Wednesday, 18 May 2011
comments on my own poems 3 (Savage Survivals)
Schemas for poems
This post has been moved to my other site, threadsofiron.blogspot.com
Friday, 6 May 2011
More on 'Council of heresy'
More on “Council of Heresy”.
Note. One of the basic arguments in ‘Council of Heresy’ was that ignoring the background of ideas used by poets in poems was a way of reaching false understandings of the poems - the false opinions amounting to heresy. So, much of the book is an exposition of various ideas significant in this background. One area was the line of poetry (not the thickest line in the whole picture, to be sure) which was, in the wake of Blake and Yeats, involved in the teachings of Western occultism. Thus the book gives a commentary on Kathleen Raine in the light of what Raine believed. This note follows up what I said in the book.
The book Picatrix was, as Frances A.Yates has demonstrated, quite fundamental to the Western occultist tradition. Its internal attribution to the Sabians of Harran in Syria has been challenged recently. In the new version, scholars think the link to the Sabians is a mere fable, as they were legendary for their occult knowledge and their astronomy.
There is some kind of link between the academy at Harran and the theological & speculative creativity of Edessa, thirty miles away. Both partook of a sociology which was productive of intellectual creativity. Other centres were knocked out by various military disasters, and there was presumably a “Syrian moment” when this area (Edessa, Harran, Nisibis, Antioch, others?) was the most productive in the European/ Mediterranean world. This moment lay, I would suppose, between the 4th and 9th centuries AD. One may regret that the intellectual agenda at that time involved the entanglement of ideas with theology. What one has to admire is the “fissile” quality of the educated stratum in Syria, the astonishing proliferation of new ideas and heresies. The impression one comes away with is of an intellectual milieu where there is no wish to be orthodox. This was the centre of intellectual creativity at the time - a title no one would claim for Christian Europe.
By chance I acquired a book on changes of climate, from 1955. (C von Regel,Die Klimaänderung und die Gegenwart) It records “But gradually a change appeared, the forests in the vicinity were felled, the pastureland was exploited, and and after the invasion of foreign peoples, for instance the Mongols, the irrigation works decayed, until everything, towns and cultivated land, disappeared under the desert sand. [...] Northern Syria was once full of blooming cities, whose ruins are still to be seen. The doorsteps are several feet above the level of the earth - a proof that the fertile earth was blown out of the yards.”
This sheds a light on the quite different distribution of intellectual power in the first millennium AD and the last one BC. Europe rose because it was the land of thick forests, abundant rainfall, and thick humus. Of course the questions which the thinkers of those cities answered were meaningful mainly within those cultures, not to us; what reached Europe was material which was quite marginal, and this is why it acquired the fringe status of “the occult”. Astrology is the prime example of this.
There is an older theory that rhyme was the invention of Ephraim the Syrian (4th century), and reached Europe as an imitation of Ephraim. This is not quite as clear as it once appeared, the facts do not form an obvious pattern, but it remains a possibility. (Recent writers deny that he used rhyme.) Another legend is that Ephraim invented the Christian hymn. (Also, that he copied the idea from the Daisanites and borrowed their tunes.)
Ephraim came from Nisibis, one of the “university cities” along with nearby Harran and Edessa. In these towns, there were numerous Christians, also numerous Jews, Gnostics, and Manichaeans. Also Neoplatonists and pagans. In the 2nd century, "Osrhoene [[Northern Syria]] was a religious melting pot, where the cult of Mesopotamian gods like Nabû and Bêl existed side by side with Syrian deities like Atargatis and Elagabal."
Nisibis was on the border with the Persian Empire, with its Zoroastrian faith. Even numerous languages were spoken there.
"The most important of his works are his lyric, teaching hymns (madrāšê). These hymns are full of rich, poetic imagery drawn from biblical sources, folk tradition, and other religions and philosophies. Each madrāšâ had its qālâ, a traditional tune identified by its opening line. All of these qālê are now lost. It seems that Bardaisan and Mani composed madrāšê, and Ephrem felt that the medium was a suitable tool to use against their claims." (Wikipedia) Mani invented his own world religion, Bardaisan also invented at least a cult, a heresy of local stature. So Ephraim read their works and wrote a “parody” of them, for a sophisticated audience which knew the originals. The competition and interaction are startling.
More difficult is gauging how the magical practices (of the uneducated, perhaps) related to the philosophical schools. The surviving texts show them intermingled and voices have been raised recently, forcibly suggesting that to divide them is to project 20th century ideas onto the milieu. This question is also tangled up with the issue of how ancient religions, for example the whole heritage of Mesopotamian religion, went on thriving and how these “irrational” conceptions were the raw material for philosophers. It seems likely that the academy of Harran involved magic and an old Moon religion as well as Greek philosophy. Next, the question of how huge drafts of Hellenistic culture were absorbed in areas like Syria, and whether the specific quality of Syrian culture of Late Antiquity was due to the combination of Hellenistic ideas and techniques with the ancient Mesopotamian material.
The idea that the “magical papyri” and so forth represent the uneducated part of the population is not based on more than supposition. We expect educated people to be critical and free of illusions, but there are huge exceptions to that. Just as educated people in the 17th century could be devout Christians, so also educated people in the 4th century may have devoutly believed in magic. In fact, the whole written tradition belongs to a minority, so where we have magical written texts (in large numbers) it is perverse to suppose that they were for the use of the illiterate. There may indeed have been a Belief, of date circa 1900, that magic is Low and belongs to savages whereas Religion is high and belongs to Europeans. This was a way of dealing with the non-Christian religions of the colonial empires. It is, rather obviously, Eurocentric. Perhaps it was no more than a fantasy, and we should see magic and religion as a continuum. The consequences of shedding this imperialist ideology may be far-reaching. Some of the most prominent occultists were super-intellectual. This connects also to the problem people have accepting that neo-Platonic magic comes from people who were top Platonists and of professorial rank.
It has been suggested that the whole body of texts in the Corpus Hermeticum was collected and preserved by the intellectuals of Harran, and that they had a “hermetic academy” between, say, 300 AD and 1000 AD. (The Mongols may have brought this to an end.) That this version of the god Hermes was developed in Harran (identifying him with Mercury in their planetary symbolism). That this knowledge reached the Arabs via Harran.
It is now suggested that ‘Picatrix’ is not named for ‘Hippocrates’ but for ‘Harpocrates’. (Thus, “the book of [har]Pcatrix”.) Harpocrates had a special association with talismans, which are very prominent in Picatrix. He was an Egyptian god of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
In ‘Council’ I deal with Anthony Thwaite’s ‘Letters of Synesius’, a 4th century bishop from Cyrene, now in Libya. I discovered by chance the other day that Synesius was a neo-Platonist. He was surely a Christian, but the language he uses in his hymns seems quite alien to us. It seems less alien if you read about Neo-Platonism - which is described in other parts of the book, but not in the chapter about Thwaite.
