Home of Iceland's law-makers
I
am in the midst of preparations for departure for France, with a quick detour
to Montreal to meet the newest Fleming, Hazel Elizabeth, born on May 23rd. For the latter weeks of June I shall be in Paris, all too
briefly, where I shall mostly be chained to a library desk while my spouse is at a violin boot camp for string-quarteters in the Rhône-Alpes. Still, it’s not exactly hardship duty,
even if I must gird my linguistic loins.
In
this blog I occasionally refer to myself in the third person, in a
light-hearted and self-deprecating way, as your bloguiste. And about
one out of three times that I do so I get an email from France, seldom
light-hearted in tone, telling me that bloguiste
is not an actual French word.
Though I am prone to blunders and hilarious mistakes in French, I
actually knew all along that bloguiste
is not an actual French word. But
I try to take a view to language analogous to Marx’s view of the world. “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways,” he writes; “the point is to change it.”
In
the early years of my professorial career I used to teach a course in Old
English. I don’t need to remind
this audience that Old English is not the language of Chaucer—that’s Middle English, with a lexicon that is
already bloated with Frenchisms—but a family of early Germanic dialects that would
require nearly as much work for Chaucer to comprehend as it requires of
us. Old English is the language of
Beowulf. To make significant progress in Old English in one semester
is an ambitious goal, and a teacher does well to sugar-coat the pill.
Hundreds
of beautiful and useful Old English words have been lost to us. I wrote a post about this some years
ago. In my Old English course we addressed this situation in the following way. At the beginning of each
semester we would select an attractive obsolete English word. Members of the class were then asked to
start using this word in their ordinary conversations. They could define it if
people asked, but were not supposed to say anything about the Old English
class. The idea of the experiment
was to see if a small number of trend-setters could make an impact on the
campus vocabulary. We had pretty
good success with gnorn (sadness,
sorrow), hwosta ( a cough) and sele-dream (gleeful party noises). We managed to infiltrate these words
into the campus vocabulary for a time—so if you want bloguiste or any other word to become “real,” just start using it. “That isn’t in the dictionary” is a
pauper’s argument. The dictionary
is not the language; it is a treatise upon
the language.
We
really hit pay dirt with the risqué rarity wifcuþu,
which is roughly the equivalent of the current campus slang “hook up” described
from the male perspective, and of course much classier. In the link given above I go into the
tragic-comic context of its appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Here I have other things on my plate. The old meaning of wif
was simply “woman”, as in the Wife of Bath, meaning a female resident of
that watering hole. The most
common occupation of women being marital, it came to mean “married woman”. Mann
still has an analogous meaning in German and in the archaic English of the
Prayer Book’s marriage service: “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The verb cuþan meant “to
know” or “be familiar with”.
Xenophobia explains the still current meaning of uncouth, as what is unknown or unfamiliar may seem uncomfortable to
the unsophisticated. It is unfair
that only the negative form is in widespread use, since couth itself would be a most useful term.
The Old English alphabet
The
odd-looking letter in cuþan, something
like a b superimposed upon a p, was called thorn. It was one of
two lost Old English letters with the value of modern th. By Chaucer’s time
scribes were often using þ and th interchangeably, but in highly
conservative forms of writing, such as some legal documents and pub signs, the
graphic form outlived people’s comprehension of it. It looked a little bit like a y—so folks started pronouncing it as one! That is where all the cutesy “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” stuff that
one finds in colonial towns on our eastern seaboard comes from. The next time you see one of these
yee-oldies, read þe and pronounce it, unstressed, the.
From the Wycliffe Bible (late 14thc) : In the bigynnyng was/the word & the word...
old and not so old yee-oldies
Perhaps
if we tried hard enough we could reclaim the thorn as well. I am
sure the Icelanders, who have thorns galore, would be happy to let us have a
few fonts on credit. An Icelandic
legislative council is a þing and the
national Parliament the Alþing or “all-Thing.” They have been doing their þing since the tenth century, more than two centuries before the
British Magna Carta.
Westminster may be "the mother of Parliaments," but "parliament" itself is manifestly a French word. And "Congress" (Latin, obviously) is not much better. Surely Anglo-Saxon sensibilities demand something a little more yee-oldy and Englishy? Perhaps Milton can show the way. The All Devils’ Parliament in Paradise Lost is called Pandemonium. We might render that in early English as the helle-þing and relocate it from the Styx to the banks of the
Potomac.
