herman newt

moving to another pond.

2011-02-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

herman and his friends are moving to wordpress. you'll find them henceforth at
http://hermannewt.wordpress.com/

no further posts from herman or his friends will appear here at blogger.
see you there, and don;t forget to subscribe.

2011-01-23T19:33:00.001-08:00

lynn gwyst's advice for young readers

nicholas ostler's book, 'empires of the word – a language history of the world' comes with glowing reviews from all the important newspapers, and ostler's qualifications are, on the surface, impeccable according to early 21^st century academic standards, out-moded as we all know those standards are. and he's right when he says that 'the interplay of languages is an aspect of history that has too long been neglected'. but, wrong as current models of language history are, my darlings, being based on the biblical chronologies which are academically unsustainable if you think carefully about it, this history is as badly flawed as any written in the past.

here's a gorgeous little quote from the preface (page xxi). sorry about the holes. J

' it is a received truth. . . that in the roman empire the west was administered in latin, the east in greek, and the greek administration lasted for many centuries more than the latin: how surprising. . . that . . . latin survived (the collapse of the empire) . . . but greek largely evaporated within a couple of generations. '

now rotflmao is not an academic comment, so i shall withhold it. i shall simply get up off the f and find and reinstall my a and find my way back to the podium to continue the lecture.

'a received truth' ?!!! without going too far into the exquisitely serious difficulties that plague the defining of the word 'truth', and without any claim to hermeneutical certainty (herman's still doing serious time for heresy in the dungeons of ogsford, beneath the clammy catacombs lined with ancient oaken shelves rotting spongily beneath their groaning loads of hide-bound books, in many-towered academica ), he clearly (herman would say 'prolly') meant 'firmly-held belief' 'article of faith' or 'entrenched dogma', not 'truth'.
it is sad that students doing linguistics aren't force-fed little epistemological gems like that, and great chunks of academica verafor breakfast along with their oh so comical chromosomes in academia. L a scholar should be able to distinguish between a truth and a cherished notion.
how is this 'truth' received? usually via the much-structured, majestically-traditioned, ecclesiastically- conditioned, primarily western european education system. to which kudos! blessed be it! hang on in there!

and whence came this 'received truth'? not hard, mes enfants: from studies of old texts.

now old texts are those written in old-fashioned languages and forms of languages, and while it's certain that all manner of changes will happen in any evolving language cloud over time, especially in troubled times, it is very difficult to trace them, and all the worse when all you've got is a few mouldy tomes left by the tinily elite and linguistically a-typical literati, and rediscovered by who knows who and when and even where and under what circumstances, (see don quixote for eye-witness accounts of book-salvaging and entertaining insights into renaissance hermeneutica and the translation and distribution of books yn termyn eus passyes) and it's all done by linguists in an intense exchange with historians and none of them trained at all at all at all in hermeneutics. let's hope this is changing. J

given the total, ardent, militant devotion some scholars seem to have to the results of these studies, which build upon without testing the foundations laid down by renaissance, medieval and earlier texts, (there i've said it)

,

i have unsubscribed. i'm taking the academically (practically) unprecedented step of thinking for myself. learning not just from inevitably flawed and annually superceded textbooks and books written by academics for the general public (which anyway get used for textbooks as any student of linguistics knows), but from any and every source that might yield insight relevant and revealing. even ostler's empires of the word is capable of providing access points for extending my own research.

i'll share it with you as we go. won't it be fun when we look at the next bit of the sentence?

and no i'm not welsh. i'm an entirely fictitious character invented for fun and frolic by wyldwyverne aka vyvyan ogma wyverne formerly, um, er, oooh, now that's going back a bit. . . and she's by a mainly - munster irishman out of cockney mongrelry with a dash of the cornovian den/dane/ duine - tá 'chuile short ann! but bred in the colonies of oz and resident there amid lizards and crows and largish mobs of human-sized, human-eyed, highly-intelligent kangaroos.

2010-11-25T19:58:00.001-08:00

howdy, newtlets,

herman isn't here. he's been arrested for heresy because he was observed by the mind-control robots to be secretly believing that Assyrian was a foreign pronunciation of Arthurian, and that otto and ossa and offa were all foreigners having a go at saying Arthur and they meant king, and they're going to string him up.

i feel a bit guilty about it because if he did believe such heretical stuff it may have been because of me. i told him how if you naively apply the best principles of historical linguistics to the corpuses, having a good general knowledge of at least several, you end up chucking out the current chronologies as spurious and fanciful and then bang goes your ecclesiastica out of both shotgun barrels and there he poor ole is on the rack and ecclesiastica turning the crank handles.

so the least i can do is take his class for him while he's away.

etty moloji is my name those of you who are new to this blog. today i'm going to talk about the futhark.

naturally, being not only understaffed, underpaid and underfunded, but also overworked, overspecialized, and over a barrel, university scholars and independent specialists in the field of runology seem to be pretty firmly in agreement that futhark is a meaningless list of the first six letters - feoh, ur, thorn, os, rad and cen - of the ancient runic alphabet that survived in various forms into medieval times in old England and Iceland, and, like some scholars of old, they have missed the glaringly obvious truth:

spells

fathers

now that means that, just as in the south of England, the u, which is sharp-cornered and sometimes also upsidedown, is pronounced ah not oo; and the '<' , named cen in the anglo-saxon rune poem, was pronounced s at least by the writers of this six-letter sequence. from other evidence, it must have been pronounced s or c, depending where you are, just as 'c' is in modern english. cen meant fire, candle, can of fuel or the burning of same. look also at kindle, pronounce the c as a s and you get cinder, incinerate, incendiary etc. spell it with a s and you get sun, and with a sh and you get shine, and sheen – and then there's scintillate; all related to words for tin. cornwall's a likely spot, innit? lot of tin, lot of dinero, lot of foreign traders with a Cornish presence having a go at pronouncing it in their own, sometimes thick, accents. not a problem, especially in view of the fact that anglo Saxons still do those things with those letters.

so how come the rune poem lists them in that order? we can't know, but i can easily imagine a reconstructionist in the past finding the word and reading it as foo-thark, which is meaningless, concluding it to have been, like alphabet (alpha, beta, etc), the beginning of an alphabet.

text-abuse in the 21st century

2010-10-03T19:55:00.001-07:00

one of the reasons that old texts are being mistranslated is that most of the work done on them was done before and during the nineteenth century when the academic mind was building on assumptions which are now easily seen to be invalid. in the nineteenth century, it was firmly believed that the precise time of the creation of the universe right down to the time of day had been accurately calculated, and what with the churches and the universities going at it hammer and tongs over everyone's head, charles darwin was having a hard time getting his work read. that was the intellectual climate, the academic position.

if the nineteenth century scholars were romantics, swept up in the heady newness of it all after long centuries of repression and anathema; and if their work smacks strongly of their impassioned fantasies of the magical lands of their ancestors, the renaissance collectors and translators of old texts were worse. they brought forth many of their texts from undisclosed hiding places and published them if they dared to publish them at all under false pretences, passing them off as fictional works they'd written themselves. this applies to dante's inferno equally with the faerie queene, many of shakespeare's plays, tirant lo blanc, and most of the arthurian texts.

the reason why this was so is still lost in the mists, but it's easy to see that these texts, if historical at all, clash wildly and howlingly with the history of the world as produced for us out of the texts from which the bible's old and new testaments were concocted, and the church was very intolerant of alternative beliefs about anything.

the amount of work these several centuries of scholars have done is vast, the structures of 'knowledge' and belief arising from it are extensive, unwieldy and precarious, and they are straining present day credence to the limit. we must believe, for example, that if an entry in the famed dictionary of the irish language, taken from a old glossary made under unknown (or even falsely portrayed) conditions by a person whose knowledge of irish was clearly inadequate, gives bizarre translations of all passages in which it occurs except a very few, it is not because the suspect glossary, dil and centuries of scholarship are wrong, it is because the irish were bizarre, and since this is what the ancient romans always maintained, it must be right.

similarly, we must not disturb the slumber of that miracle baby born of god and an intact-hymen virgin, by dating mss according to the most persuasive evidence; we must date all mss mentioning evidence of christianity, a church, a priesthood, a worldwide network of monasteries and abbeys, as later than this event.

similarly we must not see the eons old succession of ruler-priests called jesus and josephus (jose'uses) and joses and jo cephas, and caiaphas and cheop's. we have to believe this even though it means that the whole of the arthurian history has to fit into the time after the roman occupation and before the anglo-saxon period, and scholars have looked for it in vain and have started to proclaim that anyway, it doesn't really matter if it was real or not, the myth is what inspires us most.

only a few fanatics, ferocious in their defence of their falsehoods, as enraged against heretics as any old-time cleric ever was, archaic in their methodology, lacking any epistemology and abysmal at dialectic, and their fans, dupes, and equally error-driven scholars working in dependent related disciplines such as numismatics, history and comparative philology (called historical linguistics by some) still believe that the ancient texts from homer to snorri and even shakespeare and spenser, have all been accurately translated, their lexicography pretty close to perfect, their meanings well-understood and their contexts satisfactorily worked out, or else emerging as scholars steeped in the established hermeneutical traditions continue their work.

one can appreciate their predicament. the body of opinion that determines how old texts will be translated and what sense will be made of the translations will be profoundly shocked by the paradigm shift that would occur within it as a result of anyone of its fundamental assumptions being recognised as false. and each discovery of the falsity of an assumption would lead inevitably to the examination of all assumptions, and many others would be seen to be false and there'd be a total collapse of all the screen memories currently in the way of progress towards the achievement of a more realistic approach to cultural memory retrieval and maintenance from the evidence of texts.

this is rendered more painful by the fact that currently one cannot progress in the academic arena unless one is dedicated in a peculiarly archaic fashion. i have discovered in the most painful way possible that i cannot offer a word of critique upon an instance of current dogma without deeply wounding or offending the scholar i'm addressing, as if the fabric of their body of opinion is the flesh of their bones. this serves as a kind of emotional blackmail: only a nasty person would persist in presenting academics studying old irish texts with evidence that their translations are wrong. they can't defend themselves, so they resort to personal attack, insults and defamation, trying to discredit me by proving that i have not exhibited the same commitment to their methodologies as they do. their friends rally round.

this leads me to the conclusion that independent, free-thinking intellectuals with an instinct for critique and a conscientious love of truth get weeded out of these disciplines early in their career, and those that make it through to post-graduate levels are acutely aware (if they're not repressing it) that there is 'only one opinion' as an oxford scholar assert to me a short while ago (on the subject of historical linguistics) and their career depends on their not wavering from it, making their tiny little edges of progress only within existing paradigms as driven by prevailing opinion.

when it gets that seriously stultifyingly up itself, you suspect the church. but you have to dare to say: the bible is a fraud, and that immediately drops you head first into the slush-category. no truly intelligent person could say that, or even if, well okay, everybody kno-o-o-ows that, but nobody really cares, what does it matter if it's wrong or right, what does it matter if all history derivable from old texts is twisted insanely around their petty fibs and outside frauds, such that truths are no longer accessible through them, what does it matter if all chronologies are way off the mark, and all ancestral lineages horribly distorted and all cultures of the past hopelessly misrepresented, most to their detriment. after all it's the myth that drives our dreams, shapes our culture's evolution, makes us what we are.

so okay, cu chullain when ever he lost his temper had a stream of blood shooting out of the top of his head like a fountain and his knees went on backwards.

wouldn't have been that he had a red plume on his helmet and they were wrong about the knees, would it? all those scholars wouldn't be wrong?

and irish kings just did fuck horses, didn't they? wouldn't be that some translator mistook the word for a woman for a word for a mare, in a linguistic situation in which confusion about that word was eminently possible, with emer, mari(e) mare, myrgh, margh, mary, marry, maere etc, all meaning either horse, mare, wife or girl, depending where and who says it and which dialect, would it? and even if it were, it's the myth we're all enamoured of, isn't it???

and there wouldn't have been circle ceremony, with quarters and a centre and peace throughout the whole world, would there, just brehon law, which is really rather good, in keeping with bizarre magician kings who fucked their horses and rolled themselves up in bloody bullskins to find out whatever they needed to know (wouldn't have books, would they?)

oh, breath-blast them all! let their eyes be skinnyfat and a terrible soft slipperiness to their gibberish!! i'm going to translate them sanely. and just admit it when i don't know what a word means. sometimes the meaning's just lost forever... until we learn to time travel, anyway.

on the non-antiquity of the inflected languages

2010-09-26T21:07:00.001-07:00

( naturally as a wyverne spirit person, i find this a sensitive area. people who think dragons are for beheading, riding about on or running through with lances just aren't my type, y'know. even more so as an independent etymologist who disagrees with the textbooks on fundamentals so essential i can scarcely find common ground. )

this is a response to mainstream proto-indo-europeanists. they are imo up to their necks in fundamental error. their scholarship is hidebound. most of its fundamental principles were already laid down by the nineteenth century, and have never been questioned from any academic position that i could call valid, and okay, i'm finicky, but i'm not that finnicky.

the earliest inventors of the art of 'comparative philology' (now called 'comparative historical linguistics' or some similar thing) were free-thinkers ahead of their time, but they had gone under the spell of the keepers of the mostly Sanskrit traditional literature of India. their work won great acclaim and came under the scrutiny of mainstream universities which were heavily committed to church dogma. though the bravest intellectuals involved in the early development of 'comparative philology' as a scholarly pursuit were not committed to defending these dogmas, as the universities took it up, perforce they warped the study around 'established' biblical dogmas as if they were beyond question, god's own words, 'gospel'.

now, this was before darwin's work was accepted. church scholarship had established the exact date of god's creation of earth by working it out from the bible. adam spoke the first words in the garden of eden when he named the animals, less than six thousand years ago, if i remember rightly. that wasn't considered to be a myth – in fact it wasn't all right to call that a myth – until the middle of last century. it was blasphemy to hint that it 'ain't necessarily so'. i remember the bold, rash feeling there was to it too. like you looked around after to see if you were going to be struck down by a thunderbolt for blaspheming. the birth of jesus, calculated from biblical evidence and the dogma concerning them, was and still is slap bang in the centre of the one and only time scale for all earth for all time, neutral, zero, the end of an ugly era and the commencement of another, better one.

into this atmosphere came this wonderful idea of tracing the origins of words by comparing them and working out how they came to be different and from what common ancestor they diverged, and the belief that you'd soon find that original, perfect language that god and adam spoke in the newly created garden, not so very long ago.

don't get me wrong – i'm not saying they haven't progressed. they're no longer expecting to find adam's own language. they know about laetoli and the ice-ages etc. they've got quite articulate about analysing the result of this process. so what harm does insisting on the infallibility of sacred texts and the sacred traditions concerning them do? pull up a chair. J

the scene is set in william jones's famous statement that

"the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the greek, more copious than the latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)

let's unpack it. 'more perfect than the greek. . . more exquisitely refined than either' (and he might have added hebrew) refers us at once to the conviction then held that extinct, tightly conjugated languages were the original, superior languages from which the uninflected languages had deteriorated into their present forms. both were taught in schools as models of excellence to attune the mind to all that is holy and good. kid's greek text-books used to promise their pupils that they were about to learn the very language that god chose to tell us all about his son. practically angel-speak. note he doesn't regard latin as 'perfect', just 'copious', reflecting the idea that latin was less holy – 'god' had preferred the greek version to the latin vulgate since luther's and king james' versions hit the stands. his hyperbole 'more exquisitely refined' indicates that he expected to find people ready to agree with him – slightly disenchanted with the 'classics', but still seeking the elusive ideal, and expecting to find it further a-field.

this idea of the superiority of ancient languages goes back to the celtic idea of the twenty noble languages which are recorded as having been taught in the Scythian schools. while scholars have declared roman writings all but infallible, they have dealt more contemptuously with the everyone else's, so while livy's account of road-making with vinegar and fire (eg) is considered fact even though impossible, the Scythian schools are still often considered to be entirely mythical, even though supported by truckloads of evidence. in fact they were extremely influential. but when did they exist and what were they?

the oldest datable examples of writing we have are not earlier than the renaissance, and while we can date parchment and ink, we can't date the actual text. no spoken examples date from before the invention of the phonograph. carvings on stone are notoriously difficult to date. carbon dating is sometimes farcically inaccurate, as are all other methods of dating carved inscriptions.

(read don quixote for a contemporary account of salvaging old texts from the burnings. it gives a wonderful account of publishing, translating, getting away with appearing learned to people who aren't and then making it up as you go along and being pain for it, and the hermeneutics of the age are all exquisitely there.)

analysis and a modern (not post- which obscures it a bit) education shows how they must have come into being. both modern and ancient languages were taught in neat paradigms. then, immersion and/or wider experience of the language fills this out. you can imaging this potted approach narrowing down to the pure condensed form of paradigms: the conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns and adjectives.

so the idea that the inflected languages are older than the non-inflectedies s still fondly and firmly held today (although i might refer you here to a discussion on the celtic l list in which Raymond karl concede me this point early this year or late last). there is no evidence to support claims re the antiquity of the inflected languages. none at all.

irish old texts describe a Scythian school which taught the twenty noble languages to trainee officials who would then be sent to the places in which these languages were spoken to live and work there, in positions of high authority - like an english speaking student taking german before going to teach geology at a german university. the date is now not knowable, but evidence i'm seeing places it in the middle ages, not too long before the Norman invasion in England.

i've been making a sort of study of anc gk textbooks of the 19^th and early 20^th with the help of nigel molesworth (google him if you don't know him – but beware, he's a steeeeeep learning curve). they keep turning up in op-shops and they're much easier to learn anc gk from than the latest, which is inclined to be over-reacting to the octopus – it's not everybody's medicine. the little first form grammar is naïve and pure, with the only spin on it being the probiblical one, before it was obscured by all the modernistic (and post-) spins of the 20^th century, and the honest attempts to eliminate spin from language teaching; so the politics in them is glaringly intelligible.

(probibly should slap copyright on probiblically as a coining) (or bung in a hyphen)

these languages were taught as second languages from chantable paradigms into which the original had been potted up by the scholars responsible, and chantable vocabulary lists. a student who learnt a language in this way never heard the natural language until sent out into the field. but language change was then as now faster than textbooks could keep up with. so teachers educated in this way, the learned celts who educated young romans for example, were having to teach natives whose language had continued to evolve through bride-exchanging, conquest and immigration et al, the text book, chantable paradigm version, which had only ever been a very imperfect misrepresentation of a snapshot in time of a rapidly evolving language. a thoroughly artificial language, yet it carried so much prestige that the natural speakers of the original were regarded in some instances (notably welsh and greek) as inferior languages and were replaced by the chantables in schools for the elite, which over the generations provided a leg-up into civilisation for the locals by teaching it to them until the original language at last died out.

this system disappeared when the celtic empire went down (we can't assume we know when that was, as i'll explain later) and attempts at reconstruction were made during the renaissance. the most recent instance of this we have is the ancient greek, which was reconstructed from the old texts that surfaced after the fall of Constantinople. these texts were translated inexpertly around the fantasies of impassioned reconstructionists, whose work has never been checked except tautologically, according to the lexicography and grammar they themselves invented, all debate being knock-out competition instead of respectful consideration of all viewpoints.

there's more coming, but it's a good beginning if you can loosen up on believing the textbooks on the antiquity of the inflected languages.

darn! the panting syllable

2010-06-27T19:37:00.001-07:00

the great adventure began one day when bluestocking the bard was looking something up in the local library. discerning that the book she needed wasn't there, she muttered under her breath, 'darn!', and it's a good thing it wasn't something stronger, for it echoed rather loudly, as stage whispers do, in the still, stiff silence of that stern and sullen place. at once the woman behind her, who had been poking about in some of the dustier, cobwebbier shelves, abandoning all decorum, screamed 'yoicks!' spun on her stubby high heel and stared bluestocking full in the face. 'tally ho!' she added, remembering almost to whisper. she beamed and nodded. 'darn,' she said. 'just the one i'm after.'