Council offers a rather unmediated account of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s description of noises made, formally, by members of cults in his time (1st or 2nd century AD), and points out that this “pre-verbal vocalisation” resembled the acts of 20th C sound poets. I now have more information available on this, as supplied by Wolfgang Schultz in his Dokumente der Gnosis (1910). He gives examples of ‘sound poets’ who may not have been the same ones mentioned by Nicomachus. In the text known as ‘The Mithras Liturgy’, there are seven poems which recall seven stages of the creation, each one accompanied by a different pre-verbal (and pre-human) noise. In this case, the primitive sounds recall the primitive state of the universe, before words or even shapes were fixed. Similarly in the creation myth recital known as ‘Abrasax’. (See pages 79 and 84 of Schultz’s book.) This is the theory, but my guess is that sounds of this kind had a presence in various rituals of the Low Empire without the benefit of clear theoretical underpinning. Schultz offers us a breakdown into vowel chanting, non-verbal noises, and chanting of meaningless sound strings (which quite often have a numerical symbolism built into them). These types may have different histories and distributions, but they all belong together in the world of the para-verbal.
I had not seen Schultz’s collection of sources (1910, reprint 1986) when writing ‘Council’. One of its merits is that it includes the “low” magical material and gives helpful explanations of it. Theologians and intellectuals tend to leave this material out. Schultz acutely presents a theory that Gnosticism arose from people analysing the whole glittering morass of magical spells and rites and deducing a philosophical system out of it. He rapidly says that this is a wrong theory. All the same this is the source of quite fundamental insights. Either you think that magic is sunken religion or that religion is bureaucratised magic.
I am aware of two ‘Basilidian talismans’ of the Roman period found in Britain, one in Norfolk and one in Carnarvonshire. (See Wikipedia article for ‘Thetford treasure’.) These may suggest that Gnosticism had reached Britain during the Low Empire. However, it would be possible to buy talismans without understanding the difficult theology. They were very portable and very tradable. The talismans have very brief inscriptions which do include the invocation-name IAO. This is not certainly dependent on Gnostic theology describing IAO. Written amulets are a classic way for someone illiterate to acquire the 'power' of the written word.
To close, a reminder that the project of ‘Heresy’ is not to prove the doctrines of occultism right, but simply to allow readers to understand certain books of English poetry, as a step towards artistic judgement of them. Describing any single “mythical system” distracts us from the fact that a poet may have a purely personal mythology - so, five poets mean five mythologies. I am following up what GRS Mead wrote in 1913, that the modern cultural situation reproduces the situation of the Late Empire, with energy going into cults.
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
commentary on my own poems (2)
Schemas
Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt.
this post has been moved to my other page, threadsofiron.blogspot.com
Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt.
this post has been moved to my other page, threadsofiron.blogspot.com
Commentary on my own poems (1)
Schemas
This post has been moved to my other site, threadsofiron.blogspot.com
This post has been moved to my other site, threadsofiron.blogspot.com
Monday, 28 March 2011
Irrepressible creativity on the London Scene
Walk right out, sit right down
Readers may be aware of stirrings around the Writers Forum Workshop series in London. This series offers a room where people without any literary reputation can read their poems aloud to an audience which is there to hear new poetry. Discussion is banned in the sessions, but as they normally take place in a pub there is plenty of opportunity for people to hear reactions, and to discuss points of art, in the outfield. One of the two organisers resigned in July 2010, upsetting the fan base. Then in September 2010 twelve people sent a letter to the other organiser announcing that they were setting up a new series of open events, as they found him hard to work with. (The letter is currently available on the web here http://www.wfuk.org.uk/blog/?paged=3). The dissident group set up forum/ reading events under the rubric of ‘Writers Forum Workshops (new series)’. The new series would not have Lawrence Upton as its director/ administrator. The letter was signed by Sean Bonney, Wayne Clements, Johan De Wit, Steve Fowler, Antony John Francis, James Harvey, Jeff Hilson, Matt Martin, Stephen Mooney, Nat Raha, Linus Slug, Jamie Sutcliffe. While the sessions were always full of people with no understanding of poetry, the persistence of the avant-garde members meant that some share of the sessions was taken up by modern-style poetry, obviously varying from year to year.
(The rest of the world uses 'workshop' in a different sense.)
There is also a Writers Forum publishing house. While the sessions have always been completely open, and dominated by students and out-patients, the pamphlet series reflected Bob ‘the Gob’ Cobbing’s view of the universe. (Policy since Cobbing’s demise in 2002 then has inclined to follow his line.) The anthology of the first 500 titles was a memorably dreadful book, full of spattering and whitterings. Of the 1500 titles now published, it is fair to say that, if you read all of them, you would die. However, of the ones I have read, there is a deposit of pure gold at the bottom of the slagberg. The production values were miles below standard (this has changed since 2002), but there are important titles by Colin Simms, Sean Bonney, David Sellars, and Adrian Clarke, for example.
It is fair to say that the indifference of WF to the arts of publishing contributed to the obscurity in which the ‘London School’ languishes when it comes to being read by people who don’t go to Writers Forum. (‘School’ doesn’t mean they all swim head to toe.) We recall that truly important work has been produced by Maggie O’Sullivan, Ulli Freer, Adrian Clarke, Harry Gilonis, Gavin Selerie, Robert Hampson, and Allen Fisher, for example. I think we have to mention Veer Books as being the most satisfactory series of books collecting classics of the London scene going back to the 1970s as well as the new work, which is at a historic peak right now.
I think keeping the WF name is a mistake and unjustifiable. The basis on which this is wrong is unfortunately bourgeois - it relies on a notion of property, and then of inheritance, which is rather distasteful in an artistic context. If Cobbing owned the name, and passed it on to two people, and Lawrence Upton is the only surviving office-holder (after Adrian Clarke’s resignation), then the name does belong to Upton. Since the assets of an open reading session are, simply, the powers of the listeners to transform the poem for the poet whom they are listening to, the name on the flier is hardly of great importance.
We do not have any photographs of Lawrence behaving badly. However, there is a long history of people feeling that he is officious, long-winded, authoritarian, dogmatic in condemnation and loyalty, uninterested by most aspects of poetry, is stuck in his ways, has a mausoleum view of the avant garde based on genealogy and obsequy, etc. He has been described as ‘the Berlin Wall of the London poetry scene’. All of this coagulates like treacle but does not solidify into fact. But the split in this writers’ group is exclusively about Upton’s personality, not about literary differences. The workshop could sustain those, its members do not have to agree with each other about what the next poem should look like. Also there was no big bad thing that anyone has been able to name - just a persistent irritation. In fact, it is not too much to say that if Lawrence promised not to undertake any more monologues, in particular ones about loyalty, the rules of art, and his holidays in Cornwall and Serbia, he would be forgiven.
The twelve names include an impressive array of talent, many of them have been significant in AE’s past and no doubt will be in its future.
Any account of Upton’s history as someone dogmatic who annoys people has to go on for long enough to admit that WF was thriving under a duo which included him, and that there were at least enough people swarming around the WF scene to form a secession and stalk out.
My feeling is that the key events in the poetic realm are irretrievable, the evidence too fleeting to be recoverable. It would be hard to construct an account which all parties would agree to. Most probably the process had to do with dynamics of personal exchange which are too subtle to be caught.
Going back almost 20 years, the planning process for Angel Exhaust (not yet called that) involved meetings between Adrian Clarke, Andrew Duncan, Johan de Wit, and Robert Sheppard, which were chaired by Lawrence Upton as he was felt to be someone who could keep control of the time factor in the discussion. (I think Gilbert Adair dropped out before the meetings started.) The objective was to find a literary programme which a magazine could implement, and the starting point was to create an outlet for the London School. The challenge of writing policy texts which the other editors could agree to was extreme. Lawrence was a good chair and I am grateful to him for facilitating this process.
