorist passive for οραω, which has the base sense "to see". In I Cor 15:5, Paul is in the middle of giving a sort of basic confession of faith; he had just finished saying that Christ had died, was buried and rose again on the third day. He then goes on that "και οτι ωφθη κηφα επειτα τοις δωδεκα". κηφα here is in the dative (I can't seem to do an iota subscript here). Hence, this might be translated rather obviously "and that he was seen by Kephas, and then by the Twelve". Now, this was essentially the translation a fellow student gave for this passage, but our teacher (actually a well known expert in Koine Greek) objected to this translation on the following grounds: οραω, he said, can mean "to see" in the normal way with your eyes, but it also has a broader sense. It can be used, for example, for things like mystical visions or intellectual intuitions. Therefore, since the word is not restricted to the simply visual dimension, he would prefer that it be translated in such a way as to leave open the non-visual possibilities of the word οραω: St. Paul might be refering to some sort of mystical vision or a "faith experience," and not to an actual seeing of a risen Christ with the eyes. So his choice was: "and that he appeared to Kephas, and then to the Twelve".

Now, I have a problem with this logic. Granted that οραω can be used in all these non-visual ways, isn't the same true of the English verb "to see"? One might experience some revelation and "see the light", or perhaps "see the error" of one's ways. In fact, "see" can be used in so general a way as to refer to almost any type of knowing or experiencing something: "Come and see for yourself", "I see now that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees." So if the English verb "to see" can express as wide a range of meanings as the Greek verb οραω, why not use the one to translate the other?

This begs another question, however: if the English verb "to see" can have such a range of meanings, why is it that the phrase "and that he was seen by Kephas, and then by the Twelve" seems so clearly to indicate something visual, as opposed to some purely mental apparition? I think this merits some attention, so I intend to do a small series of posts looking at this question. I think it is significant that οραω and "to see", in fact, are both what might be called "basic" words: they are both words learned at the Mother's knee, describing a very basic and very universal phenomenon. This indicates to me that one must understand the wide range of dictionary meanings for these words in a special way. In other words, the fact that there are multiple options that can translate the word οραω means something different from the fact that there are multiple options that can translate, say, the word μορφη, which also has a wide range of meanings but is an abstract word even at root.

So, I'll be pursuing this line of thought over the course of some days. In the end, I'll come back to the question of the translation at stake and make my choice.

Blog Translation Carnival

2006-02-16T18:27:00.000-05:00

For those interested, ALTALK, the blog for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), has announced the Carnival of Blog Translation. See the link for details and rules, as well as a decription of the particular blog phenomenon known as the carnival. In short, pick any blog post that was posted in February (even among your own), and translate it. Into what? Into whatever you're qualified at, or interested in trying! Sorry, gaetanus, I don't know how many blogs you'll find in Coptic or Syriac... ;-)

(h/t to languagehat)

My Blog is Random and Different--Just Like Everybody Else's

2006-02-16T01:55:00.000-05:00

[cynicism]
If you're new to blogging, you may still be fresh and innocent and think how wonderful it must be to have a venue for your random musings for all to read. If you've read any blogs other than those of yourself, your friends, and your neighbor's sweater-wearing chihuahua, you have likely found that approximately 70% of blogs maintained by actual people are self-described as 'random' or some essentially synonymous expression (see "stuff" in The Bitter Scroll's own subtitle). It's cute, in a wacky, slightly modern-rebellious kinda way. (Because, you know, not following the crowd is what everybody's doing these days.)

Unfortunately, what lacks in content will never be fully made up by form or medium of expression. The more readers who experience the wearing-off of the novelty of blogs, the more they will want some indication of content, some way to fit what you're likely to say into the vast hierarchy of knowledge and opinions. The more you leave it open, the more readers will fear pictures of pets or detailed descriptions of how you felt when you stubbed your toe yesterday.

The solution? Well, it depends if you think there's a problem, of course. If you really don't want to be heard--you just want to talk--blogging probably really is for you. (And easier on the rest of us. You can't click away from a RL conversation.) But if you want people to read your stuff, you need to give them a reason to read before they read. In the approximately 0.4 seconds in which they judge your blog worth it or not when they stumble across it, you need to convince people that your blog is worth reading. Then, of course, actually make worth reading.