'one what?' asked bluestocking.

'panting syllable. that's what 'darn' is to me. and i'm after that little one. i've been on is track a long while and i know im well. you can catch scent of im from donegal to china and all the way up the danube and down the dnieper changing from tin to tan and from tan to can and every which way and now ere e is ere: darn.' she was short and muscular with big bowling-ball breasts, powerful thighs and thick, white fingers. 'etty moloji,' she concluded proffering that hand. bluestocking shook it and smiled her widest, and would have said, 'oh, how interesting,' but the librarian caught her eye with a sombre glare and she only nodded. but as she left the library, she found etty beside her, tugging her sleeve. 'you see i need to know why you said "darn" instead of "blast" or "shit" or something. where and when did you first hear it, used how, and by whom, and when and where and why did you first start using it yourself. and much more. may we walk together a space.'

'certainly. why, i'd be helping scholarship. i first heard darn from my mother and father when i was little, and i asked them what it meant and they said it had no meaning: it was just something you say. i suppose it must have been some old reference to the goddess dana. she's well-documented anyway. where would you like to walk?'

'cornwall? there's such lots of lovely runnable syllables there. and you often catch glimpses of our darn.'

'well, that's fine with me,' said bluestocking the bard. 'my great grandfather was a Cornishman.'

'well, you mean a den, then?'

'a dane? no, a cornishman.'

'the cornish word for man is den.'

'oh, i see, it only sounds like dane.'

'well, i wouldn't say only. it's going beyond the evidence to say they're the same word, but we should not rule out the possibility, which is rather strong in this instance, although whether dane came from den or vice versa, or whether both came from a common source extinct or extant can't be guessed at yet. added to which there are other possibilities, some of them equally strong. greeks intermarried with britons long ago, though the history documenting it has not been understood.'

'oh, are you going to refer now to the danaans? because weren't greeks once called danaans?'

'well, it's not as simple as that. i was thinkin of tirant lo blanc. but it goes back further, you see: it's about tin. now, ere in cornwall' (which is where they now were) 'they ad a tin-trade, and people came from everywhere, all of them talking their eads orf an in all sorts of languages and foreign accents, ship-board creoles, pidgins and things. among them they'd've pronounced tin in every possibly way: tin, tan, ton, tyn, tun, twn, tn, and then some said chin and gave us china (there was also a pottery industry, making fine china, too; some said can, cen or even sin, and there's the cin of incinerator. there's shine, sheen and then other metals, zinc, tungsten and other industries that use tin, or other metals, such as dying, paint-making and leather-making give us tint, tan, tone and so on. and then all kinds of containers are made of metals, some of them named for the metal: tins, cans, tanks, and here's a verb: contain and, depending what you put in em and how long it pullulates, stench, and stink. even the noise it makes is a din. and that's only the english words. Cornish has tan, meaning fire, and tinn or dinn, meaning hard, stern, and uncompromising, and related to the english stern. . . '

'what's fire got to do with it?' bluestocking couldn't help asking.

'they made their fires in tins.'

'who did?'

'the people who used the word tin to mean fire. they heated their spaces by lighting a fire inside a tin. that would get hot and warn the room. light the fire would mean the same as light the tin. some people would still say that today. the irish word for fire is tine, sometimes pronounced like chin-é or chin-ye. maybe even chimney means fires. -ne or -ney is a plural ending in some old dialects. it's like the irish –anna. means the same as the english any in some instances.'

'and stern too? where does the s come from?'

'that's a long story,' said etty. 'let's call in at the diwotti and talk about it over pastiow ha pott te.'

'good idea,' said bluestocking, and into the diwotti they went.

don't miss the next exciting instalment: where the s came from

2010-03-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

there's a new book on the market, a hermeneutical work, and everybody's talking about it, so i'll be having a peruse of it as soon as i can get hold of a copy. for those of you clambering for my wise help and guidance, i'll let you know whether it's worth a gecko or not. shlomo zand or sand is the author, and The Invention of the Jewish People is the book. i've ordered the paperback -paupers must live like paupers - so watch this space.

without knowing what zand has said, i have to applaud his title. i've always been a great believer in the invention of, not the jewish people, but of the popular notion of the jews, as a fantasy to sustain the bible account of creation. but the real, original jewish people are elusive enough.

on the subject here's an interview i did with etty moloji, while researching the exodus of cornish people from exeter, which our history bod, Hiss, Dorian tells me is dated to the 10th century, but dates that far back can't be considered reliable because every household kept different records and even if they had any calendar at all, they weren't synchronised. so the chronologies are a bit of a giggle. lights! action!

herman newt: good day to you, etty, i'm seeking insight into the reality of the character behind the name tewdar. he became the leader of the cornish when, in driving them out of exeter, aethelstan's soldiers killed his father. can you help us with the etymology, etty?

etty moloji: ooh heaven's yes, there's such a lot of it there, herman. panting syllables as far as the eye can see. now the first thing to do, ooh thank you, is that elderflower? how refreshing, all sparkly. now the first thing to do is to hold the word down with one foot, and divide it carefully into its written and spoken components. the written bit is hard and firm, so we hold it by that, and now squint about for the phonetic possibilities. say it. how would you say that, herman? t*e*w*d*a*r?

herman newt: well, i’d say tew rhimes with dew, or it’s stew without the s, so i’d go for chew for the first syllable, and d@ for the second, and i’d put the emphasis on the first. chewdah. oh i get it. in cornish that's mutate to jewdah. like judah.

etty moloji: only if they spelt it chewdar, but they didn't. that doesn't mean they never did, only that we haven't recorded it. but you could bet your last mudworm at least some of them would have and yes, that does support the hypothesis of a link between the two. but can you think of any other ways? for example, your assumption that tew rhymes with dew or stew is pretty packed for an etymological foray. it assumes that the t is, like that in stew or like the d in dew, slender. perhaps it was at least sometimes, but let's feel about for all the possibilities and see what sort of contexts they guide us to. you see the spelling must have the power to represent the sounds it represented in some way to the writer, bearing in mind that, for example in modern english, spelling gets almighty surreal sometimes, so we can assume a range of pronunciations loosely referred to at least by the letters.

herman: oh, i see. yes, well tew, as in ‘’e didn’t tew me why’.

etty: that’s it. and of course the vowel will vary from speaker to speaker e, o, i, a, @, u, etc. you see spelling was well, idiosyncratic, and writing was getting a tad cryptic. butcher’s hooks, you know. rows and rows of them, and when you get ms and ns and and vs and us and ws and double ls and double is and things like that all in a row its anybody’s guess, especially when you’re learning the school language out of text books, like they did latin, and gaulish and oh, all the inflected ones, for chrissakes they’re not old, they’re jerrybuilt from potted grammars, and you could so easily get taught the wrong word and there’s your tell turned into a tew before you know it.

herman: is this what happened?

etty: oh no! woah, hold your horses, herman! this is only one possibility. but we’ll come back to it. let's now glance at http://wapedia.mobi/kw/Tewdar where we see this:

Furv Latin y hanow a via nepprys Teutharius, nepprys Theodoricus. An Frankyon a's galwa Thierry, ha'n KembroyonTewdr

lynn gwyst translates that for us as 'the latin form of his name would be sometimes teutharius, sometimes theodoricus. the franks called him thierry, and the welsh, tewdr.' this gives us a glimpse of the sort of range of phonetic possibilities.

herman: um, this isn't exploring the relationship between the names tewdar and judah, etty.

etty: well, not yet, but there's a lot of work to do and a lot less if you do it right the first time. and it's probably just as relevant and to the point to pick up the word jew and consider its relationship to the french word dieu, the irish día, the jo of joseph(us) and diel, devil, deva, devon and all. we'll look at other aspects next time.

herman: well, all right, class. Etty has given you your homework: making copious reference to at least a good beginner's knowledge of at least six languages including hebrew, cornish, ancient greek, old irish and english, french, spanish, morroccan, dutch, gothic, persian and german, explain the relationships between these several words: the word jew, the french word dieu, the irish día, the jo of joseph(us) and diel, devil, deva, devon tracing their origins and noting every appearance in the literature. note any overlap in distribution with the words tewdar, judah, and tudor. try not to leave england yet. for next week, have read about athelstan and the expulsion of the cornish under tewdar from exeter. more wine, etty?

etty: no thank you herman. i am not a lush. (fading out)

2009-08-08T21:38:00.000-07:00

erm, herman isn't here right now, so it'll have to be history, instead. we're looking at byzantium by john julius norwich.
it's in three volumes:
the early histories.
the apogee.
the decline and fall.

it was first published by viking in 1988, reprinted by penguin in 1990, and in its fourth printing by 2007, dorian’s is the folio edition, all covered over with little bits of gold and lots of glossy pictures of antiquities tucked in here and there between carefully designed pages of text.

here glanced into by the renowned historian dorian hiss, or, as he is more likely to be referred to in citations, bibliographies and indexes, hiss, dorian, known affectionately to his friends as hissy. a graduate of st custards, as was the celebrated nigel molesworth, dorian obtained his phd SUMMA CUM LOUDER from the iona gwersity (you don’t pronounce the g and the w is a labio-dental) of wyeuro in 2008, and has been serving on committees and writing blogs ever since. (whether there is any truth in the rumour that hissy is really aka the ‘truly appalling vyvyan ogma wyverne’ as oxford scholar mark williams aka megli of the message boards once called her on the celtic-l list, is a matter for further research. dorian himself knows nothing of such rumours and anyway prefers to keep to the facts. what’s of more interest to us here are hiss, dorian’s thoughts about norwich, john julius’s three volume book. i'll hand you over to hiss.

hem hem, as for byzantium - it’s a proud book, with some of the most conceited modesty i’ve ever encountered. don’t even think to compare him to gibbons, he implores in his intro, but since gibbons has declined and fallen in most historian’s esteem these days, at least, so we hope, it would do but little harm if we did. like gibbons, he truly believes that most of what has happened so far in history is a blessed relief because if anything had happened differently it would not now be like it now is, and then where would we be – christ alone knows, maybe it would be different or something, saints preserve us. he starts his chapter one with “in the beginning was the word”, without attribution – ’nuff said. anyway, he got good marks in history to the tune of a phd in it i daresay, though there’s no mention of it in this edition, pry as i might between the pages and even down the back of the spine, but he was a good friend of somebody influential to do with the new yorker and had visited istanbul in 1954, and he has (or anyway expresses) strictly orthodox views - that’s why his book got published at all – so he’s representative, if not definitive, and that makes him a fair target for the likes of me.

i’m going to take a fairly detailed look at some of the things he says in chapter one, just as they come up. even before the plagiarism of his first sentence, he quotes for us a slab of a quote from constantine himself which he found in eusebius’s de vita constantine. it includes the simple direct assertion that ‘beginning at the remote ocean of britain. . . with god’s help i banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing. . .’ without mentioning where it all ended. i warn you that this is a quote from a quote from a quote, and while we can be sure that i have copied it pretty accurately from norwich, john julius, and that he has copied it pretty nearly verbatim, or even to the letter, from a translation by williamson, g a of eusebius’s history of the church from christ to constantine, there’s no knowing how accurately williamson translated it from the latin, and even less knowing how accurately it was translated into the latin from its original source. then, how reliable were his sources as a truthful account of the exact words of constantine the great? eusebius swears blind that the author of that history knew the 'victorious emperor' personally. but was the 'glorious emperor' referred to constantine? and was eusebius the author of that particular history?

i refer you to my colleague, the distinguished moloji, etty, for a brief etymology of the chap’s monicker. over to you, etty.

moloji, etty: no. no, really dorian. no.

hiss, dorian: what? what do you mean, know?

moloji, etty: just that. i mean nobody ever believes anything i say. they all get it off the web and the web just gets it off the universities and the universities all get it off each other and . . . and . . .

hiss, dorian: please don’t snivel, etty.

moloji, etty: . . . and they never stop to think.

hiss, dorian: well, you do, etty, i know you do.

moloji, etty: well, you see, they all think eu is greek and means sweet, good and nice and all that. they think the hellenes were naïve, but they weren’t, they were half-educated braggards. worse still, they think the hellenes were greeks.

hiss, dorian: yes, but don’t tear your hanky dear. tell us what eu really was.

moloji, etty: well, i could if i could only get you to believe just one little thing – no, two.

hiss, dorian: try us, etty.

moloji, etty: well, the hellenes were british, or anyway, celts from britain; that’s the first.
and the second is that just as now in the britain of today, half of ‘em couldn’t say ‘l’ except before a vowel and half of ‘em could. the ones who couldn’t pronounced it w, which was spelt variously w, u, oo, or o. eu.

hiss, dorian: are you sure of this, etty?

moloji, etty: blood oath.

hiss, dorian: so what does eu mean?

moloji, etty: hell. they also dropped their ‘h’s half the time, some of ’em.

hiss, dorian: hell?

moloji, etty: yes, for feic’s sake, as in hellenes.

hiss, dorian: but eusebius was a roman.

moloji, etty: nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. i’ll say that again. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh. nngggghhhnghhhhnghhhhh.

hiss, dorian: well, what then?

moloji, etty: eu means el, which means hell, as in hellene. You see it was originally pol, as when everyone used to put up the central pole of a proposed building to proclaim a new polis. polis was a plural form of a word ancestral to and very similar in meaning and pronunciation to the modern english word pole – a wooden post. perhaps the original polis was a wooden structure, like the iron-age hill forts which had wooden ‘palisades’ (polis is palace in england, palais in france, baile in ireland, but the meaning varies a bit) and pales and poles and palings are all to do with wooden posts. polis means poles. but the meaning got transferred to any polis or palace whatever it was made of, and because stone ones lasted better and were harder to burn than wooden ones, and the forests were diminishing anyway, the wealthier ones stopped using wood, even when wood was available and they had to import the stone from far away. but then when the far north was colonised, they sent brides for the norse men from the warm south to the snowy northern extremes and they all got terrible frostbite and lost their lips. read about the medusa for example. here's a link to that brilliant scholar, the truly appalling vyvyan ogma wyverne's brief, easy to read, ground-breaking essay on the subject. needs revision but it makes its point:

http://www.esnips.com/doc/e391f897-b5f4-477b-afb3-92d14c426535/p--k--split-or-how-the-gorgon-lost-her-liks---i-mean-lips...

the fathers took little interest in their children’s education and may have been absent, fishing or hunting, or working outdoors while the children were small, so the brides taught them to speak. how do you teach a child to say ‘polis’ when the nearest you yourself can get is chailleach, or kali, or coll, and sometimes even the l was reduced to a y or j, when it wasn’t just a w or a u or a oo anyway. and these kids taught their kids the language their mothers taught them. so they became the original q- celts though i prefer to refer to their language as a-labiate as distinct from the labiate forms that the p-celts with their full lips were having no trouble at all with. so when they came south and found their mothertongue strangely be-p’d they rejected the notion that their q-forms were wrong, and so the battle was on. depending on who your companions were it was either poll or coll, and where fists were knuckly and tempers uncertain it wasn’t worth your while to be wrong. homer probably knew that apollo was achilles, (the vowels went every which way under the influence of different accents) but today’s historians and mythologists, your good self excepted, and others who have had the simple sanity to read and agree utterly with the article at still haven’t penetrated to that juicy little piece and sucks to them for their stupidity, i say.

hiss, dorian: now, now, etty, i say, that’s a bit strong.

moloji, etty: well it’s so very provoking. one hesitates to say ‘they are all dickheads’, but . . .

hiss, dorian: look, we’ll have to stop here, etty. we’re already five hundred words over the limit and. . .

moloji, etty: wait on. i haven’t got to the main point yet. you see, frost-bite wasn’t all. there was sunburn, too, affecting the p-celts, and making them say f and v for p and b. and by the time they all got together, they had a full array of syllables all meaning the same or nearly the same, either a polis or some feature of it, or a person from a polis. they had kells and kils and cells and sells and sols and suls and syls and sals and thells and theos and dells and dals and dails and thales and zells and zeals and challs and hells all over the map. they had pells and polises and palaces and piles and bells and bailes and old baileys and bols and bills and fells and filidh and villas and phillys and files and fools, and mills and mulls and maels and and mhaols, pronounced like wheels, and williamses and oh, mobs more, and to stop fights, or because lip damage and its consequences had been so extreme, some of them reduced all cs and ps to hs or just dispensed with them altogether.

you see the polis was the main identifier of any person, so polglas, for example identified a person as a glass polis person – the glass trade was very rich, but the word comes from older words related to class and classic, and were educational as much as commercial, though often enough both. achilles just distinguished any polis person from someone who wasn’t a polis person, and the labiate form was apollo. but names like golgotha, helvetia, ballinderry, kildare etc specify which polis, using the local variant of the original pole word. so if you dropped the first letter, whichever it was, you tended to get a neutralish vowel which was so often prefixed to a noun of some sort that in some speeches (in spanish and arabic for example) it became a definite article, while in greece it became a prefix denoting general niceness or superiority. so euserbius’s first syllable meant either pole, pleasant or the. if anyone tells you they know better send ’em to me. tell ’em i’ve got a black belt in karate and . . .

hiss, dorian: thanks etty. shall we leave the rest till. . .

moloji, etty: and the second syllable means serb, aka sab, serf, seraph, sherrif, and any number of rellies, and the third one, ius, started out as a frost-damaged poles reduced to hells, with the vowel changed to i, as in hills, and the h dropped, and the ll reduced to u, as in ius, used as a suffix with its origin forgotten by the committee that put together euserbius’s name. so it means the serb. but serb hadn’t yet come to mean a citizen of serbia yet. there were serbs/serfs/seraphs/siabhras etc all over southern europe, and their extent has not yet been mapped. it’s a scandal, it really is.

hiss, dorian: well, thanks, etty. bBut I really must stop you here, though you’re obviously busting with more to say on the subj. sorry, you lot, we didn’t really get very far down page one, did we. oh well, more next time.

for homework, read homer on apollo and achilles and compare and contrast the two. then read the myth of the medusa and google the old ventriloquists’ song ‘can you say bread and butter without moving your lips’ and try it. try also ‘my mum made me mumble’.

