English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

7:16 PM

@Mitch It is a bit unfortunate that people only, ever, and always think of none by Chaucer whenever the topic of Middle English arises, for there are many other works in “Middle English”, many rather different from Chaucer.

Random Onebox:

EBird

eBird is an online database of bird observations providing scientists, researchers and amateur naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution and abundance. Originally restricted to sightings from the Western Hemisphere, it was widened to include New Zealand in 2008, and was widened to cover the whole world in June 2010. eBird has been described as an ambitious example of enlisting amateurs to gather data on biodiversity for use in science. eBird is an example of crowdsourcing, and has been hailed as an example of democratizing science, treating citizens as scientists, allowing the public...

@Cerberus Look at how “gender” works in the Nordic tongues, where you have a distinction between common and neuter. There’s good reason linguists prefer to think of grammatical “gender” not as some sex-based marker of boys and girls, but rather of a type-system instead, something more generic and less about the nads.

Danish has common and neuter, as do some types of Norwegian.

> Swedish nouns and adjectives are declined in genders as well as number. Nouns belong to one of two genders—common for the en form or neuter for the ett form[48]—which also determine the declension of adjectives. For example, the word fisk ("fish") is a noun of common gender (en fisk) and can have the following forms:

> Swedish pronouns are similar to those of English. Besides the two natural genders han and hon ("he" and "she"), there are also the two grammatical genders den and det, usually termed common and neuter. Unlike the nouns, pronouns have an additional object form, derived from the old dative form.

> Early Old Swedish was markedly different from the modern language in that it had a more complex case structure and that it still retained the original Germanic three-gender system. The gender system resembled that of modern German, having masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. The masculine and feminine genders were later merged into a common gender with the definite suffix -en and the definite article den, in contrast with the neuter gender equivalents -et and det.

It is believed that Proto-Indo-European started out with only two genders: animate gender and neuter/inanimate gender. The animate gender later split into feminine and masculine, at least in some systems.

Also, gender often becomes effaced in the plural.

Which doesn’t always mean it no longer exists.

Think of French articles: singular articles la and le both go to les for their plural forms, so you would then need an adjective to show you which gender the noun is. There the nouns don’t lose gender just because they become plural, although the definition article is the same for both.

Arradras

7:42 PM

@tchrist in German, all three genders - der, die, and das - all become die for plurals, but you probably already know this

tchrist

Basque still has an animate–inanimate gender system. Asturian has the normal modern Romance of masculine and feminine, each occurring in singular and plural forms, but it also has a special 5th (or 3rd) gender used for abstract nouns, mass nouns of substance. We would use the zero-article here in English, like saying that “rice is cheap”. They’d use the mass-noun/neuter for the abstract rice, but as soon as you need to make a noun definite, you must choose between masculine and feminine.

@Arradras Yep. :)

So it really just is about classification. Anglophones first stumbling upon Romance or German or Norwegian are ill-served by the sex-based gender idea. They ALWAYS get this all twisted up in their head, not understanding that grammatical gender and biological sex are NOT THE SAME THING.

Arradras

Girls don't become female until they become die Frau

tchrist

No, they don’t become feminine.

They are always female.

These are different things.

Arradras

slip of the tongue ;P

tchrist

Das Fräulein still has no Y-chromosomes.

She is also still an animate being.

Das Mädchen has the same issue. Even as a virgin, she has no Y-chromosomes.

And thinks.

Or at least, that is the theory.

Practice may not measure up.

Mitch

7:51 PM

@tchrist those other guys need to get their marketing agents harder at work because Chaucer is all there is in high school English.

and Beowulf before that

tchrist

@Mitch The Gawain poet is of great importance.

Mitch

oh. wait... not the tolkien story? or monty python? It's all a blur.

Edmund Spenserr? or is that Early modren?

tchrist

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the other ones.

Mitch

the best writers today are writing for TV (I heard someone say)

Robusto

@Mitch Word.