I think we've got more than enough blue pills in the blogosphere. We could probably use a few more attempts to escape from the matrix of randomness and, ironically, uniformity.
[/cynicism]

When Bureaucrats Try To Talk Linguistics

2006-02-12T19:12:00.000-05:00

Don't know how I missed this post the first time (h/t to Månskensdans), but it really is funny. I can't wait to be asked if I have a native speaking knowledge of Etruscan or IndoEuropean -- or Quenya, for that matter.

I'm totally with Johan on this one (if I'm translating correctly): "Not that I need to, but now I know what I'll do next time someone questions the benefit of my learning Gothic." A Swede after my own heart.

Cool Saga Quotes #3 & 4: Think the Terrible Two's are Bad?

2006-02-12T06:18:00.000-05:00

This one's just classic. It's from the famous Egilssaga:

When the time came for Skallagrim and Bera to go to the feast, Thorolf and the farmhands got ready as well; there were fifteen in the party in all.

Egil told his father that he wanted to go with them. "They're just as much my relatives as Thorolf's," he said.

"You're not going," said Skallagrim, "because you don't know how to behave where there's heavy drinking. You're enough trouble when you're sober."

Oh--did I mention that Egil was three at the time? In his defense, though, he was mature for his age:

As he grew up, it soon bcame clear he [Egil] would turn out very ugly and resemble his father, with black hair. When he was three years old, he was as big and strong as a boy of six or seven.

There. All better, right?

Learning from Linguistic Friendships

2006-02-12T02:14:00.000-05:00

First off, Hejsan! to all my readers in Sweden, a whole bunch of whom seem to have gotten here by way of a link someone posted on a Swedish fantasy and RPG site. (Jag börjar lära mig svenska, och var glad att finna en intressanta sida där jag kan öva mig att läser.) Incidentally, Scandinavian readers of Tolkien are bound to recognize some of the Old English words and names of the Rohirrim that are lost on speakers of modern English. E.g., Gamling the Old, where gamol is simply the Old English for 'old', like the modern Swedish word gammal. Relationships like this come from the Norse influence on Old English (from Norwegians and Danes mostly) during the centuries before the Norman Invasion (9th to 11th).

Anyway, the main reason for posting has to do with a quote I remember reading about from either Tolkien or Lewis, I can't remember which. The gist of the quote was that not only were all of the Inklings friends, but that one's friendship with one person illuminated one's friendship with another. To wit: C. S. Lewis had a certain relationship with Tolkien, but it only went so far. But when others of the Inklings were around, he learned even more about Tolkien's personality by watching his interaction with them. Each person brought out a different facet of the personality of each of the others. As members of their circle left or died, Lewis (I think the quote was from him) found that his own friendship with Tolkien was affected as well, by being limited: He would never again be able to watch and learn from the interaction between Tolkien and, say, Charles Williams.

My little epiphany this morning came when I was reading (with extensive help of a dictionary) a Swedish-language blog (Månskensdans -- which now lists Bitter Scroll on his blog list; tack, Johan!). As I look up the word betyder and discover that it means 'to mean' (as in, "tack means 'thanks' in Swedish"), two thoughts rush into my head at the same time. The first is that it's got to be a cognate of German bedeuten: the 'eu' of German was a development from a ü-sound in Middle High German, and that sound is spelled 'y' in Swedish. The second is that betyder looks a lot like 'betide' -- admittedly a word no one uses anymore, but modern English speakers still recognize that the question "What will this betide?" is asking "What will this mean?"

I love moments like this. My short but growing relationship with my new friend, the Swedish language, has helped me form a closer bond with a much older friend, German. (Yeah, I know this sounds weird, but stay with me.) Readers may notice that I often speak of words and languages like members of a family: "These words are cousins, descendng from a common ancestor." ... "Gothic, and its younger Germanic siblings Old Saxon, Old Norse, Old English...", etc. I see the analogy even more clearly now. If you've ever gotten to know the family of a person you know well, you start to see the little ways they act in a new light, and you understand that person better. So it is with language families. If you really want to know a language thoroughly--why it has some of the expressions it does, why certain verbs are defective, why it forms words they way it does, even why it sounds the way it does--get yourself on a linguistic Family and Friends program. You'll never stop learning.

