MEAN.

March 5, 2009 by 126 Comments

Archibald MacLeish famously ended his 1926 “Ars Poetica” with “A poem should not mean/ But be.” I learn from Peter Howarth in the LRB that Robert Frost put a nasty spin on this in a notebook entry: “A poem shouldn’t mean, it should be mean.” So much for the grandfatherly figure maundering about roads not taken, so beloved of careless skimmers of anthologies.

Comments

  1. mollymooly says
    March 5, 2009 at 9:12 pm

    A poet should not mean, but de-

  2. James says
    March 5, 2009 at 9:19 pm

    Maybe he meant “average”.

  3. John Cowan says
    March 5, 2009 at 11:38 pm

    A poem should not be average, but median.

  4. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:06 am

    Mean also means “common” or “humble”. Remember in the Christmas song “What Child is This?” (1865) where the baby Jesus lies in such mean estate where ox and ass are feeding? Frost was 9 years old when that was written. So, what was the most common meaning of “mean” back then? Too bad you need a subscription to see the rest of the context.
    ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

  5. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:09 am

    careless skimmers
    In some high schools this was required reading.

  6. Kári Tulinius says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:36 am

    It’s really hard for a modern reader to appreciate how incredibly influential MacLeish’s Ars Poetica was at the time. He simplified the Modernist project into an easily graspable dictum. It’s all so very familiar today but back then and for years to come as modernism spread through the literary world Ars Poetica was the program for a revolution.
    Still a fine poem, mind.
    I wonder how many times “A poem should not mean/But be” showed up in other people’s manifestos or as epigraphs to other works. I know of at least one classic work, Icelandic poet Steinn Steinar‘s masterpiece Tíminn og vatnið which, in its first edition, had that as its epigraph (removed once published in a book).

  7. Noetica says
    March 6, 2009 at 1:29 am

    A poet should not mean, but de-
    A poem should not be average, but median.
    Apo|em|mean|der|sing|én|I|OU|sly|for|U|save|rage|hum|
    ant|ype|sto|mbarvelat|tit|udet|hat’s|whatit|take|
    sattitude|Atit|,Dude|mean|median|ormodec|entrail|
    tenden|cyan|yway|but|what|butt|wat|doe|si|tmean|a|
    Poem|t’me’an|you?

  8. Grumbly Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 2:17 am

    A poem meanders ingeniously
    for us average human types tomb arvel at
    titude that’s what it takes attitude at it,
    dude mean median or mode centrail tendency
    any way but what but twat
    does it mean a poem t’me’an you.

    I’m thinking of “how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death”.

  9. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 4:08 am

    Robert Frost put a nasty spin on this in a notebook entry: “A poem shouldn’t mean, it should be mean.” So much for the grandfatherly figure maundering about roads not taken, so beloved of careless skimmers of anthologies.

    Robert Frost’s father died of tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was 11, leaving the family with just $8. Frost’s mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920 Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Both Frost and his mother suffered from depression and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost’s wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.
    Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1904, died of cholera),…son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide), … daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Only two outlived their father. Frost’s wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.

    So much for the asshole, always depicted making crabby comments, so beloved of careless writers in the LRB.

  10. jamessal says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:57 am

    Cruelly hard life notwithstanding, Frost’s having been a super-competitive curmudgeon does take some of the bite out of his famous tennis-with-the-net-down quip.

  11. jamessal says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:58 am

    I hadn’t known his life was that cruel, though. Interesting Howarth didn’t include any of those details in the piece — or maybe he did, I read (and enjoyed) it months ago. They seem relevant, anyway.

  12. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:11 am

    You never hear that stuff, only that he was an asshole, I don’t know why.
    I didn’t know until I stole that quote from Wiki that his father had also been an editor at the San Francisco Examiner. That’s an association no one ought to have to live with, although I’d actually vote for the San Francisco Chronicle as the all-time worst paper in the USA.

  13. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:37 am

    $8 went a lot farther in those days, you know.
    Kemnneth Rexroth was orphaned at age 13 too, and lived somewhat on his own thereafter. His “Autobiographical Novel” should not be taken literally, however.

  14. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:45 am

    Oops, sorry. I meant ‘worst paper in the world’.

  15. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:47 am

    No one will learn about Frost’s own wounds and tragedies by reading his poetry; he left no clues. An appalling chain of misfortunes, numerous deaths in the family, madness, suicides, and silence about this, as if confirming his Puritan heritage, which demands that one conceal what is private behind a stoic facade. The worst part of all this is that in concerning oneself with him one is menaced by a sense of one’s own particular existence. If the boundaries of the human personality are so fluid that we truly do not know who we are and are constantly trying on different changes of costume, how did Frost manage? It is impossible to grasp who he really was, aside from his unswerving striving toward his goal of fame, in an attempt to exact revenge for his own defeats in life. […] In Frost’s defense, I should add that he did not soften the cruel truth about human life, as he perceived it, and if his readers and listeners did not understand that very well, all the better for them.
    (From Czeslaw Milosz’s essay on Frost. NB: Taking those passages out of context has probably distorted their meaning a little, but I can’t quote the whole thing.)

  16. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 8:09 am

    I think the Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga could give Frost a run for his money in the Writers With Awful Lives stakes. A shortened version of Quiroga’s Wikipedia bio:
    When [Quiroga] was only two months old his father accidentally shot himself while returning from a hunting expedition. [As a young man he] moved to Paris but, after meeting with a series of disasters, decided it was not the place for him…In 1903, while attempting to explain to a friend how to operate a gun, he accidentally fired it, killing his friend. Quiroga was interrogated, put on trial, and eventually exonerated. [Quiroga then moved to the Argentine province of Misiones.] In 1909 he married Ana Maria Ciries, a former student, and they had two children, Eglé and Darío. In 1915 Ana Maria, deeply depressed by the hard work and loneliness of their life on the frontier, poisoned herself with cyanide. For several years Quiroga lived in Buenos Aires, while continually visiting his property in Misiones. In 1927 he married Ana Maria Brancho, thirty years his junior, who also disliked life in Misiones, and eventually left him. In 1937 Quiroga was diagnosed with cancer and committed suicide by dosing himself with cyanide. Both his children from his first marriage also committed suicide later in their lives.

