New Tolkien collection — and a new publication credit

A little more than two years ago now, I received an interesting inquiry from Didier Willis, the President of “Le Dragon de Brume”, a small French non-profit association promoting J.R.R. Tolkien and publishing essays about him and his works. In their own words, “créée en octobre 2010, le Dragon de Brume a pour objet de promouvoir, par la diffusion ou la représentation d’études et de travaux de recherche, la connaissance des œuvres de l’auteur britannique J.R.R. Tolkien dans le monde francophone.” It seems they had published their first collection the summer before (that is, 2011), called Tolkien, le façonnement d’un monde, Vol. 1: Botanique et Astronomie. As part of that collection of essays on Middle-earth botany and astronomy, they’d translated and reprinted an essay by Kristine Larsen. How could they not, seeing as Kris is the world’s greatest expert in the intersection of Tolkien and astronomy?

They were, it transpired, beginning work on a companion volume, and Didier was writing to request permission to translate and reprint another of Kris’s essays, this time “Sea Birds and Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, and the Many Metamorphoses of Eärendil and Elwing”, which attentive readers will know was published in my own book, Tolkien and the Study of His sources: Critical Essays. I was certainly amenable — Kris’s essay is a fantastic one, and I was thrilled it might be read more widely, and perhaps even lead some readers back to my book (follow and share the link!) — and the rest of the permissions issues were quickly worked out. Two years ago this month, they began their work on it.

Some months later (now we are up to November, 2012), Didier wrote me again. He had been discussing the permissions involved in reprinting one of his own articles, written for l’Arc et le Heaume, a publication of Tolkiendil, another, larger French non-profit promoting Tolkien. Coincidentally, one of my own essays, “La Jeune Fille Elfe dans la Forêt: Une Image Récurrente chez Tolkien” (previously unpublished), had been translated and printed in l’Arc et le Heaume. Didier’s essay inquired into the possibilities of sourcing Tolkien’s conception of Númenor in a curious medieval mappa mundi (collected in Cotton Tiberius B.v), which depicts a star-shaped island near the Pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar. They really do look alike, two asterisks in the ocean. How appropriate for an asterisk-reality! Didier went on to make the responsible search all scholars make for other research bearing on their own, and this led him to another essay dealing with Tolkien and mappae mundi. Care to guess?

Indeed, this was my own essay, “Sourcing Tolkien’s ‘Circles of the World’: Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi”, which appeared in a collection called Middle-earth and beyond: Essays on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien. So, Didier wanted to work out permission to translate and reprint this article, to appear alongside his own. All the parties were in agreement, and this work commenced.

At long last, I am thrilled to report that Tolkien, le façonnement d’un monde, Vol. 2: Astronomie et Géographie has now appeared — this very month in fact. And in it are Kris’s essay and mine. You can read about the collection and peruse its full table of contents by following this link.

I happen to have before me print copies of both volumes — thank you very much, Didier! — and they are quite nice! No indexes, alas, but they make up for it by the inclusion of a lot of carefully chosen illustrations, maps, and figures. Alongside Didier’s and my essays, for example, are reproductions of the mappae mundi being discussed. Alongside Kris’s essay are reproductions of manuscript pages from Christine de Pizan and Guillaume de Machaut from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I highly recommend both volumes for anyone with an interest in Tolkien and the ability to read French. That’s probably a lot of you. I haven’t read the entire two-volume set yet — only a few essays so far, like the translations of Kris’s and mine, Didier’s and one or two others — but the range of subject matter is impressive, even within each volume’s deliberately narrow scope. Some of the scholars’ names are already familiar ones — Damien Bador, Bertrand Bellet, and of course Didier Willis (who alone has six essay in the two volumes!) — while others are new to me, as I am no doubt new to them. But that’s part of the fun and excitement of reading a collection assembled halfway around the world. Different voices, different histories, different cultures of reception. Yet through it all, the Professor, his magnificent creations, and our shared admiration for them.

Recent publications

Hello, friends. I come to you today with a few publication announcements. Two of my older works — one of them much older — have recently been published, and another one is in translation for forthcoming publication. Here are the details.

My essay, “Some Contributions to Middle-earth Lexicography: Hapax Legomena in The Lord of the Rings”, appears in the new issue of The Year’s Work in Medievalism. The year in question is 2011, but the issue has been delayed until now. In fact, I haven’t seen it yet, but I expect my copy to arrive any day now. The issue, edited by E.L. Risden of St. Norbert College, includes several other very interesting-sounding papers. You can see the full table of contents here. This essay was originally written for the Scholars Forum on The Lord of the Rings Plaza (read it here), at the request of David Gransby (aka halfir), who, sadly, passed away last summer. He was a good friend — although we never met in person, since he lived in Thailand — and I would like to dedicate the publication of this essay to his memory.

About a year ago, I shared news that one of my essays had been translated into French for a special number of L’Arc et le Heaume, the journal of the French Tolkien Society, Tolkiendil. I’m very happy to report that the essays originally written in English and translated for the special anniversary issue are now available (in English) on the Tolkiendil website. Follow this link to read essays by Ted Nasmith, John D. Rateliff, Tom Shippey, Thomas Honegger, and of course, yours truly. Coincidentally, all the scholars named here were also contributors to my book!

And last but not least, more news from Tolkiendil. As some of you may know, the Society published a collection of essays last year called Tolkien, le façonnement d’un monde, Vol. 1: Botanique et Astonomie, edited by Didier Willis. Learn more about it here. Didier is now at work on a second volume, hopefully to be published this year. In addition to including a French translation of Kristine Larsen’s essay, “Sea Birds and Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, and the Many Metamorphoses of Eärendil and Elwing”, which was published in my book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources (McFarland, 2011), the collection will include a translation of my own essay, “‘Circles of the World’: Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi”, originally published in Middle-earth and beyond: Essays on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kascakova; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

This will make two of my essays translated into French. I’ve also had requests for permission to translate others into Dutch and Bulgarian, and there is an unauthorized translation of one of my essays in Brazilian Portuguese online.

“More like a grocer than a burglar”

I’m sure all of you remember Gloin’s rather unflattering first impression of Bilbo in the first chapter of The Hobbit:

Humph! […] Will he do, do you think? It is all very well for Gandalf to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives, and kill the lot of us. I think it sounded more like fright than excitement! In fact, if it had not been for the sign on the door, I should have been sure we had come to the wrong house. As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts. He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!

But as we know, first impressions can be deceiving. Over the course of their journey together, Bilbo redeems himself in the dwarves’ eyes many times over, finally declaring in Smaug’s lair, “I’ve done it! This will show them. ‘More like a grocer than a burglar’ indeed! Well, we’ll hear no more of that.”

This is all very obvious, I know, but I mention this to set up a point of comparison in The Lord of the Rings. I can’t recall ever having seen this observation before, and to refresh my memory, I even made a quick search of most of the usual works in the secondary literature. If anyone of you has seen this before, please let me know where!

Gloin’s comments above are quoted from the first chapter of The Hobbit, as I said. As all of us here know, the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings shows a number of parallels with its predecessor (as indeed does the entire novel). To name a few:

• both novels features parties, one totally unexpected, the other long-anticipated
• in The Hobbit, Gandalf’s fireworks are recalled; in The Lord of the Rings, they’re actually seen
• both witness the reappearance in the Shire of Gandalf after a long absence
• both have Bilbo suddenly departing from his home without telling people where he’s going
• both feature prominent anachronisms: mantel-clocks, post offices, express trains
• both include legal paperwork by the clock on the mantel in Bag End: an employment contract in The Hobbit, a will and other documents in The Lord of the Rings
• both describe a wish to travel and to see mountains; etc.

You may see where I am going with this line of comparison. Is there something in The Lord of the Rings to line up with Gloin’s character-ization of Bilbo as being “more like a grocer than a burglar”? I think there is. And now that I’ve focused your attention, perhaps you can guess what the connection might be.

We are told that the special family dinner-party for Bilbo and Frodo’s combined birthday celebration “was held in the great pavilion with the tree. The invitations were limited to twelve dozen (a number also called by the hobbits one Gross, though the word was not considered proper to use of people); and the guests were selected from all the families to which Bilbo and Frodo were related, with the addition of a few special unrelated friends (such as Gandalf).” A bit later, Bilbo alludes to the number in his postprandial speech. Bilbo is turning eleventy-one, Frodo thirty-three, thus:

Together we score one hundred and forty-four. Your numbers were chosen to fit this remarkable total: One Gross, if I may use the expression. No cheers. This was ridiculous. Many of his guests, and especially the Sackville-Bagginses, were insulted, feeling sure they had only been asked to fill up the required number, like goods in a package. ‘One Gross, indeed! Vulgar expression.’