I think the trouble with Lawrence is that he doesn’t want to react. He has taken on systems of values, to do with Marxism and art, and sees all questions as being solved by them. In a way, this is selfless. He does not own the opinions, he is merely the servant of the person who owns them. But if you disagree he accuses you of disloyalty. The ideas Lawrence serves are condensed and immobile, like a house. They are deeply unlike ideas, but they are like property. Lawrence has an abiding feeling that everyone else is a deviationist, but what we are supposed to be loyal to is lost in the fogs of time. It is something like ‘all art has to be non-discursive, free-form, yibble-scribble’.
This conflict may give glimpses of process. Metaphors, for example - one thinks of the title of a 2011 conference on ‘legacies of modernism’. What does this mean? it starts with something big dying, we all stand around the cadaver and try to grab bits of it? Like a turkey or something? If you go for this lethality (someone has to die before you inherit the asset), it is a story like ‘The Midsomer Modernist Murders’. I don’t accept that what is happening in 2011 is a continuation of something that was happening in 1920. This is too much like trying to prove ownership of a house (”root of title” I think you say).
The unstated word is ‘ownership’. Lawrence owns WF but doesn’t want to use that term. Cobbing owned it & Lawrence inherits. And suddenly taking direction of the London School is a breach of Lawrence’s property rights. And we are being directed by the dead. I don’t think that legitimacy is something which comes from the dead and which is posted to us through a letter-box shaped like Cobbing or Upton. The funerary urn as message box. You press a tap and out comes a handful of dirty ashes in the form of acknowledgement from Kruchonykh, Hugo Ball, or Pound. Thanks a bunch. This preoccupation with legacy and inheritance has an unfortunate alliance with the belief that all talk of creativity, talent, personal choice, is bourgeois subjectivity. Both lead to a rigidity in the decision process. People writing poems following inherited rules, observing regulations, being like an official in the Ministry of the Avant Garde. Then, in the end, an authoritarian interpersonal style.
The theory is that anything freeform like ‘sound poetry’ or ‘visual poetry’ is subjective. But the subjectivity embedded in it can become vestigial, ritual, ineffective. Dogma too is subjectivity in cadaverous form.
I think it is actually a form of weakness to want to "acquire" the 50 years of history of Writers Forum. Surely the poets at the new series have autonomy & sovereignty and don’t need a legacy title? Surely the signatories to the letter to Lawrence are talented enough to float their own ship? And surely the London Scene is happening more than ever right now, and 2011 is not thirty years too late?
The key factor on the London 'underground' scene has been the strong interpersonal bonds which override artistic differences. Occasional rifts have little effect on a geology of mutual affection.
Readers may be aware of stirrings around the Writers Forum Workshop series in London. This series offers a room where people without any literary reputation can read their poems aloud to an audience which is there to hear new poetry. Discussion is banned in the sessions, but as they normally take place in a pub there is plenty of opportunity for people to hear reactions, and to discuss points of art, in the outfield. One of the two organisers resigned in July 2010, upsetting the fan base. Then in September 2010 twelve people sent a letter to the other organiser announcing that they were setting up a new series of open events, as they found him hard to work with. (The letter is currently available on the web here http://www.wfuk.org.uk/blog/?paged=3). The dissident group set up forum/ reading events under the rubric of ‘Writers Forum Workshops (new series)’. The new series would not have Lawrence Upton as its director/ administrator. The letter was signed by Sean Bonney, Wayne Clements, Johan De Wit, Steve Fowler, Antony John Francis, James Harvey, Jeff Hilson, Matt Martin, Stephen Mooney, Nat Raha, Linus Slug, Jamie Sutcliffe. While the sessions were always full of people with no understanding of poetry, the persistence of the avant-garde members meant that some share of the sessions was taken up by modern-style poetry, obviously varying from year to year.
(The rest of the world uses 'workshop' in a different sense.)
There is also a Writers Forum publishing house. While the sessions have always been completely open, and dominated by students and out-patients, the pamphlet series reflected Bob ‘the Gob’ Cobbing’s view of the universe. (Policy since Cobbing’s demise in 2002 then has inclined to follow his line.) The anthology of the first 500 titles was a memorably dreadful book, full of spattering and whitterings. Of the 1500 titles now published, it is fair to say that, if you read all of them, you would die. However, of the ones I have read, there is a deposit of pure gold at the bottom of the slagberg. The production values were miles below standard (this has changed since 2002), but there are important titles by Colin Simms, Sean Bonney, David Sellars, and Adrian Clarke, for example.
It is fair to say that the indifference of WF to the arts of publishing contributed to the obscurity in which the ‘London School’ languishes when it comes to being read by people who don’t go to Writers Forum. (‘School’ doesn’t mean they all swim head to toe.) We recall that truly important work has been produced by Maggie O’Sullivan, Ulli Freer, Adrian Clarke, Harry Gilonis, Gavin Selerie, Robert Hampson, and Allen Fisher, for example. I think we have to mention Veer Books as being the most satisfactory series of books collecting classics of the London scene going back to the 1970s as well as the new work, which is at a historic peak right now.
I think keeping the WF name is a mistake and unjustifiable. The basis on which this is wrong is unfortunately bourgeois - it relies on a notion of property, and then of inheritance, which is rather distasteful in an artistic context. If Cobbing owned the name, and passed it on to two people, and Lawrence Upton is the only surviving office-holder (after Adrian Clarke’s resignation), then the name does belong to Upton. Since the assets of an open reading session are, simply, the powers of the listeners to transform the poem for the poet whom they are listening to, the name on the flier is hardly of great importance.
We do not have any photographs of Lawrence behaving badly. However, there is a long history of people feeling that he is officious, long-winded, authoritarian, dogmatic in condemnation and loyalty, uninterested by most aspects of poetry, is stuck in his ways, has a mausoleum view of the avant garde based on genealogy and obsequy, etc. He has been described as ‘the Berlin Wall of the London poetry scene’. All of this coagulates like treacle but does not solidify into fact. But the split in this writers’ group is exclusively about Upton’s personality, not about literary differences. The workshop could sustain those, its members do not have to agree with each other about what the next poem should look like. Also there was no big bad thing that anyone has been able to name - just a persistent irritation. In fact, it is not too much to say that if Lawrence promised not to undertake any more monologues, in particular ones about loyalty, the rules of art, and his holidays in Cornwall and Serbia, he would be forgiven.
The twelve names include an impressive array of talent, many of them have been significant in AE’s past and no doubt will be in its future.
Any account of Upton’s history as someone dogmatic who annoys people has to go on for long enough to admit that WF was thriving under a duo which included him, and that there were at least enough people swarming around the WF scene to form a secession and stalk out.
My feeling is that the key events in the poetic realm are irretrievable, the evidence too fleeting to be recoverable. It would be hard to construct an account which all parties would agree to. Most probably the process had to do with dynamics of personal exchange which are too subtle to be caught.