  17. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 8:32 am

    $8 went a lot farther in those days, you know.
    Ever since you found out they’d named a street after you in Napier, New Zealand, you’ve lost all your sympathy for the little guy, John Emerson.

  18. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 8:45 am

    It’s 2 shootings, a murder trial and 4 suicides (Total: 7 victims) vs 1 TB, cholora, puerperal fever, dying at birth and suicide, 2 cancers and 5 mental illnesses (Total: 12 victims).
    My Robert Frost beats your Horacio Quiroga any day of the week.

  19. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 8:46 am

    And “orphaned at age 13” doesn’t even count.

  20. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 9:13 am

    My Robert Frost beats your Horacio Quiroga any day of the week.
    Hey, if we’re going to play the literary equivalent of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen then I’m going to have to disagree. My Quiroga had a more miserable life than your Frost. Frost never killed himself, his best friend or anyone else for that matter. His wife didn’t commit suicide either. And Frost’s family merely suffered the usual range of standard-issue Victorian-era diseases, physical and mental.

  21. jamessal says
    March 6, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Also, two of Quiroga’s suicides took place after he died. You could argue the kids must have been miserable, making him more miserable, but that is conjecture — and inadmissible as far as I’m concerned.
    Frost would be happy to know he won this battle too.

  22. jamessal says
    March 6, 2009 at 9:17 am

    Hey, if we’re going to play the literary equivalent of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen
    Oh, we’re doing it. We are definitely doing it.

  23. jamessal says
    March 6, 2009 at 9:22 am

    One more thing, not Quiroga’s fault, but hunting accidents just aren’t garnering much sympathy these post-Cheney days.

  24. MMcM says
    March 6, 2009 at 9:26 am

    Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen
    Actually, At Last the 1948 Show, by the other Frost.

  25. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 10:19 am

    Amazing, i feel that RF is going to be my next favorite poet
    another extreme, i’m reading SB and think if all this was his mental state all the time how he managed to write all that down and even publish his amazing books, there was some deep dissociation from self going on and recalled a homeless person on the A line when i was going to JFK, he explained to me when the last stop at the airport will come and was writing something into his notebook, paper, from time to time, i was curious what but couldn’t read it from where i sat and felt impossible to look at him longer, or offer him money, i should have done so, but felt it was intruding his privacy, so stupid
    life is kinda fair in distribution of happiness, fame, immortality though it seems so uneven
    SB wrote he would have been at home in ‘the high depression of Gobi’, i thought it was high elevation, but yes, he would have been happy perhaps, unknown

  26. Conrad says
    March 6, 2009 at 10:51 am

    “SB wrote he would have been at home in ‘the high depression of Gobi'”
    Remaarkable, I read this line in situ this very morning.

  27. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 11:09 am

    Come on, cancer beats suicide.
    I don’t know what you think you’re doing in the Gobi Desert, Conrad. You go home this instant.

  28. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 11:17 am

    And who is this SB she keeps talking about? Saul Bellow? Samuel Beckett? Sally Bowles? Sid Barratt?

  29. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 11:41 am

    i liked Saul Bellow’s short stories too, but not that acutely

  30. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Shirley Bassey?

  31. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    My son’s cousin took an off-road tour of Mongolia, including the Gobi in springtime. The Gobi is called “semi-desert” and is really booming with life at that time.
    Beckett’s reall toughness would have been tested by a year in Ohio.

  32. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    Timbuktu, Samarkand and the Gobi Desert are real places now, that you can go to if you want. No longer can they be images of exoticism.
    The hardest places to go to of any interest now are Burma and Ethiopia / Upper Egypt / Sudan, for politico-military reasons.

  33. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:38 pm

    Timbuktu is much diminished, but Samarqand and neighboring cities have wondeerful architecture.

  34. MattF says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    John: I went to a lecture some years ago about the underground watercourses that have been discovered (via satellite radar) under the Sahara– The lecturer told the story that he once took a visitor from the Sahara region around the Arizona desert. The visitor’s comment was that it was a not a desert, it was a jungle.

  35. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 12:58 pm

    Come on, cancer beats suicide
    I think you’ll find Quiroga had cancer and committed suicide, so that’s a twofer. Also, Frost farmed “north of Boston” where all the wildlife he had to worry about was stray adult-oriented rock groups. Quiroga lived and worked in the tropics, trying to start a cotton plantation in the Chaco, then moving to Misiones, a jungly bit of Argentina which has no dry season, but plenty of dangerous fauna and diseases. Frost’s efforts to match this were pathetic. According to his Wikipedia bio, Frost once “went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia”. Ooh, scary. Did Frost try to supplement his income by inventing a machine to kill ants and a project to make wine from oranges? Quiroga had to. Did Frost lose his job and his only source of income and have to be supported by his friends shortly before his death? No, he was gallivanting around with JFK, the wuss.

  36. Conrad says
    March 6, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    Fact for John Emerson: Tempe AZ, where I spent 3 years, and which really would have sent Beckett over the edge, is twinned with Timbuktu.

  37. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    As far as the four Yorkshireman poverty competition goes, I think that no one can beat Knut Hamsun. He was self-educated and came from a poor family in the Norwegian Far North, and at 13 was apprenticed to a rope-maker. I have trouble imagining anyone lowlier than an apprentice ropemaker. I can’t even imagine a proud master ropemaker strutting around revelling in his master’s status. Of course, this was Norway where there wasn’t much to revel in.

  38. Grumbly Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    No one will learn about Frost’s own wounds and tragedies by reading his poetry; he left no clues … how did Frost manage? It is impossible to grasp who he really was … In Frost’s defense, I should add

    What defense, what charge? Is there any justification for prying into a man’s life, except for one’s own personal reasons? In what you quote by Milosz, I find no personal involvement, only haruspical lit-crit – and that not even done in an interesting way. It’s the same tabloid intellectual tripe that has been boiled over Plath, Beckett, and the rest. This kind of thing needs delicacy, not disembowelment.

  39. Grumbly Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    On the other hand, nothing wrong with a round of Four Yorkshiremen! It’s the po-faced hand-wringing that chaps my ass.

