Bayeux Tapestry detail: Coronation of Harold, created by Myrabella, 2013, used under Creative Commons license
19 November 2013
Jonathan Owen over at the Arrant Pedantry blog has a list of twelve mistakes that people tend to make when opining about “grammar.” It’s a comprehensive and sensible encapsulation. (I’ve been trying to compile a similar list for the past few years, but keep getting distracted.)
14 November 2013
Running eighteen minutes, this film is a bit long, but it’s a must see for anyone interested in the history of publishing. The 1925 silent film documents the entire process of creating a book, from creating the type to loading the volumes on a truck for distribution. It features Oxford’s Clarendon press and at some points you see the Oxford English Dictionary being printed and bound.
Tip o’ the Hat to Lexicon Valley
5 November 2013
The opening line of Beowulf has always posed a bit of problem for translators:
Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
The problem is exactly what the word hwæt is doing. Hwæt is the etymological ancestor of the modern what, but the Old English word’s semantic and grammatical functions are not the same as the modern word’s. Most translators have treated it as an exclamation, along the lines “listen!” or “lo!” rendering the line as something along the lines of:
Listen! We have heard of the glory of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes in days past, how the noble ones performed acts of courage.
In his 2000 translation, Roy Liuzza translates hwæt as “listen!”, treating it hypermetrically and giving the word its own line. Robert Fulk translates it as “yes” in his 2010 translation. In the standard edition, Klaeber’s fourth, Fulk and fellow editors Robert Bjork and John Niles gloss it as “what, lo, behold, well.” And Seamus Heaney famously translates it as “so.” The 1898 Bosworth-Toller dictionary says of the word, “used as an adv. or interj. Why, what! ah!”
But a recent article by George Walkden of the University of Manchester challenges this traditional analysis. Walkden makes a compelling, but by no means ironclad, case that hwæt is not an interjection or an adverb, rather it has no independent meaning from the clause it appears in. It combines with the remainder of the clause to produce an exclamatory effect. In this way it is similar to the modern English how, as in “how you’ve changed!” According to Walkden’s conclusion, the opening line of Beowulf would read:
How we have heard of the glory…
There are four main problems with treating hwæt as an interjection or adverb. The first is that it always appears in an unstressed position, when one would expect interjections to be stressed. Walkden also points out that hwæt, when used in this fashion, is never separated by punctuation from the rest of the clause (which is not particularly damning in and of itself because punctuation in Old English manuscripts is haphazard at best). Ælfric in his grammar, the only extant contemporary Old English grammar, does not analyze hwæt as an interjection (but this is negative evidence; we can only guess as to why Ælfric makes this omission). Finally, hwæt is not only used to initiate speech, and it is found in texts and passages that are not oral in nature. Walkden’s hypothesis does not suffer from these problems.
The core of Walkden’s argument is a syntactic analysis of the use of hwæt and its Old Saxon cognate huat. He finds that in clauses beginning with hwæt/huat, the verb tends to appear in a later position than would normally be the case for a root clause. Instead, hwæt-clauses follow the pattern expected of a dependent clause. If hwæt were an interjection independent of the clause, it should not influence word order.
Walkden’s conclusion holds for both prose works, where syntax tends to be more regular, and poetry. It also holds for original works, like Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and for translated works, like the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, where one would expect the original Latin syntax might have an effect on the syntax of the translation.
The chief question I have regarding Walkden’s work is a methodological one, whether he formulated his hypothesis and then tested it against the corpus, or whether he analyzed the corpus and then formulated the hypothesis to explain a pattern he found. If the first case is true, then his analysis is quite strong evidence. If the second is the case, then not so much. Random patterns will always appear in any type of “data mining” exercise, and their existence tells us little of value.
That question aside, Walkden’s analysis will have to be taken into account in any future translations of Beowulf.
The Independent provides a nice lay encapsulation of Walkden’s argument and its implications.
Sources:
Walkden, George. “The status of hwæt in Old English.” English Language and Linguistics, 17:3: 465–88.
13 October 2013
[This is the first in what will be an irregular series of posts on various quotations posted to the internet. The internet is a wonderful source of information, but when it comes to quotations it is abysmal. I’ll lay good money down, giving odds, that any given quotation taken from the internet is defective in some way. ]
A friend of mine posted a picture of some autumn leaves to her Facebook feed today, and inscribed on the picture was:
Autumn is a second spring, when every leaf is a flower.
—Albert Camus
A nice sentiment, a bit treacly for my taste, but nice nonetheless. But alarms bells went off in my brain when I saw the quotation was ascribed to Camus. The sentiment didn’t sound like the dark and gloomy writer that I was familiar with. But hey, people write all sorts of different things, and maybe Albert penned this in one of his more manic moments.
So I set out to look it up.
The regular web was no help. Sure the quotation was there, ascribed to Camus, but as usual none of the hundreds of quotation pages gave any kind of authoritative source. I wanted to find in which of Camus’s works or letters does the line appear?
But Google Books came through, and it turns out that Camus did pen the line, or at least its original French incarnation. It’s from Act 2 of his 1944 play The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu). But plays and other works of fiction are tricky things. Did Camus really mean this as a hymn to the beauties of autumn, or is this something he placed in the mouth of one of his characters only to twist it into some kind of existential angst? So let’s see in what context Camus used these words:
MARTHA: And often, in the harsh, bleak spring we have here, I dream of the sea and the flowers over there. [After a short silence, in a low, pensive voice] And what I picture makes me blind to everything around me. [After gazing at here thoughtfully for some moments, JAN sits down facing her.]
JAN: I can understand that. Spring over there grips you by the throat and flowers burst into bloom by the thousands, above the white walls. If you roamed the hills that overlook my town for only an hour or so, you’d bring back in your clothes a sweet, honeyed smell of yellow roses. [MARTHA, too, sits down.]
MARTHA: How wonderful that must be! What we call spring here is one rose and a couple of buds struggling to keep alive in the monastery garden. [Scornfully] And that’s enough to stir the hearts of the men in this part of the world. Their hearts are as stingy as that rose tree. A breath of richer air would wilt them; they have the springtime they deserve.
JAN: You’re not quite fair; you have the autumn, too.
MARTHA: What’s the autumn?
JAN: A second spring when every leaf’s a flower. [He looks at her keenly.] Perhaps it’s the same thing with some hearts; perhaps they’ll blossom if you helped them with your patience.
MARTHA: I’ve no patience for this dreary Europe, where autumn has the face of spring and the spring smells of poverty. No, I prefer to picture those other lands over which summer breaks in flame, where the winter rains flood the cities, and where ... things are what they are.
What we have is a cherry-picking of a quotation, removing it from its context and thereby completely changing its meaning. Camus is not extolling the beauty of autumn, but rather portraying it as false and deceptive replacement for a poverty-stricken and bleak spring, tricking one into thinking that all is in bloom, when in actuality everything is dying. Now there is the Camus that I know and love.
Source:
Camus, Albert. Caligula and Three Other Plays. Justin O’Brien, trans. New York: Knopf, 1966. 104–05.
22 September 2013
A bit of amusement for a Sunday morning.
It seems that the IBM Watson computer, the one that bested the Jeopardy! champs, developed a foul mouth after being given access to the Urban Dictionary. Watson is seven years old; so the behavior seems age appropriate.
The text of Wordorigins.org by David Wilton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License