Going back almost 20 years, the planning process for Angel Exhaust (not yet called that) involved meetings between Adrian Clarke, Andrew Duncan, Johan de Wit, and Robert Sheppard, which were chaired by Lawrence Upton as he was felt to be someone who could keep control of the time factor in the discussion. (I think Gilbert Adair dropped out before the meetings started.) The objective was to find a literary programme which a magazine could implement, and the starting point was to create an outlet for the London School. The challenge of writing policy texts which the other editors could agree to was extreme. Lawrence was a good chair and I am grateful to him for facilitating this process.
I think the trouble with Lawrence is that he doesn’t want to react. He has taken on systems of values, to do with Marxism and art, and sees all questions as being solved by them. In a way, this is selfless. He does not own the opinions, he is merely the servant of the person who owns them. But if you disagree he accuses you of disloyalty. The ideas Lawrence serves are condensed and immobile, like a house. They are deeply unlike ideas, but they are like property. Lawrence has an abiding feeling that everyone else is a deviationist, but what we are supposed to be loyal to is lost in the fogs of time. It is something like ‘all art has to be non-discursive, free-form, yibble-scribble’.
This conflict may give glimpses of process. Metaphors, for example - one thinks of the title of a 2011 conference on ‘legacies of modernism’. What does this mean? it starts with something big dying, we all stand around the cadaver and try to grab bits of it? Like a turkey or something? If you go for this lethality (someone has to die before you inherit the asset), it is a story like ‘The Midsomer Modernist Murders’. I don’t accept that what is happening in 2011 is a continuation of something that was happening in 1920. This is too much like trying to prove ownership of a house (”root of title” I think you say).
The unstated word is ‘ownership’. Lawrence owns WF but doesn’t want to use that term. Cobbing owned it & Lawrence inherits. And suddenly taking direction of the London School is a breach of Lawrence’s property rights. And we are being directed by the dead. I don’t think that legitimacy is something which comes from the dead and which is posted to us through a letter-box shaped like Cobbing or Upton. The funerary urn as message box. You press a tap and out comes a handful of dirty ashes in the form of acknowledgement from Kruchonykh, Hugo Ball, or Pound. Thanks a bunch. This preoccupation with legacy and inheritance has an unfortunate alliance with the belief that all talk of creativity, talent, personal choice, is bourgeois subjectivity. Both lead to a rigidity in the decision process. People writing poems following inherited rules, observing regulations, being like an official in the Ministry of the Avant Garde. Then, in the end, an authoritarian interpersonal style.
The theory is that anything freeform like ‘sound poetry’ or ‘visual poetry’ is subjective. But the subjectivity embedded in it can become vestigial, ritual, ineffective. Dogma too is subjectivity in cadaverous form.
I think it is actually a form of weakness to want to "acquire" the 50 years of history of Writers Forum. Surely the poets at the new series have autonomy & sovereignty and don’t need a legacy title? Surely the signatories to the letter to Lawrence are talented enough to float their own ship? And surely the London Scene is happening more than ever right now, and 2011 is not thirty years too late?
The key factor on the London 'underground' scene has been the strong interpersonal bonds which override artistic differences. Occasional rifts have little effect on a geology of mutual affection.
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Edenkoben Blog, Andrew Duncan
Edenkoben Blog
I can’t do diary entries about the book I am trying to write because it is all too intense. But I get fifteen minutes off from time to time and i can write about that.
The first week here was lost due to migraine. I was unable to work. It was just due to moving countries i think. I like staying in one place, I find it very hard to convince myself that i actually want to go somewhere else. So at a rational level i am glad to be here, at an unconscious level I am in panic and disorientation. Or maybe it’s anxiety about writing the book.
I got a DVD-box with 50 films from the ‘Scotland Yard’ series (1955-9 I think) and was very happy watching those in England. Part of the project here is a scheme for investigating German Pulp. I was aware that in Germany 30 edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ adaptations were filmed in quite a short period after 1955 (possibly 50). I was curious about “bad German films” and by extension “bad taste in Germany”. Also, in the problem of entertainment in central Europe: the entertainment sector seems to have been colonised by American and British products. This applies especially to the old communist bloc: there was this terrible earnestness, everyone was supposed to learn classical piano, go to ballet classes,and read Pushkin, there was no communist entertainment sector. (Which isn’t quite true, as we shall see.) I got hold of a couple of the Edgar Wallace films on DVD: they aren’t bad and they don’t take themselves at all seriously. (It comes out like ‘valise’ in German.)
This doesn’t quite mean that I am trying to write a science-fiction novel in the style of 1950s B-movies. Not quite, anyway.
(March 15) We went to Wissembourg. This is in Alsace and just on the French side of the border. Alsace was annexed by France in 1648 and although it was german-speaking at that point a slow process of francisation has taken place.
I was enthusiastic about the Alsatians not being nationalists: they always wanted to be part of France even while remaining protestant and keeping their language. It shows that you don’t have to base everything on ethnic identity. I couldn’t get agreement on this. There were election posters up and some were for for a local Alsatian party: “’s Elsass unser land”. But the slogans on the poster were about bilingualism in administration and autonomy. No mention of separatism - they want to be part of France, and there have been Alsatian parties for many years who wanted to be part of France but wanted a better deal for the language.
Wissembourg has a bilingual market - some stallholders speak French and some german. The design of houses is what attracts attention. The houses look very much like houses in the Palatinate, although not identical. In the central square there are some that look more French - dormer windows, metal window-frames, curved iron ferronnerie on the balconies. But the date of the buildings was during the period when Alsace was part of Germany (2nd Reich) after 1871. We couldn’t work this out. Maybe the buildings were put up deliberately to show that the people regarded themselves as French.
It seems to be completely vines here, but in fact there are some asparagus fields if you go a few miles on, and there are some trees for almonds and figs. A notice said that people are trying to develop a Pfalzisch (Palatinate) cuisine based on figs, or at least using figs. Red Pfalzisch wine features a lot, I was surprised, I am told that it has been developed a lot in the last ten years. I drink it because it doesn’t exist in England, it’s not the best red but it is distinctive. The white is much better but then everyone knows about that.
I have a whole apartment in an old house on the edge of town. The apartment has a Kachelofen (tile stove), not in use. I can’t work out all its working parts. I think you put coal in at a stove somewhere and then pipes carry the heat to other parts of the building. I read in a book I got here that the early version had earthenware pots (‘thin unglazed pots’) because they worked out that they retained heat very well (like bricks in a storage heater) and the mutation into Kachelofen with the earthenware tiles came much later. The ones here are glazed in green and grey and look very handsome. The house was bought by the region (Palatinate) when it was ‘marod’ and done up. ‘Marod’ means ‘bashed about a bit’ or ‘derelict’. It’s what they say about a government that is about to collapse or an insolvent firm. But the earliest meaning is ‘soldier unable to march’, and hence ‘marauder’.
Email from John Kozak: “May have mentioned this, but did you ever meet my colleague Nick Bretherton, whose father was on Bomber Harris’s staff? “Bomber” was a bowdlerised sobriquet, he being known as “Butcher” to the chaps. Harris’s team built test blocks of flats and designed their incendiaries to ignite soft furnishings; aimed for working class areas to maximise the kill count, avoiding the middle-class, Hitler-supporting, districts. Max Hastings used to play the Decent Tory on the Graun’s comment page and occasionally the LRB, but is very much the Voice of Foam in the Mail: a photographer chum who worked for him at the Telegraph shudders at his memory, explains why Pte Eye call him “Hitler”.”