Do you see the connection?

A grocer was originally “one who buys and sells in the gross, i.e. in large quantities, a wholesale dealer or merchant” (OED). Like “burglar”, but unlike so many others of Tolkien’s carefully chosen words, “grocer” is of French origin. It first appears in English in the fifteenth century, spelled grosser. Before that, we can trace its etymology backward to Anglo-Norman French grosser “a bulk merchant” < Old French grossier, agentive of gros “large”, and also meaning “a bulk merchant”, but earlier meaning more generically any “enlarger” < Medieval Latin grossārius “bulk merchant”. The original ss became c under the influence of a related vocation, “spicer”, cf. French épicier, the normal equivalent to our word, “grocer”. Interestingly, Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary shows that in certain regions alternate spellings persisted into the twentieth-century, including grosser, grozier, and grosher (the word is often pronounced this way in American English even though spelled grocer).

So, you see, Bilbo’s socially inept use of the word gross, especially applying it to people, actually befits somebody who is, or at least, appears on the surface to be, “more a grocer than a burglar”. Even after his earlier adventures, he still grosses up his neighbors and family without hesitation.

Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull have pointed out that Tolkien is punning on gross in the nominal sense of a number (a dozen dozens) as well as in the adjectival sense of “fat, coarse, unrefined”, probably applicable to most hobbits, and they also point out Tolkien’s use of “engrossing” nearby (The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, p. 68). But I think Tolkien was further punning on grocer = grosser, one who deals in grosses, whether they be goods in a package or hobbits. It might have been unintentional, but I doubt it. In any case, intentional or not, it’s another enjoyable point of contact (and a subtle one) between the opening chapters of these two great works of Middle-earth.

Celebrating Tolkien’s 120th birthday

I am very pleased to be able to share some detailed information about a special upcoming issue of L’Arc et le Heaume, the publication of Tolkiendil (the French Tolkien Society). This is an exciting publication for me, since I contributed an essay — but especially for the franco-phone Tolkien community, for even better reasons. But I will let Vivien Stocker, its editor, do the rest of the talking from here. Everything that follows this paragraph is the announcement Vivien forwarded to me. I’ve edited it only slightly (e.g., giving the titles of the essays in both French and English).

[Vivien Stocker:] As you already know, this year will mark the 120th anniversary of Tolkien’s birth. To celebrate the event, the association Tolkiendil, which promotes the work of J.R.R. Tolkien throughout the French-speaking world, will publish a special issue of its magazine L’Arc et le Heaume, release scheduled for the coming summer. Several authors honoured us by writing brand new essays for this volume, or by providing us with texts never published in French before. In addition, The Tolkien Estate, HarperCollins and Verlyn Flieger allowed us to translate Tolkien’s own essay on Smith of Wootton Major, previously issued in the expanded edition of that tale in 2005 and still unreleased in French. Thus, we are proud to announce the contents of this volume:

• Vivien Stocker: “Éditorial”
• Isabelle Pantin: “Tolkien et le Romantisme” [Tolkien and Romanticism]
• Thomas Honegger: “Plus de Lumière que d’Ombre? Approches Jungiennes de Tolkien et de l’Image Archétypale de l’Ombre” [More Light than Shadow? Jungian Approaches to Tolkien and the Archetypeal Image of the Shadow]
• John D. Rateliff: “Un Fragment, Détaché: Bilbo le Hobbit et Le Silmarillion” [A Fragment, Detached: The Hobbit and The Silmarillion]
• Tom Shippey: “Arbres, Tronçonneuses, et Visions du Paradis” [Trees, Chainsaws, and Visions of Paradise]
• Jason Fisher: “La Jeune Fille Elfe dans la Forêt: Une Image Récurrente chez Tolkien” [Tolkien’s Recurrent Image of the Elf Maiden in the Wood]
• Jérôme Sainton: “Amdir ah Estel”
• Jean-Rodolphe Turlin: “Wandering Madness: Le Motif de l’Errance dans l’Œuvre de Tolkien” [Wandering Madness: The Motif of Wandering in Tolkien’s Works]
• Ursula Le Guin: “Schémas Rythmiques dans Le Seigneur des Anneaux” [Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings]
• Ted Nasmith: “Une Longue Histoire” [A Long Affair]
• Bertrand Bellet: “Sir Orfeo, une Traduction” [Sir Orfeo, a Translation]
• J.R.R. Tolkien: “Essai sur Smith de Wootton Major” [Essay on Smith of Wootton Major]

The entire volume will be in French. We hope to present the original versions of English articles online on Tolkiendil.com after its release. For more information, follow this link. [By the way, the wonderful portrait above, which I reproduce here with permission, is by the talented Belgian artist, Pascal Legrand.]

Are the grammar books all right about alright?

I used to be a bit of a perfectionist when it came to language. I was known — infamous, I should say — for correcting everyone’s grammar, from the time I first learned what grammar was, all the way to the time I started learning about the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Nowadays, I’ve given up correcting people’s grammar — not because it doesn’t need correcting (!), but because I’ve learned that it is practical usage, even incorrect usage, that moves the wheels of language. If people are going to start spelling nightlight as nitelite, well, why not? If people want to use they in the singular, well, this has a long pedigree in English usage (if it was good enough for Shakespeare). And if people want to spell all right as one word, alright, let them.

For the record, I spell it all right, and consequently, it tends to catch my eye when people spell it alright. This is what happened while I was reading a political commentary by the well-known journalist, David Frum. The title of the column is, “In South Carolina, the kids are not alright” [link]. The title doubly caught my eye, and you might be able to guess why. Frum adopts the renegade spelling alright, referring to a song by The Who in which it is so spelled. But the same phrase is the title of a successful, award-winning film, The Kids Are All Right. See that? Thirty-five years more recently than the song, and thirty-one more recently that a documentary film about The Who with the same title, the newer film reverts to the “correct” spelling. My guess is that the 1965 song was the inspiration for the title of the 2010 film, but I don’t know that for a fact.

But although (all though) I write all right, it doesn’t bother me when others write alright. Why not? Apart from the fact that the linguistic winds are always (all ways) blowing change into the sails of the language, and apart from the fact that the compound form is already (all ready) deeply entrenched in popular usage, there is a long, legitimizing history of this form. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary has it, marked obsolete, and dates one of its earliest uses (c. 1230) to a passage in the Ancrene Riwle. The OED gives the passage thus, “And alriht so of þe oðre wittes”. In fairness, some editors of this work have transcribed it al riht (two words). For example, J.R.R. Tolkien [1], and much more recently, Bella Millett [2]. In fact, most editions of the Ancrene Wisse have it as two distinct words, though I have seen one or two which have it as a single compound word, and it was obviously also (all so) the case with the edition consulted by the staff of the OED. How can we answer which is right, among all the extant manuscripts, and with all the editorial preferences imposed on them? [3]

But this is rather beside the point, or perhaps it even reinforces the point, as I hope some of the parenthetical phrases in the preceding paragraph suggest. All right comes down to us from the Middle English al riht(es) or alriht(es), in turn from Old English eal(l) riht or eal(l)riht. Certainly, the origin of this, and all of these similar collocations, is as two distinct words, but it has been written as one for nearly as long as it has two. In my view, there is no reason for anyone to feel guilty about writing alright, all right? It’s a perfectly good word, albeit (all be it) wrong by convention. But grammar is a fragile thing. Tomorrow, who knows?

And now, I am wondering: have today’s francophones started writing çava (as one word)? After all, the OED gives alamode as a perfectly good alternative for à la mode.


[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, MS Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 402. Early English Text Society, No. 249. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. See, for example, p. 36, l. 21f., where Tolkien reads al riht al swa (“all right also”).