Mitch

7:54 PM

The Chartreuse knight is in the bathroom, praying to the porcelain goddess

tchrist

The Ancrene Wisse was also in Middle English.

    Siþen þe sege and þe assaut     watz sesed at Troye,
    Þe bor3 brittened and brent     to bronde3 and askez,
    Þe tulk þat þe trammes          of tresoun þer wro3t
    Watz tried for his tricherie,   þe trewest on erþe:
    Hit watz Ennias þe athel,       and his highe kynde,
    Þat siþen depreced prouinces,   and patrounes bicome
    Welne3e of al þe wele           in þe west iles.
    Fro riche Romulus to Rome       ricchis hym swyþe,
    With gret bobbaunce þat bur3e   he biges vpon fyrst,

Mitch

Gah! They can't spell worth shit.

tchrist

That’s Middle English, not Old English. And it certainly isn’t Chaucer.

@Mitch You just don’t like all the 3’s.

    When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
    and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
    the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
    was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth--
    it was Æneas the noble and his renowned kindred
    who then laid under them lands, and lords became
    of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
    When royal Romulus to Rome his road had taken,
    in great pomp and pride. he peopled it first,
    and named it with his own name that yet now it bears;

Mitch

and the lithping

tchrist

The Sybarite of the South thinketh all such forms speech defects, but sis is seir own problem, and sey should sinks again.

The Bob & Wheel thing was really cool.

Mitch

8:06 PM

who are Bob and Wheel?

tchrist

Bob is the link that connects the head-rhyme part at the top to the (head-and-)tail–rhyme part at the bottom, which is the Wheel.

    Ande quen þis Bretayn watz bigged bi þis burn rych,
    Bolde bredden þerinne, baret þat lofden,
    In mony turned tyme tene þat wroȝten.
    Mo ferlyes on þis folde han fallen here oft
    Þen in any oþer þat I wot, syn þat ilk tyme.
    Bot of alle þat here bult, of Bretaygne kynges,
    Ay watz Arthur þe hendest, as I haf herde telle.
    Forþi an aunter in erde I attle to schawe,
    Þat a selly in siȝt summe men hit holden,
    And an outtrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez.
    If ȝe wyl lysten þis laye bot on littel quile,

Chaucer could only manage tail-rhyme. He was too influenced by Boccaccio’s Decameron. But the Rebirth began in the Home Counties of Rome, whence its meter and light spread outwards in waves.

Bob is short.

He has just a couple of words.

Then suddenly the Wheel turns, all metered and tail-rhymed, although as you see, head-rhyme was not abandoned.

There’s also Pearl and Sir Orfeo.

And one more.

Mitch

Hip-hop is the only place that poetry is happening now. all that Faire queen and Ode to a Grecian Urn are lame in comparison

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6408

tchrist

> Perle, pleasaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere,
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.
So rounde, so reken in vche araye,
So smal, so smoÞe her syde were,
Quere-so-euer I jugged gemmeȝ gaye,
I sette hyr sengeley in synglere.
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Þurȝ gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
Of Þat pryuy perle wythouten spot.

SyÞen in Þat spote hit fro me sprange,
Ofte haf I wayted, wyschande Þat wele,
Þat wont watȝ whyle deuoyde my wrange

Quere-so-euer is of course Wheresoever.

        Wherefore a marvel among men I mean to recall,
        A sight strange to see some men have held it,
        One of the wildest adventures of the wonders of Arthur.
        If you will listen to this lay but a little while now,
        I will tell it at once as in town I have heard
BOB:                    it told,
WHEEL:          As it is fixed and fettered
                In story brave and bold,
                thus linked and truly lettered,
                as was loved in this land of old.

Here is a brilliant four-way side-by-side translation comparison of SGATGK.

But I count three in verse and one in prose.

@Mitch: So you are doing a rap translation of Sir Gawain?

It would be trendy.

More Gawain translation comparisons.

Johan Larsson

8:53 PM

I see walls of text

Mitch

It's a maze. Use the left hand rule.

Or right hand rule. Just don't switch in the middle.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…