I read two books about the bombing campaign before coming here. It looks pretty much as if it was all ethically flawed and inhuman, illegal, and based on a complete miscalculation in military terms. I read Max Hastings on 'Bomber Command' because he is so enthusiastic about Deeds of Valour and so when he says it was all a horrible mistake you have to agree. 600,000 dead civilians. I read Martin Middlebrook’s book about the Hamburg raids (three nights, one book) and he points out that the industry was south of the harbour, and included wharves building submarines, and north of the harbour it was all residential. But Harris only planned to bomb the north, the south wasn’t even in the target zone. When I read that sentence I was just appalled. No migraine, I just went pale.
I had to get into this a bit because WG Sebald had written a book about it and I knew it would come up at some point. I don’t think it’s legal to bomb civilians. The ‘rules of war’ say you can bombard cities under siege, but that implies that you have infantry dug in around the city.
Hastings remarks that none of the English war films shows the bombing of civilians as heroic/ desirable/ intended. He cites 100 war films between 1945 and 1960, blimey, it seems like 500. ‘Cocoa, sir?’ But I think this gives us a verdict; the British people were supposed to be the force behind all this and they found it so unattractive they didn’t want to see it. There seems to be this pervasive, central lie: Harris knew he was bombing to kill civilians in maximum numbers but the paperwork never conceded that. This is where we start to think of a war crime: why cover it up if it was legal and a ‘morale builder'? (More accurately, a proportion of the British public would have been happy to watch that stuff on screen, but it wasn’t enough of the public.)
The sign in the town centre says that Edenkoben has a population of 6600. However the infrastructure is there for a much larger town. Basically it is a tourist town, on the Weinstrasse [Wine Way], and dead in winter. There are vast numbers of Weinstuben (sort of between a shop and a pub, ideally run by the owner of the vineyard) and the plan is that you go to a Weinstube run by the vintner, sample all the wines produced a few fields away, and buy a bottle of the one you like. The sign says that the earliest form of the name is ‘Zotingowen’, ‘at Otto’s farmsteads’, so the ‘koben’ is just borrowed from the word for ‘pigsty’. The town is full of wooden arches which cross the street and which have vines trained over them which will be flourishing with green leaves in the summer. I wanted to go to the Heimatmuseum [local history museum] but it is only open in season, and it is a wine museum. Every second building sells local wine. Maybe Z’Nottingowen’ means ‘at Nott’s farmsteads’.
Much fuss here about the defence minister having copied parts of his doctoral thesis on constitutional law. Could be just omissions from the footnotes but Spiegel magazine claims there is an entire thesis by someone else copied into it. This is something that didn’t come out by google searches but by the second wave of digging. Politicians aren’t meant to have detailed knowledge, but to synthesize other people’s work. OK, but taking without acknowledgement is theft, that is less ambiguous. He has already given the doctorate back, an unusual step. I wonder if there is an appropriate ceremony. Zu Guttenberg is the most popular politician in Germany, a poll showed that 78% of people thought he should play an important role. He is glamorous, his wife is glamorous and coutured up, they appear in ‘Gala’ which is like Hello magazine. He comes from a noble family which owns forests, she is Bismarck’s great-granddaughter (but doesn’t look like Big Otto). Whereas Merkel is about as glamorous as Gordon Brown. One comment here is that plagiarism is most common in law and theology, the professions of people who are supposed to protect morality. Another theory is that Guttenberg’s early nonchalance about the ‘parallel passages’ was because he didn’t know they were there, he had paid someone else to write the whole thesis. (later development: Guttenberg resigned.)
The big local supermarket has a second hand book section under the same roof. You put the money in a tin, as I eventually realised. There were two books side by side by Hans grimm and verena Stefan. Stefan’s book (“Sloughing skins”) was a primary classic of feminism, circa 1970, written when nobody knew what the word implied, when it was a sort of ‘trip’ or ‘experimental consciousness’. Grimm was a writer much-favoured under the Nazi regime and preoccupied by the need for Lebensraum and so forth. He wrote about colonists in German South-West Africa, a regime in which up to 1914 most of the natives died. It was sort of a dress rehearsal for later endeavours. It just seemed so weird that they were side by side on the shelf. I suppose if you are going to be an expert on German culture you ought to know about the literature of the Third Reich, those books are there in the supermarket, very cheap, it’s an opportunity. But I think I will just pass that one by.
Rosvitha points out that the krimi i watched on Sunday (“Notruf 110”) was a continuation of a series which began on East German TV. After the reunification, they brought in new police commissars, but it is the same series, set in Halle. Rosvitha says that the old episodes had a completely different set of manners, the police bosses just treated their underlings like dirt, and the cops were always giving criminals moral lectures. So real features of East German society were there in the TV programmes, let through because no one in charge noticed them. This is part of the “communist entertainment industry”, which really did exist.
There was a juvenile delinquent, a sort of biker plus teddy boy, such an obvious suspect that it had to be someone else. After a certain point it turned out that he was Russian: the commissar goes to a sort of club room and the kid jokes about him in Russian to all the other delinquents hanging out. The commissar turns out to speak perfect russian and gives him a real dressing-down. Calls him ‘ptichka’, which means ‘little bird’.
I suppose there was a russian garrison, the Red Army had its forward bases close to the border with East germany and not days away in Soviet territory. So there were marriages and also russian kids.
I doubt I can get old episodes on DVD, they might turn up on German TV at about 3 am.
Bought some soap powder to wash a woollen sweater by hand. Having done this I found a label which said it was polyester cotton. Dummkopf! But the label also says you can’t spin dry it. Big problem. But this was the only non-machine wash item I brought.
Much discussion about ‘The King’s Speech’ which is showing in Karlsruhe. I try hard to get it across that I would never watch a film about the royal family unless it involved decapitation. On the poster for ‘A single man’ Colin Firth and Julianne Moore are lying side by side with their heads on cushions and it is striking how well Julianne’s hair matches the cushion cover. Mmm! Tasteful! I couldn’t help thinking “gay film based around the soft furnishings”. Big cliche i know. Rosvitha asked me about Christopher isherwood, I couldn’t come up with much. I think i read three of his novels, ‘A Single man’ was so bad that i stopped. Claudia saw the film and said it was too tasteful, too much based around the decor. What did happen to isherwood? In 50 years after 'Goodbye to berlin'?
There is a poster in one of the shops here showing Lex Barker, who played the hero in a large number of Karl May Western films in the 50s. These led on to the spaghetti Westerns. There is clearly something in common with the Edgar Wallace series here. Both are lucrative examples of the German entertainment industry. But both are set in the Anglo-Saxon world. This allowed for an effect of Diminished Reality and this was part of them being entertaining and undemanding. The wallace films aren’t exactly spoofs, but there is an element of casualness and comedy about them. The thriller mechanism still works, but the dialogue involves quite light-hearted repartee.