2009-07-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

The first person to assume the title Rex Anglorum (King of the English) was Offa of Mercia.

ahem, morning everyone. emerging from my silurian slime is getting easier since the drought broke, and i've been noticing that more and more, the historians and interpreters of old texts both long and short, (texts and interpreters come in all lengths and widths), both in the past and the present, and yes the future too, all seem to be needing a bit of help with it and that's what i'm here for.

so you can all heave a great sigh of relief that the really murky problems of history have been taken out of the sticky fingers of the homo sapiens and handed to us newts, who are bound to do less mischief with them. this we amphibious axolotlene neotenites undertake for the good of all earthlings out of the pure goodness of our hearts. so take your pencil out of your ear, michael, and don't chew your nails in class please susan.

today we're going to look at the above quote which comes from wikipedia's beautifully crafted web-page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs where it appears about four lines down from the top after the bit that warns you about not counting ethelreds, egberts and things. good advice it is too and i'd strongly advise you all not to take any of it too seriously until i've written things in the margins as a guide.

for now we're going to look appalled, gaze aghast, if you like, upon the horrific mess the experts are making of english history because of a simple oversight which we shall find revealed in all its gaspworthy shockingness when i part the murky waters for you with my spatulate fingers to show you the true meaning of the quote above and to trace for you some of the implications of it.

offa was a king back in the eighth century ad, or so they say, though i wouldn't trust 'em. before the renaissance, during the renaissance and right up until after the renaissance, there were more calendars than you can shake a stick at, and they had to be reconstructed anyway from entries in tomes, and you couldn't always tell entry numbers from year numbers nor could you tell page one of a given book from year one of the founding of the city, monastery, tower or school that kept it, nor could you be sure you had the first book of a series or the fifth, seventeenth or zillionth. then even when the calendars were sorted out, historians and recorders of events were undisciplined in their attempts at chronology, and were often ambiguous or made errors. in other words, all english dates before round about the first of the georges are suspect.

furthermore, even when you know the date of a book, you don't know when the entries carefully copied into it were first written. many a beautifully bound book of gloriously prepared parchment was made at the capture of a castle or monastery, country house or church, and all the papers and parchments in it gathered into a neat pile, translated and often quite freely edited, often ineptly by people who did not know the language well and were too proud to admit it, (see keating's account of this in the history of ireland and the coming of the cruel false st patrick who replaced the earlier beloved one) and sometimes even sarcastically (see cervantes accounts of this in don quixote). i mean, o ye earnest questers after truth, trust not the chronologies. however, for now they're not relevent to today's discussion.

nor the spellings neither. they hadn't learnt the rules yet, and they also hadn't learnt that bbc english as we find it in the oed is the (only correct) way to go and all the rest is bad english, or unlearned or rough english, or very very ignorant english, so spellings were everywhere and any which way, with even the sloppiest speakers thinking their way of saying fings was right and finking it was all right to spell it like it sounded and as you can expect, even respectable monks were making the most godawful mess of it and look, if you will - jane and anthony i'll talk to you after class and if you don't mind i'll confiscate that astrolabe right now you can have it back at the end of term - look if you will, i say, at the consequences and no, james, they aren't funny, it's just a pity that a few have to spoil it for the rest of us.

all right, now, take out your exercise books and we'll do a little experiment. i'll adopt a really really cute english accent of the sort where a simple ah for artichoke is pronounced just like an o for otter, quite posh really, and then i'll add in the little quirk we often see among poms in their own land who seem unable to pronounce a th and so say f instead. ve very fought of it might bovva some, but uvvas will be fomiliar wiv ve occent i mean. i fink it's extont somewhere in london. now i'll give you all a spelling test. i want you to write down the words i say in your best bbc english.

movva

what have you written felicity? mother? good girl.

next, fovva

paul? father? good boy.

next. offa.

geoffrey? stocks what stocks? who would put you in the stocks?

charles? don't be ridiculous, there is no rack any more.

no, maureen, they don't burn heretics at the stake anymore - this is a perectly safe exercise. you would not be burned for a truthful try.

ouch, that hurt, nigel! those are very heavy objects you are hurling! ouch! i say, sit down everyone please. please, get back to your desks. hey, drop that gun! stop, i say! all right, you asked for it: hand me the capsicum spray, etty. thank you. there! and there! and there! gaynor, run and get nurse to look at phillip's head, it looks nasty - who did it now? gloria, is this your ipod? i'll see you after.

now sit quietly and answer my question. did anyone even try? amanda? yes, correct arthur!!!!!!!

now for homework write a fifteen hundred word essay on 'how trustworthy are the chronologies relating to king offa of mercia aka king offa of england, and why would anyone even care?' have on hand a large box of tissues for crying into, and remember there's a helpline available for if you get dizzyings and swoonings or a fit of the vapours from staring into the turgidity of it at all. i recommend a sprig of parsley behind the ear for those with weak constitutions.

valete

2009-02-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

Hallo, me darling ones. Here at last is a photo of me, Herman Newt, with Axol O'tl, who spoke to us last time so memorably. I am here alone today to talk of fairies and elves, and despite the slander and defamation of character, I’m adopting a fairly newt-ral stance on it, tiny amphibious fingers clinging to the bark of a partially submerged branch, body flat, tail dragging in the ooze.

In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
of which the Britons speken greet honour,
al was this land fulfild of fairye
The elf-queene with her joly compaignye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede,
This was the old opinion, as I rede…
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

That’s the start of the Wife of Bath. It tells us newts a lot about Chaucer’s times and his view of what was then to him, Britain’s past; and however distant or recent the past described, it might as well as well have been ancient, so strange the people and scenes described in the written and oral traditions of the time seemed to the Normanised English people of his day. As the Wife of Bath points out, elves were no longer to be seen in her day in England. These days, most people take this to mean that elves, along with fairies, never really existed, although some believers in parallel universes might believe that they were ‘supernatural’ beings viewed sometimes when the magic was right, and now in occultus. Yet although I have not checked every instance of elves in texts, so far nothing disturbs my sense that all references to elves in the pre-Renaissance texts and the oral traditions were to real solid flesh and blood human beings. Periodic reworking of texts as their language became old-fashioned, quaint and sometimes inaccessible, introduced hermeneutical errors which were woven into the fabric of the tales giving them a magical or miraculous atmosphere that they did not have for their original authors.

If in a song the ‘elf-king’s daughter did appear…’ an ambiguity arises for some listeners accustomed to eerie tales - ‘did appear’ can mean ‘appeared suddenly’ or ‘became briefly visible’ implying ‘out of thin air’. So a magical attribute is imputed to the elf, which then is said to have the magical power to appear and disappear at will. This makes it a supernatural being, and for those who don’t believe in such things, throws doubts on the possible value of the entire document dealing with elves, fairies and the like. I shudder to think how often such judgments have deprived us in the centuries following of truthful historical texts that could have told us so much discarded to be lost or burnt because a conqueror did not believe them…

Let’s imagine that the authors of these old texts that mention elves did not think of them as supernatural beings, but as real flesh and blood people with the ordinary powers of mortals. How does that song go? Steele-Eye Span used to sing it, and very nicely too, with eerie, supernatural wailing music in the back ground… I think it was on ‘All Around My Hat’.

A knight he rode his lonely way
Thinking about his wedding day
As he rode by a forest near
the Elf-king’s daughter did appear
Out she stepped from the Elfin band
smiling she held out her hand,
Welcome sir knight, why such speed
Come with me the dance to lead…

So far nothing magical at all, but the word ‘appear’ does become a little ambiguous when we hear that it’s an elf doing it. But watch what happens in the refrain:

Dance dance, follow me,
all around the greenwood tree
Dance dance, while you may,
tomorrow is your dying day
Dance with me, Dance with me…

Is this elf prophecying (a magical act but one that quite real prophets can do) or is she threatening (implying that she could bring about his death ) ? If it’s an elf, you can accuse it of anything, and any reconstruction of its song undertaken in the past when elves were feared would make the sinister worst of it. If it were not an elf, it might be easy to believe that his dying might be her intention from a quite unmagical murder, ‘dance with me and/or I’ll kill you’, but it’s also possible that it’s not a dying at all. There are I believe many instances of ritual and ceremony that are referred to in words that subsequent historians have mistaken for words for death and killing, because of semantic shifts that we now have no records of. We talk of ‘gilded’ youths, but no longer remember that gilding was the same as schooling. For some people the only instances of attention from the guilds they belonged to was at their birth and at their death, so for them any guild ceremony was likely to be a funeral. Think of Kells, Cille, and Kil-, all meaning ‘church’. Think of the Irish ‘bas’ death and compare with imbas, the Cornish abbas words to do with religion that changed meaning as they travelled. So it’s possible that this song records that in the two languages of the knight and the elf, the elfin word for a wedding was like the knight’s word for dying. (I see linguistic confusion like this in The Taming of the Shrew, where the bride is forced to learn to call the sun the moon just to please her husband.)

In the song this elf offers the knight spurs of gold, a shirt of moon-bleached silk, and a crown of gold, which may have been wedding gifts (in which case it’s a garbled wedding song, in which a fatal misunderstanding between bride and groom resulted in a murder, or a gift of recruitment – the elf trying to recruit a knight whose loyalties are elsewhere. She lives in the forest, she has all the trappings of high and courtly civilisation and she wishes to enlist a knight. I believe it might be an initiatory ceremony, in which the traditional three gifts are tokens: the spurs signifying a horse and a place in her cavalry, the shirt her livery or uniform, and the crown a series of intitations amounting to an education, with a crown to certify him a leaned knight. Our knight refuses to dance and refuses the first two gifts, but he wants the crown, and therefore she proclaims that ‘a plague of death shall follow’ him. Now that’s a fairly nasty accusation to make about someone who isn’t here to defend herself. Maybe it was a ‘series of ceremonies’. Here’s how it was carried out anyway:
‘Between his shoulders a blow she dealt,
such a blow he never felt’
Now if he couldn’t feel it, it didn’t hurt him, did it. So maybe she wasn’t dealing death, just ‘killing’ him softly (ie, initiating him) with a ritual stroke in preparation for his marriage.

There’ll be more on this subject soon.

2008-12-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

I hope you've all read Nicholas Ostler's, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World.
Published to much acclaim was this book, and certainly he’s put a lot of work into it, but he’s made a mistake or two and it is surely incumbent upon every newt astute enough to perceive them to mention them to anyone who, without the many benefits of eye-of-newt hermeneutical techniques, might be seduced by the hype and claim to high authority of this extraordinarily well-written book, into believing that it is academically adequate. My darling little efts, eggs and variously educated and mis-educated entities, it absolutely isn’t. And the way it fails of academic excellence has some, er… interesting political implications.

It begins with a Preface which gives us a laudably post-modern (at long last) glance at an idea of ‘language’ as distinct from ‘languages’, and then in the Prologue he bids a cavalier farewell to Commonsense, and with it 20th/1st Century hermeneutics and along with them both all claim to credibility as a scholar. Yes, in the very next pages he gives a poignant account of the meeting between Hernán Cortés and Moteukzoma (Montezuma) on the causeway across the lake to Tenochtitlán that has never been subjected to rigorous, academic scrutiny, but its sources are always treated as impeccable eye-witness accounts not ever to be doubted in any detail on any account whatsoever.

Now I doubt not that this man Ostler is a well-loved person making valued contributions to the saving of threatened languages, and no doubt he is personally charming and good-natured – I would hope so. I know he is a real, warm, honourable, loving, caring person, and I wish him health and prosperity in all his good dealings and kindly correction in all others, as I would wish for myself, and it is his relative merit that has brought his prologue under the lens today. I find fault with it, and I shirk not.

Any real hermeneuts among you will not fail to notice the many grand and glorious ideas for PhD theses to be plucked from the many hermeneutically astounding, rich and myriad-faceted details and levels as we flick the sludge from our gills and enter this exquisite little text. Accompanying us today will be Axol O’Tl, famed neotenous newt of the luminous lake (willing to answer any questions, and even if we ax a lot’ll answer ‘em all :) )! There’s bags of stuff about the who, what, when and where that we could detail and mountains more that we have yet to get articulate about, and that’s only in locating the current publication and its author and his informants and their sources. And every step of the way there’s politics, religion, and other forms of vested interest at every turn. Not just baggage, but there’s some hard-driving stuff in there, and some of it impacts powerfully on peoples lives. Whether for good or ill, let’s look…

First, let’s cut through the heavy hermeneutical work without too much attention to detail, lifting it gently out of the matrix, chipping off the rust and coral, wiping away the muck. Here we have a text (the prologue) within a text (the book) which discusses a text (a written account of a dialogue between Cortés and Moteukzuma taken from a text (the contemporary encyclopaedia of Aztec culture, General History of the Affairs of New Spain ) which was selected from many other contemporary texts which also record, it after having been taken down by a recorder from bilingual utterances a portion of which are interpreted. Ostler is writing in English from sources including many key sources originally in Spanish, except for the Nahuatl sentences attributed to Moteukzoma.

Now the Prologue itself is a simple account purporting to be factual of the meeting of two cultures whose languages, Spanish and Nahuatl, were mutually unintelligible. The meeting was mediated by a Nahuatl speaker from Coatzacoalcos, a good deal more than the length of England from Tenochtitlán, who had been ‘traded’ as a child to Xicalanco 200 miles west Tenochtitlán, and so understood Yucatan Maya, and a Spanish priest who had lived for eight years in a Mayan village after being ship-wrecked. Moteukzoma spoke in Nahuatl, the Yucatan speaker translated it into Yucatek Maya and the priest translated from the Mayan to the Spanish. The Mexican chieftain welcomed Cortés as a god, or at least a mighty Lord, and yielded his authority to him without hesitation. And without so much as an academic qualm, Ostler believes it, O ye beauteous ones, totally unhermeneuted as it is. (Yes, Elaine, I did, I coined that word, but you may use it free of charge if you wish, just mention this URL when you do.)

Hmmm. Well, questions do arise in the hermeneutical mind, and not least among them, why haven’t the academics asked any of them? Let’s ask that miracle of neoteny, Axol O’Tl Axolotl.

Herman Newt: Welcome to our tasteful little blog on the edges of Academica here, ah, Axol O’Tl. Has anyone got a clear account of the linguistic situation back then, late 15th, early 16th century?

Axol O’Tl: Well, I can’t explain why no-one’s asked until now, unless they’re still too enchanted by Cortés’s account of himself, or complicit in his fraud, but since you ask, nope. The information we have is very, very sketchy. There’s been a lot of sickness, genocide, social disaster and cultural collapse since then, and the Nahual that survives has evolved. And the languages of Central America, like those of southern North American and Northern South America were always very fluid and complex, with most people belonging to several linguistic groups at various stages of their lives. Political boundaries have never coincided with linguistic boundaries, and within any geographical area uniformity and immutability of a speech is rare, even when languages remain clearly distinguished in the minds of most speakers. Most population centres would have several languages. There were lots of lineages, all proud and competitive and mixed marriages wove them together, along with their languages. So while most people spoke more than one language, many individual languages came into being and died out within a generation. Some of these were prestigious and others had great local or widespread influence on other accounts.

Herman Newt: How easily would native speakers of Nahuatl from centres six or seven hundred miles apart have understand each other at a first meeting?

Axol O’Tl: Well it’s bloody obvious isn’t it, I mean, how likely is it? Hmmm? They’re further apart than London and Scotland, for example, and a good rural Scotch burr takes some getting used to if say, rural Somerset’s your English, though they’re both ‘English’. Even some old dialects much closer to London were impenetrable until you’d lived with them for a while. And this Yucatan speaker, now how old was she when she was ‘traded’? Had she but fading memories of infantile Nahuatl? Or had she been traded as part of a group, for wives maybe, in which case she may have been able to keep it up pretty well. Obviously, with the information we now have, we’re left guessing. But since nowhere else in the world does it occur that two diverging forms of a language that distant in a culture that various and changeable remain mutually intelligible for long, it seems highly unlikely that she’d have been much help.

Herman Newt: How likely is it then that her Yucatan would have been identical with, or intelligible to natives of the village in which the priest had lived for 11 years?

Axol O’Tl: How would anyone know? How well did the priest learn Yucatan during his stay? Was he alone among them, in which case he’d have picked up some, or was his whole crew there, in which case the pressure to learn to speak it well would have been a lot less. No-one knows.

Herman Newt: The speeches attributed to Moteukzuma have been recorded in Spanish by scribes perfectly unacquainted with the Nahuatl language then?

Axol O’Tl: Yes.

Herman Newt: And were taken down from the dubious translation of a dubious translation?

Axol O’Tl: Yes.

Herman Newt: And this translation is the one still being offered to us as the correct one! Does this agree with the modern Nahua?

Axol O’Tl: Nobody’s ever asked. They take Cortés at his word.

Herman Newt: No! No historian would! No scholar would!

Axol O’Tl: You’d think, wouldn’t you.

Herman Newt: So, is tot¬eukyoe, otikmihiyowiltih otikmoziyawiltih really what was said? And does it really mean ‘Our lord, how you must have suffered, how tired you must be…?’

Axol O’Tl: No, Herman it doesn’t. The second two words are a pair, variants, in fact, of a single sentence. Observe that otikm__iy_wiltih are identical in each. Vowels only have to be unstressed to vary a lot. Where one spelling give o and the other I, you can posit a schwa. It’s a Spaniard writing it, and there are several Spanishes now, and there were more back them. Z and th and h are confusable in the old ship-board creoles. So otikmihiyawiltih is the same as otikmoziyowiltih. The scribe recording this was evidently trying out different spellings, which a recorder of rapid speech eye-witnessing a historic first encounter between two civilizations would have been most unlikely to have time for. So no, it doesn’t mean ‘Our lord, how you must have suffered, how tired you must be…?’

Herman Newt: So what does 'toteukyoe, otikmihiyowiltih otikmoziyawiltih' really mean?

Axol O’Tl: Who can guess? They’ve had to make something up. Nobody really believes that Moteukzuma really surrendered to Cortés believing him to be a superior being. Cortés was in a position to lie like a pig in slush and get away with atrocities. No one knew enough to contradict. By the time Nahuatl had been practically reinvented to accommodate fraudulent translations like this, it was impossible to tell how what words got into which lexicons and entered the language that way, as a contaminant. And the normally fluid Nahuatl language went on evolving, and now just shakes its head, same as the native Irish speakers with old Irish. But while they have something, anything, to support it they can get away with it. Especially if you can get ’em for atrocities – cannibalism, human sacrifice, anti-Semitism…
No record at all exists of what was said there. The only texts they have are no more transcripts of real conversations between people up against seriously daunting linguistic barriers than my back foot.

Herman Newt: Thank you, Axol, for your time.

Axol O’Tl: My pleasure!

Well, everybody, Lynn Gwyst’d be the one to ask. Maybe next time. For homework, read Four Masterworks of American Literature: Quetzalcoatl, The Ritual of Condolence, Cuceb, The Night Chant. Edited by John Bierhorst. University of Arizona Press / Tucson 1989 ISBN 0-8165-0886-0. Write a nine and a half thousand word essay on why you think Quetzalcoatl sailed from Cornwall in a ship, showing your hermeneutical workings out in the margins and lots and lots of foot-notes and bibliogs, and what has any of it got to do with Penn Bran yn y Gyst (Head of Bran in its chest). Mention evidence of race-memory-trace links to the folk-song, The Irish Rover: ‘She was an iligant craft, she was rigged fore and aft/and how the tradewinds drove her…!’

Tata.

2008-11-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

H: Hallo again, it’s me, Herman. I’m back.
Etty Moloji who spoke to us once or twice a while ago would like to introduce us to her good friend and colleague Lynn Gwyst, who wants to talk to us today about sex.

E: Hallo everyone. I and my partner Dorian Hiss email: hissdorian@Yoohoo.com have had some wonderful intercourse with Lynn concerning the politics and sociology of language evolution, and what she doesn’t know about the ins and outs of tongues is nobody’s business. It’s fascinating stuff, so I’ll get out of your way.

L: Good day, Herman and Etty. I’m very pleased to be here today. I’m interested in general linguistics. I want to look at three words in particular: sex, gender and the other one’s too rude. Um, sorry Herman, I don’t think I can go on.

H: Ahem, a euphemism, perhaps, Lynn?