[2] Bella Millett, ed. Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. Early English Text Society, No. 325. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. This is essentially an edition updated from Tolkien’s of forty years earlier. Compare to [1] the passage on p. 27, here read a bit differently, as al riht alswa. By “corrected edition”, does she mean to say she’s correcting previous editors or correcting the scribes? :)

[3] To give one notable example: Frances M. Mack and Arne Zettersten, eds. Ancrene Riwle: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, BM MS Cotton Titus D xviii. Early English Text Society, No. 252. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. Here, to compare to the same passage in the previous notes, we have yet a third transcription: alriht alswa. Arne Zettersten also discusses alriht, again giving it as a single word, in his Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle. Lund Studies in English, No. 34. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1965. This was the translation into English of Zettersten’s doctoral thesis, and it bears all the signs of influence and advice from Tolkien, a friend and colleague to Zettersten at the time. I am tempted to call Zettersten a protégé of Tolkien’s, but I am not quite sure it would be accurate. But Mack and Zettersten’s edition came just one year after Tolkien’s, as the Early English Text Society attempted to work its way through all of the extant manuscripts.

The curious lives of French prepositions

When you study comparative Romance philology, it’s only a matter of time before you notice that French exhibits some prepositional anomalies. These have interested me for years. For heaven’s sake, you might wonder, how do we explain Spanish con, Italian con, Portuguese com, Romanian cu, all from Latin cum, but French avec? Where did parmi “among, between” come from? And how about dans “in”? What about chez “at the home of”, which is so useful it has made its way even into English? None of these are found in the other Romance languages — and there are plenty of other examples — but why?

I was asking myself questions like these twenty years ago, and though I have now long known the answers, it struck me that some of my readers might be interested as well. Since chez is my favorite example, I’m going to save it for last. Let’s start with the strange-looking avec.

This word is the modern reflex of Middle French avecques, in turn from Old French avoc, avuec, avoec. The latter is the spelling found in The Song of Roland, used prepositionally near the beginning of the poem (l. 186), but used adverbially near the end (l. 3626). The word is a contracted or elided form of Latin apud hŏc “with this (thing)”. The path would have been something like Latin apud hŏc > ap[ud] hŏc > Vulgar Latin *abhoc > Old French avoc. What is most interesting is that French kept a vestigial trace of the pronoun, hōc, the neuter form of hīc “this”. Quite separately, the Latin preposition apud eroded directly into an Old French preposition od, ot, o “with” — which occurs with greater frequency than avoc in Roland. There is also one occurrence of the construction o tot “with all” (l. 1357), with the same meaning as modern avec, and which looks something like the obsolete English withal.

Originally, Latin apud and cum had different connotations, the latter more often associated with coincidence of time than with people or things, but French took one path, all the other Romance languages the other. Why is a difficult question, one that would require a lot deeper investigation that we have time for here, but it was during the Carolingian/Merovingian dynasties that avoc began to outshine od, likely under the influence of Frankish (i.e., Germanic) constructions and preferences. (Let us remember too that Old English wið was originally “against”, preserved now only in withstand; whereas, it was mid that connoted the sense of our modern preposition “with”.)

Many of the other anomalous French prepositions evolved along similar lines from Latin collocations of either preposition + noun/pronoun, preposition + preposition, or preposition + adverb. By contrast, the other Romance languages (particularly Italian) usually derived their forms directly and solely from the original Latin prepositions. The “French model” explains parmi and dans, among many others.

Parmi, also attested in Roland, is formed from a preposition + noun, from L per mĕdium “in, through the midst of” > VL per mĕdiu > OF par mi, parmi. The preposition dans is similarly formed. The usual Romance preposition from Latin in “in(to)” became French en (cp. Sp en, It in, P em, Ro în), but dans came from OF denz, in turn from L de ǐntus “from within”. There is also an alternative (and redundant) form in dedans, from OF dedenz (< L de de ǐntus). Other “compound” prepositions of this sort include avant, dehors, dessous, dessus, delà, dépuis, avant, devant, envers, devers, etc. Some of these have direct cognates in the other Romance languages, but not all of them.

As promised, my favorite: chez. This wonderful preposition is unique among the Romance languages, and so valuable and concise that is has been borrowed from French. We all know what it means: “at the house of”, as in, “party this weekend chez Jason and Jennifer.” (That’s just an example; please do not knock on our door tonight unless you come bearing wassail! ;). This one is the real anomaly, because it is essentially just a noun repurposed into a preposition. This becomes pretty obvious when you consider that the only way to translate it requires the use of a noun, “house, home, etc.”.

So, as you may have guessed already, French chez goes back to Latin casa “house”. The c > ch sound change is among the most common in the language; cp. OF castel, chastel < VL castellu, OF cheval < VL caballu, OF chien < VL cane, OF chose < VL causa, and hundreds more.

The use of chez as a preposition comes along after Roland. In Old French, chez was not a preposition, but rather a noun meaning “house”. The prepositional use today has pushed this noun out of the language. Instead, the common French word for a house is maison, of which the English cognate form is mansion (< VL mansiōne < L manēre “to stay, remain”). The other Romance languages retain the derivatives of L casa in common use, cp. Sp casa, It casa, P casa, Ro acasă — but the Latin noun still survives in modern French as the specialized noun case “a small house or hut; or a square on a chess-board”. In the 11th century, the usual construction would have been je vais à chez Gautier (translating Latin vado ad casam Walterii), but à chez contracted rapidly to chez alone.

And the rest, as they say, is histoire. :)

WOTD: Collops

As attentive readers will know, I am currently reading C.S. Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid. This, by the way, is really wonderful. Brilliant, in fact. The best translation since Gavin Douglas’s 16th-century rendition into Early Modern Scots. The more of it I read, the more I lament that it is incomplete; it’s a must-read for admirers of Lewis and/or Virgil.

Anyway, I came across a pretty uncommon word in the Lewis translation — two rare words, actually, but one of them, collops, got me thinking about etymology. First, let me give you Lewis’s lines:

While they about their meal bestir them and lay bare
The ribs and draw the numbles out and at the flame
Roast the yet quivering collops of the fatted game [1]

Isn’t that a tasty translation? For the sake of comparison, here is Robert Fitzgerald’s rather more mundane rendering (no pun intended): “They skinned the deer, bared ribs and viscera, / Then one lot sliced the flesh and skewered it / On spits, all quivering […]” [2]. Both translations are pretty accurate, but Lewis’s is much more, well, visceral. The choice of “numbles” for the Latin viscera and “quivering collops” for frusta […] trementia verubus gives Lewis the edge, at least according to my aesthetic.

So, numbles and collop are pretty rare words. Editor Andres Reyes includes them in his glossary — a good thing, since most readers, including me, will not be familiar with either word — defining them as “entrails” and “a slice of meat”, respectively. The second word caught my eye. Can you guess why?

When I see an unfamiliar word, the first thing I try to do is determine its meaning from my knowledge of Indo-European etymological principles. Possible cognate forms swim into my mind, often revealing the meaning and origin of the word — but occasionally leading me down the primrose path. In this case, seeing that a collop is a slice of meat, what would you think of? If you’re me, it’s Italian scaloppe (think of veal scaloppini, a dish of thinly sliced veal), Spanish escalope, French escalope, all meaning a “cutlet, cut of meat”. The derivation is from Latin scalpere “to carve, cut”, cp. English scalpel. (One is tempted to think of the Native American practice of scalping, but this is a red herring. Back to this later.)

So this seems like an obvious etymology for English collop, right? Well, I think so, but my etymological dictionaries say no! Are they right, or am I? Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

One turns to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain (to paraphrase Tolkien). It says “derivation obscure” and gives only a couple of cognate forms, echoing an earlier scholar’s suggestion that the first element might be col– “coal”. Walter Skeat says the same, more assertively, giving the Middle English forms coloppe, col-hoppe, and (by way of analogy) the Swedish glö(d)hoppa “a cake baked over gledes or hot coals”. Ernest Weekley cites the same antecedent forms and also suggests the first syllable is “coal”, but the second (he says) is obscure. He gives the Old Swedish kol-huppadher “roasted on coals”, and he adds that the word originally meant “bacon and eggs”. Hmm. This agrees with Tolkien’s gloss in A Middle English Vocabulary, coloppes “collops, eggs fried on bacon”. And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology recaps all of the above, but again with an emphasis on bacon and eggs. The bacon, it would seem, is actually the collop (the slice of meat).

Is this right? Or is it possible that collop = “slice of meat” and collop = “dish roasted on coals; eggs and bacon” were once two entirely separate words, only coincidentally homonymic? It is extraordinarily hard to resist an etymology of collop from Latin, with those conspicuous and phonologically sound cognate forms in the Romance languages.