  40. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    What defense, what charge?
    Um, this is why I said, “Taking those passages out of context has probably distorted their meaning a little, but I can’t quote the whole thing”. I only quoted the bits relevant to this post and its comments. The first bit I cited obviously refers to the generally unknown tragedies of his life, the second to Frost’s popular image as “the grandfatherly figure maundering about roads not taken, so beloved of careless skimmers of anthologies”. You would have to read the whole essay by Milosz to understand where he’s coming from. The whole point of Milosz’s piece is that Frost is a darker, more complicated poet than his popular image would indicate. In fact, it was a “mask”: “He put himself forward as a rube, a New England farmer, writing in simple language, full of colloquialisms, about his environs and the people who lived there. A real American, digging in the soil, and not from any big city […] In fact he was someone entirely different […] His readers valued him for his idyllic mood, which was only a disguise. Beneath was concealed a grim, hopeless vision of man’s fate. A powerful intellect, unusual intelligence, well-read in philosophy, and such enormous deceptiveness that he was capable of hiding his skepticism behind his constant ambivalence, so that his poems deceived with their supposedly wise affability.” Milosz compares Frost to Paul Valéry and Bolesław Leśmian, two poets he sees as having comparably sceptical, post-Darwinian world views, whose verse Milosz likes, then asks, “Why then do I find Frost so disturbing and depressing?” The section “In his defense…” comes after Milosz has quoted Frost’s dictum about free verse being like playing tennis without a net. Milosz says “I, however, am absolutely on Walt Whitman’s side.”

  41. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 2:41 pm

    In Beckett’s case, when I found out that a number of his best friends in France were betrayed to the Gestapo by their supposed spiritual adviser, the blackness of his post-WWII work made perfect sense.
    There’s a Vietnamese novel highly recommended by me called “The Sorrow of War”. The narrator is weakly distinguished from the author, both of whom had seen their lives repeatedly devastated by a ten-year-plus war, and both psychologically disintegrating like Beckett protagonists (? w.w. for Beckett!) as the book progresses. To me the autobiographical knowledge makes this “device” more powerful.
    Lawrence Durrell’s later works use the disintegrating author/character device pretty well too, though you read it as Durrell thinking “Why the fuck am I writing fucking novels?”, with no deep trauma behind it.

  42. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 2:44 pm

    Rexroth translated some poems by Milosz’s uncle, and the two men became friends, I think.
    Rexroth is God, BTW. I’ve been going through everything he wrote.

  43. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:17 pm

    This is for Kron–I don’t know where the mariachi thread went off to. The straight poop from my students on mariachis is that you have to go to sastres (tailors) to get the traje de charro (mariachi suit). They get them in Mexico, although someone knows someone a few blocks from the school (in Chicago) who makes them. [This topic excited my students very much, plus they are not used to class on Friday, we were making up Monday’s Pulaski Day which the Chicago Public schools recognizes as a holiday, but not the intuition sponsoring the ESL class. Anyhow the students were quite squirrelly today, and started talking even faster than usual so I hope I got the gist of it.]
    The consensus is you get them (the mariachi suits) in Mexico City at the Plasa Garibaldi. You can also get them at Chapala (a lake) and Xochimilco (the floating gardens.) Apparently the mariachi thing used to be centered in Guadalajara, but there was a revival and it relocated to Mexico City. On the lake thing, the shops are on rafts that are growing into the lake and you paddle around on some sort of boat to go from place to place. The suits are decorated with canuto which is singular, collectively the decorations are called canutillo. They drew pictures on the board of different types of canutillo, one a u-shaped with little hooks on the end and also circular ones of different sizes. They nest into each other somehow, not like a snap, but I didn’t get that part. The trajes are caro (expensive), because of the hand work–the students emphasized you can’t use glue–and are either plato or dorado (silver or gold, but I think dorado is gold colored otherwise they would have said oro for the metal gold).
    That was chapter one; there may or may not be a chapter two after tonight’s class.

  44. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    The hardest places to go to of any interest now are Burma and Ethiopia
    I was in Ethiopia a few years ago and it wasn’t hard at all, except paying for the plane tickets. The war with Eritrea was over at the time, and the current thing with Somalia hadn’t started yet. Airport Security was very very tight near the Sudan border, and a freaking out hotel owner actually drove me to the airport to talk the airline out of letting me fly on the first anniversary of 9/11. A friend of mine goes to Sudan, but her parents are there and she’s Moslem–not sure if I could get in. Ethiopia is awesome, especially the stone churches at Lalibela.

  45. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:38 pm

    when I found out that a number of his best friends in France were betrayed to the Gestapo by their supposed spiritual adviser, the blackness of his post-WWII work made perfect sense.
    what are you saying, he betrayed people to the gestapo? if he did so, say, inadvertently, not knowing, no? such a completely confused helpless childlike being he couldn’t have done wrong out of intention, people can’t judge not knowing his real circumstances

  46. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    No, read, it says the spiritual adviser betrayed his friends. I suppose his friends died then.

  47. Nijma says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    It is passive voice. If you want to rewrite the sentence in active voice, you would say “The supposed spiritual adviser of a number of his best friends betrayed them (his best friends) to the Gestapo.” Putting the phrase “spiritual adviser” at the end makes it more powerful because a religious adviser is supposed to be a trusted figure and outside of politics.

  48. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    i’m so much relieved, sure he couldn’t

  49. marie-lucie says
    March 6, 2009 at 4:27 pm

    No, he did not betray anyone, but some of his friends were betrayed by someone else.

  50. Codger-in-a-fit Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    His readers valued him for his idyllic mood, which was only a disguise.

    The more fools they. Does that idyllic mood have to be Robert Frost’s real mood to be savored? This yearning for tasty personal reality behind a literary artefact such as a poem or a poet! Only the shallow know other people, at the level of their own emptiness. Others yearn to fill the void with God.

    Beneath was concealed a grim, hopeless vision of man’s fate.

    So this is really that. Reductionist claptrap! Frost writes poems, Frost speaks in public – it’s Robert Frost the poet, not your Aunt Sally perhaps concealing her suicidal tendencies again behind false cheerfulness. So you may well worry what Aunt Sally’s real mood is, but not that of the poet Frost. Unless you know him personally, and then his poetry is not the issue.

    “Why then do I find Frost so disturbing and depressing?”