L: Oh, I couldn’t, not in all honesty, Herman. A euphemism is a kind of lie.

H: Well, yes, but sometimes they’re warranted.
Euphemism, me for use ‘em!
You-know-what you-know-who’s-‘em!!!
How about: "Sex, Gender and Rolling in the Hay?"

L: Well, really now, Herman, what are you suggesting? Euphemisms do terrible things to languages – like runs in stockings. You’ve got a good stout word for - erm, you know - and you suddenly declare it obscene, taboo, illegal. This is because what it means is too rude. So you replace it with a word that means something else that only indirectly alludes to it until that gets the same meaning, which is too rude so that gets killed too, so you replace that too with some innocent word that gets contaminated, until someone thinks up a way of saying it (or not saying it in the case of words like coitus = a going together) in Latin, because nothing is obscene if you say it in Latin. Which is just as well because until then it’s just a running sore in the language, contaminating and morbidifying word after word. Think of all the words for toilet, and what they originally meant, if you know.

E: Rut’s all right, I think, Lynn.

L: Oh yes, certainly, Etty. Rut’s all right, if you’re ungulates. But as you go north in England, the vowel alters, and so does the meaning, and you’re not talking about deer anymore, you’ve got humans in mind and well, that’s vastly too rude. Unless you mean a plant’s feeding organ, which isn’t quite as bad.

H: Well, what about a Latinisation…

L: All right: Sex, Gender and Erotica. Howzat?

H: Mmmm, what do others think?

E: Erotica? Why. The e is obviously an old definite article, and rot is probably originally pronounced just like its too-rude English equivalent, and the -ic just adjectivalises it so that you can make a noun out of it bu adding –a; and the noun, EROS EROTIS (m) has been commandeered as a name for a god. Why not just call it rut?

L: Well, all right. Ah hmmm. I’d like to talk to you all about Sex, Gender and Rut.
Now to begin with, sex is whether an animal, flower or flower part is male or female – boy or a girl – a daddy or a mummy. It is not rut. Rut is the reproductive act in its many and varied contexts, from flirtation to - erm…

C: Try to keep it clean, please, Ms Gwyst.

L: Who are you?

C: The censor.

L: Oh. Well, all right, there’s really no need for it to be disgust. I mean discussed. You see, I’m really eager to get at this Gender. Shall we?

H: Oh yes, do please, Lynn.

L: Gender is a grammatical term. It is not a biological term. It doesn’t mean sex.

E: It does now. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

L: Oh, look, if you’re all going to be beastly…

H: No, no, no, Lynn. Etty’s only teasing you. Tell us all about Gender.

L: Honestly, class, Gender started out as a grammatical term. Do you think French tables are girls while Irish tables are boys? Do you think a spear reminded the Romans of girls, while a flower looked manly to them? And did they denote a lack of either masculine traits or feminine ones in a building, a column of soldiers, or a javelin, or were these felt to be more neutral in some way? No, of course not. Yes, girl at the back? Yes, you are quite correct. We don’t know what native speakers of Latin thought about it at all. We don’t know whether they thought of the different genders of nouns as being related to sexual qualities they felt or thought they felt that certain ideas or things had – proof of an archaic animistic tendency still lingering in the ‘older’ languages (which aren’t really all that old if they’re honest about it). But it’s highly unlikely in view of the fact that an altogether more mundane and relatively modern circumstance sexualised the innocent genders of the pure and simple words that became Latin, French, Irish, or whatever. Can anyone guess what it is? No Robert, not reconstructionist time-travellers from the 22nd century. No, Sylvia, nothing to do with the animistic nature of words driving the evolution of words such that they trying to become life-forms and reproduce like animals, although it’s worth a glance, that idea, now that you come to mention it. No one else? Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. It was – erm…

E: Oh, Lynn.

L: …well, you know.

H: Do you mean…

L: Yes, Herman, I do. You see, males and females er…

H: Marry?

L: Yes, that’s the word. And they have children. And if they’re inbred, their off-spring become small and infertile. So communities distant enough to be speaking different languages arrange to marry each others’ merry merry maids to each others’ merry merry men and set up a new colony in a convenient place. Husbands speak one language, wives speak another. Wives rear children to age seven or so, so they grow up fluent in their mother-tongue. Fathers take the sons at age seven and they learn the father-tongue while the girls stay with their mother-tongue. The original husbands can’t understand the women, but their sons grow up speaking both languages well. You still have two distinct languages for a few generations, but after a while, many structural features would coalesce. But you’d still have a memory of which words came originally from the women and which words came from the men. (Also treatments of words, case-endings etc.) Yes, Edwin, I’ve thought of that too, of how the neuter came into being in languages like Latin, German and Greek, and why it isn’t there in French, Irish, and Spanish (well hardly at all). A neuter is added when large amounts of vocabulary enter the language through some means other than by inter-marriage – through mercenaries and other military allies, educators, priesthoods etc for example.

H: Well, the idea’s ridiculous of course, Lynn – you won’t mind me saying that, will you. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language doesn’t mention it anywhere, so we can safely dismiss it, can’t we?

E: Yes, Herman’s right, I think, Lynn. In fact I think we should, straight away, before it gets mistaken for a useful insight leading to really worthwhile discoveries about the linguistic situation of pre-renaissance europe, and thence to understanding of the social and political forces driving language evolution in those times, and from there all the way to new insights about the mind and manners of our ancestors. That would spoil it for those who like their history deep, dark, and mysterious,which is to say unintelligible, so as to remain free to fantasise about it at great public expense.

H: Thank you Etty, for those thoughts, and thank you Lynn Gwyst for your illuminating chat. For homework, class, I’d like four and a half to five and a half thousand words on ‘whether ancient Romans thought of the different genders of nouns as being related to sexual qualities they felt or thought they felt that certain things or ideas had – and whether or not this is evidence of an archaic animistic tendency still lingering in the ‘older’ languages. (HINT: try to avoid facts, since there aren't any which support this theory and there are several which gravely endanger if not vanquish it.)

2008-04-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

getting nitty-gritty critical

my compliments of this very fine morning to mr christopher snyder, who is a very highly qualified historian, and a writer of history books.
as an undergraduate (a mere eft, indeed, had he been, like me, a newt) he collaborated on a book about king arthur which was successfully used as a university text book. which is a terrible pity because if it was anything like his second attempt (and one likes to imagine that scholars evolve with age) it helped to perpetuate the shabby traditions of bad history. pollutes the pond, so to speak.
he’s a busy academic. in 2000, when he published ‘exploring the world of king arthur’, he was a fully metamorphosed specimen, chair of a virginian university’s history and politics department and doing all sorts of other very learned things too, such as serving on editorial boards and being a fellow of one society or another of the sort that takes a deep interest in antiquities. i mean, he more than gets away with it.
no, peer review just isn’t quality control, amanda, it just isn’t, when any ‘peer’ is in effect ‘peer-reviewed’ as ‘unsound’ if they disagree too much with the hegemony. so he not only gets away with it, he’s promoted for it, and if he did anything else but proudly perpetuate the pollution of the ponds of popular and professional perceptions of the past he’d be promptly punished and possibly even persecuted with professional peremptoriness by his powerful peers and put into the pits where he’d be hard put to procure a publisher.
now i’m a fair-minded newt and it is no wish of mine to single out one scholar among so many who are all participating in the producing of such vast vistas of such simplistic pseudo-knowledge that keeping track of it all is a full-time highly paid job for our most highly educated scholars. but it happens that he sometimes writes books intended for the intelligent lay reader, not for scholars, although perhaps they might be thought useful for serious students as well. so he is paid to produce a packaged product, and i’m appalled that there’s no quality control in academic offerings to the public who pays them at all.
so okay he is a professional historian with a high reputation and i am but a humble amphibian. but many things are seen through the eye of a newt that are not visible to the eye of a professional historian, and that is why i feel it encumbent upon me that i should save you all, oh my valued readers, yes, john, you, and even, raymond and alison, you two, who would learn more if you listened and didn’t dandle each others handies in the back row, from the dangers of falling for the frauds and errors that he, poor chap has fallen for.
what is wrong with his work? here’s my assessment.
epistemology: no marks.
hermeneutics: no marks.
yes, anthea? what is epistemology? phyllis? that’s right, good girl! epistemology is the theoretics of knowledge; that is, a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, studies its premises, considers deeply the veracity of its parts, and regulates with simple sanity the tousling out of the implications of known facts. it distinguishes with great nicety between fact and theory, and deals with the production of academically sound theory by valid logic from sound bases. that is to say, basises. ahem.
and what is (or are) hermeneutics, other than the study of newts called herman? look it up in your dictionaries, yes, that’s right, simon - the methods by which scholars interpret texts. and no, murray, not specifically ‘sacred’ texts, and it is nothing to do with the extracting of abstruse ‘sacred’ sense out of all but unintelligible texts which make no sense at all to non-specialists - what did god mean when he said ‘all flesh is grass? for example. reading a text is a hermeneutical act. the words have meanings, the meanings are interrelated according to the logic of the sentences as indicated by the grammar. so it matters a lot. i don’t believe snyder has done his own translation, so i can’t hold him personally responsible for the errors of his sources, but i did take a mark off for his indiscriminate use of tricky and treacherous translations more titillating than truthful, in the face of glaring evidence of their inaccuracy.
for example, if you turn to page 80, where he is introducing us to geoffrey of monmouth, he notes that that learned author of a history of the kings of britain described himself as a PVDIBVNDVS BRITO which means, christopher has the face to assert, ‘a modest briton’. PVDIBVNDVS BRITO. a glance at that tells the average 1st former of forty odd years ago, when latin was a compulsory subject for all matriculants, that this guy wasn’t speaking classical latin. they’d’ve learnt by chanting, like i did, that BRITANVS –I (m) is the word for a briton. but all right, we might perhaps allow that there’s a reasonably high probability that BRITO (presumably) BRITONIS (m) is a dialect form of BRITANVS –I (m), but PVDIBUNDVS –A –VM means humble?
well of course he’s supported – and kept erroneous – by the lexicography, and the less we look at that the less we start to grin and giggle. i mean, julia, it is in dire and drastic need of wholesale radical revision. it is the major tool of hermeneutics, and since hermeneutics is ‘understanding’ and that’s what we’re after, let’s start rejecting what our remote ancestors bequeathed us in the way of a lexicon. lexicography must leap into the 20th century without fear or favour, and learn the art of itself, before presuming to slither it’s perverse and deviant way into the 21st. having glanced but once, or made ourselves quite queasy with looking, let’s politely look the other way.
you can of course see the reasoning behind this translation. anyone who knew good classical roman latin but not much of the other sorts, would be given pause by this little oddity and would immediately resort to good old-fashioned comparative philology as it used to be called, and they’d see its resemblance to PVDENDA, which we all know (and we doubt at our peril) means ‘requiring to be rePVDiated’. after all, it’s all about about PVD, and that of course is something too shameful to go into here. so it follows that PVDIBVNDVS would mean an abundance of PVD, i.e., shameful stuff.and ashamed of one’s abundance of PVD would equivalate approximately enough to humble, so humble is what it means. hmmmm. perhaps he even had a consciousness of having PVVD.
hey look, there’s nothing wrong with resorting to comparative philology, or historical linguistics as it is trying to get called these days – and succeeding in some circles - as long as it’s quality comp phil you’re doing. and there’s no professional historical linguistics being done on the ancient texts that isn’t based on the comp. phil. of the early twentieth and nineteenth century and earlier, when all scholars were required to swallow whole and without a murmur of protest the lexicography of the middle ages, especially that pertaining to the interpretation of ancient greek and latin texts. the need to believe that they are clearly understood, despite readily findable evidence to that they are not, has served as a kind of neurotic retarder of progress in history doing.
i mean, young efts and elvers and everyone listening to me today, current lexicography even manages to sustain some passages of the bible if – and only if - you squint and look sideways, and take the word of the copious note providers that it doesn’t look as if it means what they say it means because you just haven’t learnt enough greek – the really hard stuff that only really really learned beings know, to wit: the stuff that is totally at variance with what you learn in the first six forms of school and thereafter the next three to six years at university, in other words, they’re lying in their gills – i mean teeth!!!
and it’s the likes of them who write those lexicons, popping geoffrey of monmouth’s little gem confidently and unresponsibly in with all the good stuff with fine medieval panache. we have to go back and look at it all with very great care. imo, as they say on the message boards, of course!
fair question, samuel, what does PVDIBVNDVS mean? up until now i’ve been reserving the roman alphabet for the latin language, using an cells (uncials) only for english and other modern languages. but now i’m (exceptionally) using it to shout. NOBODY HAS THE FAINTEST I-BLOODY-FAHKEN-DEA! now that’s, epistemologically speaking, a fact.
and it is because you haven’t penetrated the enchanting mystique of the lexicography of the past, christopher snyder, that you lost one of the two marks for hermaneutics. you lost the other for jumping to silly conclusions and then stirring up the mud around you so that no one could see that that was what you’d done. we’ll talk more about why you lost the other mark some other time.
for homework, re-read nicholas nickleby, for a fine description of a yorkshire boarding school that faintly recalls its medieval origins just as it reaches its 19th century demise. it’s fascinatin’ stuff.

2007-11-25T19:51:00.000-08:00

painters paint, builders build and archers…

er, well, no, lisa, they don’t arch, they… er, practice archery.
is archery the art of making arches then, or of arching? well, not one would think, primarily. one’s intention would be, you are correct, i think, lisa, to forcefully project aimed arrows point first at the highest possible speed at a target in order, ideally, to pierce it. one would get around to observing that this involved making arches as a sort of secondary consideration, wouldn’t one?

so why call it archery and not bowery or arrowery, or bow-and-arrow-ery, or something like that? did archer come from arch or arch from archer? has archer got some other meaning besides the perfectly serviceable bowman (or bowperson, to update to gender inclusive language)? let’s investigate.

now in this flat expanse of mud i’ve just cleared with a few deft swishes of my tail, i’m going to draw with one of the tiny almost translucent fingers of one of the tiny hands on the end of one of my tiny front legs the letters that spell the word archer. ARCHER there, i’ve done it, in roman letters, not uncials, just to show you that i can.

look at it, get the feel of it, let it speak to your soul. then, i want you all to take out your favourite voice-recording device, plug in the mike, switch it on to record, press start and say it out loud. "archer". then play it back to yourself a few times, listening carefully.

in past exercises of this sort i’ve asked you to pronounce the word under the lens (or under the eye of newt, as in this instance) in as many ways as you have ever heard it said, or can imagine that it could ever have been said. but this time, just say it once, casually, sneaking up on it, so to speak, in your own native or foreign (if english is not your native language) accent.

then, take out your favourite coloured pencil, crayon or texta, or just use your toe if you prefer, and write, in any alphabet known to have been in use by english-speaking populations when the word 'archer' was first coming into general use, phonetically - according to whatever phonetic values are known to or can reasonably be argued to have been represented by the letters of that alphabet - your representation of the sounds you hear yourself producing when you read it.
for example, if you pronounce the r in archer, your phonetic representation will include a sign or character for the sound r, but if you don’t, it won’t. if you represent the sound of the first vowel as a long u for umbrella, doubling it to show length, uu might be your symbol, or if you use a for aha instead with an h to show lengthening, you might use ah for the first vowel.

for vast numbers of literate english speakers, past, present and future, the lengthening of the a would be indicated by following it with an r.

no, phillipa, the phonetic alphabet won’t help you in this exercise – the writers of old, middle-aged and ancient texts didn’t use it – they spelt ‘phonetically’ as above or obeyed book-learned spelling rules that are now not easy to relate with any certainty to any actual, hands-on, down-and-dirty speech sounds, so it’s worse than over-kill. it supports some delusional historical linguistics without clarifying the real stuff.

within living memory, when phonic values of letters were taught to small children, they used to chant things like:
‘æ’ and a ‘rrrr’ make the ‘aah’ in ‘archer’. they’d have added moreover, with reference to the second syllable that ‘eh’ and a ‘r’ make the ‘ah’ in archer, having also noted that ‘k@’ and a ‘h@’ make the ‘tch@’ in archer (where @ = eu as in...er..., sometimes named schwa, but don’t squint too closely at the rationale of it - it’s an infant science, linguistics).

i should here remind you that, incarnating for the good of all beings (albeit most inconveniently) as a juvenile human in a rural south oz primary school (after two years of kindy) i, herman newt, have first-hand experience of this, indeed, i chanted along with the rest (and what a weird mob of kangaroos, sheep, red-back spiders, king brown snakes, newts, cuttlefish, kittens, puppies and tommy-the-toy-trucks we were - but that’s dreamtime stuff, y’know, and i only mention it to explain how a newt came to be chanting english-language phonetical propositions as a five-year-old human in one of the classrooms of a small rural school way out in the spinifex), and can assert that i, this wet little amphibian in mufti, would have been at the time struggling (and i add, winning the struggle) to get the letters to spell a word that would perhaps have been spelt more phonetically as 'aacha'. but that’d make it look dutch and so in english, you have the option of using a line above the vowel to indicate lengthening, so it looks like this: ācha.

isn’t that gorgeous? - ācha

now this little exquisitude instantly sends the newt diving into the oh so intelligible murk of its database where, while it’s gone, i, blue-stocking the bard (bardly treated as i am still being on account of not seeing the value of using the international phonetic alphabet to minutely describe the phonic values of words whose pronunciation can only be guessed at) shall hum you a few bars of that hoary old ballad, ‘bold robin hood and the impertinent 21st century ballad-singer’, although i’d just like to mention that if this blog doesn’t support the æ and the ā symbols, you’d no doubt guess, wouldn’t you, what they were meant to be.
hmm mmmmm hm hmmmmmmm
hmmm hmmmmmm hmhmhm hmm
hmmm……… oh, look, the newt, it’s surfacing. i’ll get out of your way.

thank you, bluestocking!

yes, ācha.

most of you will easily recognize there, in the written form now under our newt’s-eye lens, the irish plural ending –acha, which as nobody any longer disputes at least not with any conviction, is a form of the english –age, which denotes a collective, as in baggage, rather than a plural. in irish now and perhaps but not necessarily in the past, the ch of –acha is pronounced as if spelt with a greek chi, (poor blogger can’t manage the font), that is, like the crunching of something crisp but juicy, an apple, or carrot(eh, what's up, doc?), or something like that.

these irish ch’s tend to turn up in english as a sound like the tch in church. old irish chach (pronounced ‘tchutch’, with ‘u’ as in ‘uh huh’) is english church, for example, notwithstanding the DIL’s insistence on preserving as sacred the errors of past translators who thought it meant, aah, eeny meeny miney mo, not church, not each, but battle, at least wherever possible, twist the rest of the text as it might, thus sustaining the otherwise unsustainable notion that the irish always were ire-ish, i.e., warlike, and were therefore always at war, not pious, gentle people as they often are now, fond of their churches and reluctant to fight.