This also put me in mind of the word scallop. Might this refer to the “(slice of) meat” inside the bivalve? With the original sense being “cut, carve, slice”, if the word scallop is just as old as collop, then no, probably not — but, if collop came to mean simply “meat”, losing the sense of slicing and carving, and scallop is attested much later, then maybe. So I looked up scallop too. According to the OED, (e)scallop, (e)scollop goes back to Old French escalope “shell”, and it entered the Romance lexis as a borrowing from the Germanic branch, exemplary of which the OED gives Middle Dutch schelpe “shell”. Hmm, that’s plausible, but the first attested use of this word is a century later than collop, so my theory that scallop = collop could hold water too. At least as much water as could fill a scallop shell.

Couldn’t it? What do you think?

Oh, and back to the stereotypical Native American practice of scalping an enemy … It’s a funny coincidence that the verb scalp (i.e., to remove the hair from the scalp), arising through back formation from the noun, should also resemble the same root giving us scalpel, and suggesting cutting or carving. The noun scalp comes from the Germanic “shell” root I talked about above, suggesting the skull is your brain’s shell. This is analogous to Vulgar Latin testa “head”, with the earlier sense of an earthen pot, a shell, and even a shellfish. And this is the reason we have Italian testa, French tête “head”, but Spanish cabeza, German Kopf (cognate to Latin caput). This root also originally meant “a drinking vessel”, and I’ve written about it before.

It’s all a mess of metaphors and poetic diction, isn’t it? What a tangled web of words we weave when first we practice to conceive!


[1] Reyes, A.T., ed. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 51, ll. 210–2.

[2] Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1990, p. 11, ll. 288–90.

Silent Letters in English

English is reputed to be among the most difficult second languages to acquire, and although my position is a biased one, I’m sure it’s true. It’s not so much because of the grammar, which is actually pretty simple — though it does have quite a profusion of irregular forms. I think the main obstacle is the spelling and pronunciation, which is far from regular. Just consider the inconsistencies in “the tough coughs as he ploughs the dough” (courtesy of Dr. Seuss), in which the same cluster of letters is pronounced in four different ways!

The main reason for these inconsistencies is that English is an amalgam of so many other linguistic influences, ranging across the whole Indo-European spectrum, with a staggering number of foreign borrowings from virtually every language family on Earth. If America is the so-called melting pot, then the English language is its fondue fork, dipping into the pot and drawing out whatever words it finds useful, sometimes modifying their spelling, sometimes their pronunciation, sometimes neither, and sometimes both! No wonder ESL students have difficulty.

English is particularly famous for its silent letters. Many languages have some of these. French is also notorious for them, but in French, they tend to be much more regular; in English, they are anything but! As a fun exercise, I’ve tried to think up words in which each of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet is silent. There are only one or two letters for which I couldn’t find an example (or possibly as many as five, depending on how strict you are). That’s pretty good, eh? (Or pretty bad, if you are learning the language.) In any case, more than twenty of the letters in the English alphabet can be silent, which is pretty incredible whther you deem it good or bad.

Wherever I could, I’ve also tried to show the same letter silent in more than one position in a word (i.e., initially, medially, and/or terminally). Some of these are words of foreign borrowing, though I’ve tried to limit them. Such borrowings are inevitable with English, but feel free to disqualify them if you prefer a stricter game. Also, comments on the silent letters in other languages are welcome!

A: Cocoa, Bread, Practically [and innumerable adverbs of the same sort]

B: Debt, subtle, doubt, climb, plumb, thumb, lamb, subpoena

C: Indict, muscle, chthonic, victual, czar, science, yacht, scissors

D: Handkerchief, bundt, Wednesday, djinn

E: Every, evening, vegetable, walked, talked [I don’t count the terminal e in words like fate, because it governs the pronunciation of the earlier vowel.]

F: Halfpenny

G: Phlegm, gnu, gnome, eight, align, foreign, diaphragm

H: Honest, hour, eight, exhibit

I: Business, parliament

J: Marijuana

K: Knee, knife, knot

L: Half, salmon, calf, yolk, talk, would

M: Mnemonic

N: Autumn, damn, hymn, column

O: Subpoena, Leopard, Country

P: Corps, coup, cupboard, pneumonia, ptomaine, pterodactyl, pseudo, psychic, psalm, receipt

Q: Lacquer, racquet [not the best examples; anyone have anything better?]

R: February [by some], forecastle [I don’t count non-rhotic accents, in which r is routinely silent, since this is not my own accent. Can anyone think of any others?]

S: Island, corps, aisle, debris, hors d’oeuvre, viscount, demesne

T: Ballet, tsunami [by some], thistle, rapport, ricochet, listen, castle, soften, whistle

U: buoy [by some], biscuit, victual [I disqualify u when following g and q; in those cases, it governs the pronunciation of the consonant.]

V: — [anyone?]

W: Write, wrist, answer, sword, two, whole, who

X: Faux, Sioux

Y: Key [maybe; what do you think?]

Z: Rendezvous, laissez-faire, chez [exclusively French; can anyone think of something else?]

And for even more fun, there are some words which, through the continued erosion of their pronunciation, now boast multiple silent letters in English. Examples: corps, boatswain, blancmange, forecastle — or is it actually forecastle?! Can anyone think of a word with three or more silent letters in it?

“Two shades frozen in a single hole”

Let me preface this post by admitting I am no expert on Dante — far from it — but Dante’s conception of the lowest circle of Hell as frozen waste rather than a confla-gration seems pretty unique. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall many other literary conceptions of Hell like that of the Inferno.

But apart from the imaginative force of novelty, why a lake of ice (Cocytus) instead of the more familiar lake of fire (Phlegethon)? Wondering where Dante got this idea, I made a very cursory search of the scholarship and didn’t find nearly as much as I expected to on the subject. Perhaps I don’t know where to look. One model (as seem obvious enough) could be Virgil, who hints at both burning and frigid regions of the underworld (cf. frigidus annus, i.e., winter, in Æneid, Book VI, at l. 311). Milton, by the way, picks up the same thread for his geography of Hell in Paradise Lost (cf. “a frozen continent” where “cold performs the effect of fire”, Book II, ll. 587, 595).

I’ve read that some Islamic stories depict a frozen underworld, as do some other Asian mythologies (e.g., Chinese, Tibetan, Hindu). And certainly this is true of the legends of the frozen north, as for example, the Old Norse Niflheim. But I can’t see any of these being a model for Dante. So, apart from Virgil, where else might Dante have gotten this startling image of sinners up to their necks in ice, Satan beating a cold wind from his enormous wings, and the rest? Where is the ice in Christianity? Given the overtly Christian skeleton of Dante’s poem, this seems a pretty orthodox backbone to me.

I was thinking about this recently, as I have from time to time, and a new idea struck me. Could it be a case of simple word-play, from the similarity of the Italian words, inverno “winter” and inferno “hell” [1]? Poetic conceits are often born in just this way; at least, they were for me when I wrote more poetry, once upon a long time ago. In fact, it was while reading another poet [2] that this idea sprang into my head. In Dante’s case, the two words differ by only a single letter — in fact, in both cases the letter is a labiodental fricative consonant, one voiced, the other voiceless. Words don’t get much closer than that. It’s even possible that Renaissance folk-etymologists conceived of a connection between the words (though this is nothing more than a random thought on my part). Does anyone know whether this theory (inferno / inverno) has ever been suggested in Dante circles? (No pun intended! :)

And could it be that simple? It’s certainly the kind of idea that would occur to (and appeal to) the philologically minded. After all, Dante did write one of the earliest serious works on the relationship between languages, De vulgari eloquentia (“Eloquence in the Vernacular”), in which he makes the case for the possibility of eloquent expression in the vernacular [i.e., Italian], as opposed to Latin. This incomplete work is one of the earliest “modern” explorations of grammar, philology, and historical linguistics (albeit at a primitive stage).

Dante clearly seems to have had the requisite appreciation for and facility with words that could have led him to build an extended metaphor on the association of inverno with inferno, whether through (a) serious-minded presumptions of common etymology, (b) playful and poetic legerdemain, or (c) subconscious imagery implanted by near-homophony. It might even be read as a “low philological jest” worthy of Tolkien [3]. Whether right or wrong, whether the whole story or only a small part of it, I think it’s a striking idea. What do you think?


[1] Dante uses both words in the poem: inferno, in addition to the title, occurs throughout; inverno pops up twice, in cantos XXI (“bolle l’inverno la tenace pece”) and XXXII (“d’inverno la Danoia in Osteric”). The first is especially interesting, juxtaposing as it does the senses of winter and boiling (implying extreme heat rather than cold). For other occurrences of both words over the course of the entire Divine Comedy, see Edward Allen Fay’s Concordance of the Divina Commedia, New York: Haskell House, 1969 (a new edition of the original, published by The Dante Society in 1888).