There is concern here that other Europeans don’t read German literature or take much notice of Germany. It may in fact be true that the failure to export ‘light entertainment' limits the interest in ‘serious culture', and that producing media celebrities like Tom cruise would make people more interested in German novels. I looked at an issue of ‘Gala’ and only two of the stories were about German stars, both TV presenters. So everything else was about the US entertainment industry. Literally, that includes Australians (N Kidman) and English people (Jude law), but without American films they wouldn’t be household names in Germany. It’s easy to exaggerate how interested Europeans are in anything that come from any European country except their own. But American entertainment is big everywhere.
I can’t do diary entries about the book I am trying to write because it is all too intense. But I get fifteen minutes off from time to time and i can write about that.
The first week here was lost due to migraine. I was unable to work. It was just due to moving countries i think. I like staying in one place, I find it very hard to convince myself that i actually want to go somewhere else. So at a rational level i am glad to be here, at an unconscious level I am in panic and disorientation. Or maybe it’s anxiety about writing the book.
I got a DVD-box with 50 films from the ‘Scotland Yard’ series (1955-9 I think) and was very happy watching those in England. Part of the project here is a scheme for investigating German Pulp. I was aware that in Germany 30 edgar Wallace ‘Krimi’ adaptations were filmed in quite a short period after 1955 (possibly 50). I was curious about “bad German films” and by extension “bad taste in Germany”. Also, in the problem of entertainment in central Europe: the entertainment sector seems to have been colonised by American and British products. This applies especially to the old communist bloc: there was this terrible earnestness, everyone was supposed to learn classical piano, go to ballet classes,and read Pushkin, there was no communist entertainment sector. (Which isn’t quite true, as we shall see.) I got hold of a couple of the Edgar Wallace films on DVD: they aren’t bad and they don’t take themselves at all seriously. (It comes out like ‘valise’ in German.)
This doesn’t quite mean that I am trying to write a science-fiction novel in the style of 1950s B-movies. Not quite, anyway.
(March 15) We went to Wissembourg. This is in Alsace and just on the French side of the border. Alsace was annexed by France in 1648 and although it was german-speaking at that point a slow process of francisation has taken place.
I was enthusiastic about the Alsatians not being nationalists: they always wanted to be part of France even while remaining protestant and keeping their language. It shows that you don’t have to base everything on ethnic identity. I couldn’t get agreement on this. There were election posters up and some were for for a local Alsatian party: “’s Elsass unser land”. But the slogans on the poster were about bilingualism in administration and autonomy. No mention of separatism - they want to be part of France, and there have been Alsatian parties for many years who wanted to be part of France but wanted a better deal for the language.
Wissembourg has a bilingual market - some stallholders speak French and some german. The design of houses is what attracts attention. The houses look very much like houses in the Palatinate, although not identical. In the central square there are some that look more French - dormer windows, metal window-frames, curved iron ferronnerie on the balconies. But the date of the buildings was during the period when Alsace was part of Germany (2nd Reich) after 1871. We couldn’t work this out. Maybe the buildings were put up deliberately to show that the people regarded themselves as French.
It seems to be completely vines here, but in fact there are some asparagus fields if you go a few miles on, and there are some trees for almonds and figs. A notice said that people are trying to develop a Pfalzisch (Palatinate) cuisine based on figs, or at least using figs. Red Pfalzisch wine features a lot, I was surprised, I am told that it has been developed a lot in the last ten years. I drink it because it doesn’t exist in England, it’s not the best red but it is distinctive. The white is much better but then everyone knows about that.
I have a whole apartment in an old house on the edge of town. The apartment has a Kachelofen (tile stove), not in use. I can’t work out all its working parts. I think you put coal in at a stove somewhere and then pipes carry the heat to other parts of the building. I read in a book I got here that the early version had earthenware pots (‘thin unglazed pots’) because they worked out that they retained heat very well (like bricks in a storage heater) and the mutation into Kachelofen with the earthenware tiles came much later. The ones here are glazed in green and grey and look very handsome. The house was bought by the region (Palatinate) when it was ‘marod’ and done up. ‘Marod’ means ‘bashed about a bit’ or ‘derelict’. It’s what they say about a government that is about to collapse or an insolvent firm. But the earliest meaning is ‘soldier unable to march’, and hence ‘marauder’.
Email from John Kozak: “May have mentioned this, but did you ever meet my colleague Nick Bretherton, whose father was on Bomber Harris’s staff? “Bomber” was a bowdlerised sobriquet, he being known as “Butcher” to the chaps. Harris’s team built test blocks of flats and designed their incendiaries to ignite soft furnishings; aimed for working class areas to maximise the kill count, avoiding the middle-class, Hitler-supporting, districts. Max Hastings used to play the Decent Tory on the Graun’s comment page and occasionally the LRB, but is very much the Voice of Foam in the Mail: a photographer chum who worked for him at the Telegraph shudders at his memory, explains why Pte Eye call him “Hitler”.”
I read two books about the bombing campaign before coming here. It looks pretty much as if it was all ethically flawed and inhuman, illegal, and based on a complete miscalculation in military terms. I read Max Hastings on 'Bomber Command' because he is so enthusiastic about Deeds of Valour and so when he says it was all a horrible mistake you have to agree. 600,000 dead civilians. I read Martin Middlebrook’s book about the Hamburg raids (three nights, one book) and he points out that the industry was south of the harbour, and included wharves building submarines, and north of the harbour it was all residential. But Harris only planned to bomb the north, the south wasn’t even in the target zone. When I read that sentence I was just appalled. No migraine, I just went pale.
I had to get into this a bit because WG Sebald had written a book about it and I knew it would come up at some point. I don’t think it’s legal to bomb civilians. The ‘rules of war’ say you can bombard cities under siege, but that implies that you have infantry dug in around the city.
Hastings remarks that none of the English war films shows the bombing of civilians as heroic/ desirable/ intended. He cites 100 war films between 1945 and 1960, blimey, it seems like 500. ‘Cocoa, sir?’ But I think this gives us a verdict; the British people were supposed to be the force behind all this and they found it so unattractive they didn’t want to see it. There seems to be this pervasive, central lie: Harris knew he was bombing to kill civilians in maximum numbers but the paperwork never conceded that. This is where we start to think of a war crime: why cover it up if it was legal and a ‘morale builder'? (More accurately, a proportion of the British public would have been happy to watch that stuff on screen, but it wasn’t enough of the public.)
The sign in the town centre says that Edenkoben has a population of 6600. However the infrastructure is there for a much larger town. Basically it is a tourist town, on the Weinstrasse [Wine Way], and dead in winter. There are vast numbers of Weinstuben (sort of between a shop and a pub, ideally run by the owner of the vineyard) and the plan is that you go to a Weinstube run by the vintner, sample all the wines produced a few fields away, and buy a bottle of the one you like. The sign says that the earliest form of the name is ‘Zotingowen’, ‘at Otto’s farmsteads’, so the ‘koben’ is just borrowed from the word for ‘pigsty’. The town is full of wooden arches which cross the street and which have vines trained over them which will be flourishing with green leaves in the summer. I wanted to go to the Heimatmuseum [local history museum] but it is only open in season, and it is a wine museum. Every second building sells local wine. Maybe Z’Nottingowen’ means ‘at Nott’s farmsteads’.