(it isn't that i don't know that, in hermeneutics which, for those of you who’ve just arrived, means the interpretation of texts, we’re all sometimes reduced to eeny-meemy-miney-mo-type lexicography sometimes, but it’s post-modern to admit it when we are, and not try to destroy all evidence of possible error by poisoning newts. i mean, stop the pollution of waterways and give us newts a chance!)

now in irish, much more than in english, there are many different ways to form a plural. as well as -acha, there is –anna, for example, an english variant of which is ‘any’, related, as you will instantly see, to the variant which occurs in english as ‘one’ and all its cognates in other languages. it’s also related to english and celtic articles an and na. there are other common plural endings as well, but we’ll focus on these two.

the early comparative philologists left us with a legacy of belief in a totally unbelievable tree of language which never did explain gendering of nouns or the varieties of ‘declensions’ of nouns within a language. you can go so far with such a model, even if you allow much pleaching due to intermarriage, conquest and other mergers, but after a while, there you are weaving baskets, probably with waves, and in the best(??!!) ‘academic’(???!!!!)tradition, there’s still a knock-out competition on to decide which theory is right.

last time i looked (and i’m a fastidious newt with a sensitive soul and easily shocked, so i don’t often), i noticed that they’d come up with an extraordinary way of managing the conflict: you acknowledge that the tree-form doesn’t work and declare the wave model therefore the ‘winner’, BUT, and i mean that cyril, so i’ll say it again with emphasis, BUT!!! all current historical linguistics including all the proto-indo-european root words, the gaulish ‘dictionary’, and much other equally dark and desperate lexicographical work on old texts of many languages, assumes a tree, and so we can’t just replace the tree model with a wave one even though as the winner of the power-struggle, it’s ‘right’, because bang would go the entire PIE, and along with it, most ancient history, and wasn’t it hard enough when prasto bit the dust?

so we know that it’s wrong, but it sustains current dogmas upon which so many have built so much, in the way of theories, careers, ego-trips etc, so rather than go to all the trouble of revising it all from the ground up, we’ll keep doing it anyway and ridicule any other theory to death with scorn…

this newt declines to accompany them.

preferring instead the company of frogs, wyverns and other inspired visionaries.

in short ye who have noticed that an awful lot of marrying went on back then, and if you marry continually into your own clan, disaster tends to strike you fair in the gene pool; so when an already dangerously inbred man starts wanting a girl, he starts looking about for a girl just a bit less like the girl that married dear old dad, and marriages probably were made in emhain, or heathen, or edin or eden, or else arranged by taut old tarts and tyrants in all sorts of towers, tars, tour, tarots, turrets, tias, tuas, tewes and tiwas all over the planet. and they usually saved time, money and energy, and acres of achingly pure white, or scarlet, or purple linen, cotton or silk, by marrying them off a hundred or two or four or five couple at a ceremony after giving them a week or so to socialize (grab your partner here we go) – or not as the political climate of the time allowed.

there’s a gorgeous example in the story of the duke of warwick, when the king of england with all his retinue married the princess of france with all hers.

further input would come from the militia, armies sent to defend some far distant land,who were rewarded for service with land and grateful, enamoured wives when the war was over. the school systems and fosterage also mixed languages, and so did the customs of conquest and subjugation.

now if you can get either a tree or a wave out of all that i’ll go he! i mean there’s trees, waves, clouds, flowery meadows, oceans, rivers, bogs and thank gaia, lovely murky streams and ponds of the sort that newts delight in, geysers, volcanoes, glittering mica deserts, and oh my one and only indefinable undivided infinite, eternal god that has no face but all faces, no sex but all sexes, no shape but all shapes, no substance but all substances (aren't we getting 'ancient-celtic'?), sort of amenable to every possible sort of metaphor; and none of them fit perfectly.

not one. not even bubbles in a cauldron, desmond. not even dragons in full battle-rage.

but looking at language itself as revealed so imperfectly and so fragmentarily and fragmentedly through written texts and the oral traditions, it’s clear that some people who used –acha as a pluralizing ending fetched up cheek by jowl with others who used the ending '–anna' (reduced, it seems, to ‘–ne’ in old english), and it would seem reasonable in referring to them to distinguish between them by calling the –acha-ans ‘achaäns’, or ‘achaeans’ for convenience, and the ‘-anna-ans’ as the annaäns or annaeans. (–an is of course another variant of the complex that the english word ‘any’ is a variant of.)

es, -s, -ith, -the, -adh and more are variants of an ancient es, and the ones who used it would be called ess-ans, (essene, if you spell -anna –ene) and those using a lisped variant would be athene, wouldn’t they?

-achaeans, they’re greeks, aren’t they? athens – that’s hellenic, isn’t it? well, spotted there, deborah, but no, not greek, and yes, hellenic, that is to say, hellish, or of hell. and where on the map do you find hells full of people speaking the languages whose ancient and aging texts have surfaced in the far west of europe? that’s right, wales. cornwall. england.

they tend to spell it heylin, or heyl or hel, hill, hol, hall or hull, or drop the h and spell it ell or el, as in eliseg, ellis, elys etc, and often it is obscured as part of another word, such as llanelli, or pwllheli, or minstrel (minster-hel). it’s a form of hill, and used to be a name for what is now called a hillfort.

helledh was a welsh princess. without the lisp, that’s a lot like hellas. helston is in cornwall, not far from st austell. eolas which is as near to hellas as you can get in irish, means knowledge or information. it turns us as ollamh in irish, meaning a highly educated person (hells were schools very often – refer rhonabwy at the house of heilyn in the welsh tale, the dream of rhonabwy.) ollamh is olaf in the north, and elf or aelf, in english. aelfred, aelfric, you know who i mean, and yes, that's true, gerald, hellenes are hellenes and aelfs is elfs, and you have to draw the line somewhere, but where, i ask you? where?

nigel, put that comic away or i'll confiscate it.

that’s right, celia, the –amh, reduced to an –f in english, is doing the work of an old ‘of’ word or ancestor of ‘of’. so yes, i suppose you could say that an elf, ollamh or alvin is a ‘scholar from hell’, but why would you bother????

to sum up, and i’m over my self-imposed thousand word limit by about one thousand one hundred words already, so i’d better be concise:

achaeans, athenians, essenes and the anaeid (id is a form of idh or ith, cognate with the modern english ‘(-e)s’ and denoted a plural or collective noun) were all exported to the east in the form of piles of books. oh, by their human manifestation of course!

but the main thrust is that the achaeans were archer-ans, taken to greece by the charming breton knight himself, and guess what, the ancient greek word for a bow is ‘toxa’, of two forearms’ length, no doubt, which is close enough to t-acha, allowing for a greek accent grappling with brythonic sounds and bewildered by the ‘the’. (they dispensed with the th in their own forms of the).

we’ll look closer at the athenians, who seemed to have colonized greece earlier on (unless the greeks sent atha-ans to briton and everyone’s forgotten about it), later.

and for homework, well, prep if you like, julia, i’d like you all to read once again tirant lo blanc, that bit where he does a convincing impersonation of alkibiades the general who married the king of greece’s daughter after defeating the persians for him, and marries carmesina, the king of greece’s daughter, after she’d handed him macedonia as a gift in order to make him a duke so that she didn’t have to marry a boring old general/captain, and besides, she was besotted with him, he was such a hunk, and besides, he helped her father to defeat the persians – perhaps he resembled george harrison of the beatles… or robin hood. or prince andrew in his youth.

then, in the remaining ten minutes write a twelve page essay on what is the relationship between the ancient greek word ‘damar’, a wife, and the cornish/english river ‘tamar’, (the t mutates easily to d in cornish) and the english, french and germanic words ‘dame’. (hint: start by leniting the ‘m’)

2007-10-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

winter's over (southern hemisphere here). sorry everyone, i dozed off - you know how it is for us newts when the temperature drops below tepid.

i know i've been nosing around in the affairs of fionn mac cumhaill far too much already, but i have one thing more to say of him before i slither off into some pristine new issues, all designed, marianne, to extend your understanding of the olden days when tomes were and common mortals thought runes were all magical; and it might just change the way you see old europe forever.

we think of fionn as irish because that's where the texts about him are, although he was known to have connections with finland. naturally, the irish texts use irish spelling conventions to spell his name. what would it look like with english spelling conventions? either fin mac cuval or fin mac cuwal.

but wait - in both irish and english, u can represent the u for umbrella (not the northern 'oombrella'), so two alternatives arise: fin mac caval and fin mac cawal.

but wait still further, eager earthlings, there's another possibility. in irish dialects sometimes the second word in a two-word phrase in irish is lenited, softened, which is signalled in irish spelling conventions by an h following the softened vowel only in recent times. this is not usual these days in names after mac, but it's a very changeable, loose feature and may have been common in the past.

all right, edmond, there's no proof, but it's more likely than you think because listen - if you don't want to see a newt snarl, and very nastily at that, gills all a-bristle, listen, m'boy!

when c becomes ch in irish (pronounced like the german ch) it becomes tch, as in church, in english - and also in latin, or italian for example. in english spelling this is represented as ch or -tch. in italian through the ages, ch is spelt cc, cci, cce, che, or chi. (let me know if i've missed any, atilio).

italian? did i say italian? i did! i veritably did. because look: mac chumhaill could be spelt mac chiaval in italian, wouldn't it. of course, the ai of the second syllable might mutate, especially seeing as it's unstressed. what happens if it inclines towards an e, as some irish speakers might, in preparation for the slender ll.

it'd be mac chiavell, woon it? it would, and all you'd have to do would be close the gap between mac and chiavell and slap on a kind of one size fits all plural ending 'i' and there you have it, macchiavelli, the mac cumhaills when translated into italian.

so was niccolo fionn's brother, son, or just another member of a large clan, or was he simply the conduit through whom the mac cumhaill family's philosophy of government was saved for us all to admire? who knows? but surely anyone dealing with any texts concerning either the irish fionn mac cumhaill or the european niccolo macchiavelli ought to be aware of the connections, even if it is only to dismiss them. they are there and no honest newt could deny them!!!

for homework, long-suffering ones, think up seven things in support of the proposition that macchiavelli = the mac chumhaills, and three against. if you can't think up three good reasons why not, you're in good company, albeit finny (pardon the pun). you should have no difficulty thinking up dozens of good reasons why.

just a footnote: the text itself bears scrutiny. it's one of the most bandied about and least understood texts. this prince is intent upon reducing violence by controlling rather murderous subjects. it's a benign doctrine, but like any, susceptible of mischievous misinterpretation and misapplication.

well look, i've got worms to grub up and arthropods without common names to chase down, so have a nice weekend, and drive safely.

tata
h. newt

2007-05-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

all right, fellow newts, axolotls, mud-puppies and salamanders, i’ve been splodging about in the mud and stirring up the muck and what i haven’t found there is nobody’s business. but i specially wanted to bring up today was the rhonabwy issue, in which we question deeply the assumption that the romans civilised the celts by taking education to them.

the story briefly is as follows (but i recommend you read it for yourself, as i’m only giving it to you in a nutshell, and i do contend that they haven’t the foggiest notion how old the story is, and i lay pounds to sardines it’s pre-roman and you’ll see why as the tale unfolds):

madawg ruled powys, which annoyed his brother iorwerth, who flounced off in a fit of pique to ravage england. madawg sent men after him and among these was a lad named rhonabwy who, with a few companions went to the house of heilyn which was an ivied courtyard and house with cows and an old hag tending a smoky fire inside, and a yellow ox-skin on a platform at one end. other residents came and went.

the food was indifferent and the beds abysmal, and during the night rhonabwy gets up and goes to sleep on the ox-skin. this being a magic ox-skin, he dreamed of seeing and hearing and walking and talking with the great heroes of the past, all brought to life again for him by the magic of the ox-skin.

look there’s mobs more – it was a very intricate dream, and included descriptions of the colours and accoutrements of the heroes too rich in fine detail for anyone to remember unaided. but the bit i want to talk about is the bit in italics up there, in particular, this house of heilyn and what went on there.

but first, what possessed several members of a military unit with commands from the king to scamper off to spend a night there? well, you’ll be relieved to know that they didn’t. most of them weren’t even part of that outfit, in fact only rhonabwy was, and this fine upstanding welshmen slept with his comrades at arms just as you’d expect in true military style, whatever that was back then.

what we’re witnessing here is a device commonly used in very ancient tales (helping to confirm that it is very old) of announcing noble characters with a brief or lengthy aside on their lineage and/or up-bringing, or at least excerpts therefrom.

in those days, everyone expected it so it wasn’t necessary to give warning, but these days the bit that says:

these men were quartered in didlystwn... and one of their number was rhonabwy. rhonabwy and (friends) came to seek shelter at the house of heilyn...

would read:

these men were quartered in didlystwn... and one of their number was rhonabwy*. they sought iorwerth...

and so on to the end of the account of their search for iorwerth. but the rest of that is missing, as far as i know. only the bit in unannounced parentheses is left

so to reconstruct it, you have only that among the soldiers on a mission the outcome of which is not recorded, was a man named rhonabwy, of whom is remembered the following: that once (we’re not told when) with several companions he went to the house of heilyn.

heilyn isn’t a name, but means a hellene – no errol, not the greek sort; there were hellenes all over the world, like frogs round a pond, as they said themselves, and also in wales, and anyway, maybe this story didn’t originate in wales, it might have just fetched up there after wandering all over france, spane, denmark or anywhere, all the way to hell and back, (good lord, lad, there are helsinkis, helvetias, helgas and helmuts and some of them are places and some of them are people and think, boy, think girl, use your brains, you have perfectly good ones, you won’t wear them out by using them!!!!) - a person in charge of or associated with a hell, called a hall in english. this was an iron-age boarding school. that’s a bulky sentence, a bit run-on in places, but wrestle with it, earthlings, you’ll work it out.

how do i know that, elizabeth, that it was a boarding school? not hard! read the description of the food and conditions. awful food, dreadful beds, cows in the courtyard and slimy dung and cow-piss up to your ankles, and now and then someone wet the bed or worse and you had to put up with the stink till you could rub his face in it next morning, damn his eyes and a pox upon him!!!!! you’d expect to see molesworth himself there, and his brother, and fotheringham thomas and all.

get hermeneutic, ye swabs!

this particular heilyn was an elderly educated woman, in possession of a yellow ox-skin (parchment) book. rhonabwy did not lie down upon this book, he leaned over it; and he did not dream as one asleep, but as he learned to read over the course of the years of his boyhood education, he learned to picture in his mind as if in a dream the things described in the writing within it.

then follows snippets of what rhonabwy learnt from that book – just what the teller could recall of course – the details are missing, and rhonabwy is walking around within the landscape depicted in the book as if somewhere, and it’s not clear where, it is forgotten that it was a book, and the myth(take) arises that it was a dream magically produced by sleeping on the skin of an ox.

accounts of animal skins being consulted on matters of history and genealogy can be found in classical, biblical and celtic texts and histories, and all of them can be clearly seen to be accounts of ancient reading. and yes, even the romans could read and write. they make no secret of the fact that they employed celts to educate their youth.

á propos of which, let’s finish with a word from ms mólodji, our word-beast. etty, dear...?

oh, yes, ahem, thank you hermie.

edda. ode (remember to pronounce both syllables). –oides, idea. things like that – you’ll think of a few more i’m sure.

now here’s an interesting one: oideachas. it’s irish, and means education. i see traces of an old oide with the plural ending –acha attached, and then the –s added that makes it a noun.
now, if you took this wordto rome, how would they spell it? educas. well, no, EDUCAS, rather, because they used roman letters. not uncials (an + cials/cells/kells – the colonies of the celts).

but they would soon give it latin endings and it would become educare, which is the verb for to educate, and of course they’ve got it terribly confused with educere, which means to lead out or away, and have had to invent that terrible metaphor to explain it, when all they have to do is admit they got it, along with the thing it denotes, from the goidelics, although there’s no reason to assume they were living in ireland at the time...

tata, then!

* of rhonabwy it was recorded he as a lad and (friends) went to the house of heilyn...and the whole rest of the surviving tale all the way to when he woke up.

2007-02-28T20:05:00.001-08:00

good morning everyone. i’d like you to take out your mabinogion and find the dream of rhonabwy. my 1976 penguin by jeffrey gantz may be slightly aged, but is as good as any and it has an interesting little introduction to the dream of rhonabwy, which gives us a little bit of context.

now i chat now and then with other newts, salamanders, tadpoles and toads, and occasionally chew the fat with a stickleback, minnow or other queer fish, and i’m startled now and again to be reminded that the consensus of earthling opinion concerning the celts is that they were illiterate except that the irish used the ogham for carving names on stone, and perhaps some druids may have written some little things down in perhaps greek, but heavens, no idea where they are now...

mr gantz is a very fine scholar i’m sure, and conscientious with it, but he isn’t always scrupulous about giving references, nevertheless when he says that madawg son of maredudd is a genuine historical figure, i do believe him, because if he weren’t he would not have been mentioned in a welsh historical text, and here he is, mentioned in the dream of rhonabwy. and when he says he died in 1159, and his brother iorwerth a few years later i wouldn’t question it. but i would question two or three other small points: which madawg, which iorwerth, whose 1159, and what are you calling a ‘brother’?

you see, madawg is the same as mad-og; and mad means path and og means scholar and often juvenile scholar, and many thousands of young og scholars and old boys would have identified as madog, or madawg, or however else you’d like to spell it, over a period of praps many centuries. they didn’t give their personal names back then. it’d be like admitting in front of all the blokes that your mother called you 'schnooksy'.

iorwerth, or various spellings thereof, means ireland, although its etymology shows it once meant ore-selling, and there was and still is enough of that in wales without going to ireland for it.

no word is more bandied about metaphorically, poetically, falsely and sometimes simplistically sincerely than the word brother. cuchullain called his adversary in any battle his brother, his equal, worthy to be honoured, a fellow warrior on the path of war; and scholars still want to believe he killed his own mother’s son in a single exceptional heart-wrenchingly poignant battle, so as not to reveal his impeccable and respectable code of honour because they still want him misrepresented as a barbaric uncivilised killer with blood-thirsty attitudes, who was subject to insane battle rages. also, monks call each other brothers. so in ancient texts all such details are under cautious, scrupulous doubt.

not least, whose dates. there have been many calendars in use over the centuries, and before the (sometimes only partial) roman catholicisation of the celts the gregorian one was unknown. take a look at all the other calendars known to have been in use throughout the world before the gregorian one began to prevail. many of them had starting points much earlier than 0 bc. did the welsh have their own calendar before the romans imposed theirs? did they wistfully wait for someone else to come and tell them what year it was? phillip? don’t know? moira? dai? yes, egbert? yes you are perfectly correct – and stand back, i’m about to lurch into capitOls – the correct answer is

NOBODY KNOWS!!!!!!!!!!

take a moment to recover from that before you read on: take a deep breath, stretch, get your bearings, that's right. cause there's another just like the othery coming. here it is:

how old is this text, the dream of rhonabwy, ye little blessed ones, o hermeneutical earthlings wherever you may be? arnie? jennifer? that’s right, jennifer, just as you say:

NO BLOODY BODY FAHKENWELL KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWS!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

anyway, let’s get into the text, although there is one thing i’d like to just praps mention... although jeffrey has been very discreet, there is a well, rude part in it. so while you’re reading it through, which is what i’m asking you to do for your homework, if you are under thirteen and unaccompanied by a responsible adult, when you get to the words ‘after that a wind and rainstorm arose,’ shut your eyes at once. then opening them just the teeniest bit, no peeking now, just skip the next clause of that sentence and start again at ‘and then with the restlessness of their journey...’

it’s an abysmal translation, really...