[2] I was reading Neruda’s Los Versos del Capitán in a bilingual edition when, for whatever reason, invierno fairly jumped off the page at me. Perhaps it was Neruda’s alchemical word-magic, particularly of nature and the passage of the seasons, but the similarity of Spanish infierno, invierno struck me, and I thought immediately of the same implied pairing in Dante’s Italian. In French, they aren’t quite so similar, retaining more of the phonetic flavor of the original Latin (hiver, enfer, from hībernus “wintry”, infĕrus “below, underneath”).

[3] My good friend Merlin DeTardo sums up the connections (what few there are) between Tolkien and Dante in an entry for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, Ed. Michael D.C. Drout, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 116–7.

The secret lives of irregular verbs

Ah, irregular verbs. They are the bane of first-year language students everywhere. The grammars of most languages are fairly regular — sure, nouns and adjectives offer occasional surprises (e.g., the gender-switching plurals of Italian, on which I am preparing a separate post), but is there any feature of grammar that bedevils students more than the irregular verb? I don’t care if we’re talking about English, Italian, German, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek — just about all natural languages have them. (It’s been claimed that a few, like Turkish and Chinese, have very few irregular verbs or even none at all; and of course, artificial languages, like Esperanto, are designed quite deliberately to have none.)

Students find them intimidating, nothing more than columns of more or less random variants to be stumbled through and memorized. But all words have etymologies, even the irregular forms of verbs. Etymology is really nothing more than asking how a word became the way it is. The inquiry is normally confined to root words (nouns, adjectives, infinitive verbs, and so on), but the question may be asked of particular forms too. In fact, it should be asked of particular forms, especially those for which no intuitive explanation comes readily to mind. When we do so, we find that a lot of the so-called irregular forms aren’t really so irregular after all. Let’s look at some examples.

In the Germanic languages

English has a large number of so-called irregular verbs, close to 200 of them. Moreover, these are among the most commonly used of all English verbs. It’s been estimated that when you use a verb in everyday English conversation, something like 70% of the time it’s one of the “irregular” ones. But most of these are not really (or were not originally) irregular. Rather, most of them followed very specific, if fairly complex, rules for changing their internal vowel. This process is called ablaut, and it runs the whole gamut of the Germanic language family, from the earliest recorded languages to the present day. Students of Old English often encounter the terminology of “strong” and “weak” verbs — which is another way of saying the same thing.

Even today, when we have lost touch with the rules that made these verbs more regular, we can still detect patterns. Consider just a couple of the representative classes: (1) ring, rang, rung; sing, sang, sung; spring, sprang, sprung; (2) blow, blew, blown; grow, grew, grown; know, knew, known; show, shew, shown; throw, threw, thrown. Notice shew, the original past tense of show, unfamiliar to most of us today but still in use as recently as 1915. This form has now been supplanted by a seemingly more “regular” form, showed. In reality, though, the attempt to regularize the verb has really made it less consistent with other verbs of its class. And this process of “regularization” is gaining momentum. Consider: hang, hung, but also hanged; plead, pled, but also pleaded.

Some verbs are irregular in English for a different reason. Ever wonder why the past tense of go is went? Or why we have to be, I am, I was? Phonologically, these forms have nothing whatsoever in common. As it happens, went is the past tense of wend, a verb synonymous with to go but almost extinct in Modern English. It clings to life in a few phrases such as “to wend one’s way”, and in computer programming constructions such as WHILE … WEND. But while wend has all but wended away, its past tense, went, has stuck around, stuck to a different verb! Lingusts call this process suppletion. In the case of to be, we again have forms from two different Old English verbs: beón and wesan. As a side note, in Old English, gán “to go” had yet a different irregular past tense: ic gá “I go”, but ic éode “I went”. But I digress.

In the Romance languages

A major class of Romance verbs represents the case of simple erosion, a process occurring in all languages all the time. Erosion occurs for many reasons, from easing pronunciation to nothing more than laziness. There are innumerable examples in English — e.g., every, pronounced “evry”, probably pronounced “probly” (even “prolly”), walked pronounced “wakd”. And how about one from French — est-ce que pronounced “esque”. Eventually, the spelling of these works is likely to change. But to return to verbs, where this kind of erosion or contraction has occurred, traces of the older, “uneroded” verb form survive in different forms or tenses of the modern verb, right alongside newer forms.

Think about the following Italian verbs: bere “to drink”, versus bevo “I drink”; dire “to say”, versus dico “I say”; fare “to do”, versus faccio “I do”. Where did these consonant changes come from? In turns out that bere is contracted from an older form, bevere, dire from dicere, fare from facere. These earlier forms may be found in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. And seen in this new light, the forms bevo, dico, and faccio look much more regular. We find the same phenomenon in French, where the verb boire “to drink” has “irregular” plural forms buvons, buvez, boivent. Why? Again, because of older form(s) of the infinitive, beivre, boivre > boire. We find boivre and beivre, in illo ordine, attested in the twelfth-century Roman de Renart and the thirteenth-century Fables of Marie de France.

Another class of Romance verbs appear to be irregular only because two verbs coalesced into one — suppletion again. This explains the case of Italian andare “to go”, versus vado “I go”, French aller / vais, Spanish ir / voy, Portuguese ir / vou, Catalán anar / vaig, and so on. What we have here is a pair of Latin verbs, īre and vādere, both meaning “to go”. Rather than one verb winning out over the other entirely, we ended up with surviving forms from both. Why? So far as I know, that’s a mystery. But it’s a mystery taken up with remarkable consistency into Latin’s many daughter-languages! Not quite so irregular as things might first have appeared, eh?

Summing up

Learning how irregular verb forms originated makes remembering them much easier. Typically, there are three major explanations for irregular forms. (1) Ablaut, or the changing of internal vowels to convey grammatical information; these are the “strong” verbs of the Germanic languages. (2) The erosion or contraction of forms over time, as in the examples of Italian bere and dire. And (3) suppletion, where forms from independent (synonymous) verbs coalesce into a single verb in the modern language.

These are hardly the only reasons verbs become irregular — I haven’t touched on changes due to orthography, or brought about by historic vowel and consonant shifts — but if you take the time to learn how these three broad classes operate, you will be surprised how often those troublesome irregular verbs begin to fall in line.

Linguistic egotism, or, “The I’s have it”

I — in English, the first-person singular personal pronoun, nominative case. One of the most common words you will encounter in the language. The second-person you sometimes appears before I in frequency charts — I before you, except after who? Or is it, I after me, except before thee? — but you have to remember that you is nominative, accusative, and dative, all rolled into a single form. But I + me > you, every time.

I is also one of our shortest words (only the indefinite article, a, and the vocative interjection, O, are as short). English, moreover, is the only language that capitalizes its first-person singular pronoun. Other languages (e.g., German, Italian, Spanish) bestow this nicety on the polite forms of the second-person, but not English. No, in English, it is I who is most important; it is my perspective that matters more than any other. The I of the beholder, you might say. The first Roman numeral, I, coming before all others, putting the I in veni, vidi, vici. Try to demote the letter into lower-case and you get an imaginary quantity. We simply cannot conceive of diminished personal primacy, can we? Id pro quo? No, rather, ego vincit omnia. No need to dot this I. But underline it? Aye.

What was it that started me eyeing this pronoun, you might ask? Some of you who know me might say I’ve been I-obsessed for years, but there was something else — a recent piece in the Times Online, which claimed:

A “time traveller’s phrasebook” that could allow basic communication between modern English speakers and Stone Age cavemen is being compiled by scientists studying the evolution of language. Research has identified a handful of modern words that have changed so little in tens of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would probably have been able to understand them. Anybody who was catapulted back in time to Ice Age Europe would stand a good chance of being intelligible to the locals by using words such as “I”, “who” and “thou” and the numbers “two”, “three” and “five”, the work suggests.

Three pronouns and three numbers — not much of a phrasebook, is it? I guess it might work for the Neolithic dating scene. More to the point, what of the suggestion that the pronoun, I (as opposed to the Jason, I), “would stand a good chance of being intelligible”? I don’t think so. Aren’t these scientists forgetting something rather important, namely a little thing we like to call the Great Vowel Shift? As pronounced today, I bears little resemblance to its earlier forms. Compare the sound of English I to PIE *(h)eĝ. Hmm, in the words of Struther Martin, “what we’ve got here is ... failure to communicate.” Ironically, (h)eĝ sounds more like the stereo-typical grunts of early hominids than I ever could.

