Introductory So

4 December 2011

So, one little word has been getting a bit of press lately. Some people are up in arms about an apparent rise in use of the word so to introduce a sentence.

BBC 4 recently ran a piece that featured a rant against the little word when it’s used to start a sentence. And the New York Times had a similar article back in May 2010.

I became aware of so’s use as an introductory particle when Seamus Heaney used it to translate Hwæt! at the opening of his 2000 edition of Beowulf.

Now, I don’t have any data on whether or not there is actually a rise in the use of introductory so (and as far as I can tell no one else does either) or if this is simply an instance of diegogarcity, where people suddenly start to notice a word that has been there all along. But it’s certainly much older than an alleged origin in Silicon Valley c. 1999, as proposed in the New York Times article. (I seriously doubt that Seamus Heaney is taking his cues from programmers in Santa Clara.) The OED second edition has five citations of so used as an introductory particle, none of them recent, but three of them from significant works of literature: Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Richardson’s Pamela, and Sheridan’s The Rivals. And the New York Times article cites, and then dismisses as aberrant, an instance of its use in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. So it’s not like this is a new or an obscure usage that is rearing its ugly head, threatening to destroy the integrity and beauty of our fair language.

If you object to its use, take a deep breath and count to ten. The introductory so has been with us for centuries. If you think its use is on the rise, don’t complain unless you can back up your claim with data that shows the incidence is actually increasing. If you don’t have hard numbers on its relative usage, chances are the alleged rise is simply a result of confirmation bias. You’re seeing it more because you’re noticing it more, but it’s been there all along.

(Tip of the hat to English, Jack)

Language, It's Always Changing

10 November 2011

People often think of Latin as a highly regular, rules-based language. They rarely consider that the language was widely spoken as a native tongue for 1,500 years and in diverse regions with plenty of regional dialects—not to mention all the changes in the medieval period when people had ceased to learn it at the hearthside as small children. In his blog, Languagehat identifies a famous example of Latin shifting under the feet of one of its greatest writers.

The case in question is from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II, line 49, in a reference to the wooden horse that caused the fall of Troy:

timeo Danaos et dona ferentis
(I fear the Greeks, even when bearing gifts.)

The problem is that according to the classical rules, ferentis, a plural present active participle modifying Danaos (Greeks), is genitive. It should be ferentes, which is the accusative form. And many modern versions of the epic change the the text to ferentes. Now Virgil was hardly an incompetent writer. He certainly knew his genitives from his accusatives. So what is going on?

Evan, one of Languagehat’s readers, nails it. Ferentis is an older accusative form, and Virgil wrote the Aeneid using an older, more conservative style. Checking with Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, I can confirm that Evan has it right. This is an example of change in Latin. Modern editors change the spelling to ferentes in the same way they give Shakespeare modern spelling. The same processes that are driving change in English today were driving change in Latin two thousand years ago.

Anonymous and Shakespeare Being Shakespeare

1 November 2011

With some trepidation, I’m going to wade into the “did Shakespeare write Shakespeare” kerfuffle. My trepidation is not a result of doubt on my part, but is rather that I don’t want to attract the crazies (and despite what Keir Cutler says, many of the anti-Stratford position are indeed certifiable) and that I’m not an expert on Shakespeare, having taken only one graduate-level course on the Bard. As a result, I’m mainly going to be pointing to a better scholar than I on the subject.

First, I haven’t seen Anonymous, nor am I likely to. My unwillingness to see it isn’t due to the subject, but rather that by all reports it is simply a terrible movie. I enjoyed Oliver Stone’s JFK, which has an equally ludicrous plot, and I found Shakespeare In Love to be delightful, even though it probably has as many historical inaccuracies and anachronisms as Anonymous. So I’m not going to comment further on the movie, per se.

Keir Cutler’s recent opinion-piece in the Montreal Gazette gives a nice summary of the anti-Stratfordian position and argument. Implicit within Cutler’s piece is the notion that Shakespeare was a singular genius (he even quotes Henry James referring to the “divine William") and that a mere glover’s son, the scion of low-birth, could not possibly have written the plays. Such snobbery and elitism is endemic to the anti-Stratfordian argument.

Holger Syme has replied to Cutler in the pages of the same paper and effectively demolishes the anti-Stratfordian arguments, showing that their scholarship is only a thin veneer that is easily smashed by only the slightest bit of rigorous research and analysis. I wrote a few days ago about the myth of Shakespeare’s coining new words. And for even more, go to Syme’s blog, where he has written extensively. See the entries here, here, and here. (Disclosure: Syme is a professor here at the University of Toronto, but he is not one of my teachers, and the extent of my relationship with him is once chatting briefly at a faculty-grad student softball game.)

I will make one further comment on one aspect of Cutler’s piece, however, because Syme does not mention the topic and it is an area of Shakespeare scholarship where I have more than a passing knowledge. Cutler writes of Shakespeare’s “mastering of at least five languages other than English.” This is utter hogwash; there is no evidence that Shakespeare was master of any language other than English. Ben Jonson famously wrote of Shakespeare that he had “little Latin and less Greek.” Of course, the anti-Stratfordians will claim that Jonson is writing about the Stratford man and not the author of the plays, but when one examines the Latin that appears in Shakespeare’s corpus it is apparent that it has been culled from distant memories of schoolboy Latin. The most extensive use of that language by Shakespeare is the Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1, which is taken almost word for word from the opening pages of Lyly’s A Shorte Introduction of Grammar, a text that every first-year school boy in Elizabethan England would have learned by heart. Latin elsewhere in the plays consists of little more than individual words and phrases. (Strangely, Shakespeare’s Roman plays have almost no Latin in them, “et tu Brute” being the famed exception, but I digress.) Similarly, the only other extensive use of a language other than English in Shakespeare’s corpus is in Henry V 3.4, in which Princess Katherine commands her maid to teach her English. And we get phrase-book French here, a simple lesson on naming parts of the body, with lots of sexual punning thrown in. One doesn’t need to know French at all to understand exactly what is happening on stage, and it wouldn’t have taken “mastery” of French to write the scene. As for other languages, there are a couple phrases and a half dozen words from Italian and three brief snippets of Spanish from the plays. That’s it. My point: Shakespeare was a master of dramatic art, but his work doesn’t display anything other than ordinary command of foreign languages. He is not exceptional in this regard, and in fact is probably somewhat sub-par when compared to his contemporaries, like the university-educated Marlowe.