2007-01-24T20:25:00.000-08:00

we newts are cross-disciplinarian, aware that our discourse is but one thread of a densely woven fabric, and aware too of the value of being aware of what's going on in the surrounding threads. so now and then, there'll be guest scholars to deepen and widen our senses of our contexts. today we have, ta da, ta dah...

word gizzards, with ms etty mology
good day,

i’ve dissected so many words it just isn’t funny.

i’ve mounted them on polyporous pith, with silvered pins stuck right through them and detailed notes in indelible ink on tiny card micro-pinned to each one – thousands of ’em, all regimented into phyla, orders, families, genera and species.

i’ve got dozens pickled in 70% alcohol, more pressed between the pages of books and not a few thinly sectioned and dyed with strange effects on microscope slides. been doing it for years. know all about ‘em, and i’m willing to share my encyclopedic knowledge and day to day findings with the rest of you.

but first it’s only natural that you would want to know a little bit about me. i’m thin, sharp, and nasty. i wear nasty coloured knitted things, no stockings and flat shoes. i wear my hair in a nasty tight little knot on top of my hard, pointy little head, and i eat children with a knife and fork after roasting them with the flames of my nostrils. go away, timmy!

in a word, i’m grimm, and my spirit guides are grimm and my work is grimm and my findings are a grimm as all get out.

here are my observations concerning words i encounter as i learn the languages i scrutinise to tousle etymology from. to understand me you have to

1. set aside what you or anyone else already believes

2. take a deep breath

3. read a statement – any you encounter in any text explaining the origins of or history of or derivations of words. mine or yours or anyone’s. make sure you understand just what it means.

4. apply a veracity rating to the statement according to whatever critically considered and frequently revisited and updated criteria you consider most relevant (not necessarily what it says in some book). is it factual and if so is it true? is it an opinion and if so is it supported by your own knowledge, or are reasons and are those reasons sound, unsound, not enough to go on...

5. compare with accepted dogmas, and prevailing academic opinions, as to all these points of veracity. be scrupulously fair or have bad dreams for a week or until you repent. snark. snark.

6. say in as many different accents as you can manage all words in quotation marks. really push the envelope there, exaggerate. satirical, mocking, comic, whatever, all the way to the very outer limits of possibility. e.g., sheep can be anything from ship, shoop, shuwp to shape, shipe and shoipe. savour each one. who would say it like that? can you locate a particular pronunciation with a particular region, dialect, ethnic group, school? refer to your OED where it says there’s only one or at most two pronunciations for each word – the one (or ones) native to a few of the politically dominant ethnic minorities and people under their influence. apply a veracity rating to that, earthling. is it true? obviously not. is it an opinion? yes. supported by argument? no. it is therefore not an academically acceptable statement. oxford scholars don’t know, they’re just making mis-educated guesses grossly impaired by outmoded traditions. you can make better ones from your own bases, and i’m showing you how to beginning building one.

7. consider deeply the letters. remember that ‘u’ can be for ‘ah’ for ‘umbrella’, oo for oops, oo for oolong, eu, y, v and even f, schwa, or ‘yoo’ for ‘universe’. remember that every establishment had its own spelling conventions and often their own alphabets. we see a diversity of similar scripts mostly mutually intelligible but no doubt getting dicey as geographical and cultural distance increased, across britain and ireland. then as now it is reasonable to assume that some spelt phonetically, or mixed more than one style inconsistently, while others used traditional spellings that no longer reflected current pronunciations. remember that most of what was written was lost, and the few texts we have preserved are not very likely to be typical, but rather exceptional, and that texts often fetch up far from their point of production with nothing to explain where they’re from. some texts in languages that resemble german more than english, given that the two languages have influenced each other greatly, are quite as likely to have been been written in germany as in britain. anyway, the whole area is a mess and needs revision. they’re not doing it so i will.

8. repeat for all lines.

9. review the logic.

10. take three deep breaths.

e.g. ‘taobh’ is irish for ‘side’.

1. set aside pre-existing belief

2. breathe

3. read the statement: ‘taobh’ is irish for ‘side’

4. verify

• fact ( yes, it’s in the dictionary, and many native speakers can confirm it. )
• probability: (n.a.)
• possible: high? medium? low? (n.a.)
• opinion: well-supported? feebly supported? unsupported?

5. compare with accepted dogma (dogma means teaching).
• concur? ( yes )
• veracity rating on accepted dogma. ( high – can be verified)

6. say it in all funny foreign and fantastic accents, out loud, if possible into a microphone and play back, listening intently, noting which ones sound like other words in the same or other languages with similar or different meanings are pronounced.

7. spell all these pronunciations in as many different ways as you can think of, noting any which are now or ever were in use, and what other pronunciations the same spellings might have.

8. get it in context, and work through the contexts in the same way. get quick at it, a few seconds very effective thought, stash it away in your personal cranial database.

9. review it’s logic (not poss. if it’s the first line. you need to look at the logical connections between each line and all others in a paragraph, and so on up, and then let you mind travel along all logical threads to acquaint yourself thoroughly with the whole array of possibilities, ramifications, implications and so on, so that when you come to selecting the likeliest of hypotheses to follow up – and it’s very unwise to ignore any that can be sustained logically, especially when you ignore them in favour of hypotheses that can’t, like the academics do, irresponsible cads they are, and like i never would ).

10. take three deep breaths and check to see if you’ve turned into a newt yet or not. if you have, be grateful, you have evolved in a positive way. if not, keep paddling.

here’s the second statement and the third:

‘tu’ is cornish for side.

cornish ‘tu’ is related to the irish ‘taobh’

i’ll leave you to try those ten steps to more realistic etymology, and for extras, you can tousle out (explicate) some of the implications, subjecting each step of each logical sequence of thought to the ten tests, with reference to all the other similar words discovered in steps six and seven, after each one of them has been subjected to the same ten tests and supplementary logisticative procedures.

if after having done so you’re still believing that sound etymological processes have gone into the lexicography of old and middle irish, cornish and the so-called anglo-saxon texts, i’ll cast spells on you... really nasty ones involving toads.

thank you ms mology. you've certainly given us a lot to think about...

sploosh...

2006-12-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

ancient tomes and rosetta stones

hmm hmm. i’d like to speak to you today of bloody horse skins and steaming bull-feasts, golden calves and burning bushes, yellow calfskins and chinese girl’s backs and other dream-fetchers, or books as they’re called these days.

now people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and point taken, edgar, soft, squidgy-toed entities only a cm or so tall, however long they might be should probably take your sound advice to avoid stepping on the toes of steel-capped leather-booted giants everybody is using for transport these days, though the great god pan alone knows what they think their destination might be – they’ve left it up to the giants and the giants don’t even know who they are, because they’re all dead long ago. be that as it may, class, i have my quibbles when it comes to the ‘dreams’ of the ancients and i’d like us to have a little look at one or p’raps two.

let’s invoke merlyn. i’m sure he’s got other things to do, but he might be persuaded to trickle some insight-stimulating nwyfre into our midst for the good of all beings. eus kres, old man, beloved of all? kres. well, nearly. as much as kres ever gets this far from a cricket pitch, and well, since we’re here, what a strange test we’ve just had and the ashes in our keeping again, where it seems they think they belong – light laughter, with a fastish-fading tightish smile from merlyn, who’s been, i trow, subdued since the last match, along with the rest of the poms. hahaha.

elaine, dear, a propos of your enquiry, there’s a case in point. see how kresek has been taken into the beatnik (bennik = blessed) jargon and anglicised as the nearest plausible english phonetic equivalent to obtain a decidedly ‘strange’ meaning. it’s a feature of translation that you sometimes encounter affecting, as here, key words and concepts. kres = craze = highly desirable: it’s crazy man, i.e., coll, (or kell, or school), spelled cool these days and meaning just beaut.

but the subject you’ll remember is books.

if you look at the establishment dogma we’re handed out and persecuted for rejecting or daring to refute, there weren’t any really. when the ancient hebrews needed the best advice they could get for their favourite or eldest son’s future they used to consult burning bushes. when they doubted the qualifications of a leadership claiming to be tuned infallibly to the vaporous wesen, they made golden statues of calves to replace them. our culture is based upon their wisdom, so it’s nice to know that bushes can still burn, although there’s no-one alive today who i’d trust to interpret, and that statue-making of animals and all sorts in everything from plasticine to pure gold is still a vital pass-time for millions, a hobby for thousands and a livelihood for hundreds of people in any sample of population of a reasonable size.

(no wendy, newts do not make statues of anything much, although we have our ways with mud – reuzegezellig it is too!!!!!)

the point is, human, that taken all together there are some very good reasons for suspecting every consulted thing in ancient texts of being a book or a school or other institution which kept annals, pedigrees and other kinds of history, science and philosophy in treasured books, while every act of recording is translated as writing.

the process is often described: an animal or several hundred or thousand are killed. hermeneuts are always pretending they know the various precise meanings of all the words they encounter that probably mean kill and often use the word sacrifice whenever it gets religious, or rather whenever they’re too scared to say what it really means.

there’s so much evidence of books, tomes and parchments, writing and reading, education and communication by the written word in those texts and they seem to me to be doing everything in their power to pretend there just wasn’t any. perhaps this is because they want to believe that the texts they’ve got are new and fresh and original, not too tricky to date, and they want it to reflect racist roman propaganda to the effect that there was no literature except greek and egyptian which they couldn’t really hide before they came and educated the barbarians, and they do this by refusing to acknowledge the vast piles of evidence of widespread developed taken-for-granted generalised literacy among the majority of pre-roman peoples.

the references to massive, house to captive house, methodically thorough booksearchings and book burnings, aside (see don quixote for some gloriously telling examples), they seem to want us to think that the scarcity, fragmentariness and poor condition of the pitiful few survivals of pre-roman literature reflects their pre-roman condition. to keep up this pretence you have to translate them wrongly, and that ensures that the translations make no sense or nonsense or at the very best bizarre sense that fully justifies not only the destruction of the culture concerned, but its continued subjection to the authority of... of whom, precisely, i often wonder...

you’re wondering about the golden calf? words for yellow and golden and tan etc tend to be easy to mistake for one another even when they are clearly defined. in my own vocabulary, i’d use all those words to denote the same colour in different situations. but it beautifully suggests the colour of parchment, don’t you think, and the best parchment is made from the skin of young animals, while it is still very supple and pliable and still very thin. you can refer here to rhonabwy’s yellow calf skin upon which he ‘dreams’ – dreams are almost always readings – and to prophecy, dreams, or consultation involving animal skins that cause clairvoyant dreams all the way back to joseph in his tartan kilt in the land of egypt. the buggers were up to their elbows in books, poring over tomes, ruining their eyesight in doing so and saving up all their dinerii shekels and pingines to have their young hopefuls taught to do the same.

the burning bush? there are many word pairs in extant languages whose ancestors probably contributed to the hebrew’s texts either directly or in translation (they were always translating each others texts, wives’ texts in particular into the language of their husbands, and much of the populace of the middle east seems to have been goidelic ((galilee for example and galatea)) though brythonic and hellenic speakers were also there) which mean either bush or book depending on which language you’re thinking in. tom/tome and buch/bush are two.

i’ve got reasons i can’t go into here, it’s almost time for my slot with axel lottle where we do really exquisite things together in the murk to make it more intelligible and yielding of its meanings, for preferring to think that the old hebrews having married some proto-irish colleens, their descendents inherited translations of some now lost, very ancient proto-irish texts and some dickhead ((related to dichet(al) perhaps, and meaning something like deep-thinker and certainly not obscene)) mistranslated a phrase which meant ‘illuminated/illustrated tome’ as burning bush. tom is irish for bush or shrub.

note tomahawk here, girls and boys, for when we glance at the possibility that the irish really did sail to america and go native, because it will do you good to see in this native american work the elements tom and hawk. tom is bush, and hawk is hack, or hacker, the thing you hack with see hacha, axe and saxe. a tomahawk is a small axe for cutting bushes with. you’d need something bigger for a tree – that’s how to check to see that the meaning fits. snug as a foot in a moccasin. goes right up to the saxons that etymology does and helps us to distinguish them from the sasanas, with whom they are currently incorrectly confounded by most scholars who haven’t been paying attention to moi. they’re almost certainly more to do with slate rooves than battle-axes, although they no doubt used those too.

and the chinese girl’s back? well, you can imagine for yourself what kind of text the sort of nitwit who does this sort of thing
was working with here: there’s the scene, some events of great significance have taken place and it’s hard to make out exactly what but what fun if it’s the one where they all hate each other, so they read it as a vengeful resentment that makes them record it as is proved by their method of recording it: they inscribe the text on the girl’s back with a knife, cutting each letter deeply enough into the skin to leave permanent scars which will be legible for as long as she lives.

well, maybe it was someone else’s back – perhaps an old sheep’s after the sheep had finished with it, and maybe it was written on with ink in the ordinary way, and maybe we’re not dealing with glorious vengefulness - a very suspect trait, in a culture in need of careful correction - but only with an honest intention of preserving in the ordinary way the details of events they felt were worthy of remembrance, and maybe there wasn’t any offence given or taken at all.

hermeneutics is like that.

now before you go, o golden ones of wisdom and truth, consider this: the first thing anyone could think of doing with the rosetta stone once they’d found it and polished it all up clean was to brush ink on it and press paper against it and lift off the paper and while still wet, press it against another piece of paper, and do that several times and distribute the copies to interested persons, rewetting the stone when it got dry and washing it carefully clean when they’d finished work for the day.

my question, and i want three thousand words from each of you, with footnotes and bibliography extra, illustrations fine, powerpoint presentation welcome, on whether or not you think the egyptians were too stupid to think of that and give arguments to support your opinion and evidence to support your arguments and i’ll see you down the slushpond after for a drink or a wallow in the mud. entitle your essay: was the rosetta stone once part of a printing press?

happy solstice

herman newt.

2006-11-16T22:05:00.000-08:00

we newts understand nothing half so well as puddles. puddles are what remain when ponds evaporate. they are the result of the uneven distribution of mud, which results in little hills and valleys forming. water seeks its own level and fills valleys while leaving hills high and dry. first you have a pond. then as that evaporates you have small islands appearing above the water level. as the water level drops further the islands get bigger, and then several may become connected by an increasingly continuous stretch of highish ground between them. eventually the proportion of water to land does a reverse – first there’s more water than land, then more land than water. soon only very low areas still contain water.

any hermeneut must be exquisitely aware that metaphors are always a calculated shift away from reality and conclusions drawn from studies made through them must be drawn very carefully with this in mind. any lens distorts. a metaphor’s distortions must be carefully observed and accounted for. then and only then, metaphors are very useful lenses. this puddle metaphor can be profitably brought to bear on the geographical distribution of any old or ancient culture. high ground surrounding a puddle and islands within it represent locations that are less easily retained by the culture concerned than that represented by low soggy ground, pools and puddles. pools and puddles represent homelands, colonies and such.

it also applies to our beliefs, derived from texts, archaeological traces and legends and folk traditions, about the geographical distribution of cultures. concerning the ancient past, we have plenty of belief, precious little hard factual data. so we’re necessarily constrained to work with belief. when a belief contributes to the basis of a major conjectural construct, it gets called ‘a hypothesis’. ‘an hypothesis’ if you are american, or if your speech is influenced by american speech.

now i’m thinking of fionn mac cumhaill, the irish legendary hero. it’s usually pronounced mc cool these days. famed for his thumb-sucking to procure hallucinatory experiences upon the basis of which he prophecied, fionn was a warrior. what else he was is immaterial. the fact is he is known in ireland from some rather old texts which are only of real interest to historians, linguists and celtic revivalists, and to hermeneuts and faerie folk too ethereal to see.

not many would dispute though that, once upon a time, at least someone thought it was pronounced mac cumhaill. that’s using irish spelling conventions, but using current english ones, it would have been spelt mc cuwal, and only the irish would have worried about the slenderisation of the final ll. slender or broad, ll is ll to a pom. or an ozzie, and i daresay a yank. (i use these national nick-names with affection in every instance and am amazed to be told that anyone ever used any of them any other way. i’ve only ever heard them used with neutrality or affection, so that’s how i’m continuing to use them.)

but that hasn’t really satisfied, has it? you’d want to know how the u is pronounced, u for uh huh or oo for oops, or both. both are possible in irish as well as english, depending in both languages on which word this particular specimen of an u occurs in and where you live. but does it matter? cah-well or coo-well. or in irish also caw-well.

it could be any of these and because it is in the nature of speech to vary with location, and references to fionn mac cumhaill must have been made by all sorts of people in all sorts of places, all three were probably in use at some time or another in the pre-renaissance and renaissance periods, and a whole lot of other spellings and pronunciations not recorded in writing as well.

one good bet, because it happens so often in so many other words, is that, like the ll, the mh was sometimes slender and sometimes broad; i.e., sometimes a v and sometimes a w. but poms, yanks, ozzies, kiwis and other users of english would notice the v/w difference, while the –ill/ -all difference, which the irish make much of, would elude them.

so someone at least somewhere would have pronounced that surname ‘mc or mac caval or cuval’.

now wise and wonder-working witches have always been at play with the eyes of newts, always including a good handful in their alarmingest cauldrons, and muttering such spells as would mutate a whole oceanful of newts (if newts could live in oceans) with particular reference to their eyes, with the result that newts’ eyes have some seriously admirable abilities not found in the eyes of lesser beings. they can see round corners, through drifts of densely matted twigs, up twisty apertures in banks and through quite meaningful depths of gravelly murk and slimy silt. nobody knows better than an amphibian how to identify and compensate for incidental or regular distortions.

now this here newt espies not just one 'caval' here but a whole 'cavalry' and dares to set this against several decades of etymological research and rashly opine that caval means horse and that this is so even when you spell it cumhaill, and find it along with sheep, cows and linen sheets in a list of old irish units of currency, and even when you put a mac in front of it and find it storied and gloried as an irish legenedary hero.

and merely noting here (and then dodging to evade hurled rotten fruit, addled eggs and other unspeakabilia from the academics whose dog-gone, ox-dreaming reasoning has brought them to other conclusions) that mac didn’t originally mean son of but something forgotten from which words meaning son (of), worker (with), student (of), soldier (for) etc, are derived. but i believe it orignated as something close to ‘work’ via mutation of the initial sound of a word ancestral to both work and make. both share a common ancestor with fac- the latin stem of words to do with making and doing. add in the vik or viking there, but don’t pick at it now, sandra, or it'll go off in your face! believe me, it will! just keep it in your heart.

and no, simon, we’re not dealing with PIE yet. we’re not that far back in time by a long shot, and neither is almost anyone, as you soon shall see.

i just want to share with you my newt's-eye view of fionn mac cumhaill’s surname, because i’ve got one or two shocks for you faoi. well, i mean i’ve had one or two shocks faoi. faoi is one of my favourite irish words. it means all sorts of things, but here it means ‘concerning it’.

for now, note the horse theme. caval belongs to that whole array that opens out nicely and means horse or other large herbivorous mammal. i’ll just list them; you’ll know how to imagine their distributions through time and space on a map of the world, stopping when knowledge becomes hypothesis, because the PIE hypotheses can't be trusted and we have to revise our sense of how language correlated to location in the olden days of elves and withces and cavaliers called fionn mac cumhaill.

here’s a partial list to get you started: caval, cheval, capall, cob, camel, gimel, gavar, chevr(on), capri, gabhair...

for homework, class, i want you to add at least a dozen more to the list, and write, say or just think750-850 words on the implications of this list with reference to the main means of conveyance of the scandinavian god thor, bearing in mind that he was a biggish chap and goats are tough but not that tough, and there were lots of little closely related but divergent cultures merging in marriage and working together exchanging words and modifying ways of using them.

that might get a lot of otherwise useful souls out of their goat carts and into some more appropriate conveyance!!!!!

blessed be, humans

herman newt.