Now let me be clear: to a philologist’s eye, there is indeed a likeness between I and *(h)eĝ — just as there is between I and Sanskrit अहम्, Hittite ūk, Greek ἐγώ, Latin ego, Umbrian eho, Gothic, Old Saxon, and Old Frisian ik, Old Norse ek, Old High German ih, Old and Middle Danish iak, æk, Old Swedish iak, iæk, and so on and so forth — especially when one compares them to the Old English ic (and Middle English ich). Likewise, there’s a philological resemblance between Modern English I and the same pronoun in other modern languages, e.g., Italian io, Spanish yo, Swedish jag, Czech já, Russian я — just to give a more or less random assortment.

But to a speaker or a listener — that is to say, to the ear, not the eye — there is a great gulf between the sound of Modern English I, as it has been pronounced for the last several hundred years, and any of the earlier forms of the pronoun, let alone the earliest. It’s yet one more way in which English has differentiated — even canonized — its pronoun. Even Modern Frisian and Dutch, two languages arguably the closest to English, retain ik(ke) and ik, respectively. Dutch does have mijn “my”, pronounced just like English “mine” — that’s pretty close. If the nominative first-person pronoun had become *Ij in Modern Dutch, we might have had some company up here atop this I-ful tower, but alas, no.

It’s just English. And considering all the foregoing, I don’t think I should feel too bad about having rather a big ego. All English speakers are pretty full of themselves — aren’t they? — whether backed by the erstwhile imperialism of England, the rugged individualism of Australia, or the Manifest Destiny of America. Big egos — the Big I under a Big Sky — are built right into our language. Remember: you can spell solipsisme without je, but you can’t spell solipsism without I.

English ascendant — long foreseen?

I suppose we all have a certain chauvinism for the language we learned to speak first — our “cradle-tongue”, as Tolkien has called it [1]. We may learn other languages, explore the aesthetics of speech, and perhaps (if we are fortunate) even find our native language — “our own personal linguistic potential”, embodying our “inherent linguistic predilections”. But for all that, we still fall often enough into the prejudices of our “language of custom” [2]. So please take the following with that caveat in mind and not as a personal endorsement of English as the best language in the world. (Far from it, I sometimes think.)

It has become pervasive, though, hasn’t it? One recent book on Tolkien, in which a number of international contributors were given a voice, bemoaned “the fact that English has, without a doubt, become the koiné in Tolkien studies – some sort of Middle-earth Common Speech” [3]. And of course, English has spread far beyond Middle-earth. It is spoken in almost every corner of the world, and learning it is frequently required in the educational systems of many countries. I am told that Indians begin learning English in school at the age of two years! (In the U.S., children don’t even begin school until age five or six!)

Why has English become so popular? I won’t rehearse the many arguments about the whilom successes of the British Empire, the emergence of the United States as a world-dominating political and economic force, etc., etc. You have heard these arguments many times. But other answers might be closer to the mark — or at least equally valid. Why, after all, didn’t Chinese or Hindi become the ascendant lingua franca? Both can boast more native speakers than English, almost as widely distributed around the globe.

Part of the answer might be the particular structural, phono-logical, morphological, and assimilative qualities of English. All the foregoing has been a perhaps too lengthy introduction to the following quotation. Here, Richard Carew (quoted in William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain) extoled the virtues of English some 400 years ago. His description of the “excellency” of the English language seems to come near the mark (bracketed insertions are mine):

The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still fleeting water. The French, delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear or marring her countenance. The Spanish, majestical, but fulsome, running too much on the O, and terrible like the devil in a play. The Dutch [i.e., modern German, not modern Dutch], manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel. Now we, in borrowing from them, give the strength of consonants to the Italian, the full sound of words to the French, the variety of terminations to the Spanish, and the mollifying of more vowels to the Dutch, and so (like Bees) gather the honey of their good properties and leave the dregs to themselves. And thus when substantialness combineth with delightful-ness, fulness with fineness, seemliness with portliness, and currantness [i.e., fluency] with stayedness, how can the language which consisteth of all these sound other than most full of sweetness?

Again, the long words that we borrow [e.g., from the Latin and Greek], being intermingled with the short of our own store, make up a perfect harmony; by culling from out which mixture (with judgment) you may frame your speech according to the matter you must work on, majestical, pleasant, delicate, or manly, more or less, in what sort you please. Adde hereunto, that whatsoever grace any other language carrieth in verse or prose, in Tropes or Metaphors, in Ecchoes [i.e., onomatopoeia] and Agnominations [i.e., alliteration], they may all be lively and exactly represented in ours. [4]

Carew goes on from here to provide a litany of Classical writers and the English writers who capture their styles in that language. I won’t repeat them all here. He’s clearly very partial to English (“if mine own eyes be not blinded by affection,” he admits), and he may go too far in some of his verdicts — but even so, I think he has hit on some important points. Most importantly: that even then, and moreso now, English owes much of her success (and, to Carew, aesthetic virtue) to her unique ability to assimilate the most successful or euphonic words and elements from other languages and to make them her own.

I welcome your thoughts on this — especially those of you whose “cradle-tongue” is not English. (And let me congratulate you for reading this blog in English and perhaps helping to prove the point. ;)



[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. “English and Welsh.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, p. 190.

[2] All quotations, loc.cit.

[3] Segura, Eduardo and Thomas Honegger, eds. Myth and Magic: Art according to the Inklings. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007, p. ii.

[4] Camden, William. “The Excellency of the English Tongue, by R.C. [Richard Carew] of Anthony Esquire to W.C. [William Camden].” Remains Concerning Britain. London: John Russell Smith, 1870, pp. 50–1. The text quoted is the 1870 reprint of the 7th edition (1674). The last edition Camden himself revised was the 5th (1607); the first edition appeared in 1586.

WOTD: Plumb

It’s been a little while since my last WOTD; perhaps a better acronym would be WOTW or even WOTM. But as often happens, I was recently asked whether I knew anything about the origin of the word plumb — not the fruit; that’s plum — and as most often happens, I do know something.

Plumb is one of those surprisingly useful words. It can be a noun, adjective, adverb, and verb, with a range of apparently unrelated meanings — apparently unrelated, but as we’ll soon see, in fact connected by a central metaphor. As a noun, a plumb is a simple tool: a weight fixed to one end of a line. It’s used to determine depth or verticality. For depth, one drops the weighted end of the line in and lowers it until the weight touches the bottom; the length of the line meted out at that point is the depth of the hole, water, or what have you. To establish verticality, one simply lets gravity pull the weighted end downward, then one marks the line. Why is it called a plumb, then? The word comes from Old French plomb(e), in turn from Latin plumbum “lead”. If you remember your Periodic Table of the Elements, you’ll know that the symbol for Lead is Pb (= Plumbum). A plumb line is so called because the weight attached to one end is usually a small lead ball.

The word and some of its compounds (e.g., plumb bob, plumb rule, or plumb line) goes back at least as far as Chaucer. In his late 14th-century Treatise on the Astrolabe, he describes “a plomet hangyng on a lyne” as well as the use of “a plom-rule” “[t]o fynde the lyne meridional to dwelle fix in eny certeyn place.” The word also appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum, the first English–Latin dictionary (compiled in 1440).

Because one use for a plumb is to determine depth, the verb to plumb eventually took on a metaphorical shading, “to explore the depths, to examine, to probe” — as in “to plumb the limits of human understanding”. And because another use for a plumb is to determine verticality with precision and exactitude, an adjectival and adverbial use developed, meaning “perfect(ly), exact(ly), complete(ly)” — as in “plumb center”, “plumb crazy”, or “plumb done in”. This usage is generally more colloquial, regional, or rural.

Let me close by calling your attention to two or three related words. Everyone knows what a plumber is, but most people don’t realize that plumber and plumbing derive from an underlying reference to lead — as in a pipes made out of that metal. Lead for our drinking water?! Perish the thought!

And how about the verb, to plummet, meaning “to drop downward rapidly” — just as a lead weight does! And finally, the colorful noun, aplomb, meaning “confidence, poise, skill” — the very opposite of leaden, isn’t it? But it comes to us from the French à plomb “perpendicular” — perpendicularity, naturally, being a measure taken with a plumb.