Cool Saga Quote #2: Sensible Vikings

2006-02-10T18:41:00.000-05:00

From the Saga of the People of Vatnsdal:

In due course Imgimund and Grim set off on their raiding expedition and prospered in their life as Vikings. They did not attack where it made no sense, and had acquired five ships by the autumn...

Again, practicality permeates the sagas.

Some Old English in Tolkien

2006-02-10T17:45:00.000-05:00

For general reference or interest, I thought I'd gather into one place as many of the Old English words lurking in Tolkien’s writings as I could think of. Some you’d expect; others might surprise or interest you. Some might seem more or less intentional on Tolkien’s part--as an Anglo-Saxon scholar, he would at the very least have been aware of their meanings, and therefore aware (and perhaps glad) of the “coincidence” (if such it be) between the meaning and his use. In some instances Tolkien has explicitly noted the connection somewhere (LOTR appendices, his letters, elsewhere). Of the names of people of Rohan, I've only included what I thought were the most interesting or relevant or original. (Most of them are simply historically documented Anglo-Saxon names anyway.)

Standard abbreviations are used: OE=Old English, ON=Old Norse, ModE=Modern English, OHG=Old High German, ROTFLMAO...you get the picture.

Beag: ‘ring’. In the Mercian dialect (which Tolkien used for the Rohirrim), I think this would have been spelled bag; either way, pronounced almost like modern English ‘bag’. Remind you of the last name of any hobbits you know?

Beorn: ‘man; noble, hero, chief, prince, warrior’; however, this is also how OE would render ON bjorn, ‘bear’.

Brego: ‘ruler, chief, king, lord’.

Deagol: diegol, deagol, ‘secret; hiding place; grave’, akin to diegan, ‘to die’. So if Smeagol is one who digs (see below), Deagol recalls all sorts of aspects of his relationship to Smeagol: the death he caused, the grave he dug, and that which he kept hidden and secret (this last meaning is referenced by Tolkien in LOTR, Appendix F).

Dwarrowdelf: dweorg, ‘dwarf’ (akin to German zwerg, Old Norse dvargr) + ‘delf’, an archaic noun formed from ‘to delve’, hence, ‘the delving of the Dwarves’, or ‘dwarvish digging’.

Dwimorberg: dwimor, ‘phantom, ghost, illusion; error’ + beorg, ‘mountain, hill’.

Dwimordene: dwimor + dene, ‘valley, dale’.

Dwimmerlaik: dwimor (see above) + loga, ‘liar, deceiver’ (akin to ‘warlock’).

Emnet: ‘[geographic] plain’.

Ent: ‘giant’.

Ettenmoors/Ettendales: eoten, ‘giant, monster, enemy’ (sometimes confused with Eotenas, ‘Jutes’) + mor ‘moor, morass, swamp’ or + dæl, ‘dale, valley, gorge, abyss’.

Grima: ‘mask, helmet; ghost’. Perhaps Wormtongue was a mask or ghost of his former self; or perhaps he was a mask for Saruman’s influence in Rohan. Either one works.

Hasufel: hasu, ‘dusky, grey, ashen’ + fell, ‘skin, hide’.

Isengard: isen, ‘iron’ + gard, geard, ‘place, realm, ward, enclosure, yard, garden’ (hence middangeard, “middle-earth”).

Mathom: maðom, ‘treasure’; although ironically in the Shire they were no longer seen as treasures but as useless oddities to be given away (like today's fruitcake, I suppose).

Meduseld: medu, ‘mead’ + seld, ‘hall’. As we know from Beowulf and elsewhere, the meadhall is the standard place for the king to feast with his kin and dole out gifts and entertain guests.