2006-10-10T00:39:00.000-07:00

all right, here’s an example of how an etymology should be set out, and you can see that Herman isn’t doing that, so is Herman wrong?

fly (n.) O.E. fleoge, from P.Gmc. *fleugjon (cf. O.S. fleiga, O.N. fluga, M.Du. vlieghe, Ger. Fliege "fly); lit. "the flying (insect)" (cf. O.E. fleogende "flying"), from same source as fly (v.1).

let’s examine it bit by bit. i see ogma has entered, shuffled modestly in (or pasted in with that etymology) – would you like to take a seat, sir? we’re about to do some serious hermeneutic.

where does this come from? a website purporting to be official. what does that mean? for homework, i want two thousand words from each of you on the subject, with footnotes, bibliography and powerpoint presentation including maps, diagrams and at least one full page of links. try to avoid facile, obvious statements like ‘not god’.

what language is it in? academic english specific to the discipline of blah blah blah... we’re all au fait with the techniques and have done most of them in a flash, haven’t we?

there is an as yet unexplicated implication that a great deal of conscientious, professional study has led people of proven academic ability specific to this field to this theory, and that is has the approval of many others who have examined it and found it reasonable.

but question it anyway. peer review in science was subjected to peer review very publicly and spectacularly in the nineties and found wanting, to say the least. but then, you can’t trust peer review. and anyway, who gets to be a peer in the discipline of etymology? what are the criteria, what politics, what hegemonic biases, what sexisms, racisms, ageisms?

if i write an essay in which i reason like ‘they’ do, without worrying too much about who ‘they’ are, i get good marks, i get to do honours, and if i keep doing it, i get a ph.d, and then i’m one of them. but even then i have to agree a lot or try to float a theory of my dissenting own, ignominiously as most of ‘em float, even if they get published.

being too poor to read the latest stuff hot off the presses, i read a lot of proud (often excellent) stuff written in the radical sixties and seventies, launched with high hopes, and sunk into the morass never to have the acclaim that pinker, prettier than most, has, and several of them far more intelligent than the tedious old de saussure

but let’s get to grip with the text itself.
fly (n.) O.E. fleoge, from P.Gmc.

[this tells us that the noun fly came to current english from old english, which got it ‘from’ proto-germanic. on the basis of not who says it, earnestine, but what we know – and we wouldn’t attempt this without some background knowledge, linguistic, cultural, historical etc, though none of us is a full bottle, so to speak - is it likely to be true?

well, to my way of thinking, there were many languages besides those written in in england back then, before the normans, and many of them were closely related, and as cambridge university’s david crystal says, there were creoles and pidgins and ‘chuile shórt ann. furthermore there was a lot of borrowing between less closely related languages too. so there wasn’t really a single language called old english, only a collection of texts from several different languages, and a whole heap more spoken, unwritten, unrecorded language than you could fit into a whole wheelbarrow full of books.

here’s a dash of ageism, too – historical accounts ask us to see grown men and women interacting, intermarrying, vying for or cooperating in political, military, commercial, agricultural power etc, and a bustling busy church getting in everbody’s way, with all scholars either monks or lords or better.

but i see schools everywhere, in monasteries, and elsewhere, where children from different linguistic backgrounds made schoolyard creoles and then grew up to teach in them. sometimes a very few speakers would create languages of their own, as if say, an eton scholar were barely intelligible to a harrow one, and neither intelligible to the rest.

but fortunately, most would have been able to go home and forget their school languages, except when they wanted to impress, with those who remained as staff becoming increasingly elite, and so attracting more students from more influential backgrounds until the elite languages carried so much more prestige for being less like the others etc.

wherefore the written texts very seriously do not represent the common speech and there’s no reason given here, and none that i know of, what about you, marvin? to suppose that the word came to us from the written text when it probably had all sorts of variants in all the common tongues, except those that called them something else - and it’s just as likely, or more so, isn’t it, that the word came to us through, via or from one or more of these – is unrealistic.

now, old english, allowing that it came from old english but not necessarily, and even probably, not through the form recorded in the written text referred to (although how remiss of them; they haven’t mentioned its name) is said here to have got it from the proto-germanic, which of course, means the hypothetical parent language from which branched, according to current theory all the languages which are related to the language which the english, following the example of the romans, call german.

but the germans call it deutsch. the french call it allemand, and the cornish agree it is almeynek, though the irish are willing enough to call it gearmainis. so there are immediately problems with this.

the ger- is always thought to be from words that look like ger, and have meanings clustering around the idea of sharpness, being a k-form of spear, and the man is of course man, and germans are spearmen, primitive, warlike and brave.

but whoa there, neddy. there are a lot more instances of ger meaning a fortified city or town, a garden, a guarded area, or the seat of some ruler. you can find their names in all sorts of old texts, but they’re with us still so let’s interrogate a few of the survivors.

there are gardens for example. den is cornish for man or person, related to irish duine, dane and all those. their range has shrunk and become localised geographically to denmark, but they were arguably the biblical house of dan, but it’s not worth anyone’s career to say so – thank iuno/iona, whose verse/gwers it is, i haven’t got a career. where a fortified place was called a gar/ger or similar, that of the danes was called a garden.

there must have been many of them throughout england, and no prizes for guessing what they were doing in them. you know that passage that starts

“hwaet we gardena in gear-dagum theod cyninga thrym gefrunon hudha, aethelingas ellen frem edon.”?

well, whatever established opinion might say it means, imo it really means:

“what we gardeners in the harrowed field cunningly trimly pruned have, educated lads all from edon...”

there, i’ve distinguished the ger, gar or gor – dons, danes, dens or duns, duines or doones from the gerMANs (and all their variants, of course). the word occurs as gor, car, ker, jer, cathair, etc all over the early map. i think judging by it’s range (it’s pretty close to world wide if you include oz ngarandjeri, and others, and native american cherokee, and others) it probably denotes an early language, and along with it a whole culture with its own teaching and philosophy of life, but the area was colonised by a rapidly diversifying array of others simultaneously, so we’re not looking for an empire yet.

danes, we’ve seen, garden, and if danes gardened in england, garraí means field in irish and what is bulgaria’s most famous export but rose perfume from its glorious gardens. it’s fruit gardens are wonderful too.

but not all danes/dens/dons/duines are gardeners and not all gers are gardens. cor-inthos (cathair iontas) means house of wonders in a language which when spoken phonetically is so like modern irish with its archaic spelling that you’d have to be phobic or something to miss it. but i’m told -inthos is non-indo-european so i’ll just gnaw a toenail until i feel better and then go on.

ger means fortified place. man means mine. ok that’s not proved, except that the -man part appends as readily to alla, and what’s allah doing in pre-roman europe but mining. there are plenty of allusions to turks in europe even in roman writings. turks probably are torcs, or a ‘celtic’ nobility along with the damhs, or david, davies or devas. and who married maebd (try supplying hs there, where the irish wouldn’t have shown lenition because they knew it was there: maebhdh – there y’are: maverth! close as you could get to mothers, but don’t assume yet that it was gender specific – think of mathiolo, mathgen, matholwch.

so ger mania are ger people who are not necessarily an ethnicity. now who are the dutch/deutsch? a related race? where are they? are they teutonic? does the d harden to become t? does the t soften to become d? what evidence is there for either? an essay on it class to be handed in by alban eiler – 3,500 words and yes, dianne you can use crayons to colour in your maps.

just before the bell rings, ogma has a question. when i say pinker do i mean more reddish white, or more marxist, and what has this to do with english-speaking pale-complexioned north americans’ little fingers?

hmm.

good question. i suppose you’re acquainted with the experiments that demonstrate that enraged juvenile delinquents become tranquil and tend to fall asleep quickly if placed in cells painted bubblegum pink? and you will have observed the exquisite pinky-redness of the feathery gills of albino axolotls. but at this stage, without further research, i don’t think it’s possible to know quite why gaia trickled her most celebrated linguistical soul stuff to us via a man whose surname means both more whitey-red, and more communist, no. i’ll think about it. thank you.

and ooh look, we’ve got to get through all this:

*fleugjon (cf. O.S. fleiga, O.N. fluga, M.Du. vlieghe, Ger. Fliege "fly); lit. "the flying (insect)" (cf. O.E. fleogende "flying"), from same source as fly (v.1).

before we can proceed, and we’re already 500 words over the limit.

but you can see where it’s leading. NONE OF THE ACADEMICALLY ACCEPTABLE ETYMOLOGY STANDS UP TO SCRUTINY.

so next time, back to tweedle dee and tweedle dum, and the truth behind the story of the rattle.

2006-08-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

look, all you people on the edge of your seats keen to understand about the dums and dees of tweedle, it really is time to get serious about hermeneutics and discuss just what it means.

and perhaps after all it’s time for me to throw off my newt suit and admit that i really have got a secret identity, yes folks, it’s me, the wyverne. Herman Newt is really me after all.

secondly, i have to either explain why i don’t use conventional academic terminologies much, and set out my etymologies with formal exactness in order to reference them to existing work, or start doing so, which is reasonable; and so i’ll do the former.

ten years ago, i was doing an arts degree at deakin university, australia’s foremost distance education provider, and a very reputable university in its own right. i was doing very well and had won recognition for my ‘academic excellence’. i was doing a double major in literary studies and cultural studies (both very strong on postmodernism) and was finding my way towards specialisation in ‘myth and legend and the oral traditions’ in one and ‘hermeneutics, the interpretation of (sacred) texts’ in the other. i had studied the philosophy of knowledge and power, freudian psychology, and comparative religion in support of these two majors, and i’d learnt the art/science of critique from second wave feminism as an extracurricula in my first bash at a university education (in latin and greek at the university of adelaide) when i was in my late teens and early twenties, practiced it diligently through all through the years of my maturation, and refreshed it with a dip into third wave feminism at first year level at deakin.

between my first and second attempts at university education i read intensely on a wide range of subjects from science to linguistics, devoured skeet’s dictionary of indo-european root-words and subsequently satisfied myself that it was self-indulgent fantasy supported mostly by bombast and the power high-up academics have to crush their critics, and still i’m fond of it. i was since my teens a fervid reader of etymologies and prone to get lost for hours in dictionaries which i had opened to look up a word i’d long forgotten about, reading etymology after etymology, lapping ‘em up like lollies, noting with keen attention those that appeared to me to be wrong, bent around politics, twisted round ecclesiastic or hagiographic fibs, or just inadequately researched, and so i brought all this to bear on everything i read. that’s three decades of it a decade ago, so it’s four decades' worth now.

the climax came when all of these disciplines converged in 1997, when as a deakin undergraduate with lots of nice high distinctions behind me and confident of more to come, i undertook close analyses of the oresteia, gawain and the tain bo cuailgne in the same semester as a study of hermeneutical techniques from ancient to post-modern as applied or applicable to jewish, islamic, hindu, christian and buddhist sacred texts. in all innocence, expecting praise, i whipped out my lens of feminist-style critique, which examines texts critically for political, racist, sexist, religious, and personal bias; not fearing to psychoanalyse, and i added my own psychological slant of recognising, as freud did, that everyone has a neurosis, mental health consisting of the successful management of it; and also that that is best accessed through buddhist notions of samsara, of which all texts will bear evidence of cultural and authorial management or mis-management.

what happened next was okay as far as the t/ain went. cuchullain and emer are old friends of mine. i draw great inspiration from them both. i wrote my first essay of the semester on gawain and got a high distinction for it, (i have to boast sometimes to compensate for not getting the degree,
for here i faltered and finally fell,
withdrew with weeping, sadly i succumbed,

i mean, i’m about to explain why i quit without completing the semester).

even before my gawain essay came back (with a high distinction as it turned out) i got stuck into aeschylus, hoeing right in with a knife and fork, doing all the right things as i’d learned from feminists and was cottoning onto from a brief round with communications studies at first year level, and was now getting helped to from ‘hermeneutics across cultures’, and i found to my horror that what happened when i did all that did not tally at all with what apparently was and still is current belief about aeschylus, homer, cassandra or the greeks. in fact it clashed horribly.

reader, i flipped. the wyverne withered to a skinny wet lizard, and laid a single egg, in which the illustrious Herman Newt was conceived.

at the time, to anyone who wanted an excuse, i mumbled something about massively catastrophic paradigm shifts, crippling arrays of non sequiturs, and a so-called ‘scientific revolution’ looming paralysingly on my horizon with the awful threat that i would be the only person in the world having this particular one and would therefore never be able to pass another essay without lying. cuchullain would despise me. emer would refuse to teach me featherstitch.

i spent a few weeks gibbering in corners and when the gibbering had passed from excited, rapid and febrile to disconsolate and murmurous, and had almost stopped, i took up irish, cornish, ancient greek, latin, spanish and dutch, brushed up my french, toyed with my little bit of german and practiced my few sentences of serbian with my serbian best friend the son of satan. ya mislim da mosemo. mi smo bili ovde sinoch. ya sam bog. all those things serbs say.

i’ll soon be moving on to welsh, polish, icelandic, finnish, sanskrit, hebrew and russian, two to three years of each. as even the sorcerer, de saussure said, ‘learn languages’. later i’ll do cheroke, basque, arabic, moroccan, igbo and ngaranjeri. or along those lines. i have to fit danish in somewhere, and fairly soon, i think! my day is divided into six or seven lesson times so that it’s no harder than the matriculation year at high school, with the added lightener that it’s done for love.

anyway, that was because it had become clear to me that one has to do one’s own translations – you can’t let all that stuff hang on the hermeneutical decisions of a very few who died long ago, without ever reading bilimoria on truth and transcendence, bell hooks on permeant racism in earnestly idealistic discourse dominated yes dominated, sister! by white middle class, educated women, or the wyverne on hermeneutics (modest blush).

i mean what hit me, what floored me, what threw me clean off my perilous seat, o loved ones, most cherished, was that cassandra was caesa(r) an dra, whose plural even in greek would be - if provided with 2nd declension case endings and let’s do it, hey, just to make ourselves gibber, just to see the embryonic herman newt quiver in his egg - would be draoi, the irish word for druid – and if she, ha ha, is a druid (apart from that she’s no sexy spear prize – their education was so long they were elderly before they got to be druids) well, shit, so is julius caesar isn’t he? (caesar is pronounced kaess-ar, not seesa, benjamin, and don’t carve things on your desk with your compass please – it isn’t smart – caes rhymes with mass. caesars were cathars who couldn't say th, not roman emperors, except when a cathar was a roman emperor. but the romans were terrible fibbers, so don’t believe a word they say.)

i mean, ‘she’ was probably a wizened little old man about four feet tall with a shiny bald domed forehead fringed with lots of fluffy white hair and a big white beard and long lovely moustaches and i’m sorry he had to die that way – i really am.

there’s a lot of gender confusion caused by grammatical gender or something that sounds like it being mistaken for actual gender. e.g., for years i gave poor old mircea eliade a mental sex-change purely on the basis of the final letter of his first name – it wasn’t till i read the small print, all that waffle on the back cover and the forewards by prominent anthropologists that i discovered he was a man and gave him back his dick and balls. i daresay he’s grateful, though he might have benefitted from the shamanic experience of it. they did things like that a lot. so perhaps he was a she.

so the whole scenario shifts. troy was celtic. so aeneas is celtic. you remember all you who did latin, how he scarpered when troy fell with his grandad anchises on his shoulders. but it wasn't the whole man. ‘anchises’ is irish for ‘the basket’ for feic’s sake. it had his ancestor’s bones in it. the skulls. the skulls. the sacred bones of the ancestors. skulls and long bones. jolly old rogers. skulls. ostoun. ho stone, the stone, the bone.

so rome is celtic. is rome celtic?

a year’s long radical revision would arrive at where rome is celtic.

i mean hermeneutics begins by asking all the questions and while underlining the ones that get answered, ‘i don’t know’, bravely faces those that get answered, well, that, but no it wouldn’t be that, no one else thinks it’s that, mumble, murble, gibber gibber.

look that’s way over me thousand words – i’ll slither back into my other identity now and see you all later.

and sorry to shock you all, i’m not really a nice slimy newt, i’m really only a tacky little wyverne in greeny-gold lamé after all.

2006-08-05T20:14:00.001-07:00

dum dee dame di damh

we’ve managed to bail up dum and s/he’s consented to be interviewed.

first of all there are two ways of arriving at dum if you’re an evoluting syllable:

(1) via dun which belongs to a complex including the english –don, -den, -dene, town, dane, and -ton, etc., and the irish duine (person), the cornish den (man, person) and (mumble muffle humble mumble – i haven’t learnt any welsh yet so what the hell do i think i’m doing saying anything about it at all) probably something or other in (keh! keh!) welsh, too (heh! heh!), and it may have become the dum of dumfries and dumbarton, both in scotland, one on the clyde and the other on the nith, to accommodate the following labial, although god knows why it would – it didn’t in dunbar, dunblane, or dunfermline; or

(2) via a common ancestor with the english dame meaning a ((once noble)) woman, the irish damh (and we’re north enough for goidelic gaelic to have had a spear in this cauldron) meaning a noble person or a stag, and the ancienter tome which my cherished copy of the shorter ogsfort dictionary – gasp, sorry, i did mean to ay ox ford ha ha, of course there’s an ox-ford there, isn’t there. wouldn’t not be, would there? deirim é, no! oxen everywhere, i’m sure. i mean if i were alive in the olden days and i wanted to refer to the biggest and most famous education centre in my world, well i’d just refer to a nearby feature like the place where the oxen could drag their drays across the river, i would, i mean even then it wouldn’t have been worth one’s career (and, heh heh, i use the term loosely, nay, hilariously) to mention ogs as if anything so unbritish, so, well, goidelic, could have been happening that close to l’ógres, (the og-eries) would it, and rightly so, for who would let anything as fork-bearded and bandy-legged put little golden crowns on the heads of sweet little english children? no! never! there were never any ogres in l’ogres! and no, wouldn’t of been a fort, feic, no!, forts are ancient and ‘we’ KNOW the date of the establishment of oxford, don’t ‘we’? much later, wasn’t it, i mean before the romans, there wasn’t even roads, let alone education (now will you let me off the rack, torturer? o thank you, thank you, and yes, i’ll remember that in future, it just really was an ox ford, and yes, i must remember to put off indefinitely that search i keep trying unsuccessfully online for an actual photo of the very ford referred to.)

(psst, if anyone is actually reading this blog, any help with this search would be much appreciated. fair dinkum, i’m sure they’ve got themselves covered, but where can i find a map showing the exact or most likely location of, or a photograph of this famous ford?)

sorry, everyone, i had to step outside for a moment. where were we? oh yes, dum.

now without getting to intimate with each one of them, i’ll run past you a quick list of words and bits of words that you might like to consider as possible cognates, derivatives, ancestors, or near rellies of dum. tome, domesday, doom, etym, thomas, thames, times, tem(ple), tim(othy), tam(sin), dam(son) dem(oiselle), team, dam, dumb, dump and through damh, dauph(in), daphne, dove, duffer, duff, dubh, daves, deves, devon, david, davies, davis, devil, dover, ooh and there’s mobs more, but as you can see you do have to leave england, because it’s ‘ancient and cold’ and yea verily, noble as all get out!

yet here we are in good ol’ england, witnessing their marriage with england’s tweed trade (which was world-famous before julius even thought of incarnating as a cathar - pronounced caes-ar where th’s are too hard for you - let alone a roman), perhaps even the mass-marriage of all of the lasses eligible to be brides of one with all the likely lads of the other. tweed-all to dum.