Much fuss here about the defence minister having copied parts of his doctoral thesis on constitutional law. Could be just omissions from the footnotes but Spiegel magazine claims there is an entire thesis by someone else copied into it. This is something that didn’t come out by google searches but by the second wave of digging. Politicians aren’t meant to have detailed knowledge, but to synthesize other people’s work. OK, but taking without acknowledgement is theft, that is less ambiguous. He has already given the doctorate back, an unusual step. I wonder if there is an appropriate ceremony. Zu Guttenberg is the most popular politician in Germany, a poll showed that 78% of people thought he should play an important role. He is glamorous, his wife is glamorous and coutured up, they appear in ‘Gala’ which is like Hello magazine. He comes from a noble family which owns forests, she is Bismarck’s great-granddaughter (but doesn’t look like Big Otto). Whereas Merkel is about as glamorous as Gordon Brown. One comment here is that plagiarism is most common in law and theology, the professions of people who are supposed to protect morality. Another theory is that Guttenberg’s early nonchalance about the ‘parallel passages’ was because he didn’t know they were there, he had paid someone else to write the whole thesis. (later development: Guttenberg resigned.)
The big local supermarket has a second hand book section under the same roof. You put the money in a tin, as I eventually realised. There were two books side by side by Hans grimm and verena Stefan. Stefan’s book (“Sloughing skins”) was a primary classic of feminism, circa 1970, written when nobody knew what the word implied, when it was a sort of ‘trip’ or ‘experimental consciousness’. Grimm was a writer much-favoured under the Nazi regime and preoccupied by the need for Lebensraum and so forth. He wrote about colonists in German South-West Africa, a regime in which up to 1914 most of the natives died. It was sort of a dress rehearsal for later endeavours. It just seemed so weird that they were side by side on the shelf. I suppose if you are going to be an expert on German culture you ought to know about the literature of the Third Reich, those books are there in the supermarket, very cheap, it’s an opportunity. But I think I will just pass that one by.
Rosvitha points out that the krimi i watched on Sunday (“Notruf 110”) was a continuation of a series which began on East German TV. After the reunification, they brought in new police commissars, but it is the same series, set in Halle. Rosvitha says that the old episodes had a completely different set of manners, the police bosses just treated their underlings like dirt, and the cops were always giving criminals moral lectures. So real features of East German society were there in the TV programmes, let through because no one in charge noticed them. This is part of the “communist entertainment industry”, which really did exist.
There was a juvenile delinquent, a sort of biker plus teddy boy, such an obvious suspect that it had to be someone else. After a certain point it turned out that he was Russian: the commissar goes to a sort of club room and the kid jokes about him in Russian to all the other delinquents hanging out. The commissar turns out to speak perfect russian and gives him a real dressing-down. Calls him ‘ptichka’, which means ‘little bird’.
I suppose there was a russian garrison, the Red Army had its forward bases close to the border with East germany and not days away in Soviet territory. So there were marriages and also russian kids.
I doubt I can get old episodes on DVD, they might turn up on German TV at about 3 am.
Bought some soap powder to wash a woollen sweater by hand. Having done this I found a label which said it was polyester cotton. Dummkopf! But the label also says you can’t spin dry it. Big problem. But this was the only non-machine wash item I brought.
Much discussion about ‘The King’s Speech’ which is showing in Karlsruhe. I try hard to get it across that I would never watch a film about the royal family unless it involved decapitation. On the poster for ‘A single man’ Colin Firth and Julianne Moore are lying side by side with their heads on cushions and it is striking how well Julianne’s hair matches the cushion cover. Mmm! Tasteful! I couldn’t help thinking “gay film based around the soft furnishings”. Big cliche i know. Rosvitha asked me about Christopher isherwood, I couldn’t come up with much. I think i read three of his novels, ‘A Single man’ was so bad that i stopped. Claudia saw the film and said it was too tasteful, too much based around the decor. What did happen to isherwood? In 50 years after 'Goodbye to berlin'?
There is a poster in one of the shops here showing Lex Barker, who played the hero in a large number of Karl May Western films in the 50s. These led on to the spaghetti Westerns. There is clearly something in common with the Edgar Wallace series here. Both are lucrative examples of the German entertainment industry. But both are set in the Anglo-Saxon world. This allowed for an effect of Diminished Reality and this was part of them being entertaining and undemanding. The wallace films aren’t exactly spoofs, but there is an element of casualness and comedy about them. The thriller mechanism still works, but the dialogue involves quite light-hearted repartee.
There is concern here that other Europeans don’t read German literature or take much notice of Germany. It may in fact be true that the failure to export ‘light entertainment' limits the interest in ‘serious culture', and that producing media celebrities like Tom cruise would make people more interested in German novels. I looked at an issue of ‘Gala’ and only two of the stories were about German stars, both TV presenters. So everything else was about the US entertainment industry. Literally, that includes Australians (N Kidman) and English people (Jude law), but without American films they wouldn’t be household names in Germany. It’s easy to exaggerate how interested Europeans are in anything that come from any European country except their own. But American entertainment is big everywhere.
Saturday, 26 February 2011
European substrates: interviews with Marlies Philippa
Marlies Philippa interviews (excerpts)
Note. The Utrecht Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (EWN) (4 parts, 2003-9) is probably the most significant contribution to European substrate studies yet to appear. On publication, the editor, Dr Marlies Philippa, gave some press interviews, which are available on-line in Dutch. I have translated parts into English because they are so passionately interesting for the student of substrate words.
1.
Q What is the difference from other etymological dictionaries?
A Philippa: ‘The etymological dictionary of Van Dale treats more words, but apart from only going into each word briefly, it also has no claims to science. The other dictionaries are out of date in two ways. In the first place they are not based on the modern vocabulary of the 21st century, and in the second place they do not make use of the latest scientific insights.’
Thus, linguists have come ever more to believe that many very old Germanic words do not find their origin in Indo-European, the source language from which most European languages originated. The Dutch words dom, doof, leep and slim for example probably do not derive from Old Indo-European, but from a language which was spoken in our regions when Indo-European invaded thousands of years ago. Dom and doof were probably related in the old language, also called substrate language, as were leep and slim. According to some estimates some 15% of our everyday vocabulary (not counting compounds and derivations) now consists of substrate words. The new etymological dictionary is the first one that makes extensive use of this so-called substrate theory.
from interview 2.
Q. How do you explain that there are words sitting in Dutch which are much older?
Marlies Philippa: For that we must look further back in history. Europe has been inhabited for many thousand years. It is significant for language development in Europe that between 3000 and 2000 BC large groups of Indo-Europeans spread out from South Russia over the whole of Europe and a part of Asia. There are firm archaeological proofs of this. Their language, Indo-European (also called Indo-Germanic) then penetrates Europe and parts of Asia. Indo-European forms the shared basis for almost all later European languages, thus also for Dutch. I say almost, because some languages in Europe, such as Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and the now dead Etruscan remained outside the Indo-European sphere of influence. In the course of a few centuries the original languages from before the Indo-European invasion are squeezed out, but not completely. The original, pre-Indo-European languages are what we call substrate languages. And the substrate languages had a great deal of influence on Indo-European. In most modern European languages you find many pre-IE substrate words remaining. These are then more than four or five thousand years old. Words like apple, herring, thief or bakkes have thus been with us for millennia.’
Q. Just like words such as bijl, drank, hengest, and carp. These words do not sound old to my ears. How do you recognise an ancient substrate word?
