Digitizing Manuscripts

14 April 2014

A short video from the Bodleian Library that provides an overview of what digitizing library materials entails.

Hwæt You Say? (Redux)

20 March 2014

Back in November, George Walkden published a paper on the Old English word hwæt and how it is used in in Old English poetry, most famously in the opening lines of Beowulf:

Hwæt! We Gar-Dena    in geardagum,
þeodcyninga    þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas    ellen fremedon.

My previous post summarizing Walkden’s article is here. But in a nutshell, Walkden says that instead of translating hwæt as an independent interjection “Listen!” “Lo!”, as is usually done, that it is part of a larger exclamative phrase, “How have we heard the glory...” Walkden uses statistical analysis of the word’s use in four works, three Old English and one Old Saxon, to make his case.

In his blog, Phenomenal Anglo Saxons, Peter Buchanan has challenged Walkden’s statistics, saying that his results are insufficient to draw a general conclusion about how the word is used in Old English. For anyone interested in the topic, I highly recommend Peter’s blog post. And if you’re not especially interested in the Old English, but want to know what the heck a p-value is, you should also give it a read. It’s one of the clearest explanations of statistical significance that I’ve seen. Not only does Peter walk through the mathematical process for determining p-value, but he explains exactly how the measure should and shouldn’t be used.

[Full disclosure: Peter is a friend of mine, who finished up his PhD here at Toronto last year. We share the same dissertation advisor.]

Books Read, 2013

31 December 2013

As I posted for 2011 and 2012, here is a list of books I’ve read over the past year.

Asterisks mark those that are re-reads.

Ælfric, various homilies and hagiographies

*Alexander, Lloyd: The Chronicles of Prydain (The Book of Three; The Black Cauldron; The Castle of Llyr; Taran Wanderer; and The High King)
Aristotle, Poetics
Augustine: Confessions
Augustine: De libero arbitrio (Concerning Free Will)
Augustine: De quantitate animae (Concerning the Size of the Soul)
Austen, Jane: Emma
Bradshaw, John: Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet
Bredehoft, Thomas: Early English Metre
Bremmer, Jan: The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
Cavell, Megan: Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature (unpublished ms)
Clemoes, Peter: Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry
Dante, The Inferno
*Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Dennett, Daniel: Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
Dennett, Daniel: Freedom Evolves
Fagin, Don: Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
Gibbs, Raymond: Poetics of the Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding
Greenfield, Stanley: Hero and Exile: The Art of Old English Poetry
Grundy, Lynne: Books and Grace: Ælfric’s Theology
Harbus, Antonina: The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry
*Haywood, Eliza: Fantomina
Hitchings, Henry: The Language Wars: A History of Proper English
Hitchens, Christopher, ed.: The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
Homer: The Iliad
Hume, Kathryn: Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt
Low, Soon Ai: The Anglo-Saxon Mind: Metaphor and Common Sense Psychology in Old English Literature (Ph.D. dissertation)
Morris, Colin: The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200
Njal’s Saga
Nunberg, Geoffrey: Ascent of the A-Word:Assholism, the First Sixty Years
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Phillips, Michael: Heart, Mind, and Soul in Old English: A Semantic Study (Ph.D. dissertation)
Plato: Symposium
*Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock
Robinson, Fred: Beowulf and the Appositive Style
Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jetha: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships
Savage, Dan: American Savage: On Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics
Selections from Old Norse sagas and poems
Tyler, Elizabeth: Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England
Ullman, Walter: The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages
Virgil, The Aeneid
Wehlau, Ruth: “The Riddle of Creation”: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry
White, Curtis: The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

55 Canadianisms

18 December 2013

An interesting survey of fifty-five different Canadianisms. The results are not statistically valid, but probably roughly align with reality.

Since I’ve lived in Toronto for three-and-a-half years now, I thought it would be interesting to tally up the words that I’m familiar with. I’ve heard about half of them. Some of the unfamiliar may be due to the fact that I live in Toronto and not Canada proper. Others may be due to not having traveled in wider social circles (e.g., back in my younger drinking days, I probably would have known what a forty-pounder was). And of course due to diegogarcity, over the next week I’m sure to hear many of the ones I had thought were unfamiliar.

My experience with these words:

Familiar and Used:
tuque
runners
parkade
eavestroughs
Garburator
pencil crayon
bachelor apartment
whitener
Robertson screws/screwdriver
keener
mickey
two-four/flat
all-dressed
gotch
hydro
skookum
fill your boots
pogey
chocolate bar
track pants
thongs
college
brown bread
pissed
dish cloth
two-way ticket
chesterfield

Familiar but not used
donair (I recall the rare occasions I’ve seen this word from previously encountering doner kebabs in Germany)
chip truck
take off (only from Doug and Bob MacKenzie)
serviette (seen on labels, but I’ve never heard anyone utter the word)
rubber (I know it as a Briticism, but I’ve never heard a Canadian refer to one as such)

Unfamiliar:
ABM (I’ve probably passed by signs that use it and heard people utter it, but never noticed)
homo milk (I’m 100% certain I would have noticed this had I seen it)
gasbar
icing sugar (I don’t bake)
fire hall
Jiffy marker
hooped
twenty-sixer/twixer
forty-pounder
sixty-pounder
Texas mickey
give’r
BFI bin (I’ve seen the bins, but never heard anyone call them that)
kangaroo jacket
freezies
stagette
turfed out
bugger the dog (I am familiar with fuck the dog, but from my language studies, not as a Canadianism)
housecoat

Other:
Pablum (I’ve only encountered it in metaphorical/historical use, and then that was in the States)
lineup or queue (I’m familiar with queue, but I’ve never heard lineup)
no-see-ums (familiar from the States; I’ve never heard a Canadian utter this word)