So, till next time, I hope y’all found this post plumb int’resting. (Did I really just write that? *groan* :)

WOTD: Oubliette

I found my arms swathed down — my feet tied so fast that mine ankles ache at the very remembrance — the place was utterly dark — the oubliette, I suppose, of their accursed convent, and from the close, stifled, damp smell, I conceive it is also used for a place of sepulture.

— Ivanoe, Sir Walter Scott (1819)

This is a wonderful little word. An oubliette is a dungeon or prison cell whose only means of egress is through a trapdoor in the ceiling. For that reason, it’s usually deep underground, dark, cold, and made of earth and stone. It’s basically the opposite of the chamber in which Frodo was imprisoned in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, which was at the very top of the tower and could be reached only through a trapdoor in its floor, though I daresay one might still call that an oubliette.

The etymology of the word should be readily apparent to French speakers. It derives (fairly recently, too) from the French oublier “to forget”, which in turn comes from Latin oblīvisci “to forget” (and from which we derive the Modern English oblivion). With this etymology in mind, the chamber in the Tower of Cirith Ungol really would have become an oubliette if Sam hadn’t come along, and all the Orcs had killed each other off leaving Frodo all alone in the Tower!

With a slightly related etymology and meaning is perdition. Like oubliette, the word comes to us from Latin by way of French. In this case, it’s the French perdre “to lose” (which is not so different from forgetting), from Latin perdĕre, which means “to lose utterly; to destroy, finish, ruin” (more literally per “to an end” + dăre “to put”). Perdition refers more figuratively to eternal punishment in hell, which is rather what being lost or forgotten in an oubliette must feel like. I can’t help but think of the Man in the Iron Mask.

Are there opportunities to use oubliette metaphorically in the world today? Ever been stuck in an elevator between floors? I have, and I’d say it’s pretty close. A small, claustrophobic cell from which the only escape may be through a trapdoor in the ceiling. More rhetorically, one might use the word to describe a kind of figurative cul de sac in an argument, or perhaps a social or political trap into which one has fallen.

Digging deeper into the Flammifer

Aah, but how deep is too deep? You tell me.

Last week, I wrote about the Flammifer of Westernesse, one of those seemingly innumerable and always conspicuous single-use coinages for which Tolkien is justly renowned. I talked about two things: searching out a possible source in Ovid, and considering (in brief) the challenge of how to translate such neologisms. I used the example of Italian, which was really the catalyst for the whole post. So what more can be said? Well, let’s see ...

Mark Hooker, who is much better acquainted with the subtleties of translating Tolkien than I am, reminded me that along with Lucifer as a model for Flammifer, there is also Christopher, which literally means “bearer of Christ” — this time, from Greek: Χριστος “Christ” + φερω “to bear, carry”. Yes indeed! And I think we can be pretty certain Tolkien knew the etymology of this anthoponym, having bestowed it on his youngest son.

Then, on the point of how the phrase has been approached by translators, I’d like to add to our catalog of examples. I’ve dug up a few more myself, and Mark also provided me with several additional translations of Flammifer of Westernesse. Several of the translators had the good sense to leave the word alone, while others made an attempt (sometimes a clever one) at translating it by sense.

In the first category, the two German translations (Carroux and Krege) each have Der Flammifer der Westernis. Similarly, the Dutch (two translations, both made by Schuchart) has De Vlammifer van Westernisse — here, the change in spelling is made for pronunciation. The French translation, like the Italian, also retains the word unchanged: Flammifer de l’Ouistrenesse.

As some of you may know, the Russians made rather a mess of things with more than a dozen efforts over the years, some of which remain unpublished and some of which are hardly translations at all. Without attempting to explain the situation fully (for which I am not qualified in any case), let me just pass along the information Mark Hooker shared with me. For more details on the history of the Russian translations of Tolkien, see his book Tolkien Through Russian Eyes. Any mistakes you spot here are probably mine, and not his.

The Gruzberg translation is the only one that leaves the word unchanged. It has the lines, Carrying through the darkness of the heavenly sphere, / The Message of the Western Lands, The Guiding Light — the ‘Flammifer’.

In the earliest official Russian translation, by Murav’ev and Kistyakovskij, the poem is only translated in the loosest possible sense, with no attempt to render Flammifer of Westernesse at all. Ditto the Grigor’eva and Grushetskij, V.A. Matorina samizdat edition, and Nemirova translation. The Ukrainian translation, by the way, is of the same basic form – leaving out the idea of the Flammifer altogether in favor of, well, I don’t quite know what. I can’t make much sense out of it through dictionary translation alone. If anyone out there reads Ukrainian and is interested in taking a look, let me know.

And here’s a novel solution: the Yakhnin and Bobyr’ translations omit the poem altogether. *smirk* Both ‘translations’ are really rather severe abridgments — retellings actually — for a younger audience. Think Russian Cliffs Notes for children.

Now, let’s turn to the second category: attempts at translating (or replacing) Flammifer into the local language, one way or another. Here are several to consider. Some are fairly close, while others demonstrate a greater poetic license.

Another of the Russian translations, by Volkovskij, ends rather strangely with, To the Shinning Lighthouse. The basic idea is there, but something is clearly lost. The two Polish translations offer, respectively, Plomieniec na podobloczu! = “[carry] a little flame through the heavens [lit: under the clouds]” (Skibniewska); and Zwana Plomieniem Ludzi Zachodu = “Called the flame of the people of the West” (Lozinski). Among some of the other Slavic translations, there is the Czech Světlonoš ze Západní říše = “The bearer of light from the Western Empire” (the Czech říše is cognate to German Reich, Old English ríce); and the Bulgarian Задморски вечен Пламотвор = “The eternal overseas Creator of Flame”.

Among the Romance languages, the Spanish and Portuguese translations are much looser than the Italian and French. They have, respectively, la luz flamígera de Oesternesse and lâmpada a flama qual Porta-chama do Ponente.

And just for grins, let me take a stab at the Estonian. The final two lines of the poem are: ja lampi kandmas üle maa / on Läänesaare Tulilaev. As near as I can make out, dictionary in hand, this means “the lamp borne over the earth in the Fire-vessel to the West-island.” Anyone out there who’s capable, please feel free to improve on that. Läänesaare seems to have in mind Tol Eressëa, while Tulilaev (tuli “fire” + laev “boat, ark, vessel”) is a commendable replacement for Flammifer.

Let me finish up with probably the most interesting of the Russian translations, the Karrik and Kamenkovich (poems translated by Stepanov): This is the 1994 annotated edition with running commentary on some of the Germanic and Christian motifs to which Tolkien alludes throughout The Lord of the Rings. The translation has: “Shine on, O Erendil, the Light-Bearer of the West!” K&K (or Stepanov, I presume), opted to replace Пламеносец with a more archaic word, recalling my previous comments on the Italian fiammifero. The Bulgarian translation, however, as I’ve said, retains something closer to the Lucifer/Venus connection with Пламотвор. But more interesting to me: the translators provide a footnote explaining their choice. Here’s the note (and thanks to Mark for the note and translation into English). As you’ll see, it’s very à propos of my comments on Lucifer / Venus in the previous post and comments:

Light bearer of the West. The original used the Latin word Flammifer (“Plamenosets”). In Latin, the word rhymes with the name for Venus — Lucifer, which, however, is used in the Latinophone Christian tradition as the name of the mutinous Archangel Lucifer (i.e., an analogue to Tolkien’s Melkor), and Tolkien, of course, had to find a replacement for him. The same thing happened to the Slavic name for Venus (Dennitsa) used in the Slavic translation of the Holly Books. Therefore, the translator used another Russian word to name Venus, which is actually a calque from Latin, but which does not, in contrast to the latter, carry any undesirable negative connotations. The Catholic Latin used by Tolkien here is rendered by the archaic word “svetonosets”, even though, in principle, the word “flammifer” [Фламмифер] could have been left untranslated. After all, it is also marked in English as a foreign word.

Oh, and one final note: I have the Chinese translation also; however, I know so little Chinese (maybe half a dozen words — at most :) that I don’t really have a foothold for commenting on the attempt. So it’s a complete mystery to me — but likely to be pretty interesting. If anyone out there would like to take a shot at it, click on the image above and let me know what you make of it. :)

If any of you made it this far, give yourselves a round of applause. I suspect most readers will have given up in the paragraphs on Russian — if not earlier.

A phonological mystery — solved?