Michel Delving: micel, ‘great, big,’ hence Scottish ‘muckle’. So the name signified a great digging or dug area.

Mirkwood: mircwudu, ‘dark forest’. In Norse poetry the term referred to the vast expanse of primeval forest in Germanic areas of the Continent.

Mordor: ‘murder’

Mundburg: mund, ‘protection, trust, security, the king’s peace’ (hence names like Edmund) + burg, byrig, ‘fortified dwelling, walled city’ (hence the –burg, –bury, and –borough endings of English place names). So Mundburg would be the city that symbolizes safety and security, with a royal connotation.

Orthanc: ‘intelligence, understanding, cleverness, skill, mechanical art’ (akin to OHG urdank). Isn’t this precisely the (downward) progression that Saruman’s mind underwent?

Quickbeam: cwicbeam, ‘aspen, juniper’.

Riddermark: mearc, ‘mark, sign, line of division; an area thus defined: boundary, district, province’ (possibly akin to the name Mercia). So the Riddermark is the district of the Riders (with the vowel in 'rider' shortened), just as Denmark is the district of the Danes.

Rivendell: reofan, ‘to rend, break’ (akin to ModE ‘rift’) + dell, ‘vale, hollow, dale’. So, a valley formed from the rending of stone (either naturally or otherwise).

Saruman: searo, searu, ‘clever, cunning’.

Scatha: sceaða, scaða, ‘criminal, assassin; fiend, devil’.

Shadowfax: sceadu, ‘shadow’ + feax, ‘hair’. (Compare Fairfax.)

Simbelmyne: simbel, simle, ‘ever, always’ + myne, ‘mind, remember’.

Smeagol/Smials: smygel, ‘retreat, burrow’. Hence, a ‘smial’ could be a modern descendant of this word, while *smeagol might indicate one who burrows or digs.

Smaug: Could be related to either (or both) of smygel (see previous entry) or smoc, ‘smoke’.

Theoden: þeoden, ‘king, ruler’, akin to þeod, ‘people’; Þeoderic (Go. Þiudareiks, Norse Þidrek, Germ. Dietrich), name meaning ‘ruler of the people’; and þeodisc, ‘of our own people’, akin to teutisch, the old form of deutsch, ‘of the German(ic) people’.

Thrihyrne: ‘three-cornered’.

Warg: wearg, ‘wolf, outlaw’, akin to Norse vargr.

Withywindle: wiðig, ‘willow’ + windel, ‘basket’. So the Withywindle river valley was like a big basket of willows.

Coffee

2006-02-10T16:15:00.000-05:00

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable

At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty

You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it

Your caffeine addiction level: high

What Kind of Coffee Are You?

Actually, my favorite type is Arabic/Turkish coffee. Every time I've come back from Palestine, it has taken me a while to get used to the weakness of American coffee. The solution I found is to drink tea when I come back, then even American coffee tastes strong in comparison.

My statue

2006-02-08T18:22:00.000-05:00

Well, not really. This is the statue of King Alfred in Winchester. I'm testing out Hello for publishing pictures.

Feasts and Fun in February

2006-02-08T15:10:00.000-05:00

Here are some language-related or otherwise my-fancy-striking observances slated for this month, as listed on a couple of very unofficial-looking sites. Still, they're fun.

Feb. 13th: Blame Someone Else Day, Get a Different Name Day, International Skeptics Day

Feb. 20th: Northern Hemisphere Hoodie-Hoo Day

Feb. 21st: International Mother Language Day

February is also National Time Management Month. It's National Cherry Pie Month, but also National Children's Dental Health Month. Finally, February is Library Lovers Month.

The current Catholic calendar (on which each day is the official feast of approximately 37,345,509 saints) includes the following:

Feb. 13th: St. Jordan of Saxony. Saxon noble and Dominican historian.

Feb. 17th: St. Guevrock. 6th century Briton with a cool name.

Feb. 22nd: St. John the Saxon. Invited by King Alfred--not me, the first one--to restore faith and learning to the English abbeys ravaged by the Danes. Killed by French monks.