(did i mention dumnorix?)

now glancing over that list and taking off the fleeting impressions that arise, pressing them firmly between pages of a book and mounting them on clean white card-board, you get a sense of a very ancient people going back to where dome still equalled home, which was possibly in the steppes somewhere, where nomads used to use mammoth tusks, but hey, there’re other ways of building domes – look at that of st peters, or the modified domes of the islamic mosques, and besides, tombs are probably in there somewhere, and so tomb-dome-home builders, who stored their written history in thick, sheep-skin parchment books of great weight of which the doomsday book is a surviving example (or do we all have to pretend all the data’s in for that one and there’s no need to revise it? domes de is more likely to mean tomes doers and i could prove it with reference to the anglo-saxon rune poem, but (keh, keh) it’s probably not worth my career...

they are right into literacy, education and so on, so we know they’re post roman, because the romans introduced literacy to the britons when prasto took the toga, didn’t they. umm, look, thames means tomes. st thomas, dame schools, temples, all mean literacy, and what’s more, mighty intense population monitoring. we’ll not ask here what boots it that my dame hath a lame tame crane, but flick an eyelash at it if you like and it’ll do you no harm. she was a neat, figure, bonneted, booted and buckled, and mostly not a horsewoman – she got about not much and on foot. perhaps she was forthright, if not quite a tomboi. and look, she would beg to differ with me concerning the etymology of the word dee. for although there is no doubt that dee was a very inferior creature at the time of the quarrel, it is as true that he had become so, having come from as noble a lineage as her own (poor dumb thomas and simple tom agreed, and she would and they would never marry into any lineage that was not worthy), for te, tea and dee, and yea the de of domes de too are all forms of tow(er), also spelt tiw, or tiw(as), and all ultimately from dor, terr, and the like. that’s such a biggy, i’ll leave it for now. but you’ve met the dame, and she’ll explain to us next time about tweedle’s specific dum and perhaps we’ll have a peep into the tower, tiw, terr complex, because, don’t choke on your egg n-óg, gilbert, but i think there we’ll find god.

2006-08-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

dum dee dame di damh

we’ve managed to bail up dum and s/he’s consented to be interviewed.

first of all there are two ways of arriving at dum if you’re an evoluting syllable:

(1) via dun which belongs to a complex including the english –don, -den, -dene, town, dane, and -ton, etc., and the irish duine (person), the cornish den (man, person) and (mumble muffle humble mumble – i haven’t learnt any welsh yet so what the hell do i think i’m doing saying anything about it at all) probably something or other in (keh! keh!) welsh, too (heh! heh!), and it may have become the dum of dumfries and dumbarton, both in scotland, one on the clyde and the other on the nith, to accommodate the following labial, although god knows why it would – it didn’t in dunbar, dunblane, or dunfermline; or

(2) via a common ancestor with the english dame meaning a ((once noble)) woman, the irish damh (and we’re north enough for goidelic gaelic to have had a spear in this cauldron) meaning a noble person or a stag, and the ancienter tome which my cherished copy of the shorter ogsfort dictionary – gasp, sorry, i did mean to say 'ox ford', ha ha, of course there’s an ox-ford there, isn’t there. wouldn’t not be, would there? deirim é, no! oxen everywhere, i’m sure. i mean if i were alive in the olden days and i wanted to refer to the biggest and most famous education centre in my world, well i’d just refer to a nearby feature like the place where the oxen could drag their drays across the river, i would, i mean even then it wouldn’t have been worth my (ha ha) career (and, heh heh, i use the term loosely, nay, hilariously) to mention ogs as if anything so unbritish, so, well, goidelic, could have been happening that close to l’ógres, (the og-eries) would it, and rightly so, for who would let anything as fork-bearded and paunch-bellied and bandy-legged put little golden crowns on the heads of sweet little english children? no! never! there were never any ogres in l’ogres! and no, wouldn’t of been a fort, feic, no!, forts are ancient and ‘we’ KNOW the date of the establishment of oxford, don’t ‘we’? (well, no, according to the website of that venerable institution, there it was when the normans got there, and nobody knows how long it'd been there) but well, we can assume, and perhaps if we value the connection between our shoulders and our heads we'de better assume that it was much later than when there'd've been hillforts with ogres in 'em, wasn’t it? i mean, before the romans, there wasn’t even roads, let alone education (now will you let me off the rack, torturer? ooooh thank you, thank you, and yes, i’ll remember that in future, it just really was a slip of the intellect, and i'm sure now that it was named after an ox ford, which would have been the most conspicuous feature of the place, and yes, i must remember to put off indefinitely that search i keep trying unsuccessfully online for an actual photo of the very ford referred to.)

(psst, if anyone is actually reading this blog, any help with this search would be much appreciated. fair dinkum, i’m sure they’ve got themselves covered, but where can i find a map showing the exact or most likely location of, or a photograph of this famous ford?)

sorry, everyone, i had to step outside for a moment. where were we? oh yes, dum.

now without getting too intimate with each one of them, i’ll run past you a quick list of words and bits of words that you might like to consider as possible cognates, derivatives, ancestors, or near rellies of dum. tome, domesday, doom, etym, thomas, thames, times, tem(ple), tim(othy), tam(sin), dam(son) dem(oiselle), team, dam, dumb, dump and through damh, dauph(in), daphne, dove, duffer, duff, dubh, daves, deves, devon, david, davies, davis, devil, dover, ooh and there’s mobs more, but as you can see you do have to leave england, because it’s ‘ancient and cold’ and yea verily, noble as all get out!

yet here we are in good ol’ england, witnessing their marriage with england’s tweed trade (which was world-famous before julius even thought of incarnating as a cathar - pronounced caes-ar where th’s are too hard for you - let alone a roman), perhaps even the mass-marriage of all of the lasses eligible to be brides of one with all the likely lads of the other. tweed-all to dum.

(did i mention dumnorix?)

now glancing over that list and taking off the fleeting impressions that arise, pressing them firmly between pages of a book and mounting them on clean white card-board, you get a sense of a very ancient people going back to where dome still equalled home, which was possibly in the steppes somewhere, where nomads used to use mammoth tusks, but hey, there’re other ways of building domes – look at that of st peters, or the modified domes of the islamic mosques, and besides, tombs are probably in there somewhere, and so tomb-dome-home builders, who stored their written history in thick, sheep-skin parchment books of great weight of which the doomsday book is a surviving example (or do we all have to pretend all the data’s in for that one and there’s no need to revise it? domes de is more likely to mean tomes doers and i could prove it with reference to the anglo-saxon rune poem, but (keh, keh) it’s probably not worth my career...

they are right into literacy, education and so on, so we know they’re post roman, because the romans introduced literacy to the britons when prasto took the toga, didn’t they. umm, look, thames means tomes. st thomas, dame schools, temples, all mean literacy, and what’s more, mighty intense population monitoring. we’ll not ask here what boots it that my dame hath a lame tame crane, but flick an eyelash at it if you like and it’ll do you no harm. she was a neat, figure, bonneted, booted and buckled, and mostly not a horsewoman – she got about not much and on foot. perhaps she was forthright, if not quite a tomboi. and look, she would beg to differ with me concerning the etymology of the word dee. for although there is no doubt that dee was a very inferior creature at the time of the quarrel, it is as true that he had become so, having come from as noble a lineage as her own (poor dumb thomas and simple tom agreed, and she would and they would never marry into any lineage that was not worthy), for te, tea and dee, and yea the de of domes de too are all forms of tow(er), also spelt tiw, or tiw(as), and all ultimately from dor, terr, and the like. that’s such a biggy, i’ll leave it for now. but you’ve met the dame, and she’ll explain to us next time about tweedle’s specific dum and perhaps we’ll have a peep into the tower, tiw, terr complex, because, don’t choke on your egg n-óg, gilbert, but i think there we’ll find god.

2006-07-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

Tweedle Dee and, yes, Susan, perhaps Dum.

Tweed-all, or all the tweeds are or is the plural of tweed and tweed is also a river. What luck! It enables us to locate geographically a parent of our famous quarrellers on a real world map, close to the River Tweed. It’s a bonnie river that starts in Scotland and flows southish west until it becomes part of the border between Scotland and England before emptying into the North Sea. May its waters be ever sweet: pollution free, beautiful to view and life sustaining, fish plentiful in the waters, wildlife abundant in its valleys.

But we’re dealing with two tweedles here: dum and dee. Dee’s well, look now, well, would you look at that, another river, or hang on, it’s two! Well, feicim e! (Excuse me if I sometimes lapse into my beloved Gaelic). One’s mostly in Wales in the north and west forming bits of the border between Wales an England with a bit going over into England and it empties into the Irish sea via a large estuary, and the other is wholly in Scotland emptying into the sea at Aberdeen. Aber is Cornish for river mouth, and cognate with the English Harbour, so the Deen of Aberdeen is a kind of genitive or adjectivalisation of Dee. It denotes a Port in Cornish, the mouth of a much-used river.

But Dundee, or Dee-Town, is situated way down south on the banks of the Tay. Get out your Atlas, Wayne, and have a look.

While you’re there, check out Tees and Teesdale. My whiskers bristle just thinking about ‘em. You see, one of the major languages once spoken in this area was, as we well know, a so-called ‘Brythonic’ language, that is, a close relation of Welsh and Cornish. In Brythonic, among the initial letter mutations that characterise them, we see the t transmuted to d in certain grammatical situations. That couldn’t happen at all if there were no tendency to pronounce t as d, to which the speakers might yield at last under certain kinds of logistical pressure. It’s the Moor in them, and there’s evidence of their having sometimes also inter-married with Turks and with Indians. In the Brythonic languages the logistics that apply that pressure seem to be within the grammar of the language itself.

Here, about the Border lands, where the language is no longer spoken but the descendents of the people who spoke it are still contributing to the gene pool, the guilty logistics have been shifted, shuffled off unceremoniously into the cultural psyche to manifest with morose devil-may-care in the readily penetrated disguise of a geographically determined diversity, or what might pass for one if you didn’t know what cussedness of human personality and repressed bitterness in the submerged psyche determines the distribution of such manifestations. Ts become ds. Tee in the self-confident south of the tea country is Dee in the given-their-come-uppance north. Ty, Tay, Tyburn etc – they’ve even gone and wallowed about the vowel, haven’t they, the irresponsible urchins!

Now if tweed is a type of woollen cloth, what is tee, dee, tay, or ty, English and at home in the North where Brythonic speakers once spoke? Arnold? Maryjane? Yes, Elspeth? That’s right – tea. What sort of tea? I don’t know. I know that tisane is ti + ane, and that ane = -anna (Irish plural ending) and any (English word) so that tisane means teas-any, and any here probably means -any sort, and indeed in France and Blegium it still does. It’s only in England that the choice narrowed so dramatically to the one imported from the orient. What range or array of teas had they there? I, Herman Newt, do solemnly declare that it’sa pound or even two to a sardine and that quite a small skinny one that it was a developed industry here once, and teas were being exported.

No Phillipa, I don’t believe that Underzo and whatsisface, in Asterix the Gaul in Britain had hit it on the head when they said that before the Dutch East India company and the British Raj the Poms stopped everything at four o’clock for a cup of plain hot water. There’s scattered evidence of tea-drinking before the arrival of the Romans but I won’t go into it now. And yes, Sally, of course: te is Irish for hot, teas is Irish for heat, and deas is Irish for nice and also for south. In a cold country, nice and warm tend to become synonymous.

It’s enough to know that there are some small hints that there was a tea industry in the North of England and the south of Scotland (although I’ll say now that it’s a chastened people that would mutate tea to dee, curtseyers, I’ll warrant, and curtseys go with frills, don’t you know, even on their pinnies, would you believe it! Places like that, Timothy becomes dimity and there’s your curtains. By god, that’s tea you’d be drinking in a place like that.

I’m thinking that it’s Dee would be curtseying to Tweedle, not Tweedle to Dee, but not necessarily in this instance. Thank you Darlene. Rosemary, Raspberry leaf, rose petal and violet. I’ll have the raspberry leaf, please, and strawberry jam and cream with me scones. Ta.

It’s likely that Tweedle and Dee were the parents of Tweedle-Dee. That’s how it works with double-barrel names, isn’t it? Mr Tweedle and Ms Dee or Ms Tweedle and Mr Dee? He wouldn’t curtsey, would he? Would Ms Tweedle? I can’t see it. Which was which?

That’s not necessarily going to be easy to ascertain until we’ve examined the marriage customs of back then. Back when, Oscar? Hmmm. Perhaps that too, must await further data which, who knows, we may be able to dig up along with the dirt on Dum.

Next week, Gregory, and Jason and that other galoot who was also flicking wet goo off the end of his ruler at Katherine and Mandy, I’ll see you outside after the bell goes. Two lumps please, Darlene...

2006-07-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

Hallo. Herman Newt is my name. I hermaneut.

Today I would like to hermaneut 'Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum', which has come down to us as a nursery rhyme from we know not where or when but might be able to educate our guesses re which, if we stay true to the rules of sound hermeneutics as we discover (as distinct from invent) them.

Hmmm, hmmmm! Allow me to clear my throat before I go on. Hermeneutical tasks tend to be daunting and I’m a fairly dauntable beast. The undauntable ones are the ones fahking it up. I spell fahking like that to distinguish it distinctly and absolutely from the word that rhymes with ducking and is too rude to say. Fahking is the same word as faking, but both words have undergone a semantic shift over the years. Both relate to making. That’s what it means when I say it and, I venture to opine, when most people say it, allowing for it's having come adrift of its semantical moorings here and there and almost completely in some places (St Skeat and all that's holy keep it from clagging up to the too-rude sense!) and sometimes it carries a moral judgement to the effect that one should not. And probably one should not fahk up the hermeneutic as it is being properly done , and should endeavour to point out any flaws we see in it - not opinions we disagree with, but actual errors. Most arise from mistaking the hypotheses of someone hugely up there (oh my goodness hardly to be seen for the mists of distance an the slamming of cloister doors) for facts, a mistake arising from mistaking someone hugely up there for a god.

Well, now, I’ve already made a couple of etymological assertions that I can’t prove and for sure, I will not declare myself to be in possession of any sort of knowledge. But I do educate my guesses with honest care and I certainly hope you will give them them due and critique them with the same respectful courtesy I intend to offer those whose guesses differ from mine.

The rhyme I'm concerned with today, amusingly fictionally contextuallized by Lewis Carroll in 'Through the Looking Glass', and traditionally illustrated with a depiction of two fat identical twin lads, goes like this:

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
Agreed to have a battle,
For Tweedle Dee said Tweedle Dum
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then a monstrous crow flew by,
As big as a tar barrel,
And frightened both the brothers so
They both forgot their quarrel.

Now I’d like to opine – er – yes, Friodur, you are correct, those red twirly-whirly things hanging off the sides of my face that look like the feathery gills of an axolotl are indeed my side whiskers, did you wish to make a comment upon them? No? Good. I’d like to opine that tweedle is a word to do with which tweed is another, or more intelligibly, the tweed part of tweedle is the tweed part of tweed. Tweed, now, is a river, isn’t it? an English river, or rather, in the interests of the exquisite accuracy we’re all aspiring assiduously to, aren't we? a river in what is currently called England.

But it’s also a kind of woollen cloth, nicht wahr?
One of my warm woolly favourites, cosy and gorgeous. Mmmmmm! :).

No, Bernadette, I did not mean ‘to which we’re all aspiring assiduously’ – I prefer the grammatical option of using a preposition to end a clause with that I’ve availed myself determinedly of.

Of the '–le' the 'e' is silent, so ‘-le’ is as we know pronounced 'schwa+l'. ‘L’ in English is pronounced either as the first letter of ‘letter’, or as the last letter of the Cornish plural ending ‘–ow’. This is because the Cornish plural ending ‘–ow’ is the English word ‘all’, and vice versa. Both are variants of the Cornish word ‘oll’. Another variant, without leaving Britain, is the adjectival suffix ‘-al’ as in ‘feudal’. Don’t let anybody tell you it ‘came from’ or was ‘derived from’ or ‘borrowed from’ the Latin, just because it occurs also in Latin. They haven’t even got these bits of words fully and indisputably mapped yet, especially those that have been harvested from old texts without the help of hermeneuts of the impeccable character and superbulosity of geniosity of myself, so it’s far too soon to slam on vectors, i.e., guesses about which word moved to where from where when and how and under whose supervision. Wait till the dust has settled from the last mega-shake-up – the rise and fall of poor old Rome, blessed be she, and the Romanisation of the Fahken Catholic Church, poor beast!

The '–le' of 'tweedle' then is the ‘–al’ of feudal, and is the remaining trace of a Brythonic plural ending which is ‘-au’ in Welsh if I’m not wrong, though the current pronunciation of -au in Welsh raises a question or two and when some quirk of Welsh pronunciation raises a question, it sort of tends metaphorically to be the raising of a scab and there's usually some piece of schrapnel from some violation of Welsh heritage festering away under it and since it's got nothing to do with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum I won't go into it here, but fear not, beloved mabon, we're breaking through) and so 'Tweedle' means Tweeds.

Tweeds are cloths, for making clothes. Weeds are among other things, clothing. It survives in the phrase ‘widow’s weeds’. So the weed part of tweed and the weed part of weed are the same word. So what’s the t?

Here’s my humble little guess, educated assiduously over a very long period of time spent poring over maps of the world with masses and masses of little wordlets snapped up from a whole array of wriggling, seething, constantly evolving, sometimes rapidly mutating, language-culture complexes, splattered and sprayed about over the map of the world with exquisite care and uncanny accuracy by my splendid self, though even I can be wrong sometimes, with particular attention paid to the little twiddly bits that everyone else seems to neglect or just make gruff sort of approximate noise re, through thickly beetling 19th century moustaches of academic respectability (otters, they all seem to be, which is to say, Arthurs) that seem to imply that it isn’t worth your academic career to look too closely at things like this, but there, who knows, there probably are just heaps of academics somewhere crouched just as securely and conscientiously over their tomes and charts who already know all about the meaning of t in the word tweed; they’re just not sharing it with us counter-culture independent scholars because it costs too much to publish abstruse etymological stuff and it sells to such a very restricted market, and they’re not going to put it on the web for free!!! - unless they have but no one has ever actually found it yet because they're too poor to advertise, so you have to rely on the OED which is notoriously out of date with all except a few words that happen to have been enquired about by more than the critical mass of enquirers who could no longer stand the obvious erroniousness of what they found there; or the little paragraph on the right-hand bottom corner of the horoscopes and puzzles pages of your favourite family magazine, to get a sense of what the prevailing opinion is, and this might be because they KNOW it’s vulnerable to critique, and don't want anyone to see, and that... why yes, Josephine, you are correct, that thin, grim, lipless slit under my nose and between my red-ginger curly-whirly whiskers that look remarkably like the gills of an axolotl now that you mention it, is indeed my mouth, and thank you for pointing out to us all its near resemblance to the mouth of a juvenile salamander.

Wriggly things? Why yes. Words are. And scuttly, too. No Wulftrout I see no real reason to address them through another metaphor. It’s much more tractable than the current one that wants us to see them all as trees, branches, twigs and leaves with no pleachings or mergings devourings or marryings, and everything all linear and all roads lead to Rome.

Yes, Roger, that was, I think, the bell for recess...