    Well, just don’t read him then, if he offends against your expectations of genu-wine, consistent living and dying. What’s wrong with disturbing and depressing? I read Thomas Bernhard’s depressive neurotic monologue novels when I’m depressed, and they cheer me up for some reason. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but so what? Everybody liked Bernhard personally, except the “Catholic-Nationalsocialist-Austrian establishment” he tears into, neurotically. Do I care whether the real Bernhard stands up? I don’t.
    Does knowing all that about Frost improve our understanding of Frost’s poetry, or hobble it, or something else? Does Milosz want to make an honest posthumous man out of Frost? Revealing all, then plumping for Whitman? Or is he just telling children that Santa Claus doesn’t exist? Big condescending deal. Birds of a feather undeceiving themselves together.
    This violent talk is not directed against you, JCass.

  51. marie-lucie says
    March 6, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    “betrayed by their spiritual adviser”
    I don’t know the details of the story, but given the well-known habits of the Gestapo, it is possible that the spiritual adviser did not report the group to the Gestapo himself but was tortured into betraying them.
    One hero of the Resistance was captured by the Gestapo and taken to the top floor of their building, where he knew he would be tortured. Once they reached the top of the stairs he threw himself over the railing and fell down six floors below, killing himself so that he would not be tempted to betray his friends.

  52. JCass says
    March 6, 2009 at 5:02 pm

    I’m sorry, Stu, I really can’t make head or tail of your rant. What’s “reductionist” about saying Frost and his poetry are more complicated than his image as an affable American rube or comparing his work to that of Valéry and Leśmian?

  53. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    some books feel closer than real people, so i don’t see anything wrong in people’s wanting to know more about their idols long passed away
    it’s a form of their continuation in people’s memory

  54. John Emerson says
    March 6, 2009 at 5:45 pm

    No, Beckett was a member of a resistance group, one member of which was a German spy and also a (defrocked) man of God. It was a horrible story.
    Beckett himself seems to have been an examplary person in most respects. He even was a near-professional-caliber athlete in his youth. His biography made me admire him more; subconsciously I had identified him too much with his characters.
    Beneath was concealed a grim, hopeless vision of man’s fate.
    For Milosz I’m sure that this was not negative criticism. I think he admired him without agreeing him about everything.

  55. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:02 pm

    Nij: That’s really interesting. Thank you very much.. Weird, because I’ve been all round that Plaza Garibaldi, but maybe it was too long ago. Yeah, let me know if they tell you any more. I think the Norwegian silver balls (sewn) is the way to go. I may be able to interest my daughter in it as a project.

  56. Pacific Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:05 pm

    Well, JCass, I suppose I’m handicapped by not knowing about the grandfatherly image of Frost. I’ve only read him for myself. Hat will confirm lacunae in my familiarity with public froth, such as what a “winky” is, although I work in IT. I also have read little of Valéry – his Cahiers are forever being quoted by the philosophers I read.
    I was calling “reductionist” the idea that beneath the rube image is a “grim, hopeless” etc. What is “beneath” is being conceived of as more real, substantial, reducing what is “above” to the status of accident, appearance. Perhaps that sounds too abstract, but it’s only because one sentence can only hold so much. More of a handicap is the fact that I haven’t read Milosz’ article. Maybe I’d change my mind if I read it, but I doubt it, on the evidence of what you quoted. Maybe it doesn’t seem to merit a rant.

  57. Grumbly Stu says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:25 pm

    It’s amazing how a good mutton curry can improve one’s mood.

  58. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:45 pm

    Mark the Evangelist.
    In 828, relics believed to be the body of St. Mark were stolen from Alexandria by two Venetian merchants and were taken to Venice, where the Byzantine Theodore of Amasea had previously been the patron saint. A basilica (St. Mark’s) was built there to house the relics.
    There is a mosaic on this Venetian basilica showing how the sailors covered the body relics with a layer of pork. Since Muslims are not allowed to touch pork, this action was done to prevent Muslim intervention in the relics removal.
    Pretty good trick, huh? Does the Office of Homeland Things know about pork? They could cover the US National Valuables with a pork-scented spray. Every spring the farmer round here sprays the fields with pig shit; it’s very pungent, you can smell it for miles and for days.

  59. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 6:51 pm

    Grumbly Stu, I’ve never read Søren Kierkegård, because I’m not a believer. I might be able to fit him in towards the end of the year, but we’re already very, very booked up. Thanks for the tip, though.

  60. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:28 pm

    Ok, Read. You’ve been reading …the Supreme Being. Sponge Bob? Steve Buscemi? Simone de Beauvoir? No, it was definitely a ‘he’. Subramanya Bharathi? Sainte-Beuve? Samuel Butler?

  61. read says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:44 pm

    i don’t want the spirits of all those you mentioned to haunt me, so
    i didn’t know who were Subramanya Bharathi and Samuel Butler though

  62. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 6, 2009 at 7:50 pm

    Well, at least you’ve heard of Sponge Bob.

  63. Grumbly Stu says
    March 7, 2009 at 3:40 am

    JJ, I’m thinking particularly of Either/Or, his first book. No “leap of faith” business there, no obscure philosophico-religious droning. He is pretending to be two different people, writing about Mozart, comedies, seduction, marriage, esthetics, everything under the sun. It blew me away – nothing at all like what I had expected to encounter.
    Try it out – don’t bother to read any “background” about K, you don’t need it. Either/Or is itself background enough. Kierkegaard apparently attracts a lot of pseuds who want him to be exclusively mysterious and profound. But to start with, in Either/Or, it suffices to see him as a brilliant essayist, a magician not of card-tricks but of smoke and mirrors. I just looked at the German Wikipedia entry, and nearly dozed off. The English one had pretty much the same effect, although at least it contains this curious paragraph:

    Kierkegaard has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,[54] David Lodge, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Updike.[55]

    I read it in German. I trust there is an English translation by someone with literary talent. Auden and Borges would have made a great translating team.

  64. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 5:23 am

    Ok, done. Thanks. They’re a suspiciously religious-looking bunch of authors, though. I’m surprised Terry Eagleton isn’t in there.

  65. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 5:36 am

    Read, how’s SB? Can’t you put me out of my misery? …Otherwise I’m going to tell everybody at Conrad’s blog that you only read Sponge Bob comics.

  66. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:12 am

    It’s Endgame, isn’t it.

  67. read says
    March 7, 2009 at 7:52 am

    i will read it next, meanwhile found Conrad’s blog thanks to your mentioning, thanks

  68. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 8:45 am

    You’re welcome. Conrad writes very well about London.