Well, we’ve just polished off another July, folks, and it got me to thinking. Why is the Italian word for that month luglio, and not *iuglio, or even better *giuglio (which would match giugnio “June”)? I’m pretty familiar with sound change as a process driving language development, but this one has puzzled me for a while now.

As we all know, the month of July is an eponym honoring Julius Caesar, just as August is named after Augustus Caesar. And as in English, the other Romance languages all preserve the j, or else use an i if the j isn’t a natural part of their alphabets (as is the case with Italian). For instance: French juillet*, Jèrriais (a Norman dialect of French) juilet, Spanish julio, Portuguese julho, Provençal juls, Catalan juliol (originally julh), Romanian iulie, Sardinian arjolas, Walloon djulete, Neapolitan julo. And even outside the Romance language family, the word has been loaned out into other languages as far and wide as Estonian, Indonesian, Faroese, Hungarian, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, and dozens of others — even Hawaiian!

Well, let me back up a moment. I say that it’s pretty much universally j or i, but there are two exceptions I know of: the Friulian lui and Ligurian lûggiu — but both these languages are spoken in the north of Italy where they must have experienced considerable influence and competition from Italian. It wouldn’t surprise me if both had earlier forms with the vowel or semivowel rather than the voiced alveolar lateral approximant of modern Italian. (Yeah, the chicks dig me. ;)

Looking further back toward the source, I should note Occitan julhet, Greek ιούλιος, and Latin (the horse’s mouth!) jūlius, iūlius. So how did we end up with luglio?! The substitution of j for l (at least, medially) in the Romance languages is fairly common, especially in Spanish (e.g., Latin filius > Spanish hijo, Latin folium > Spanish hoja) — but the reverse? Even the 18th Century Italian linguist Giovanni Veneroni suspected this was an error and corrected luglio to *juglio in his celebtrated Italian Grammar, adding “sic corrige meo pericolo” as a CYA.

According to an online etymological dictionary of Italian, the substitution is explained by dissimilation. This is a linguistic process whereby two similar sounds in a word become less alike over time in order to make pronunciation easier (e.g., Old French marbre > English marble). But that doesn’t sound right, does it? To me, it sounds like *giuglio, *iuglio > luglio is the reverse of dissimilation, increasing the burden on pronunciation!

But wait a minute! In pondering this over time, another thought occurred to me. Setting aside *giuglio, despite its attractive harmony with giugnio, let’s assume for a moment that the original form was *iuglio. It’s actually extremely common in Italian to substitute i for l. There are hundreds of examples of this. A few common ones: Latin flos (genitive flōris) > Italian fiore, cf. French fleur; Latin plătĕa “a broad street or court” > Italian piazza, cf. French place; Latin flŭvius > Italian fiume, cf. French fleuve. I’m not sure if this process is observed initially. In all the examples of which I’m aware, it occurs after an initial consonant; most of the time this is a labial (f, p, b), but not always (e.g., Latin claudo > Italian chiudo). I also don’t know whether the process was bidirectional (i > l as well as l > i), but if so, then perhaps this is the answer after all. What do y’all think? Plausible? Any opinions or information to add?


* In Old French, July was originall called juinet “little June”, but it became juillet through the continued influence of Latin through the Middle Ages. In an apparently similar process, we see Sicilian giugne “June”, giugnietto “July”. “Little June” — isn’t that cute? :)

One Month Online!

One month and twenty-four posts ago, I brought forth on the Internet a new blog, conceived in philology, and dedicated to the proposition that there’s more to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Garner, et al., than meets the eye (or ear). Now I am engaged in a great — oh well, you get the idea!

In my very first post, I talked about the word, lingwë, which I’d chosen for the title of my blog, so I thought I’d commemorate the one-month “anniversary” (mensiversary? lunaversary?) of my blog by writing a little bit more about what else lingwë might mean.

I’ve found two interesting occurrences of lingwë — well, not the Quenya word, but something spelled like it. In my earlier post, I pointed out that lingwë is a sort of homophone of Italian lingua “language” (its plural, in fact, is lingue). Well, it turns out that Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof used my spelling in the development of an early Proto-Esperanto. He called his first crack at a universal language, Lingwe Uniwersala — and there were a lot more w’s in it (pronounced as v’s), showing more of Zamenhof’s German/Slavic background. From a roughly contemporary account:

En l’année 1878, la langue était déjà à moitié prête, quoique entre la « língwe [sic] uniwersala » d’alors et l’Esperanto actuel il y eût encore une grande différence. [1]

The second one occurs in one of the two manuscripts of the late medieval poem usually referred to as La3amon’s Brut. The earlier manuscript (MS. Cotton Caligula A ix) reads: “& he makede ane he3e burh: / Albe Lingoe wes ihaten” (“and he made a noble burg: Alba Longa it was named”). But interestingly, the other manuscript preserving the poem (MS. Cotton Otho C xiii), written down about fifty years later, toward the end of the 13th Century, reads slightly differently: “and he makede one e3e bor3: / Albe Lingwe ihote” (emphasis added) [2].

Alba Longa was an ancient Mediterranean city, reputed to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus (the legendary founders of Rome). The name is usually translated with some variation on “Long White City,” though the second element, Alba, is sometimes connected rather with the Alps or with Latin alba “dawn” [3]. As we already know from my discussions about Albus Dumbledore, all of these derive, in any case, from albus “white”.

Alba Longa as “Long White City” then naturally puts me in mind of Minas Tirith, the White City of Gondor — which, by the way, is in roughly the right place geographically to correspond to Alba Longa, if we undertake a projection of Middle-earth onto Europe, as some have done. And Tolkien himself informally placed Gondor in and around Italy more than once. Perhaps something deserving further research! [4]

So there you have it! We find another surprising appearance of “white”, with its hints of “elves”, the homophonic suggestion of language and linguistics, echoes of Harry Potter, the Swiss Alps that Tolkien visited in his youth, and Middle-earth geography — all encapsulated by a rather extraordinary accident in my choice of the name for my blog.

Now that’s fun for the whole family! :)

[1] L’Année Linguistique, publiée sous les auspices de la Société de Philologie. Tome I — 1901–1902. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1902, pp. 318-9.

[2] La3amon. La3amon’s Brut. Trans. Frederic Madden. London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1847, p. 10.

[3] Livy. [Ab urbe condita] Books I, XXI, and XXII. Rev. ed. Ed. J.H. Westcott. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1890, p. 5-6, 221n28.

[4] Judy Ann Ford has an article in Tolkien Studies Volume 2 (2005), “The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire”, but she doesn’t mention Alba Longa. Which makes sense, as it precedes the Roman Empire. Such research might nicely bookend Ms. Ford’s.

What's in a name? [Updated]

Onomastics is an interest of mine, and since I've already made a partial translation of my name into Quenya, I thought I'd take a moment to discuss the etymology of my own name, for those very, very few who might be interested.

Jason – “Healer”. Greek Ιασων /iason/, from ιασθαι /iasthai/ “to heal”.

My mother originally wanted to name me Travis (< Old French traverse “a crossing”, once indicative of the profession of toll-collector). Luckily, that didn’t happen.

Aldrich – “Old/All Ruler”. It seems to contain the Old English elements ald, eald “old” + ríc, ríce “ruler, powerful person”. The latter is a common element of personal names in English (as is ælf “elf”). Or it may be eal "all" + dryht(en) “lord, ruler”. In either case, the meaning is pretty much the same. There are a number of cognate forms, including French Aldric and Aldéric, and Germanic Aldridge, Al(l)ric(k), Eldritch, et al.

The name comes from my father’s mother’s brother: Aldrich Vrska, a second-generation Czech immigrant. Does anyone know the meaning of the name Vrska? [Update:] Poking around the Internet, I found a great Czech dictionary online, and based on that, I think the name Vrska probably derives from vršek "knoll", or more likely, the plural, vršky "knolls". Surnames derived from features of the local landscape are, after all, very common. But here's the really fun part: the word vrš has a whole series of "fish" meanings — "fish basket", "fish pot", "kiddle". (What's a kiddle? It's — you guessed it! — a kind of fish basket. :P)

Fisher – “Fisher”. Pretty self-explanatory. The only point to make here is that this is the English, and not the German, form of the name (though, of course, they're related). That is, its antecedent is Old English fiscere “fisher”. I hate seeing people misspell my name Fischer. Ech!

Anyone with an etymology of his or her own name, please feel free to leave it in the comments! :)