Feb. 25th: St. Ethelbert of Kent. Baptized by St. Augustine of Canterbury, leading to conversion of thousands of countrymen.

Some Wisdom for your Wednesday

2006-02-08T14:43:00.000-05:00

Norse wisdom, specifically. Today is Odin's day, after all, so here are a couple of my favorite verses from the Norse Hávamál, The Sayings of the High One (Odin), which imparts little snippets of practical, day-to-day Viking wisdom like a Norse Book of Proverbs:

Wits are needful for someone who travels widely,
anything will do at home;
he becomes a laughing-stock, the man who knows nothing
and sits among the wise. (5)

...

About his intelligence no man should be boastful,
rather cautious of mind;
when a wise and silent man comes to a homestead
seldom does shame befall the wary;
for no more trustworthy a friend can any man get
than a store of common sense. (6)

...

Wise that man seems who retreats
when one guest is insulting another;
the man who mocks others at a feast doesn't really know
whether he's shooting off his mouth amid enemies. (31)

...

It's a great detour to a bad friend's house,
even though he lives on the route;
but to a good friend's the ways lie straight,
even though he lives far off. (34)

...

He should get up early, the man who means to take
another's life or property;
the slumbering wolf does nto get the ham,
nor a sleeping man victory. (58)

...

It's better to live than not to be alive,
it's the living man who gets the cow. (70)

...

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the self must also die;
but glory never dies,
for the man who is able to achieve it. (76)

Keanu Reeves tried his hand at translating this last verse in The Replacements when he told his team: "Pain heals; chicks dig scars; glory...lasts forever!"

Cool Saga Quote #1: "When I was your age..."

2006-02-07T02:27:00.000-05:00

I suspect that Cool Quotes will become a feature of The Bitter Scroll, since there are so many cool quotes from Germanic literature, but since I've been reading the Saga of the People of Vatnsdal, it's first. It's a bit long, but check out the way Ketil the Large rails at his son to get him to do something with his life:

On one occasion Ketil said to Thorstein his son, "The behaviour of young men today is not what it was when I was young. In those days men hankered after deeds of derring-do, either by going raiding or by winning wealth and honour through exploits in which there was some element of danger. But nowadays young men want to be stay-at-homes, and sit by the fire, and stuff their stomachs with mead and ale; and so it is that manliness and bravery are on the wane. I have won wealth and honour because I dared to face danger and tough single combats. You, Thorstein, have been blessed with little in the way of strength of size. It is more than likely that your deeds will follow suit, and that your courage and daring will match your size, because you have no desire to emulate the exploits of your ancestors; you reveal yourself to be just as you look, with your spirit matching your size. It was once the custom of powerful men, kings or earls -- those who were our peers -- that they went off raiding, and won riches and renown for themselves, and such wealth did not count as party of any legacy nor did a son inherit it from his father; rather was the money to lie in the tomb alongside the chieftain himself. And even if the sons in herited the lands, they were unable to sustain their high status, if honour counted for anything, unless they put themselves and their men at risk and went into battle, thereby winning for themselves each in his turn, wealth and renown -- and so following in the footsteps of their kinsmen. I believe that the old warriors' ways are unknown to you -- I wish I could teach them to you. You have now reached the age when it would be right for you to put yourself to the text, and find out what fate has in store for you."

Thorstein answered, "If ever provocation worked, this would be provocation enough." He stood up and walked away, and was very angry.

Ah, for the good old days of raiding and plundering! Simpler times...

I love the writing style of the sagas. So down to earth, direct, practical. Very approachable. It's the same with their nicknames. On (or near) the continent you have names like Louis the Fat, Aethelred the Unready (OE UnrÃ¦d, meaning ill-advised) and Charles the Bald, which are descriptive enough, but the Scandinavians have a certain knack for nicknames: Erik Blood-axe, Thorfinn Skull-splitter, Unn the Deep-Minded, Thorbjorn the Pock-marked, Asbjorn the Fleshy, Asgeir Scatter-brain, Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, An Twig-belly, Ragnar Shaggy-breeches, Thorarin the Evil, and (poor girl) Thordis the Stick.