  69. John Emerson says
    March 7, 2009 at 10:07 am

    The great Danish writers known to the civilized world are Kierkegaard (= “cemetery”), Hans Christian Anderson, and Isak Dineson (who wrote in English).*
    To my knowledge they are not competitive in the Four Yorkshiremen game and never were apprentice ropemakers, but three more peculiar human beings could not be found anywhere in the world.** H C Anderson is supposedly the model for Uriah Heep.
    We must conclude that an all-pastry diet is not beneficial to the normality centers of the brain.
    *Naxo is not read in the civilized world.
    **Dineson was an extremely vivid character but would not be actionably weird in a serious World Court of Weirdness. She was included in order to complete the Olympic team.

  70. read says
    March 7, 2009 at 10:27 am

    HCA had Marfan’s like Lincoln and Chukovsky they say, people with Marfan’s are very productive like their h-ormones forces them to be that and i recalled i read somewhere it was cited like an example of the disease genes working positively
    wikipedia says HCA fell out of bed and it was the cause of his injury and death, so
    but i agree orange wine and tropical heat with mosquitoes are hard to beat
    /wow, the word h-ormone is considered as like questionable content

  71. Conrad says
    March 7, 2009 at 10:40 am

    Arthur, I came across the expression about Gobi in “Texts for Nothing”, but since that functions as a sort of ragbag of bits from Beckett’s works past and future (Pozzo from Godot makes an early cameo), it could be in another work. I’m sure google will tell you in a moment, but I can’t be bothered to check it right now.

  72. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 11:00 am

    Thanks, Conrad. I’m glad you returned so quickly. I was a bit worried, because of your tendency to walk such long distances. There are no pubs in the Gobi Desert. Did everybody see the piece in the NY Times book review that Jamessal sent me, about Becket’s letters ?

  73. A.J. P. Crown says
    March 7, 2009 at 11:06 am

    Whore moans can be quite questionable. I think HCA and SK look alike. I really doubt that Dickens had HC in mind for Heep, Dickens liked HC, he just found him a bit tiresome (he came to stay for five weeks, uninvited).

  74. language hat says
    March 7, 2009 at 11:56 am

    wow, the word h-ormone is considered as like questionable content
    Sorry about that, it’s one of those things I occasionally add to my blacklist in a fit of frustration over spammers. I’ve removed it, so we can discuss hormones as much as we like.

  75. read says
    March 7, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    -s, strikes

  76. John Emerson says
    March 7, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    If socialism gives you anm erection lasting more than three days, consult a physician.

  77. John Emerson says
    March 7, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    Another burning question: Was Mr. Churchyard a hunchback? Most recent studies say no. He was stooped and not very robust, but not hunched.

  78. A.J. P. Crun says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:00 pm

    If I’m going to be verging on the prescriptivist, why not in Danish — a language I don’t even kno? Isn’t kirkegård ‘churchyard’, as it is in Norwegian? So what is Kierkegaard, then? An old spelling of kirkegård? (I think we’ve discussed before that using aa or å in your name is just a question of preference, but people stick to that preference.)
    Where is that Sili? He’s never here when I need him.

  79. language hat says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    From Wikipedia: “A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter å, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the letter aa; the old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names and old documents (for example, the name of the city of Aalborg is spelled with Aa following a decision from the City Council in the 1970s).”

  80. A.J. P. Krun says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:15 pm

    As everyone kno, the greatest great dane wasn’t Isak Dineson played by Meryl Streep flying an airplane, but Tycho Brahe. Nowadays he would have been a Swede, because Skåne is no longer in Denmark. I remember the Brahes are on John’s list of Swedish noble families, but I think everyone who counts considers him Danish — I know I do.

  81. A.J. P. Qrun says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    Yeah, but that’s bollocks, as far as I know. If I want to call myself Storbraaten and not Storbråten I can do so. I could be wrong, of course.

  82. A.J. P. Q says
    March 7, 2009 at 6:21 pm

    Look, forget the double A. I was really wondering if kirke had replaced kierke at some point.

  83. marie-lucie says
    March 7, 2009 at 7:28 pm

    Isak Dineson
    It is a Danish name: Dinesen.

  84. Nijma says
    March 8, 2009 at 3:15 pm

    We never found out the context of “mean” in Frost’s notebook entry, if indeed the answer is given somewhere behind the subscription barrier. Is it “nasty”, “average”, or “humble”?

  85. John Cowan says
    February 19, 2019 at 1:53 am

    So yes, Kierkegaard does mean ‘churchyard’, and since Søren, though etymologically < Severinus, is a euphemism for Satan, we can read his name as ‘the devil in the churchyard’.

  86. Lars (the original one) says
    February 19, 2019 at 4:41 am

    Herr Kroen, to answer your question before the 10-year deadline runs out: The ‘extra’ E in Kierkegaard is an old convention for marking vowel length. We now use the much superior system of rote learning.

    And yes, Søren is an extremely bleached euphemism for the devil, even little kids can say Av for søren without risk.

  87. David Marjanović says
    February 19, 2019 at 6:01 am

    Huh. How did St. Severin, from what is now Austria, become so popular in Denmark and nowhere in between?

  88. Lars (the original one) says
    February 19, 2019 at 7:24 am

    There are at least 5 Saints Severinus, but the Danish name day for Søren coincides with that of Saint Severinus of Cologne (October 23).

    At a guess, the Danish form of the name allowed it to join the other ‘rural’ names like Hans, Jens, Ib, Per (also saints) — and there really weren’t that many of those, so each of them got a lot of bearers. In languages where it kept close to the Latin, it was probably only used in more refined families.

    (Also N.F.S.Grundtvig is Nikolaj Frederik Severin (son of a pastor), that’s where most Danes will have encountered the Latinate form (if at all). Does he get to keep his initials in English, unlike H.C.Andersen?)

  89. Bathrobe says
    February 19, 2019 at 8:07 am

    Could it have something to do with Severin von Kusiemski?

    I imagine Scandinavians are more masochistic than Germans…

  90. John Cowan says
    February 19, 2019 at 8:18 am

    Usually yes, to judge by the first few pages of Google results. In an encyclopedic article about him personally, his name will be typically spelled out at first reference, but when his theology or educational theories are being discussed, he’ll be initialized. (The WP.en article about him is named “N. F. S. Grundtvig”, but the first reference is spelled out.)