A. Marlies Philippa: Without etymology you can’t explain why vader was ever pater. Such a word must, first, only be found in a limited distribution area. If the stem of a Dutch word is also found in Persian, then you can be sure that it cannot be a substrate word: Persian and Dutch are communally Indo-European languages, but they don’t have the same substrate. Further we have quite clear ideas on how IE words sounded. If you apply known laws of sound development to a word, you can define a word that has a non-Indo-European sound or form. That is another good indication. Thirdly, you can look at the meaning of a word. When the Indo-Europeans came to live in our region, they bumped into objects which they had never seen and which they didn’t have words for. Then they took over substrate words for them from the native population. Examples of that are words which have to do with plants (apple, bes, erwt, hazel) or animals (big, bee, das, herring).
A Did they only take over words for things they didn’t know or did they take other words too? We also sometimes take over English words because they sound good?
Marlies Philippa: ”Of course the Indo-Europeans mixed with the native population. You see then that they took over mainly short handy substrate words and that the ancient words can even replace Indo-European words. You must think of words that have to do with the body (bakkes, buik, darm, head) or with housekeeping (besom, board, drink, hemd, hood) or with shipbuilding or carpentry (boat, board, bolt). Also other short, frequent words landed in our vocabulary: thief, dumb, god, grip, help...
A: Did appel, haring, dief and all the other old words help to give Dutch its shape or did they just hang around unobtrusively in our language?
Marlies Philippa: “They contributed to its form. Roughly from the year 1000 BC on various Indo-European languages began to develop, under the influence of substrate languages, and among them was Germanic. Our Dutch belongs to the Germanic language family, together with among others Frisian, English, Swedish, German and so forth. You can say that our Dutch consists for 15% of the ancient substrate words, for 15% of old inherited words (deriving from Indo-European) and for 70% of relatively young loan words (from other languages, such as Latin, French, German and English).”
Note by AD. As the EWN has about 14,000 headwords it is credible that the ‘substrate’ heads, reckoned as 15%, number about 2000. The EWN can alternatively be considered as a ‘dictionary of the substrate language or languages’.
'leep' and 'slim' are both cognate with English words 'limp, lame' and show alternations which are not possible in the 'legitimate' Indo-European line of descent. The 'floating nasal' does appear in some IE contexts (English 'lick', Latin 'lingua') but not in this particular one. 'Limp' is presumably cognate with German 'links' ('left (side)') and this shows the p/k alternation which is particularly important for the substrate tier in Germanic.
Note. The Utrecht Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (EWN) (4 parts, 2003-9) is probably the most significant contribution to European substrate studies yet to appear. On publication, the editor, Dr Marlies Philippa, gave some press interviews, which are available on-line in Dutch. I have translated parts into English because they are so passionately interesting for the student of substrate words.
1.
Q What is the difference from other etymological dictionaries?
A Philippa: ‘The etymological dictionary of Van Dale treats more words, but apart from only going into each word briefly, it also has no claims to science. The other dictionaries are out of date in two ways. In the first place they are not based on the modern vocabulary of the 21st century, and in the second place they do not make use of the latest scientific insights.’
Thus, linguists have come ever more to believe that many very old Germanic words do not find their origin in Indo-European, the source language from which most European languages originated. The Dutch words dom, doof, leep and slim for example probably do not derive from Old Indo-European, but from a language which was spoken in our regions when Indo-European invaded thousands of years ago. Dom and doof were probably related in the old language, also called substrate language, as were leep and slim. According to some estimates some 15% of our everyday vocabulary (not counting compounds and derivations) now consists of substrate words. The new etymological dictionary is the first one that makes extensive use of this so-called substrate theory.
from interview 2.
Q. How do you explain that there are words sitting in Dutch which are much older?
Marlies Philippa: For that we must look further back in history. Europe has been inhabited for many thousand years. It is significant for language development in Europe that between 3000 and 2000 BC large groups of Indo-Europeans spread out from South Russia over the whole of Europe and a part of Asia. There are firm archaeological proofs of this. Their language, Indo-European (also called Indo-Germanic) then penetrates Europe and parts of Asia. Indo-European forms the shared basis for almost all later European languages, thus also for Dutch. I say almost, because some languages in Europe, such as Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and the now dead Etruscan remained outside the Indo-European sphere of influence. In the course of a few centuries the original languages from before the Indo-European invasion are squeezed out, but not completely. The original, pre-Indo-European languages are what we call substrate languages. And the substrate languages had a great deal of influence on Indo-European. In most modern European languages you find many pre-IE substrate words remaining. These are then more than four or five thousand years old. Words like apple, herring, thief or bakkes have thus been with us for millennia.’
Q. Just like words such as bijl, drank, hengest, and carp. These words do not sound old to my ears. How do you recognise an ancient substrate word?
A. Marlies Philippa: Without etymology you can’t explain why vader was ever pater. Such a word must, first, only be found in a limited distribution area. If the stem of a Dutch word is also found in Persian, then you can be sure that it cannot be a substrate word: Persian and Dutch are communally Indo-European languages, but they don’t have the same substrate. Further we have quite clear ideas on how IE words sounded. If you apply known laws of sound development to a word, you can define a word that has a non-Indo-European sound or form. That is another good indication. Thirdly, you can look at the meaning of a word. When the Indo-Europeans came to live in our region, they bumped into objects which they had never seen and which they didn’t have words for. Then they took over substrate words for them from the native population. Examples of that are words which have to do with plants (apple, bes, erwt, hazel) or animals (big, bee, das, herring).
A Did they only take over words for things they didn’t know or did they take other words too? We also sometimes take over English words because they sound good?
Marlies Philippa: ”Of course the Indo-Europeans mixed with the native population. You see then that they took over mainly short handy substrate words and that the ancient words can even replace Indo-European words. You must think of words that have to do with the body (bakkes, buik, darm, head) or with housekeeping (besom, board, drink, hemd, hood) or with shipbuilding or carpentry (boat, board, bolt). Also other short, frequent words landed in our vocabulary: thief, dumb, god, grip, help...
A: Did appel, haring, dief and all the other old words help to give Dutch its shape or did they just hang around unobtrusively in our language?
Marlies Philippa: “They contributed to its form. Roughly from the year 1000 BC on various Indo-European languages began to develop, under the influence of substrate languages, and among them was Germanic. Our Dutch belongs to the Germanic language family, together with among others Frisian, English, Swedish, German and so forth. You can say that our Dutch consists for 15% of the ancient substrate words, for 15% of old inherited words (deriving from Indo-European) and for 70% of relatively young loan words (from other languages, such as Latin, French, German and English).”
Note by AD. As the EWN has about 14,000 headwords it is credible that the ‘substrate’ heads, reckoned as 15%, number about 2000. The EWN can alternatively be considered as a ‘dictionary of the substrate language or languages’.
'leep' and 'slim' are both cognate with English words 'limp, lame' and show alternations which are not possible in the 'legitimate' Indo-European line of descent. The 'floating nasal' does appear in some IE contexts (English 'lick', Latin 'lingua') but not in this particular one. 'Limp' is presumably cognate with German 'links' ('left (side)') and this shows the p/k alternation which is particularly important for the substrate tier in Germanic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)