  91. AJP Crown says
    February 19, 2019 at 9:24 am

    N.F.S. Grundtvig, don’t ever offer him a bribe. It’s funny how no one says H.C. Andersen in English.

  92. Lars (the original one) says
    February 19, 2019 at 10:51 am

    @Bathrobe, Søren was well established as a Danish boy’s name centuries before Masochism got its name. (Churches dedicated to Hellig Søren are known from the early middle ages).

    And, judging by how elaborate and bureaucratic German institutions are, I cast doubt on your supposition. (Personal experience: Getting a refund because of a delayed train can only be done by post, and takes three separate letters).

  93. David Marjanović says
    February 19, 2019 at 5:59 pm

    There are at least 5 Saints Severinus

    I had no idea. 🙂

    H.C.Andersen

    Always spelled out in German (Hans Christian).

  94. dainichi says
    February 19, 2019 at 11:12 pm

    > The ‘extra’ E in Kierkegaard is an old convention for marking vowel length. We now use the much superior system of rote learning.

    Well, to be fair, I don’t think Danish phonology has a length distinction in this particular environment any more. Did it use to?

    How did this particular convention work? I’m kinda guessing the length-marking ‘e’ applied in cases where the usual “double consonant after short vowels, single consonant after long vowels” rule didn’t apply. So, before clusters and in final syllables, I guess?

  95. Lars (the original one) says
    February 20, 2019 at 3:15 am

    @dainichi, this was just a passing mention I found, the details might be in Skautrup but I still need to get my copy out of storage. Your guess looks sensible. You can see it in action in H.C.Andersen’s original spelling.

    I do have a long vowel with stød in kirke, though it’s short in kirkegård by the usual compounding process. There are all sorts of phonological conditioning going on, though, so I don’t know if there are minimal pairs.

  96. dainichi says
    February 20, 2019 at 9:04 pm

    @Original Lars

    > H.C.Andersen’s original spelling

    Thanks, it must have been like 30 years since I last read HCA in the original Danish, which I regret. Looks like my guess wasn’t too far off. An interesting consequence is that the same long vowel is expressed differently depending on whether it’s in the final syllable or not: Sviin – Svinet (pig – the pig) vs. modern svin – svinet.

  97. Lars (the original one) says
    February 21, 2019 at 5:58 am

    Also in the forms of heel = ‘whole’ — heel, heelt, hele all with long stem vowels. This very neatly distinguishes stressed een = ‘one’ from the singular common gender article en; the length distinction still exists, coupled to the stress, and sometimes it will disambiguate a sentence, but we have to resort to the spelling én which is very marginal to Danish orthography. (Because it was so useful, een survived much longer than the other doubled vowels but was then only a deprecated oddity).

    Though I have to admit that I always just read past these ‘extra’ vowels in old books, taking them for random embellishments — it’s nice to discover that there was a system.

  98. David Marjanović says
    February 21, 2019 at 6:24 am

    So, in stark contrast to noun capitalization, here it’s the old system that seems to work like Dutch (vowel length marked in closed syllables, but unmarked in open ones because there it’s automatic), while the new one works more like German (vowel length automatic and therefore often unmarked not just in open syllables, but also in monosyllabic words that don’t end in too many consonants).

  99. Lars (the original one) says
    February 21, 2019 at 7:19 am

    But it’s not automatic, just lexical and ambiguous in spelling. Skēl = ‘scowl’ (imperative) / skĕl = ‘boundary’, diacritics added for clarity. You need to understand a sentence before you read it aloud just to get the vowel values right, never mind stress and intonation.

  100. Trond Engen says
    February 21, 2019 at 11:38 am

    I’m surprised that Danish has long i and stød in ‘kirke’. Swedish and Norwegian both have a short vowel, and for good measure it’s a tone 2 word. I would think that Søren Kierkegaards name reflects an older (Copenhagen/Eastern?) pronunciation. Colloquial/dialectal No. and Sw. has kjerka ~ kjørka.

  101. Trond Engen says
    February 21, 2019 at 3:32 pm

    Very broadly speaking, so I might add a couple of remarks:

    (I was texting against the clock while waiting to board a plane. And for some reason my smartphone decided to remove all other language options than NO-BM, and I can’t reinstall them. Now I’m between flights. Much better.)

    … as regular developments from kirka ~ kyrka(n).

    The second k hides some variation of its own. Non-Southeastern dialects have ç also here. These are mostly the same that have had y. Only some of them developed y > ø, while most of the Southeastern have i > e and rk

    The n-less feminine definites are standard Norwegian, but also regular in the dialects of Western & Southern-but-not-southernmost Swedish.

  102. AJP Crown says
    February 21, 2019 at 4:43 pm

    Original Lars: You need to understand a sentence before you read it aloud just to get the vowel values right, never mind s & i.

    That occurs in English. I will read today vs I read it yesterday. Or deFENSE Dept. vs football DEEfense in American. It’s German and Italian that want to eliminate ambiguity & doubt.

  103. dainichi says
    February 21, 2019 at 5:47 pm

    > I’m surprised that Danish has long i and stød in ‘kirke’.

    I don’t know about Lars’ dialect, but Standard Danish has no stød in kirke, and never has a length distinction before postvocalic /r/.

    > it’s nice to discover that there was a system.

    Yes, this is exactly why I regret not having read HCA for 30 years. 30 years ago I didn’t notice it, but 10 years ago I would have.

    > Skēl = ‘scowl’ (imperative) / skĕl = ‘boundary’

    I believe the Norwegians extended the double-consonant-after-short-vowels rule consistently to final syllables when they ditched us, but others can probably elaborate.

  104. languagehat says
    February 21, 2019 at 6:25 pm

    Norwegian (per Haugen’s dictionary) has skjell, skil, and skjel ‘border line (e.g. between estates)’; I’ll await actual experts who can explain the distinctions.

  105. Trond Engen says
    February 21, 2019 at 7:17 pm

    (Back home, but too lazy to turn on the computer or take out any books. I should also say emphatically that I’m no expert.)

    The difference between skjell and skjel is easy. Those are two regular (dialectal) outcomes of original short vowel + short consonant. The form skil could be one of several things. A reetymologization or contamination from the verb, a root noun from the verb, or even an archaism, if (though I think not) skel < older skil as part of the same development of short i seen in kirke.

  106. Trond Engen says
    February 21, 2019 at 7:28 pm

    dainichi: I believe the Norwegians extended the double-consonant-after-short-vowels rule consistently to final syllables when they ditched us, but others can probably elaborate.

    Yes, but not with complete consistency. Final m was excepted, probably because vowel length before m was predictable at the time. It isn’t any more. Also excepted were a few common words like <han> and <vil>. And etymological -Ld was replaced with <LL> only in some words.

  107. Lars (the original one) says
    February 21, 2019 at 7:35 pm

    @dainichi, maybe there is no phonemic length distinction, but I’m sure I have a longer diphthong in, e.g., værke than in værk. Conditioned by the open or closed syllable, I guess, but whether the extra time is on the /ɛ/ or /ɐ/ I can’t tell for sure. Probably the /ɐ/, though, and I think voicing is almost interrupted because it gets more back than the short version — but it’s not the ‘real’ stød, you are right about that, it just feels a little like it.

  108. Trond Engen says
    February 21, 2019 at 8:08 pm

    Me: I would think that Søren Kierkegaards name reflects an older (Copenhagen/Eastern?) pronunciation.

    Something like ‘ķerke”går (using ķ for palatal k since my phone lets me).

  109. dainichi says
    February 21, 2019 at 10:28 pm

    > I would think that Søren Kierkegaards name reflects an older (Copenhagen/Eastern?) pronunciation.

    I think you’re right. At least HCA spells ‘kirke’ the modern way in e.g.

    https://da.wikisource.org/wiki/Barnet_i_Graven

    , and as we’ve seen, he spells long /i/ as “ii”. So HCA’s spelling seems to be a red herring, albeit an interesting one.

    HCA usually uses ‘j’ after palatal k’s and g’s. Going back to Holberg, he seems to use ‘i’, and I can see he spells it ‘kierke’ in at least some places.

  110. David Marjanović says
    February 22, 2019 at 6:34 am

    Oh, so like Nordenskiöld and Oxenstierna.

  111. Trond Engen says
    February 22, 2019 at 7:18 am

    Well, yes, though Swedish is a rather different orthographic tradition.

    Another piece of circumstancial evidence: I’ve never heard any other Norwegian pronunciation of ‘Kierkegaard’ than [‘çærke”gå:r], but the tone of the main stress syllable may vary. I have a feeling that tone 1 (etymologically = Danish stød) is more common in literary circles. (We may speculate on why. Because it gives his name a more Danish feel, maybe just by removing it one step from the literal meaning “churchyard”? Or because late borrowings from Danish are regularly given tone 1?) That there’s a palatal fricative even in the “high” form suggests to me that the pronunciation (or rather phonemization) is inherited from the Rigsmaal of Kierkegaard’s own time.

  112. Lars (the original one) says
    February 22, 2019 at 9:32 am

    I am not sure if palatalization was ever a feature of East Danish dialects — but now I found a short account of orthographic history with page references to Skautrup, so I’ll go and dig it out this weekend.

  113. Trond Engen says
    February 22, 2019 at 9:48 am

    I forgot to add the parallel to Kiøbenhavn itself. I found a nice list of historical spellings throughout the relevant period in the no.wikipedia article on N. E. Balle’s Lærebog i den evangelisk-christelige Religion.

    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion: indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Johan Frederik Schultz, 1791. (Forfatter ikke oppgitt.)
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion, indrettet til brug i de danske skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Schultz, 1792.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion. Kiøbenhavn, 1793.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Schultz, 1795.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Schultz, 1801.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Schultz, 1802.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn: Schultz, 1805.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, til Brug i de danske Skoler. Kiøbenhavn, 1814. (Forfatter ikke oppgitt.)
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion, indrettet til brug i de norske skoler. Christiansand: O.P. Moe, 1816.[2]
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion, indrettet til brug i de norske skoler. Christiansand: O.P. Moe, 1820.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til brug i de norske Skoler. Christiansand: Trykt hos O.P. Moe, 1830.[3]
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion, indrettet til brug i de norske skoler. Christiansand, 1836.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de norske Skoler. Christiansand: Moe, 1838.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de norske Skoler. Christiansand: Moe, 1838.
    Lærebog i den evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de norske Skoler. Christianssand: Steen, 1839.[4]
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler: Omarbeidet og trykt som Manuscript til almindelig Prøv else. Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendal, 1854.
    Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige religion, indrettet til brug i de danske skoler. Kjøbenhavn: Schultz, 1860. (Forfatter ikke oppgitt.).

    And I don’t mean to suggest that the Danish palatal k was a full-blown fricativization like in Swedish and Norwegian. I don’t know when that happened in (different dialects of) Norwegian, for that matter.

  114. juha says
    February 23, 2019 at 1:11 am

    1) Speaking of Kierkegaard, what about Niels? There are a few: Niels Bohr, Niels Ryberg Finsen, Niels Henrik Abel (and Brigitte Nielsen). Otherwise, afaik, it’s Nils Holgersson, Nils Gustafsson, and so on and so forth.

    2) Oxenstierna
    I wonder what the Tavast means in Tavaststierna, Tavastehus, Tavastland.

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tavastia

  115. juha says
    February 23, 2019 at 1:19 am

    1) Speaking of Kierkegaard, what about Niels? There are a few: Niels Bohr, Niels Ryberg Finsen, Niels Henrik Abel (and Brigitte Nielsen). Otherwise, afaik, it’s Nils Holgersson, Nils Gustafsson, and so on and so forth.

    2) Oxenstierna
    I wonder what the Tavast means in Tavaststierna, Tavastehus, Tavastland.

  116. juha says
    February 23, 2019 at 1:21 am

    Wiktionary version:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tavastia

  117. Trond Engen says
    February 23, 2019 at 8:25 am

    juha: Speaking of Kierkegaard, what about Niels?

    Good question.

    First of all, Niels is Danish, Nils is Swedish. Norwegians mostly use Nils, but there’s a lot of Niels in surnames and in names running in families. On your list, the Nilses are Swedish, and all but one of the Nielses are Danish. Niels Henrik Abel was Norwegian, but he (barely!) lived at a time when Norwegian was mediated through Danish, and he was also the son of a priest and thus part of the Dano-Norwegian class.

    Second, I don’t know what ie is meant to convey here. In some names of German origin, like the surname Fries, it’s vowel length, but that can’t be the case here. Niels is a home-grown form, and the vowel isn’t long. It could be that the name at some point was pronounced [ɲels], i.e. with a palatal n and short e. [e] was the regular realization of short i in much of Scandinavian, and the allophone of n before [i] may have been kept for some time after the vowel changed. There’s no trace of the pronunciation with e today even in Norwegian and Swedish, but there’s a Danish-American archaeologist and a Norwegian-Canadian ski jumper named Nels Nelson, and one might perhaps surmise something about the pronunciation of their names before emigration. Both were born in the 19th century.

    (Heh. I seem to suggest that ~18th century Danish used i as ь. Kьerkegaard Nьels!)

  118. Trond Engen says
    February 23, 2019 at 8:58 am

    Tavastia

    from East Scandinavian Old Norse Tafæistaland (attested in 11th century runestone Gs 13 as ᛆ ᛏᛆᚠᛋᛏᛆᛚᚭᚿᛏᛁ, transl. “a tafstalãnti”, normalized “a Tafæistalandi” ‘in Tavastia’), from Tafæistr (“Tavast”) + land, the former probably being derived from tafʀ (“laggard”) + Æistʀ (“Estonian”)

    I didn’t know that. I’m still not sure if I know that. There’s a jump to substitute the missing æi on the runestone. But let’s consider it:

    In Finnish this region is called Häme, which is etymologically identical to Sápmi, and a part of the region is Birkaland, where the ancient institution of travelling traders called Birkarlar in Swedish is supposed to have originated. It’s reasonable to think that Tavast was perceived as the Scandinavian equivalent to Hämälainen. “Travelling Est” could have been used first for those they met on travels in Middle and North Scandinavia and later also for their countrymen back home.

  119. juha says
    February 23, 2019 at 9:18 am

    Tusen takk!
    The first Tavaststierna I first came across was a Sanskrit linguist (in St Petersburg, if I’m not mistaken). But I didn’t know that Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was also a Tavaststierna.

  120. David Marjanović says
    February 23, 2019 at 7:21 pm

    and the vowel isn’t long.

    Finally someone tells me! 🙂

    [e] was the regular realization of short i in much of Scandinavian

    Scots explained!

    Heh. I seem to suggest that ~18th century Danish used i as ь.

    Polish does, and at the time you could just skate there in winter…

  121. David Marjanović says
    February 24, 2019 at 7:07 am

    Niels Bohr’s grandson has an unambiguous spelling: Tomas. After a suspiciously long pause, he pronounces Niels with [ɪ].

  122. Lars Mathiesen says
    February 24, 2019 at 10:16 am

    I finally found the very clever place I’d put Skautrup (Det danske sprogs Historie) so it would be easy to find…

    And yes, the {i} in Kierkegaard is to indicate palatalization of the {k}, so {e} is the actual vowel and not marked for length. (A long /i:/ would be spelled {ii} and imply palatalization).

    This palatalization (of /k/ and /g/ before front vowels) arose in East Nordic in the 12th century, but it was never very marked in eastern Denmark (as opposed to Sweden and Jutland where it developed further); it never progressed to affricates or shibilants, except possibly for /sk/, and by the early 19th century is was almost or completely gone in the standard language — even though it had been more and more consistently marked in spelling since the 16th century.

    There is no detailed discussion of how later Norwegian came to have much further developed palatalization even in the variants closest to Danish, but it does mention that the original area included the south-east coastal strip of Norway and the old Danish lands in Skåne. (At that time the dense forests of Småland were a much bigger barrier to movement than they are now, and naturally divided both the kingdoms and the languages).

  123. languagehat says
    February 24, 2019 at 10:21 am

    Fascinating, thanks!

  124. Trond Engen says
    February 24, 2019 at 8:26 pm

    Thanks, I was pondering a thought about Danish being the cradle of lenition, and how it would in fact make sense if also development of palatalization started from the south. But I didn’t think it would be even more pronounced in Jysk, and I still can’t understand how that would work, given what I thought I knew about older Jysk.

    There are a couple of Norwegian words with “false g” — velge “choose” and ferge “ferry” springs to mind — from the hypercorrect (originally) Danish spelling of [j] as <g&gt. I’ve understood that this hypercorrecton stems from how g was lenited to [j] in Copenhagen and not in Jutland. There must have been a Jutlandic tendency in Danish orthography for a while, maybe after the loss of the eastern provinces in 1658. As a result, words like have and mave, which have [-j-] in traditional Kiøwenhawnsk (ref. also Amager [ˈɑmæjˀɐ]), are written with <v> and pronounced [-w-] in the modern national language.

    Confusion about the [w] among Low Germans familiar with Jysk (Hamburgers, presumably) lead to a misparsing of Københawen as Copenhagen: This spelling was made international by Dutch cartographers.

    These examples are all word-internally, but still.

    Update:
    I had the idea to check Wikipedia for the historical attestations of the name Give, the village in southeast Jutland:

    1280: Gygæ, 1340: Gyghe, 1350: Gøygh

    Given the etymology as a compound with gy, the 1280 and 1340 spellings must represent [gywɛ] or something like that, at least phonemically, but what’s going on in 1350? [gʷyw?]?

  125. David Marjanović says
    February 24, 2019 at 8:49 pm

    Delocalized High German diphthongization?

  126. Lars (the original one) says
    February 25, 2019 at 8:04 am

    @Trond,

    I won’t have time to check Skautrup for the historical facts until tomorrow, if that, but you are right that there is no palatalization in most of Jysk as recorded in the previous century — but if you look at map 10 here, there are a few corners left which are the ones that stuck in my mind, and I got the impression that it was much more widespread in the middle ages. (One current area is the one closest to Norway… but common to all the relic areas is simply that they are far from Copenhagen where non-palatalizing Standard Danish developed).

    The whole lenition thing I would have to look up in detail as well — Skautrup is 1000+ pages, ordered by historical period, and even though it has a lovely sagsregister (~ subject index) it takes time to check the 10 or 20 places that are relevant for a given change. But you are right that old /g/ often gives /j/ in the East and /w/ in the West, and impressionistically /w/ seems to be gaining in the Standard.

Speak Your Mind

*